1GB? "We demand one gigabyte!" I think you've been in a time-freeze like Dr. Evil :)

You need to put down the red/black pills and lay off the misogynist incel social media. Woman in the US are more likely today to be married to a shorter man than they were 40 years ago, and the difference in height of married couples has reduced by 1 inch since then. Three times as many married women are the primary breadwinner today as compared to 40 years ago. Women's STD rates are not significantly higher than men's STD rates, although reported rates are far higher for women. This is because women aged 18-64 are 50% more likely to visit a doctor each year than men, and the discrepancy is even greater for young adults.

It is true that women have more relative power in society today than they did decades ago, and that has hurt the dating market. Dating standards have always been relative, so if one side is becoming relatively more "attractive" then people on the other side will become less attractive on average. This is a pretty significant societal problem, but it is nowhere near as drastic as red/blue pill advocates claim. Women's standards have been dropping for decades, although arguably not fast enough. Men have also been starting to take on more family responsibilities for decades, although also arguably not fast enough.

Divorce law is also mostly not pro-woman, it is pro-equity. In practice this means divorce law's goal is to reduce the power disparity between spouses with unequal power. In practical terms power usually equates to income level, so if you have more income than your spouse you will have a significant amount of your power stripped away by the courts. Considering 55% of marriages have a male breadwinners and 16% have a female breadwinner (29% are egalitarian), in practice divorce laws favor women far more regularly than they favor men. One area where divorce courts unfairly favor women is in custody disputes, so men have a more valid level of frustration there.

Programs like social security are not Ponzi-schemes. First off, social security is not an investment vehicle, which is part of the definition of a Ponzi-scheme. There is also no money being stolen from these programs, since there is careful and accurate accounting of all funds including those in asset reserves.

Programs like social security and Medicare are only problems because of the kinds of demographic shifts you apparently aren't worried about. This is true no matter how a government manages social security-like programs. There will always be years in someone's youth and old age where they are not productive enough to earn enough money to meet their basic needs, and most modern societies expand on that by not expecting people of certain young or old ages to work at all. A country needs working age people to support these individuals in one way or another. In some cases it is through income taxes, in some cases it is through sovereign wealth funds. But all of those methods require working age people to labor so governments can collect taxes and companies owned by wealth funds have employees. Any imbalance in the number of working age and non-working age people will have significant impacts on the quality of life of both groups.

You are correct that feminism plays a big part, but that's because women don't want to deal with abusive men, not the other way around. And not just physical abuse. Women don't appear to want to do 30% more household chores than men even when both are working full time. Women don't appreciate their 67% increase in income from 25-55 when married compared to married men's 159% increase. Marriage has been a raw deal for women since forever, although I guess the lack of women's rights throughout history did technically make marriage the better option.

I believe it's also because economic hardship has hit young men harder than young women, making less young men into ideal mates, but that's another discussion.

This is simply not true. You would be correct in saying the drop in birth rate from 1958 to 1978 had nothing to do with economic hardship. It was a result of the abnormally high birth rate after WW2 coupled with more women entering the workforce and other effects that economic prosperity has on lowering birth rates. But that drop had stabilized and even reversed a bit for 30 years until 2008, when fertility started to drop again.

The drop in US fertility since 2008 is not because of women entering the workforce, because women workforce participation rate has remained steady since the late 90s. Median age of first marriage for females has also only increased 1 year since the late 90's (it increased 5 years from the 60s to the 90s), so that isn't a big part of the change in fertility either.

The change since 2008 is economic. The number of new homes under 1400 square feet built annually has dropped from 400,000 in the 70s to about 50,000 in the 2010s. Student loans per graduating student has increased 33% since 2008. Increased debt and increased housing costs are the biggest issues dragging down birth rates today in the US. The other factors you mentioned had already run their course by the 80s.

I also would like to know how many sell 50,000+ copies, not 500,000+. An author who can consistently sell at least 50,000 copies of each book can earn a decent living, as long as they dont take years in between each release. Knowing only 50 authors are making $1+ million per year isn't as interesting as knowing how many people can realistically be full time authors.

Instead of banning non-compete, just make sure it can't be abused. Something as simple as requiring companies to continue paying the employee their full compensation for the entire non-compete duration (with a 5% increase each year) would prevent abuse. Companies could still use them when it's important enough to protect the company, but no employees get screwed.

