"Economic Hardship" has jack-shit to do with most of the declining birthrate. Women have more money than ever. If being poor hurt the birthrate, the Third World would have ceased to exist centuries ago. Women choosing careers over marriage has far more to do with it. Those that are getting married are doing so much later in life, when their fertility is already declining, and having few children is a consequence of that. Why do you think IVF and egg-freezing are in such demand? Because women that waited until 30 to get married discover, often to their surprise, that their best chances of pregnancy are in the rear window.

Women were told that they could have it all, the best of both worlds: that they could live like men in their twenties, living the single sexual life and moving up their corporate ladder, and after they had their fun, then they could marry the man of their dreams and have their family. All in a neat package. Except nature doesn't work that way. The Biological Clock is a thing, women have a set number of eggs, and by thirty, they start heading downwards in terms of fertility. Late pregnancies have a greater chance of complications and birth defects. The peak year for fertility and healthy birth is, IIRC, age 24 on average for females.

Life is a series of choices. And choices have consequences. Declining birthrates are inescapable considering the choices made.

That's likely only the beginning for him. Roman almost certainly requires all his employees to pray at the shrines of Ron Paul and Ayn Rand on a daily basis as well. Roman's religious devotion is key to everything he says and does.

So you're saying not to hire people from San Francisco?

Not speaking for the OP, but yes. :)

As the person who has been responsible for responding to law enforcement video requests and occasionally (three times) testifying as to that process and their authenticity, it's exceptionally rare (never personally seen it) for CCTV footage alone to convict someone. Most of the time it leads the police to a suspect, usually because someone they know recognized them (not for nothing that the police frequently publish these videos/images) and then the idiot convicts themselves by talking to the cops (pro-tip, never do this). Less frequently it leads to other witnesses and/or evidence that gets them convicted.

Most of the time it doesn't do a damn thing because the crime in question isn't worth the police resources to follow up on, even if you have something pretty damning, like a legible license plate.

If AI enhancement results in more arrests for crime, I'd wager it comes about largely through the police releasing the enhanced images to the media, with the suspect(s) then being outed by their friends/family. Cops go talk to the suspect, he's an idiot and thinks he can outsmart them, and ends up saying incriminating things. Same as today, it'll just be higher quality images on the local news.

And porn. I knew I saved all those early aughts videos for a reason. ;-)

This is some racist ass bullshit and the people modding it up should be ashamed of themselves.

If you want to condemn India for something, condemn them for copying the worst parts of American capitalism.

Tell me, how many Indians do you see here? I count zero. You might be able to claim one, if you discount the fact that Ms. Amuluru is a natural born US citizen, about as Indian as I am German, but whatever, even if you include her I doubt very much she was a decision maker when it came to the aggressive cost cutting -- err, I mean "optimization" -- that lead to this, this, or this.

I don't really think it's incumbent on me to prove to you that the perspectives of myself and others are valid.

That said, have you tried to find a non-astroturfed product review for literally anything these days? Have you not noticed how Google -- who used to have the philosophy of getting you off their page as quickly as possible -- has plastered search results with "panels", using data stolen, err, I mean "borrowed", from actual webpages, and frequently directing you to other Google products and services? The last bit is the straw that broke the anti-trust camel's back on both sides of the Atlantic.

That's just Search. If you've worked with G-Suite/Workspace, you're well aware of the anti-consumer changes they've made to that product over the years. If you've come to rely on any Google products as part of your personal or professional workflow, you've probably had the discomforting experience of having the rug pulled out from under you. Is it really a wonder how they managed to go from being hip, cool, and disruptive, to the focus of so much ire?

I weirdly prefer working with Microsoft, despite their countless flaws/problems, and that's saying a lot. If you had told me 10 years ago that I'd feel that way I would have laughed in your face and asked how high you were. Hell, I became an Apple user because of a multitude of negative experiences with Nexus phones, specifically, the complete lack of QA/QC Google maintained over that flagship product line. Dismiss this as an anecdote if you want, it's not, the Nexus 6P ended in a class action lawsuit, countless people had the same lousy experience I did. Android had me for nearly a decade. If you had told me at any point prior to October 2016 I'd end up an iPhone user, again, I'd have laughed in your face.

If the products still work for you, great, but don't discount the multitude of voices saying they're inferior to yesterday's products and deeply frustrating to use.

Let me know when you can push this crap to a flip phone. Then I'll be impressed.

Til then, ad and malware free it is.

3) It will undoubtedly be used to push ads nobody except the MBA asshats asked for.

The assholes need to be plugged up too.

Some may enjoy it, even look forward to it.

That said, this is why we can't have nice things. A human always finds a way to screw things up for the rest of us.

No it's not. You're not wrong about Instagram and other platforms but even the Gen Z'ers who think those platforms == the Internet still use Google. With the possible exception of Reddit (always a toxic place and now that it's public it seems highly probable they'll add 'enshittification' to the toxicity) what platform can you use to find recipes, instructions to repair a broken appliance, swap a part on your car, reviews on some product you're looking for, experiences people have had with credit cards, airlines, etc.?

Google is still highly relevant, for better or worse, and the erosion of their core product is so commonly known that it has been covered by the MSM. Google Search is objectively less useful than it ever has been. Google (err, Alphabet) as a company lost its way a long time ago, probably around the time "Don't be evil" was removed, and it has been run by the same MBA asshats that ruined everything for at least the last decade if not longer.

This is why I don't use Windows at home.

After W7 I went to Linux and haven't looked back. It's bad enough I have to put up with Microsoft's excuses and incompetence at work, I definitely don't want to deal with that at home.

No, and because of passenger density and volume issues that affects costs. For high speed rail to pay for itself, you need fairly dense-packed areas with high traffic between each other. For HSR to successfully operate on a large scale in the US, it's going to have to be a political decision to subsidize it and eat the costs (see: the Acela).

Even liberal-ish groups that Rah-Rah things like public rail admit that it simply isn't self-supporting in the US. A decade ago, Brookings did a study on American rail, and concluded that if AmTrak was to be "saved", it was going to require a mix of killing off some routes, and subsidizing the remainder:

HSR tickets are also naturally going to be more expensive than snail-rail fares, too, further hurting traffic numbers, especially over the longer distance routes.

The US can do infrastructure just fine. What it can't do is ape a European rail model that is unworkable in the US. The United States, geographically and culturally, is as different from Europe as it is from Japan. It's a huge, wide-open area with large spaces between major metro areas outside of a small cluster in the Northeast US. Very unlike Japan and Europe in that regard. The train romanticists simply refuse to accept reality on that.

Woksters? I see the proposal to take smartphones - and screens in general - from teenagers and adolescents as being a very progressive thing to do. I can see how some people might be opposed to it becoming any sort of law, but I see the suggestion as being solidly rooted in evidence. I'm reading "The Anxious Generation" right now myself, and the studies that the book is based on have exceptionally clear results.