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You mistake me completely. I’m not advertising the virtues of this system at all. I’m just pointing out that there is nothing Korean or American about declining birth rates. This is a universal phenomenon of a society’s transition from agrarianism where more hands = more wealth to an educated, skilled labor force where each child requires a significant investment.

The US and, for example, Germany use immigration to offset this and keep their population growing. That’s simply a fact you can look up. Japan for example doesn’t want to do this and they’re dealing with the consequences of population decline. This is all over the news for years now.

I’m not saying this is good or bad or anything. This is just the way things are.

Your bit about Ancient Rome is a good laugh because it was hardly a developed society by today’s standards and it did indeed run on imported labor, except they called them slaves. So you are at once off base and also wrong.

Every developed country goes the same way. Some, like the US, are able to attract enough immigration to compensate.

So in AU you must vote or it’s a $50 fine?

I can envision how to make voting accessible. I can’t envision how to make it compulsory. Any suggestions?

It’s important for perspective that we remember how thin the line is between winning and losing. A very minor shift in voter turnout is all it takes to flip the game. The good news for us in this is that we don’t need to take the last election as a sign that the entire world is lost - we have every opportunity to change things. You could say it shouldn’t be this close, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but that’s also a pretty pointless whinge. Nothing worth having has ever been won without a fight, so we shouldn’t gripe about having to face one ourselves.

He’s a media producer, and he ain’t producing books. Of course he’s going to tell his audience books don’t matter.

Didn’t Xena start as a minor character on Hercules? If I’m remembering that rightly, it must be humiliating for him that a side character went on to outshine his whole show.

If you think there’s no work between symptoms and diagnosis, you’re dumber than you think LLMs are.

It’s actually interesting. They found the LLMs gave the correct diagnosis high-90-something percent of the time if they had access to the notes doctors wrote about their symptoms. But when thrust into the room, cold, with patients, the LLMs couldn’t gather that symptom info themselves.

The whole text is smug and dumb (traffic cones? the kind with no holes in the top???) so I’m not surprised to hear it has all these inaccuracies.

Police that are intending to disrupt a protest are planning and organizing in person, not over the radios. That’s just stupid.

They do need some kind of telecommunication. At a certain size, a protest sprawls many blocks and it will ebb and flow and shift around. You know you’re making an impact when they bring in a helicopter to spot. Obviously the copter is radioing the ground. But yeah also probably not in an easily-overheard way.

True. The feds could probably have some impact within the Harvard community. I just suspect their leverage is extremely low

Just as funny is the idea of Trump withholding federal funds from Harvard. They are private and their foundation is rich as fuck.

Regulations were put in place to prevent manufacturers from opening their own stores right next to the dealers they worked with. Dealers assume some risk when they take on inventory. Apparently it’s not like a bookstore where any unsold copies just go back to the publisher. It’s still a flimsy justification though and enshrined these middlemen who then enshittified everything. Worse, in some cases manufacturers are entirely prevented from selling direct, even if they don’t work with dealerships. It’s too much.

Strangers making claims on the internet is all this place is. There’s no “proof” needed or available here.

Someone shits in your yard and you’re going to set a porta potty out by the curb? No you’re not.

Why the hell would Tennessee’s electrical grid be all woke, anyway? Are these people totally powerless before the might of the treehuggers? I cannot believe their shameless victim bleating.

Even then you are likely surrounded by hard vacuum for light years in every direction. “Among the stars” is pretty much any goddamn place.

Right but those thousands of Trump mentions were Epstein himself saying “why won’t Mr. Trump answer my invitations to the island?” and brainstorming with Elon Musk “how can we get Mr. Trump to come visit the island?” /s

Thank you Kamala for finally killing this whole 6 7 thing.