It all depends on whether or not the demand for the thing you are throwing money at is finite, or at least constrained in some way. If you throw a lot of money at subsidizing oil or steel or some other raw material necessary to build military hardware, the cost of military hardware will go down. But it doesn't help if you decide to simply buy 10x as much military hardware. If you throw money at subsidizing the education of doctors and nurses, the cost of medical procedures would go down. But it doesn't help if you start to pay for 10x as many medical procedures.

The cost of solar panels is constrained by competition from other energy sources, so there isn't a risk of costs ballooning out of control. The only result of the spending would be more solar power generation built in the US.

the placebos are working as intended.

please do.

is this funded by closing those loopholes? because the number seems low compared to how much they save.

https://tech.slashdot.org/comm...

I quote someone else saying: "The PC world might have looked very different today had Kildall's Digital Research prevailed as the operating system of choice for personal computers. DRI offered manufacturers the same low-cost licensing model which Bill Gates is today credited with inventing by sloppy journalists - only with far superior technology. DRI's roadmap showed a smooth migration to reliable multi-tasking, and in GEM, a portable graphical environment which would undoubtedly have brought the GUI to the low-cost PC desktop years before Microsoft's Windows finally emerged as a standard. But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man."

And my comment on that included (removing all the supporting links):
      "We had choices as a society. I saw some of them first hand in the 1970s and 1980s when I started in computing. I bought Forth cartridges for the Commodore VIC and C64. I worked very briefly on a computer with CP/M (although using Forth on it though). The OS choice pushed by the person born with a million dollar trust fund who "dumpster dived" for OS listings won (who did little of the development work himself) -- with an empire built on QDOS which has shaky legal standing as a clone of CP/M which is probably why IBM did not buy it itself. And we were the worse for it as a society IMHO. ...
        But that problematical path would not have been possible without political and legal decisions to base the development of computing around the idea of "artificial scarcity" via copyrights and patents which set the stage for that. We still have choices, and we can still pick different ways forward. [With] the free and open source software movements, we are in a sense returning to older ways of sharing knowledge that were more popular before artificial scarcity was so broadly thought to be a good idea for promoting progress. One should always ask, "progress in what direction"? ...
    Bill Gate's could have spent his lifetime writing free software. That being born a multi-millionaire was not enough for him is a sign of an illness that causes "financial obesity", not something to be emulated. But, in the end, it is not Bill Gates who has destroyed our society as much as all the people who want to be the next Bill Gates and support regressive social policies they hope to benefit from someday. ..
      Those who have the impulse to share and cooperate more than hoard and compete are still stuck trying to navigate the economic mess we have made of today's society through artificial scarcity, the growing rich/poor divide, the diversion of so much productivity into weapons and consumer fads, and so on. The late 1960s and early 1970s when Kildall, Moore and Kay/Ingalls were having their breakthroughs were a more hopeful time in that sense. ...
    Still, the web and HTML5/JavaScript/CSS3 are a new hope for sharing via open standards, and they have been a big success in that sense. I'm moving more of my own work in that direction for that reason (even for all their own issues). Like has been said about JavaScript -- it is better than we deserve considering its history and the pressures that we all let shape it."

So, while you and others who are posting here are no doubt right on technical limits and marketing issues, I would say the "downfall" story is more complex socially than one man and his decisions with one design.

I'll again echo a key point about Gary by someone else quoted at the start: "But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man." We need to build a society and an economy where people who make that choice get more support and respect.

p.s. I do not mean that as a rebuke of the Arab states. They believed they had a right, and the means to take the land. But it turned out they were wrong, and they lost honourably. They have mostly since made peace with Israel - the leaders at least if not the commoners. It would be peace if not for the Arabs' real enemy: the Persians in Iran.

Nonsense, the Arabs obtained almost all the former Ottoman lands. But that wasn't good enough, they wanted 100%, so they went to war. And lost.
And lost again. Hamas never wanted Gaza, they neved cared for gaza, for the business of governing. They left all that to thew UN. All they have ever wanted is conquest.
BTW, I say Arabs because "Palestinian" did not even exist as an ethnic identity back then. if you asked, they were Arabs. It is even newer than Israel as an idea of a nation, rather than a province of an Empire.

It's really odd a ban like this didn't happen a long time ago. I think there is valid criticism that the US shouldn't allow private businesses to control media (including social media) to the extent they do without more regulation, but not allowing a foreign geopolitical adversary to do it should be a no-brainer. YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook are all banned in China. The fact TikTok has been allowed in the US for as long as it has is ridiculous.