MLR

From glancing at the numbers it looks pretty similar, but there's been a huge drop in births in California in the last 10-20 years so it's probably the last few years where that will be true.

Peak birth year was 1990 after booming through the 80s, births started falling off a cliff after 2008 and last year there were about the same number of births as in 1980 despite the population increasing by 80%.

It's an odd thing, brutalism is almost universally hated by the general public but there's a seemingly endless stream of people who are willing to wax lyrical about why stained concrete blocks are actually the pinnacle of architecture.

By the by, one of the people specifically pointed out in this article was apparently paying a total tax bill of 17 million dollars against a net worth of 2 billion, and whatever tiny increase in taxes he would've ended up paying was enough to make him flee the country.

If you can't bear to pay back even a tiny, tiny fraction of what you've been given then you shouldn't have it at all.

It's a very common thing, it's called gubbing in the circles I know it from.

There are services called betting exchanges that essentially facilitate peer-to-peer gambling, they make money from commission so they don't care at all about your betting strategy, big players and companies are probably operating on those platforms.

That's not the basis the award is decided on, I presume it may have been in the early years of the award, but generally it's given as a lifetime achievement kind of thing - the recipients are often decades removed from their most influential work.

Not who you were replying to, but I think I understand where you're coming from so I just wanted to contribute my point of view.

I think it's becoming more and more clear that the thing we talk about as Autism doesn't exist as a specific condition, but rather what we currently talk about as Autism is probably a syndrome.

I suspect eventually we'll home in on the various underlying genetic, environmental, and social causes and end up being able to categorise individuals as presenting with Autistic traits/Autism syndrome due to x/y/z rather than somebody being classed as Autistic.

If it's actually only a 2.7% decline in employment relative to baseline then the increase in total wages paid would have to be very small to make this a bad policy.

I agree that a lost job should carry some kind of premium compared to a total increase in wages paid, and you also have to go and look at the total hours worked to get a good picture, but if the total relative increase in remuneration was higher than about 10% or so I think that's probably enough to be able to hand wave the employment decrease.

If it only turns out to be 5% I'd be a bit iffier about it.

In the UK we have a pretty generous minimum wage (for over 21s), I think even relative to $20 in California, and the effect on employment has been very small while minimum wage jobs now give a pretty OK life, so I'm inclined to support high minimum wages generally.

Winged and legged are still pronounced like that too, at least by some.

Interestingly, as an addition to the parent comment, there's a certain point in time where a lot of -ed words are often spelt -'d, which presumably is from the transitionary period between the expectation that the -ed was pronounced and today's general pronunciation.

The study in Wales and a second study in the US were about herpes zoster (shingles), they both seem to support a link to Alzheimer's and, from what I read, the second study mentions other dementias.

https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.100...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03201-5

Do you know if there have been any of these kinds of recreations done on contemporary languages/dialects/accents, or I guess even created ones, to test the accuracy of these methods?

It sounds like something that should obviously have been done, but my naive googling isn't getting me anywhere so far.

Regular rail is ruinously expensive in this country too, East West Rail, which is an unelectrified <100mph railway, is probably going to end up costing in the region of £10bn and take twenty years to build.

Even local tram projects with distances in the single digits can cost hundreds of millions of pounds now, it's ludicrous.

Even from that point of view this isn't as simple an equation as you might think, old people dying is probably a positive for the economy (not an economist, don't quote me on that), and less people being born may be a net positive for the economy in the short term too.

Regardless, China has a healthy amount of people turning eighteen every year at least until 2037, the demographic dip/collapse has only really been a thing for the last couple of years and may pass in time.

It seems a bit of a weird political move for Ukraine to draw attention to dubious post Second World War territorial annexations, a large amount of the territory of the country was acquired after what was basically a war of aggression against Poland - that's just ignoring the stuff acquired from Axis members or co-belligerents.

I know it was all rubber stamped after the war, and modern European countries are very unlikely to push it any way, but given how the communist regimes are viewed now I don't know how much people would accept that.

