Not using Plex is the gift that keeps on giving. Why so many people went for it when there were better open-source alternatives available, I'll never know.

Trade deficit as an emergency, I think that's the economic equivalent of declaring the color of a T-shirt to be an emergency.

There are quite a few Vinfast cars going around, I wondered if people were importing them individually but then I spotted a Vinfast dealership off the highway (401 I think?) next to a Lotus dealership.

Chile seemed to be making something similar work with early-'70s computer technology, until Henry Kissinger decided that democratic socialism was a threat worse than Soviet communism and had the regime overthrown and replaced with a murderous right-wing dictatorship:

https://thereader.mitpress.mit...

I thought you should be able to find the link to the data in the news article, but since you can't, here it is:

https://www.pewresearch.org/so...

While the planet could support more people with properly managed resources, this idea that innovation comes from pulling the genetic one-armed-bandit enough times to hit a few jackpots and pop out a few Einsteins is ludicrous. Einsteins aren't born, they're made and enabled. If you want new ideas and innovation, support and empower the people who are already there to do it. We already have lots of people who could generate new ideas including lots of potential Einsteins, they just don't have the time or conditions to make a breakthrough like he did. They're scrapping away at a shitty job that eats all their time to make an already rich person richer instead of having the time to study bleeding-edge physics etc. in their generous downtime at a chill job in a patent office. Or they've gained the skills to make breakthroughs but are wasting them on making Facebook more addictive or developing Grok.

Per capita GDP isn't even a good measure because it isn't a measure of average wealth at all, it's a measure of total national income with no regard for how big the average person's slice of the pie is at all. I think what you're looking for is median household income or median personal income.

It's not society, society doesn't care too much about population growth, it's the economic system. Capitalist economic systems require infinite compounding growth in a finite world (so that capitalists can at any time turn their money into more money without doing any work), and so far the main driver of that growth has been population growth.

In a related problem, most pension/retirement schemes work like a long-running intergenerational ponzi scheme that will only avoid collapse as long as the next generation is bigger or at least wealthier than the last, and now we have two generations that are smaller and poorer.

A reasonably slow population decline wouldn't have such problems, but that's not what happens when a society suddenly makes 2 generations too poor to afford kids and also smart enough to realize it.

Here's some data to back it up:

https://fortune.com/2024/07/25...

Are you trying to argue that while they say they can't afford kids, they're actually not having kids because they're wealthy but don't know it?

I heard one libertarian argue that instead of having roads anywhere that a private entity doesn't feel like building one, people should just be driving offroad 4x4s through unmaintained mud trails, like in some of the more remote parts of Russia. Which is ideologically consistent at least.

Important points to live by, not just for software. The drive to find simple solutions to complex problems rather than accepting and managing complexity causes a lot of harm and waste.

That's fine for hobby programming, but sadly companies now do all their PHP coding with frameworks, either Symfony or, more commonly, Laravel. I'm guessing because they think it makes their developers more like replaceable cogs. No need to demonstrate real coding proficiency, just experience with the chosen framework.

Google is measuring water use by a different standard than everyone else:

https://www.theregister.com/20...

While we haven't fully documented a person dying from wet-bulb heat specifically, it's basic thermodynamics, we shouldn't have to conduct some kind of Josef Mengele experiment to prove that if you massively reduce the effectiveness of a human body's only cooling system, evaporation, through high humidity (a crucial factor, it's not just a matter of 35C+ alone) and turn the temperature up high enough they'll die. Do you have any hypothesis on how a person might survive this? Hundreds of people have likely died this way in heat waves in India over the last few years, they just didn't do it while scientists were monitoring them the whole time as would be required to attribute it to wet-bulb heat in particular.

Dinosaurs were not exactly warm blooded so I don't know why you'd suggest that humans should be able to survive anywhere dinosaurs did. Also modern humans have not even been around for a half-million years. Not that we would have any way of knowing if a large fraction of the Homo Erectus that ever lived died from wet bulb heat anyway.

Personally I've experienced these conditions when moving stuff into an enclosed crawlspace under a building in the Caribbean. Underneath the building was over 35C and the humidity was close to 100%. Sweat would just build up and drip off the bottom of my shirt under there with increasing speed. It was a clearly unsurvivable environment. The only way to stop getting hotter was to get out.

Some science you should have a look at: https://www.uottawa.ca/about-u...