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gmoot

> norms are very strictly enforced

And now norms are not enforced at all, and look at who we have in the white house. This is why we can't have nice things.

Well, yes and no. The remedies are impeachment and electoral accountability. Both of which have broken down in this era of extreme partisanship.
What is the profit margin of a health insurance company? Google suggests 2-4%, with United at about 6%. This does not seem that extravagant.
Re:America's Prison Population Is in Serious Decline on Thursday June 26, 2025 @09:10AM (#44387088)
Or possibly you would have learned emotional regulation sooner.

Kids change you, for the better if you let it. There's nothing like a completely helpless infant who is totally dependent on you to wear down your selfish tendencies.

I don't dispute that the teen birth rate is much lower now. I'm trying to estimate out the counterfactual "what would the US birth rate be if teen pregnancy was (say) the same as 2 decades ago" ? Currently it's 1.66.

But the back-of-napkin math is hard for me to figure out from the given "births per 1,000" women per different age group.

Children used to be your retirement plan.
Just the other day my wife and I were marveling that people in our neighborhood groups are requiring pet sitters to be insured and bonded.

The future has always been uncertain. The modern world focusses on risk mitigation to an astonishing degree compared to generations even in the relatively recent past. A lot of that has produced good results. But personally I suspect that we're overly focussed on safety to a degree that inhibits human flourishing.

Where can I find information on how much of the birthrate decline is due to unwed teenage mothers?
Re:Basic Income Pilot Project: Study results on Wednesday April 09, 2025 @04:23PM (#43637450)
> There is no effect on money supply if this is funded through taxes

Of course there is. Suppose we tax Elon several billion dollars. Now, instead of sitting in his money vault, it flows into the economy where it increases demand pressure.

Re:What If We Made Advertising Illegal? on Saturday April 05, 2025 @02:44PM (#43595726)
Your access to all of that collective knowledge is funded by ad revenue.
Re:AI 2027 on Thursday April 03, 2025 @10:34PM (#43577754)
The welfare state is predicated on a pyramid-shaped population.

Also: people deride infinite growth, but growth is what is responsible for lifting large portions of the population out of poverty. If global markets were repriced tomorrow to expect no future growth, economies would collapse.

There may be a way to accept low or no growth without economic collapse, but if there is no one has figured it out yet. That's nothing to be cavalier about.

Re:Why I don't discuss politics with friends on Wednesday April 02, 2025 @11:44PM (#43564500)
It's not though.

Looking at exit pool demographics might help if you're struggling to have any empathy for a Trump voter. They are largely working class and undereducated and astonishingly diverse for a republican candidate in recent memory.

Re:Why I don't discuss politics with friends on Wednesday April 02, 2025 @11:28PM (#43564374)
This can be done, carefully, through in-person conversations. I think it may be nearly impossible on social media, whose primary purpose seems to be to enforce group identity.
Re:Alphabet spins out Taara – Internet over lasers on Monday March 17, 2025 @08:43PM (#43394497)
Elsewhere in the thread it suggests ~$30k for one link. Which is exactly in line with buying 10 of the ubiquiti devices.

But I think you would need 20 of them, 10 on each end? Plus extra install, networking equipment, etc. Which would make Taara significantly better.

>it seems entirely possible (maybe even likely) that what we experience as consciousness is some kind of illusory side-effect of biological processes as opposed to something autonomous and “real”.

I've heard this idea before but I have never been able to make head or tail of it. Consciousness can't be an illusion, because to have an illusion you must already be conscious. Can a rock have illusions?

Re:Gambling on Papal Conclaves on Wednesday February 26, 2025 @11:36PM (#43191405)
Seems like it should be a mortal sin or something.

Also - the "Doge of Venice" ? What are the odds.

That is the whole point of Tariffs. To discourage purchase of foreign goods.
Re:Build a tiny CA for your homelab with a Raspberry Pi on Sunday January 19, 2025 @10:12PM (#42764615)
Why wouldn't you want to use Lets Encrypt for proxmox, etc. ?
Re:The world of Dante's Divine Comedy on Monday December 02, 2024 @02:53PM (#42299702)
If you are comparing Inferno to Paradiso, then this is a poor summary of it.
Re:GenChess on Tuesday November 26, 2024 @05:47PM (#42250969)
Playing around, the prompt "Arm cpus" generated an opponent "Leg cpus". You are technically correct...
Re:We're forking Flutter on Monday October 28, 2024 @04:38PM (#41976009)
Google's internal monorepo.
"You" can learn to steer your mind by choosing which of these thoughts to capture and dwell on, by monitoring them.

There is voluminous writing in the area of monastic spiritually about this. On the one hand, they affirm that these thoughts aren't chosen, using the vocabulary of sinful thoughts introduced by demons. But it's also clear that change is possible through prayer/meditation (not exactly identical to modern ideas about mindfulness).

Re:A Nobel Prize winner's brilliant tirade against mortality on Thursday August 08, 2024 @01:15AM (#41188331)
Loss is cumulative. After so many scars life can start to feel like a burden.
I mean, there was also a depression, a world war, and the increasing availability of birth control.

That factoid doesn't mean much on its own.

We tried to counteract this with our own children by giving them a lot of freedom.

But these things are very network dependent. Yes we let our kids play in the street and bike around the neighborhood, but it is boring because there are not any other kids to play with, so they don't do it much.

Re:Mitochondrial Eve on Monday July 22, 2024 @12:33PM (#41036359)
Yes. If we consider genealogical rather than genetic inheritance, then incredibly you only have to go back 5,000 years or so to find a common ancestor.

https://johnhawks.net/weblog/when-did-humankinds-last-common...

My n100 system idles at 10W from the wall. It has many more components to power (2x m.2, sata, 5x nics, etc.) than this SBC though.

Much higher than a raspberry pi, but still low in comparison to any desktop server

Re:Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico on Thursday June 06, 2024 @11:55PM (#40605179)
> with different diplomatic choices they probably could have gotten Japan to surrender before the USSR attacked.

Such as?

Re:Friends don't let friends export to CSV on Monday March 25, 2024 @10:12PM (#39823630)
"I'm a big fan of Apache Parquet as a good default. You give up human readable files, but..."

Lost me right there. It has to be human readable.

I don't disagree, but the actual situation in America does not match this ideal at all.

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