Thanks, that was a much more nuanced take that I have a much easier time agreeing with :)

I think the population problem has some in common with food distribution: There’s enough food in the world, it’s just distributed in such a way that some places have obesity as a societal-level issue, while other places people are dying of malnourishment.

Similarly, the global population is increasing, however it’s increasing far more rapidly that sustainable in some places, while declining more rapidly than sustainable in others.

There’s only so much you can do by redistributing wealth in a better way (which I think we should, regardless). It doesn’t help to tax the rich if there isn’t any manpower you can buy with that tax income to actually do the work that needs doing. I think that’s the scary part about a rapid population decline: We’re heading towards a situation (in some places) where the ratio of capable workers to people needing care approaches 2:1, which means a far larger fraction of the population will need to spend their entire working career as direct care providers than is currently the case. You can’t really alleviate a manpower shortage with just money.

It’s a dog whistle every time.

Population decline isn’t inherently a problem (unless you’re a racist worried about “your people” losing power). Too rapid population decline is a big problem. We’re already seeing the effects: When the sum of birth rates and working-age immigration fall fast enough, the ratio of working-age people to care-needing people also falls. I don’t think I need to explain why it’s a problem that every able-bodied working age adult will be responsible (directly or indirectly) for taking care of more people. It puts more pressure on everyone, and impacts societies ability to care for those in need of it.

A controlled, slow, population decline would probably just be a good thing at this point. However, that’s not what prognoses are pointing towards, and that’s why (non-racist) people are worried.

never had more than one week off here or there

Wat?

I live in the US

That explains it…

You’re welcome to hop over the pond if you ever want to combine fulfilling work with proper time off :)

Footgunscannons

Gen Z is just as smart and capable as any other generation.

The introduction of social media, with all the addiction, depression, anxiety, etc. associated with it has somehow managed to not affect peoples problem-solving skills? There are so many studies confirming how fucked the younger generations are regarding all kinds of mental health that it’s frankly absurd to believe those findings are completely independent of things like attention span and problem-solving skills.

Also:

• Article: Refers to an actual study.
• You: “This article is pointless speculation”.

So… when used at a population level rather than at an individual level, and used for comparison between generations from the same place… they’re a good metric?

These companies literally design their product with the intention of making people overspend. As long as micro transactions have existed, the problem of kids over spending their parents money because they were allowed a single purchase has been a problem.

The companies in question are making bank off this. They know it’s an issue, and they actively exploit it to make more money. It’s extremely unethical.

Sure, I’m not advocating for doing what he did, regardless how he paid for it. I’m putting myself in the shoes of a young father that just wanted to make his kid happy and didn’t properly consider the bigger picture.

People buy their kids all kinds of things that are bad for them with the best intentions. We usually don’t conclude that they deserve debilitating debt as a consequence.

• 9 yo Kid is making vidya
• Doesn’t have many viewers
• Want to make kid happy
• Spend 20 $ on ads
• maybe_a_couple_views.png
• Three weeks later
• I’m literally 118 009 $ in debt

MFW

Honestly, if you can’t understand how absolutely debilitating this is over a tiny misstep, I hardly know what to say. People commit manslaughter and get off easier that this. It’s in no way reasonable to say that “Oh, you shouldn’t have used the company card to pay 20$ for your kid - you deserve life-ruining debt”.

Blame the dad

Honestly, it shouldn’t be legal to pull more than like 100 USD off a card without re-verifying the card holder. Fuck these companies that take your card once and have no fucking limit on how much they’ll pull from it without verifying it’s you.

Sure, you should have a limit on your card. That doesn’t make it okay for others to exploit you when you make an obvious mistake. Let’s not pretend these companies aren’t aware how much money they’re making off people’s kids spending more money than they’re allowed to.

I’m no expert, but a quick Wikipedia search was enough for me to not immediately brush it off as pseudoscience.

It’s not claimed to be exact of course, but it does appear to me that consensus is that it can be done with reasonable accuracy.

Beauty of handwriting is that it doesn’t even need to be consistent for an expert to determine with pretty high accuracy whether or not it’s coming from the same person. A physical signature is actually a pretty decent way to verify that a specific person really did sign something.

So much this. They’ve basically figured out that if they burn enough money, they get the equivalent of billions of meth-charged monkeys on typewriters.

Anything with a security hole (so… basically everything) will eventually be broken into if you throw a data center worth of computational power at trying every conceivable hack. That’s basically what they were doing here. The only mildly impressive part about it is the amount of resources they’re willing to throw at this.

I may have missed something, but I got a substantially longer time, with a lot higher pressure.

I just did the numbers - looks like you’ll need around 120 days to fill the hose with one of the biggest commercially available pumps I could find.

I’ve been a bit busy at work, but I’ll deliver on my promise of numbers :D

I’ve used the Darcy-Weisbach equation for the pressure drop / flow rate relationship, and assumed

• We have laminar flow in the hose (which is reasonable)
• You’re delivering water at 1 bar (can’t go below that without suction on the receiving side)
• Viscosity of water: 1.0518 mPa s
• Viscosity of air: 18.03 micro Pa s
• Your hose is indestructible, and can therefore tolerate arbitrarily large pressures.
• You have the pump ready at day 0, and the hose is already stretched out at day 0.

The biggest pumps I could find (1, 2, 3) can deliver water at 400 MPa, with pretty high flow rates (much larger than what we can support with our hose). We’re talking about pumps that draw on the order of 1 MW of power.

We start pumping water into the air-filled hose at 4 000 bar on day 0.

After two days, the water front has moved about 1000 km along the hose. Flow rate is at about 1.2 L/s, and pressure at the water front is at a solid 450 bar. This is looking good.

After one week, the water front has moved about 2000 km along the hose. Flow rate is now at about 0.6 L/s, and pressure at the water front has fallen to 200 bar. You begin to worry.

After two weeks, the water front is now at 3100 km. Flow rate has further fallen to 0.4 L/s, and pressure is at 150 bar. The pressure on you to deliver is substantially higher.

After three weeks, water has been pumped 3900 km, and is moving at a speed of 1.15 m/s. Pressure at the water front is around 100 bar. The guys that loaned you money for the massive pump and indestructible hose are lurking around your house.

About 100 days later, the first water starts flowing out of the hose in LA at a flow rate of about 0.5 L/s. It would take you about half an hour to fill the 1000 L tank at this rate. Too bad the tank was impounded by the guys that loaned you the pump and indestructible hose. You have gone into hiding.

A garden hose is about 2cm in diameter, you’re gonna need a pretty massive pump to get any flow rate to speak of through that hose. I’ll be back with numbers for you ;)

Well that’s exactly what I said that I seem to remember reading? So provided I’m remembering correctly… yes?

with no saying …

Well that’s the neat thing when paying money for something: You get a contract detailing exactly what access you get and what you can use it for. You typically read and sign this before paying.

Requesting paid access for research purposes would probably get you there though. After all, they need to sell access to posts and comments through some API to make money off all that data.