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Comment Re:Hardly anyone is ready for children early enoug (Score -1) 275

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.

Comment intelligence is not the prerequisite to survival (Score -1) 61

Are they really looking for intelligence in these LLMs or are they missing something else that slows down their progress? Is it intelligence, that we are trying to get out of LLMs? If so, I think they can be easily at least as 'intelligent' as anyone, they certainly have more information than any one person does. Maybe what they are looking for and not finding just cannot be found that way, that's because it is not intelligence they are looking for but some form of organic animal like behavior? In that case they will be looking for a while, not until we have robots everywhere that are more than a camera on a car, something that can touch, taste, smell, feel pain, hunger, consume to sustain itself, will the new level of 'intelligence' appear.

Comment Re:Yea. (Score 2) 113

Being "skilled up" mostly just means that you keep your skills matched to the relevant skills for today's job market, not yesterday's job market. In a field that changes fairly quickly, that is a continuous process for anyone who wants to remain employed in the field over a full 45-50 year career.

One problem is that people who are attracted to a field may have unique skills and, more critically, interests that align with the field at the time the enter it. However as the field changes in what it requires, those people may not be nearly as interested in the field and therefore less motivated to continue to "skill up" because it seems like work to do so rather than a pleasurable exercise in its own right.

Comment Re:Context is needed (Score 1) 136

Because photosynthesis produces oxygen, and increased CO2 would lead to a higher oxygen production rate. It's pretty basic science that one learns in middle school.

I picked 25% arbitrarily, it could be higher or only marginally lower, and presumably it'd take a great deal of time for the entire planet's oxygen levels to stabilize to newer CO2 levels.

Comment Re:500 means statistically significant health effe (Score 1) 136

In a word: yes. (And no, I don't understand the mechanism here.)

The studies on both have been pretty conclusive. Masks have had zero measurable impact over baseline on viral infection rates in anecdotal studies, have been shown to significantly increase bacterial infections in the wearer, and they contribute to increased blood CO2 levels for the wearer. Rhetoric - yours or mine - aren't really factors here, it's merely what we've been able to prove scientifically.

Comment Re:500 means statistically significant health effe (Score 1) 136

I didn't get anything backwards, you misread and made an incorrect inference.

China has a lot more people. They also have a lower per-capita CO2 emittance but higher overall, because more people.

Because they have more people, they're also outputting (breathing out) more CO2. Thus how you get 4-5x total more. Because people breathe.

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