Longer than most think.

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

-Sixteen Tons, Tennessee Ernie Ford

"Harvard is a hedge fund with classrooms" - Scott Galloway

It's not just in Britain. All across the West, there's a shortage of native-born doctors. The expense and hassle of getting an MD is bad enough. Then you also have the modern stresses of being an MD (which in America, includes a highly litigious culture where doctors have to get maddeningly expensive malpractice insurance). The workload is huge, and the money is only good for the hyper-specialists now. The home-grown family doctor is an endangered species in the US, and we're addressing it in two ways: handing doctor duties to those lower on the chain, and importing doctors from the third world. Every single new doctor at my not-large Southern US hospital in the past three years has come from 3 places: India, Pakistan, or East Africa. This of course, robs those areas of badly needed doctors. And it doesn't really matter if your system is private or nationalized. Look at the ranks of doctors that staff your local services. You'll see similarities everywhere in the West: there's fewer of them, and they tend to come from overseas.

The best schools always included a mix of techniques in teaching. You had "drill 'till it kills" in math, THEN you had logic and reasoning exercises. You had memorization of names and dates, THEN you had deep discussions of historical events. A good education includes both rote and discussion, and always has.

Oh FFS. There are lots of knowledge that isn't "practical" yet is valuable to our culture. You people piss and moan about children not being properly educated, but when someone suggests that things like cursive writing and other finer points of civilization should continue to be taught, you scoff with bullshit like this.

My mother's generation had mandatory classes in Latin during high school in the early 1960's. As a culture, we're the poorer for having dropped those kinds of requirements. There's a reason the finer schools still require them. I'm all for more of a focus on the practical for kids... more shop classes, more practical math (loans and interest, basic accounting, etc), but to suggest that we should chuck all of the finer points of culture into the trash because it's "trying to get back to a past that time forgot" is complete and utter horseshit.

No they're not. You're exaggerating. The majority of these developments are still empty. China's declining birth rates coupled with the increased mortality from COVID have thrown in a monkey wrench into their planning. Up to 80 million units are still empty, with slim prospects for ever being bought or even used as social housing. Most of them are just crumbling ruins at this point. Even where people have moved in (often with heavy government subsidies, essentially turning units into an eastern Section 8 housing project), occupancy is still under 10%. They simply built too many units, and there aren't enough people to live in them. Some developments are being reclaimed for agriculture, with farmers grazing livestock and plowing fields on the strips of land between crumbing concrete structures.

So this is Geniza from between the First and Second Temple? Sorry, just had to ask. :)

Well, it's not really AI in any sense of the honest term; it's not a self aware machine. AI has become a marketing term for servers running a bunch of fancy scripts that produce dialogue that can pass for human speech fairly well. BUT... AI is a game changer economically because those fancy scripts are already killing jobs, jobs that won't be replaced by something else. So in that sense, AI isn't "bullshit". It's an extinction level event for entire classes of formerly human work. And the economic and social and political crisis that it will create has clearly already began.

This presupposes that they don't get plenty of "real world" while they're homeschooling. As if they're in some hermetically sealed environment where bad things never touch them. When we homeschooled ours, one of my wife's single friends objected, asking us "what about socialization?". Well, what about it? There's still plenty of it with friends and family, church, and play. And when they're young adults, they're better able to deal with the scum of the world than a pre-teen or teenager thrown into the cage match that is modern public schools where you can't get to them. School is supposed to be about education, not be a Thunderdome where the weak are weeded out for the coming apocalypse. Whatever my sons missed in public schools, they're far better off not being in a concrete box where some hulking delinquent 3 to 4 years older than all his class peers is punching teachers or pulling a gun on students.

It's the Christmas season. Everybody loves a two-for-one deal.

A direct line between County Cork and Loudon VA does not go through the east coast of Maryland on a spherical earth, that was the only point I addressed. Even if you wanted to maximize how much is laid in the ocean as opposed to land, there are still shorter distances that would land you on at least in Delaware. While I am sure there are logistical reasons to do it where they are doing, that is irrelevant to my point.

Yeah that sounds off. Probably mean digging at coastal shallower waters then just having it lay on the floor elsewhere, that's the standard.

That's assuming we live on a flat earth. A shorter line between County Cork and the US would have the US terminus much further north.

Oregon isn't Nigeria. All of the worker creature comforts aren't being flown in at great expense because local infrastructure and services are shit. Houses and restaurants are being built. Stores are being built. That means employing the locals for the most part, raising their wages and improving their infrastructure.

There are downsides to big companies coming into small towns. I live in one, and the increased traffic and general hassle of more people annoys the fuck out of me. But our standard of living has most definitely gone up, not down.

"We are crazy."

What's incredibly frustrating is how much of the craziness has been created and driven by Australians. Other countries want to push back against Trump? Go after the lunatics who fill his dementia-ridden head with all the crazy ideas, including their companies.