boelboel

Not exactly academics but as they were mentioned somewhere in this thread, physicians follow this same sort of path. It's actually a lot less uncertain than academia, it's almost impossible to screw up if you're a mediocre but somewhat bright "good" student. There were people I met in medical school who basically never had to take decisions in their life (which is sort of crazy as they take decisions about the lives of others).

It's actually not that expensive if you take an inside cabin, I remember seeing prices of about 900usd at some point, which isn't more than a plane ticket if you take into account the food/entertainment. Right now there's some crossing from the UK to New York starting at about 450 pounds, you have to call though.

Go back to medical school, I'm only very early in my career and in my home country you can restart medical school at any point in time (it's also extremely rare to do so).

It's like with the music industry, it got easier for anyone to make music/release music in theory. Meanwhile for the last 100 years there's mostly been more concentration/consolidation.

when TVs were this expensive you didn't have this technology. Furthermore you had less competition from e.g. Korea and China in the TV sector.

"average human who's read a few books on the subject and is good at bullshitting" seems like a large portion of white collar workers that make bank.

Energy sources aren't perfect substitutes

It's not just a matter of population density, the sichuan basin and most the east coast is just doesn't get much sun/wind. If not for these 'resource provinces' they would've just gone full on coal.

The growth of energy use is mostly in countries that are industrializing/developing. Places like India/Indonesia/Vietnam/... are where most energy will be added and they'll all add coal.

The robot thing was also what japan bet on in the 90s

I don't think financial incentives will actually do that much, it's generally seen as something that works only marginally. People get more kids when they get stable/good jobs, have a support network, have a culture that incentivizes births.

South Korea is currently throwing money at the problem, upped parental leave even did some things to make it easier to retire if you got a lot of kids. I'm almost certain these things won't meaningfully change the situation (maybe go from 0.8 to 1.0) as all korean children are expected to get good jobs (white collar, certain professions) , they structure their society towards this and it's impossible to get a high birthrate like this.

I actually read about how something like presence of nuns in your town in italy was quite correlated with birthrates as it basically relieved all women but the nurses of some duties. In Korea you can see how the stability leads to a very significant effect on birthrates as Sejong is by far the highest birthrate region. Interesting since those really obsessed about birthrates also seem to hate the worker protections that make it difficult to fire people. I guess housing is another of those stability factors since renting really ups the risks of children.

I think for most millenials it's an excuse not really the actual reason they don't want/get kids (although i think there's a few actual believers).

Although I think there's a good chance that this will happen there's no reason to assume that we'll be better or at most slightly worse in the future just because that's all we've experienced in (recent) human history, it's a sort of survivorship bias.

Besides the AR glasses, this is roughly what already happens when PE rolls up a trade or clinic. One (licensed) expert oversees a bunch of less-qualified staff following a script. Just optimize the revenue and let schmucks pay expert prices.

It's like if you took some of the challenges of waymo and made them even worse. I imagine it'll take a similar amount of time to get there (although waymo still hasn't rolled out anywhere 'unpredictable' e.g. Naples, Istanbul, Mumbai).