rayiner

Birth rate is collapsing even in countries that have plenty of housing and don’t have skyrocketing rents.

It’s a collective action problem. The government should ban it.

I hope it works out for them. In my home country students overthrow the government and put a Nobel Prize winning economist in charge. Now GDP growth has collapsed and the security situation has become precarious.

I’m also reminded of Ashraf Ghani, the last President of Afghanistan, who was a professor and wrote a book “Fixing Failed States.” He ended up fleeing the country like a coward as it collapsed.

It’s notable that students played a major role in the 1979 Iranian revolution that ended up putting the Ayatollah in power. In fact to my knowledge, student-led revolutions have never produced a long term positive outcome. Any examples?

That may be the literal meaning but over 70 years. The term has gotten the connotation of man-made, but in a fake bad way. Your car may be artificial, but no car company advertises anything to do with the car as artificial. Mercedes doesn’t have artificial leather in the car.

To be clear, I think most marketing is dumb. But avoiding the word artificial isn’t completely random.

It's because "artificial" sounds scary. If you think about it, nobody would use "artificial" for branding in any other context.

If you keep in mind that the median voter in a primary is 65, then the government we have seems to do a pretty good job of reflecting the opinions of the politically engaged subset of the population.

Mostly monogamous marriage is almost certainly a stable equilibrium given that you see it in societies all over the world that had no contact with each other and little in common otherwise. You see monogamous marriage in neolithic europe as well as among native americans.

It's co-evolution. As the society advances, it develops rigid timekeeping to enable further development.

We have given it a try. It’s how most of the world worked until industrialization, and how much of the world still works (like my dad’s village in Bangladesh). It’s a recipe for poverty.

Wow I didn’t know CGNAT was a thing for home users.

Meanwhile I’m here carving out a couple of /64s from the /48 block of IPv6 addresses Comcast gave me.

> Or, we come up with a system that actually follows the rhythms of nature, rather than forcing a standard schedule year round.

The clock-driven day is one of humanity's greatest inventions. You can't build a spacefaring society on "following the rhythms of nature."

It's actually extremely logical. It makes sense to line up the day with the actual sunlight hours at any given time. But people have millions of events keyed to specific times. It's much simpler just to shift the time base for everyone than for everyone to remember "the kids' karate practice is at 4 pm in the winter and 5 pm in the summer."