Again, I don't think it'll cause any problems, but right now I would be avoiding anything at all controversial given that support for them might wane over winter if things get bad in Europe.

This seems to be pseudo-history at best, the saying is centuries old in some form or another - Wiktionary has "it never rains, but it pours" at 1772, and even then it was being given as a trite saying.

Maybe it popularised the modern wording, but the story in the article isn't going for that angle at all.

As far as I'm aware Japanese immigration policy for skilled workers is relatively lenient, it's just not generally considered an attractive place to migrate to from places that generate a lot of migrants.

The UK and Ireland impose passport controls on the EU (Common Travel Area) which won't change, with regards to customs checks we're engaging in a bit of legal theatre to claim that NI is remaining inside the UK customs area but de facto it will be in a customs union with the EU/the Republic of Ireland and the customs border will be between Great Britain and the island of Ireland as a whole.

The plan in the UK IIRC is to mix hydrogen (10-20% I think) into the existing mains gas supply to lower the carbon intensity somewhat, in the long term though we're trying to replace boilers with heat pumps for domestic housing.

Something like 60% of the UK rail network is unelectrified and recent electrification projects have been ruinously expensive, we need something to fill in the gaps and hydrogen definitely has potential.

That's basically the plan for the UK network going forward, electrification has been ludicrously expensive so most of our rail network (in miles) is serviced by diesel trains, even some of the major lines have had full electrification indefinitely delayed.

It also allows un-electrified or inactive railway lines to be incorporated into urban metros much more easily and we're doing that as well.

Old English had a letter called thorn that would eventually be replaced with the modern th or a y (ye olde is just said the old).

The y^e form was apparently used for the King James Bible in 1611 so it's plausible it might still have been a normal way of writing "the" as late as 1650, rather than as an affectation or abbreviation.

Edit: He also uses y^t for that which I hadn't noticed at first glance.

That was in the midst of the Industrial Revolution and during a time when the UK also had direct and indirect control of exploitable colonies, I don't think the debt to GDP figures of the time are particularly relevant to modern nation states.

Japan has avoided financial collapse with a giant debt to GDP ratio for years now, I think the advent of QE and owning your own debt via central banks has made the whole thing seem a bit silly.

Hardcore History covers some important bits of the Roman Republic, including Caesar's conquest of Gaul, that episode is currently free too - https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-60-the-celtic-hol...

Punic Nightmares and Death Throes of the Republic cover other important bits of the Roman Republic, they're both incredibly good, but they aren't free anymore.

They were independent in the interwar period, technically lots of the Western USSR/former Russian Empire formed independent states after the First World War but only the Baltic states are usually considered to have been occupied by the USSR AFAIK.

The most likely scenario is that their predictions at the time have been surprisingly neatly counterbalanced by what actually happened, some big factors off the top of my head:

1. The industrial/economic/demographic collapse in the (former) USSR and Eastern Europe 2. Huge per capita emissions reductions in Western Europe and the USA 3. Stagnation in Japan 3. Slower global population growth than predicted

IIRC oil comes in many different grades, I believe North Sea Oil is a higher grade/more expensive than general US oil (West Texas Intermediate I think it's called), so we export North Sea Oil and then buy cheaper oil for our own needs.

I imagine that if one is being as technical as possible then sex is pretty unambiguous, i.e. egg/female sex cell producing -> female, sperm/male sex cell producing -> male.

Of course that leads to complications when you have to try and generally apply it, which is where the ambiguity comes from.

The budget cuts and (resulting?) move to "clickbait" articles and reporting has started to show pretty badly in the last year or two, the amount of basic errors and typos they let through is definitely far higher than it used to be.

I'd imagine that prohibitions against homosexuality existed in (at least) the pre-British Muslim dynasties, no?

In the UK I believe ours is six weeks in the summer, two weeks Christmas, two weeks Easter, then one week in the middle of each term (three per year).

I'd have to actually check though, been a while.