Imagine how much more plastic and other petrochemicals you'd have if we stoppes burning most of it.

The rapid expansion of the population seems to have been largely due to economic factors specifically the need to have a lot of kids on a farm for labor combined with the requirement for a lot of kids to take care of the parents in their old age.

Also the lack of birth control but that's believe it or not a lesser effect. Japan's birth rate dropped below sustainability even before they had the birth control pill available. Also Japan didn't legalize birth control until 1995 go figure...

Basically polls show women want 2.6 kids however it looks like maintaining the population requires 2.7 kids. So without economic and social pressure to force women into having more kids than they want the human population actually starts to decline.

Now there are a bunch of religious wackadoodles and psychopaths that want to turn women back into property and bring back stuff like marital rape in order to boost birth rates. Not sure that'll work though without the need for a shitload of farm workers and we just don't need that many Farm workers.

It is possible that the billionaire class will dismantle capitalism and our modern technological society bringing back a twisted form of feudalism but if they do that the lower cast will almost certainly lose access to reliable food and medicine that allowed the population explosion in the last hundred years or so. And that's without talking about things like world wars brought on by mass unemployment and stuff like that...

Assuming our species doesn't wipe itself out we are probably going to plateau and start to decline in population.

On the other hand ask any expert in foreign policy and they will tell you that at any given time the world is a couple of mistakes away from a large war and this time we have nuclear weapons. I could very easily see us putting crazies in charge of the arsenal too

Just a note - MacOS is Unix https://www.theregister.com/20.... Linux is Unixy as we say. Note that Unix is "POSIX compliant" now, and has been for a long time, (1993) so the pedants among us might want to weigh in on that.

Point is, I bash around in Terminal half the day. The default is now zsh, but bash sounds better to speak.

Yeah, when I have to go into Windows command line, I have to remember to shift my mental state.

Main point is, I have Apple create the ecosystem while I do paid things. Why should I have to do that? My burn rate overwhelms the cost of the phone or computer very quickly. It's like having a starter motor on a car instead of a hand crank. Obligatory car reference.

Exactly. There is a meme that all Apple users are clueless, with more money than brains. Sure, some are. It would be silly to think that Android and Windows users are the intelligentsia of computer, phone, and tablet users. Some are smart and savvy, some are not

You are trying to make the inferior performance of Android product integration a flex. Yes - I get Apple to provide a functioning integrated system. I have things to do that I am paid for, and those things work so much better with an integrated system that I do not have to futz with while unpaid, simply to make them integrate after a fashion. Just getting a computing device to function is so early 1990's.

And my familiarity with UNIX and its close brother Linux - well, I don't know about sleeping better, but I can get more hours of sleep.

But at least we have fewer Home Depot day laborers and restaurant prep cooks.

*sheds tear*

...MURICA!

Living in the rust belt takes a toll on vehicles. It's rare to see anything from the 00s here anymore. You don't see 90s cars unless they were garage kept by grandma or bought out of state.

In either a great way or a horrifying dystopian way.

Either we get rid of billionaires and ruling classes and we rule together without demanding leaders control us or we let the billionaires take over and become trillionaires and then completely dismantle capitalism. Once that happens the economy collapses, all of us basically regress into feudal poverty and about 1% of the population will still have modern technological civilization and the other 99% will have basically nothing.

That's the plan anyway. People keep asking if none of us have any money who's going to buy the billionaires' products?

You think they haven't asked that same thing? You don't think Elon Musk and Bill Gates have noticed that they are completely dependent on you and your filthy little consumers and worker bees in order to have their wealth and prestige and power?

Of course they've noticed it and of course they don't like it. They are taking steps to eliminate the dependency.

That said I don't think they're clever enough to pull it off completely and I think eventually they will start world wars and go nuclear but time will tell.

Maybe when the raccoons take over as the next dominant species they'll be better off than we were. Or it could be beavers. They're pretty close to having opposable thumbs with a few mutations.

Just in time for completion of the Epstein Ballroom.

Because passing tariff costs to consumers is admitting it was nothing more than a new tax enacted by the dementia patient.

It’s 2025 and food costs double or even triple what it did 5 years ago. People aren’t going to shell out extra cash just to say the copper wire in their $40k base model car is American sourced.

You’ll notice it’s GM telling suppliers and not GM choosing new suppliers. Because factories don’t spring up overnight and imagine the nightmare when GM buys a million connectors from a new supplier that fall apart in six months.

Ford made the news because they were complaining about not being able to find 5,000 Machinists but it turns out the reason they can't get those workers is they built the factory in the middle of nowhere and nobody wants to live out in the middle of nowhere for a job where they can be laid off at any time without any other jobs around. It's basically a company town at that point and you're fucked if you live there because it's only a matter of time.

Meanwhile even if the factories come back the jobs don't because the vast majority of the other work is automated. 5,000 machinists sounds great but that's for auto work. Most of the stuff we make these days as a species can be made by robots and machines. So you can do all the tariffs you want and you might get the factories back here but you aren't getting the jobs.

The only reason you see so many people in factories overseas is there paid slave labor wages and if they try to unionize their fascist government just kills them and harvests their organs.

They're all good reasons to use tariffs to force industries to come back even if we don't get the jobs. Not having semiconductors built here as a national security concern.

But we need to stop talking about bringing back jobs with tariffs because that's just not going to happen.

For some, it looks like other places they might put it. Be more inclusive.

You are right about that. As well, they only released them in certain markets where they figured out the demographics. In the world at large, they'd not be so successful. We live in a world where a few people think the iSock is a good idea. Probably the same demographic that believe the new Jaguar commercial people are cool. I suppose if they think the iSock is cool and want to spend the money they can. I suspect they might also have problems with financial savvy, but that's another story.

Do you think? Do you think that Android ownera are all Mensa members or Illuminati?

The iPhone pocket was for sale in very limited locations, picked for demographics. Deciding Apple users are a separate species is kind of prejudiced.

Let's see, there are many of us, like myself, who are on Apple products for a number of reasons

MacOS is UNIX. I'm UNIX. So I'm going to have a UNIX computer. I spend hella much time in Terminal.

The phones and tablets and computers all integrate to an extent that is is impressive. No, Windows and Android don't, not as well.

Family member integration is excellent ApplePlay is much better than AndroidPlay.

Aside from the orange abomination phone, and the stupid iSock, the products are well designed, and tasteful.

So there are many reasons to own Apple products. Yes, some people are in it for some kind of status. Just like some people are into Android as a reaction to those Apple users who they claim are universally stupid status seekers.