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calmdon South Korea: The only middle power of its kind

> Why is that being treated as inherently bad, though?

We are not making this decision completely willingly, it is more just happening and it is out of the governments control. To me this means it is risky, and can we pull out of it? How do we pull out of this shrinkage?

I guess the good thing is that the developed world is all in this together, rather than only parts of it. That reduces the chance of massive disparities as a result of the changes it causes.

If would feel much more comfortable that we completely understood it, and how to control it.

There will be a lot of changes that will occur. For example conservatives are less effected by population shrinkage than liberals in the US -- probably just because conservatives are less likely to be city dwellers? Or maybe it is conservatives have different values... or a combination of values that effect whether they live in the cities.

Atheists have lower reproduction rates than those who are religious as well. (which probably correlates with liberalism/conservatism as well.)

I wonder if there are any genetic contributions to conservatism/religiousness? If so this may be a period of rapid genetic evolution...

calmdon South Korea: The only middle power of its kind

I think robotized war changes the equation a bit here. At least with regards to non-adjacent conflicts. But for adjacent conflicts between non-superpowers, if one area is depopulated, it may be much easier to walk in and keep that territory.

calmdon South Korea: The only middle power of its kind

So urban cities are anti-child? Thus we will see cites change or depopulate?

Does low fertility correlate with dense urban dwelling and sky high real-estate prices? I suspect it probably does, but I haven't seen any proof.

Maybe this shift to remote-first work that happened over the last 18 months will help....

calmdon South Korea: The only middle power of its kind

Let's take that at face value.

If shrinking populations are okay, what is the desired population level? Right now no country seems to be able to stop this decrease in the modern/developed world. We are just currently shrinking.

calmdon South Korea: The only middle power of its kind

SK is committing demographic suicide though, so whatever you think of its success, it has a pretty fatal disease. It has the lowest birthrate in the world.

This is going to cause significant economic problems quite soon, or they will have to open up massive immigration which will completely change the country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_birth_rate_in_South_Korea

How does the developed world pull out of this type of tailspin? Japan and other nations are also facing this exact same issue and we seem to be not paying attention to it.

The core issue is that in most of the developed world, people do not have enough children. And even immigrants in their second generation and beyond also do not have enough children, as such it appears to be a cultural/way of life/society norms problem. It is as if the developed modern world is currently designed as a population sink.

This is going to be one of the grand challenges of the 50 years.

calmdon The UK’s delta surge is collapsing

https://www.barrons.com/articles/covid-cases-uk-us-today-516...

Delta surged lasted 50 days in India and 45 days in the UK. We may see something similar

That would be nice

calmdon [dead]

Exactly. I think if you cited source it may have avoided u getting downvoted. Alex is a major vaccine skeptic who has been consistently wrong in his prognostications on Fox News

calmdon [dead]

Alex Berenson is mostly a krank who has been consistently wrong in his predictions.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-...

calmdon Blizzard's reputation collapsed in just three years

Stunning fall. For a while Blizzard could do no wrong. I feel that Bobby, the CEO, is very focused on results and only understands gamers third hand at this point.

That works for a while when the employees still care but once they stop caring there is no one to steer the faltering ship.

calmdon Get Ready for the 'No-Buy' List

A reminder that Bari is against cancel culture until you criticize Israel. She is such a hypocrite: https://theintercept.com/2018/03/08/the-nyts-bari-weiss-fals...

calmdon Scarlett Johansson Sues Disney over ‘Black Widow’ Streaming Release

Disney+ with 100M active subs is completely different than minor streaming services before that.

calmdon Scarlett Johansson Sues Disney over ‘Black Widow’ Streaming Release

This makes sense. A lot of stars expect a cut of box office revenues and negotiate that in. But the negotiations happened probably prior to the pandemic and the new situation probably was unthinkable.

Also the box office in general has been destroyed recently because of the pandemic. What would have likely been $+150M opening weekends and close to $1B totals revenue (or even more) are reduced to fractions of that.

EDIT: Even worse, it was actually to be released in May 2020, thus the negotiations for salary were likely done in 2017/2018 or possibly earlier. Disney+ wasn't even announced back then.

calmdon Scarlett Johansson Sues Disney over ‘Black Widow’ Streaming Release

The problem is if Disney blacklists her from its main franchises, Star Wars and Marvel and Pixar/Disney animation films, that is more than half of the box office these days.

The box office is I think 50% super hero films now.

That said I think they won't...

calmdon Apple Reports Third Quarter Results

Federal taxes?

calmdon Freenom, the free domains website, is a scam

Who is behind Freenom? Shouldn't they have to disclose this method of business in their TOS?

calmdon On the lack of progress reports from the Mill project

Their ideas will become more widespread but it may be done by a different team at this point.

calmdon iOS and Android must respond to NSO-like attacks with better security

Key quote from the article:

> The trick is to strike the right balance between offering more system indicators without inadvertently making attackers’ jobs too much easier. “There is a lot that Apple could be doing in a very safe way to allow observation and imaging of iOS devices in order to catch this type of bad behavior, yet that does not seem to be treated as a priority,” says iOS security researcher Will Strafach.

calmdon Mitchell Hashimoto takes on a new individual contributor role at HashiCorp

He is fabulously wealthy now. He doesn't have to work. What is the percentage of his ownership in this $5B company? 10%? More? He's achieved his goals likely. Probably will want to slowly cash out and diversity.

Do other things...

calmdon RNA demethylation increases rice and potato yields 50%

There is a long term trend that vegetables are getting less nutritious, yes. And it is speculated that it is because of soil depletion.

https://www.cookinglight.com/eating-smart/nutrition-101/frui...

calmdon Mitchell Hashimoto takes on a new individual contributor role at HashiCorp

I did not know about this: https://www.nomadproject.io/docs/nomad-vs-kubernetes

Is it good? Is there a growing user base? Why do I not hear about it?

calmdon Mitchell Hashimoto takes on a new individual contributor role at HashiCorp

I hope he is creating a simpler Kubernetes competitor for robust container orchestration/management. Hint hint.

calmdon CIA officer from bin Laden hunt to lead Havana Syndrome probe as cases rise

Doing it to the US is ballsy, but I bet you could have gotten away with this for quite some time against less major actors. In fact I question why someone would use this against just US diplomats in such a low stakes situation. I would have saved this weapon for when it would have made a difference.

calmdon CIA officer from bin Laden hunt to lead Havana Syndrome probe as cases rise

Imagine any protracted conflict, if you can give the other leadership group minor brain damage, you'll more likely be able to out maneuver them.

calmdon Epic Games acquires Sketchfab, a 3D model sharing platform

Epic Games has been on an acquisition tear -- just in last 12 months:

- SuperAwesome, child safe games

- Hyprsense, facial animation

- Cubic Motion, another facial animation tool

- Rad Game Tools

- Tonic Games, makers of Fall Guys

- Reality Capture

- ArtStation, artist portfolios + marketplace (usually 2D renders)

- Sketchfab, artist portfolios + marketplace (usually 3D models)

On each acquisition, they usually lower the price of the tools to near nothing. It seems to be a clear consolidation play.