Surveys of adults are pretty clear... parents are less happy and are more stressed moment to moment, but report higher life satisfaction. So pick your poison. I have kids. Some days it's a struggle, but I'm glad I did. It's an amazing experience and I'm a better person because of it.

Exactly. The last generation fought for women to have a choice... women felt like the option of a career was denied to them. They now have that choice, but the reality of the fact that you have to choose family, career, or a lesser combination of both is causing some heads to explode. "You mean we can't have it all?" Well, no, men couldn't have it all either. Every single rom-com or drama movie growing up explained to me that as a man I would face a dilemma: have a super-successful career, or be a great Dad (with the latter always being portrayed as the "right" choice). You have to set priorities. There are trade-offs. For some reason our culture never explained that to young women.

The Neanderthal misanthropes want more legal immigration,

Exactly, just like the con artist was hiring all those legal immigrants to work on his failing properties. The same guy who doesn't hire Americans but always finds a way to hire an immigrant.

No, but instead go with the stats, that well over 95% of the kids that are "confused", grow out of it..?

Well sure. And when 95% of all statistics are made up, who can argue with it?

This is exactly what Tesla did for years. In addition to getting billions of dollars in socialist payments from the taxpayer, the company used regulatory credits to keep itself going. It didn't make money on its poorly designed vehicles.

Ford does not have the luxury of using those same credits so its numbers are more reflective of the cost to start up an EV car company.

On the other hand, hopefully this sort of technology will reduce the number of exploited people being forced to work in slavery conducting scams in call centers in India and other places.

They'll just be moved to forced prostitution or manually breaking ships. Then again, have you seen all those videos of "manufacturers" in India where everything is done in a room with no safety precautions whatsoever?

Not all abuse is physical, and women have basically the entire government (men with guns) at their disposal to meet out abuse if a relationship turns sour, if they so choose.

Yes, "abuse" when the woman doesn't want to be with the guy any more and the guy doesn't take no for an answer. Sort of like this guy. Or this gold medal catch of a "man".

Because, as usual, the "man" always blames the woman for his faults and issues. Nothing is ever on him.

It's also relevant that California voters are more pro-EV than other states (or most of them, anyway; not sure about Hawaii), so the political will to absorb this cost, is probably going to be there.

If they drop the prices on the EVs, they can sell more of them. Sure, the per-unit profitability will be even lower, but they can make up for it with higher sales volume!

Not in this case. If someone tells me, that he mistrusts Cisco products and would rather not use them, that's fine. If somone tells me that "even he knows better than to use Cisco", I have to assume that his qualification is that of an armchair expert.

If someone's understanding of network security consists of "Don't use X", I know I will never hire him for any consulting work.

It turns out that after the One Child Policy was changed to the Two Child Policy, the birth rate continued to decline. It then changed to a Three Child Policy, and the birth rate continued to decline. State-run media then started cranking out articles encouraging women (especially young women) to get married and have children, and the birth rate has continued to decline. And then 2020 happened, and the birth rate declined some more. So everything they've tried, hasn't started working yet.

First-world countries can generally compensate for reduced birth rates fairly easily, by allowing some amount of immigration. But if China wanted to do that, they would probably have to tone down the extensive xenophobic propaganda that they use to deflect blame for anything bad that happens, from the ruling party onto foreigners. And then they would have to find some other way to disperse all that negative energy, or it could turn into social unrest, which the CCP absolutely Does Not Want.

So they either have to find some way to reverse the trend and get the delta birth rate aimed upward again, or else they're going to have some serious population shrinkage. And it's worse than the raw "total number of people" number makes it look, because most of the population is already too old to have children. So even though it's going to be six or eight decades before it finishes happening, the population is going to dip to somewhere around half its current size, unless they can get the birth rate to *explode* upward. Raising it from its current value (1.16 births per woman if you believe the official figures, which may be padded, possibly significantly so) to 2 or even 3 births per woman, at this point, will still leave them with a very substantial population decline in the medium term (a few decades), and _then_ it would stabilize or start to rebound.

At this point, they know about the problem. It took them way too long to realize it, but now they have. They either just haven't figured out what to do about it yet, or they're hesitating to do it for fear of backlash. (At some point, I suspect, they will at least seriously entertain the option of making birth control illegal. And if that doesn't work, there are even more drastic measures that I wouldn't put past them.)

Some combination of social inertia, network effect, bundling, and the fact that most people are either not technically inclined enough or not brave enough to try installing an operating system themselves.

Worker shortages are not bullshit; it's just basic demographics. Go look at a population pyramid sometime. Your generation didn't have nearly as many kids, and now we have a tiny generation entering the workforce just as the largest generation (the boomers) is in the midst of retiring. This isn't rocket science; it's arithmetic. And if you started and grew 4 "successful" companies and you still don't have a wife or a home, then I suspect everything you just posted here is the real bullshit.

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.