521–530 of 643 posts
Peter Zeihan wrote a really interesting book about this topic recently - "The End of the World is Just the Begining". He sees population decline as one of the gravest dangers facing civilisation. Implication being in the title of the book.
If you're in the market for doom porn, there will always be someone willing to sell it to you.
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Many kids are forced to do these activities to pad their application for colleges and sometimes it is for show and prestige.
Oh. That’s batshit crazy (the college application thing). Why should non-academic achievements make any difference whatsoever when applying to college? Is that a thing anywhere except the US? As for show and prestige, that’s usually what the parents want, so that’s squarely in the "something is wrong" category.
all these can be fun but as a kid you are not doing them to have fun, there is constant pressure to win awards and be the best at these. and the list is picked more from appearance on a college application than enjoyment for a child.
this is most american kids now with any ambition of getting into a prestigious school. it will not get you scholarships though.
it is also not mentioning that "academic excellence" in high school has moved from straight As to 6-8 AP exams in a single year, i shit you not.
It's always interesting to look at what these numbers exactly mean because it's deeply counter-intuitive. For the sake of simple modeling, imagine we have a society with 100 people with a fertility rate of 1, that give birth at 20 and die at 80. Here is how that looks: --- Year 0: 100 newborns Year 20: 100 twenties, 50 newborns Year 40: 100 forties, 50 twenties, 25 newborns Year 60: 100 sixties, 50 forties, 25 twenti…
The population didn't double over the first 60 years unless your 100 newborns were created ex nihilo.
I imagine booming populations in Africa will likely offset much of the working population in these countries with low birth rates. As a European I can imagine what impact having high immigration from Africa mixed with all the property being unaffordable and owned by older white generations will have i.e. huge disparity in wealth between black and white, quick growth of black population and decline in white population…
Korea and Japan are very much against mass immigration. Koreans in particular are notoriously xenophobic: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/world/asia/south-korea-di... There's also an even weirder anti-feminist backlash happening as well.
I've been meaning to write about this for a while, but this does not surprise me in the least. The life in Korea is way too competitive and stressful. The hellscape begins in pre-school and primary school where parents make kids go to private school AFTER school, often till late evenings. This progressively gets worse and worse until university. In my father's generation, people could relax after getting into univers…
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This kind of dangerous logic is how you end up with anti-vax conspiracy theories about Bill Gates and mind control, about how one could trust Pfizer’s Phase 3 vaccine trial data they submitted for approval, etc. On the one hand, yes of course: sources matter and you need to consider whether anyone has a motive to mislead, or even merely a motive to not dig too deeply into a claim they might wish to believe. But on th…
>This kind of dangerous logic... Different or opposing opinions are neither dangerous or violent.
Unpopular opinion, I guess.
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Do you really think genetics don't matter? Depending on the study, IQ heritability is between 60-80%.
Okay but that just implies that having a wide distribution of IQ is well adapted to our natural environment.
It's always interesting to look at what these numbers exactly mean because it's deeply counter-intuitive. For the sake of simple modeling, imagine we have a society with 100 people with a fertility rate of 1, that give birth at 20 and die at 80. Here is how that looks: --- Year 0: 100 newborns Year 20: 100 twenties, 50 newborns Year 40: 100 forties, 50 twenties, 25 newborns Year 60: 100 sixties, 50 forties, 25 twenti…
I have 3 kids with one due at the end of the year. All are from the same woman and we’ve known each other since being teenagers. We are planning to have 5-7 total. They really add a richness to life. It’s fun to see people stare when we go out.
Serious question: How on earth can you afford this?
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Can you provide some of these sources for folks open to educating themselves?
You can look for M. Bairoch's research for instance ("Révolution Industrielle et Sous-Développement") Some other put the "start" of industrialization way before, at the end of the Renaissance. As I understand it, there was a progressive flow of industrialization that was clearly visible in Belgium/Netherland, and also started brewing in the other surrounding countries, but the "Industrial Revolution" term was coined…
By your earlier logic, he shouldn't be trusted with this claim any more than Wikipedia or Britannica should be trusted with the claim of British origins.
Seems like we'd need a non-British, non-Belgian source to make any definitive claim, right? /s