Now TV will be an endless string of sequals and reboots for 70 year old franchises too, just like Movies. Great. I can hardly wait.

Personally, I'd expand a bit. Two games I've played recently are No Man's Sky, an open world SciFi survival craft game, and "Still Wakes the Deep", which is more a horror themed action visual novel.
Still Wakes the Deep is completely voiced, but utterly, absolutely, on the rails - there's always only one way forward. Thus, replayability factor is lacking.
No Man's Sky isn't voiced at all, but would likely make a lot of people cringe because of a large but still limited number of dialogues. Plus, well, probably whatever mechanic they use for the translation device, because you don't start knowing the alien languages. NMS has the "hundreds" of characters.
So I could see AI being used to not only create "hundreds" of different voices for all the characters, but to write different dialogue for them, even if it is variances on common themes.
Go from basically 100 characters with maybe different appearances to unlimited characters with like 100 archetypes.

Correct, the headline should be: Why is Fertility So Low in EXPENSIVE Countries?

The reality is that 'high income' more likely than not means high prices, constant pressure to keep earning money, because there are very few things in 'high income' (expensive) countries that doesn't cost money. We are constantly forced to pay taxes, never mind that in expensive countries large parts of the population live in dense urban areas, in cities and nobody has land that they can live off of. If you have no source of food other than the store and you cannot avoid paying taxes and paying high costs of owning or renting a property, then you are constantly under pressure to earn money.

In an expensive country you have expensive government and this government never ceases to pressure you to pay more taxes, makes things truly unaffordable by pretending to give it to you for free, basically in expensive countries you are forced to provide not only for yourself and for your children and maybe for your elderly parents, you are forced to provide for your expensive government.

An expensive government is obviously the cost of running the government itself, salaries, pensions, buildings, all expenses but it is also all of the laws, that are constantly adding more and more expenses to the system, thus mostly forcing the government to get deeper into debt and to steal your purchasing power through inflation (money printing).

Under these circumstances people who have access to contraceptives will use them almost always and this prevents almost all unwanted pregnancies. The other part of the population is just too stressed out and too tired from constant earning to pay for all of this 'high income' expensive stuff.

At the end children become a luxury for those, who can afford just a little more than the other guy or they become a way to suck money out of the system itself by getting onto various programs. They are an irrational choice for many, so to have them you either have to have a direct financial incentive or to be irrational or to be wealthy enough to afford them.

I chuckled at the headline too. I came here to ask "indeed?" indeed

So no citation then?

[citation needed]

The idea that new build anything is cheaper than nuclear that has been operating for three decades or more is ridiculous on its face. If I'm wrong, please, by all means, direct me to the evidence thereof.

Is that with all this solar, wind, etc.... China *still* must build more coal plants even tho we are finding out their population is smaller than we thought.

In time, it will destroy demand for coal but for now, the projections are still for more coal plant by 2045.

I'm hoping they are wrong and solar/wind comes online faster. It's cheaper than coal but they simply can't produce and build it out fast enough globally.

And it's not just kids (won't someone think of the children)...

In Texas, we can get a half dozen "watch" alerts a day when storm systems are moving through.

That's *POINTLESS*. If your alert system is sending more than one message a day, you probably didn't set it up well.

And worse, the watches usually mean "stay at home, avoid getting caught in deep flood waters" and not "leave your home because floodwaters over your roof will be there in under 90 minutes."

And it's not even just amber alerts. You can get a half dozen "watch" alerts from a fast moving system *per day*.

At that level, "watch" alerts are useless. Especially since in most of texas they mean, "don't leave home or your car may be flooded out" and not "leave home- your home will be flooded out".

And the short staffing of the service in the U.S. due to Ham-handed layoffs this year did not help.

Sorry, you were talking about prices today and "still using" nuclear. Your comment re: subsidies suggests you are talking about Hinkley Point, which is not yet generating power and no subsidies for said power generation are being paid.

Existing nuclear is probably the cheapest energy in your grid. The "good news" at least for you is that almost all of it is scheduled for decommissioning by the end of the decade, so you will be able to see just how "expensive" it was when your rates go up as a result.

You should have been replying to the other guy. Something screwed up with my quote block so it looks like the ignorant statement was written by me, but I was trying to quote him. Agreed it's a pretty dumb take, which was my point.

Darth Cheeto is not going to permit any coal plants--not because of anything related to him, but because no one has any plants to permit. Anything currently being discussed is a pencil exercise at best (and will almost certainly never come to fruition).

I work for a company that provides equipment for fossil power plants. There is a shit ton of gas coming in the next five years but no coal at all. New coal power is dead in the US.

Energy prices in the UK are high because we are still using too much gas and nuclear

You realize the vast majority of cost in nuclear is in the construction, yes? The idea that "energy costs are high because we are still using nuclear" is absurd. Decommissioning nuclear plants will increase your costs.

I wonder if there is anything that has been going on for the last half century or so that could explain why employees could be more efficient and you might have less of them for the same task, even in the face of having more customers. Some sort of revolution, maybe of the computer sort?

On second thought, nah, that wouldn't make any sense.

just play human music at 5% processing and keep the settings on auto, we'll deal with this later.