MadDemon

Did they really die out, or did the population just merge with modern humans? Most people on the planet have some Neanderthal DNA, so clearly there was some intermixing. If modern humans were a much larger population, it makes sense that the Neanderthals only contributed a small amount of DNA to the gene pool. I could imagine that they were just slowly absorbed into the much larger Sapiens population.

That does not explain how mathematically your statement of 40%-60% heritability represents anything other than a coin flip.

Doesn't 50% heritability mean that it's a coin flip in a 2 party country? So basically no heritability?

If a debtor can't pay their debt, you don't just get to wipe out the bond holders. There is some kind of negotiation to try to restructure the debt and see how much the bond holders can still get. Simply wiping out the debt would create a terrible precedent with terrible consequences for the credibility of the whole eurozone. Who would want to lend money to an EU country if they just get wiped out when things get bad? It would've also had bad consequences for the financial system and potentially caused some institutions to go belly up. The way that countries typically get rid of their debt is by printing money to serve it and thereby inflating it away. But that is obviously not popular among the remaining EU countries. It was always clear that the Euro comes with this constraint that you can't just inflate away your debt.

Greece took on more debt than they could serve. Do you expect the tax payers from other countries to just pay for that without significant changes to how Greece operates? If you can't pay your debts and you can't print your own currency, you lose some sovereignty. But I feel like Greece would have been worse off if they still had the drachma and tried to print their way out of the crisis.

The high voltage DC transmission lines from north to south are being built right now and for example SuedLink is expected to be operational in 2028. Their transmission capacity will be more than enough. Why would you split Germany into electricity zones now, if in a few years the transmission problem will largely be fixed?

It's great for you that you were able to create this app that wouldn't otherwise exist, but does that app dramatically increase your overall productivity? And can you imagine that a significant chunk of the population would experience a similar productivity boost? I'm not saying that there is no productivity gain, but big tech has promised MASSIVE productivity gains. I just feel like the productivity gains are more modest for now, similar to other technologies. Maybe one day AGI comes along and changes everything, but I feel like we'll need a few more break throughs before that.

LLMs and their capabilities are very impressive and definitely useful. The productivity gains often seem to be smaller than intuitively expected though. For example, using ChatGPT to get a response to a random question like "How do I do XYZ" is much more convenient than googling it, but the time savings are often not that relevant for your overall productivity. Before LLMs you were usually already able to find the information quickly and even a 10x speed up does not really have too much of an impact on your overall productivity, because the time it took was already negligible.

Liechtenstein is as much a monarchy as Britain is. It probably falls more in the direct democracy bucket. Also, the GDP per capita figures for these tiny countries are very missleading because you can have a situation where more than half the work force is commuting into the country every day for work. They increase the GDP but don't count in the capita part.

The food system in Europe works pretty well.

That's definitely questionable, but a drop in the bucket. Irrigation for all the farms in the desert is using vastly more water.

They seem to be able to survive with the small amount of water that is allocated to them from the Colorado river.

Las Vegas is actually very efficient with their water use.

The Brenner base tunnel is still under construction.