I think that is a misunderstanding. Life expectancy was around 30, but that is heavily skewed by high child mortality. Once you survived into adulthood, you had a good chance to live to 40 or 50, which was old age back then.

Yeah, and then you starve or just die of natural causes.

Yes, but the SR-71 missions were always considered illegal. They were a demonstration of what you could get away with, not what was allowed.

Spy satellites are different, they are generally considered legal.

Exactly. Unauthorised aircraft in the airspace will always be addressed, even civilian ones.

China says that the balloons were "uncontrolled" and entered the US by mistake, but they are lying. Balloons can be controlled, and these are controlled.

And even if they were right, the US is still within their rights to shoot them down.

He did his groundbreaking work in 1974. A recognition in the 70s, or 80s, or even the 90s would have been nice.

Now, it seems a bit pointless.

Indeed. A lot of the computers shipped during COVID were underspeced, with slow CPUs and not enough memory.

This would be an ideal situation to start a performance initiative, and finally give people better computers again. But no, AMD has to put profit before the customer interests. (And Intel are possibly even worse, NVidia certainly is.)

And by far. Over a million people are estimated to have died by lead poisoning, and a lot of that can be traced back to the Ethyl Corporation.

In the lawsuit, they even tried to argue that lead levels were "normal" because it was everywhere. They used the fact that they had poisoned the whole planet as a defence.

Compared to that, Boeing committed a minor crime. But the response is exactly the same: never admit a fault, bribe people, cut a deal, and pretend nothing happened.

I assume there are regulations for the transport of radioactive material, and they were all broken?

The law doesn't. It says they "may" accept bitcoin. Which does not make it legal tender.

They may accept pretty much anything, but you cannot force anybody to accept bitcoin.

WTH?

You think children are a private good, like a dog? A toy? A transactional investment?

I would hope that just about any country sees children as the future of society.

But yeah, that would be one way to solve the problem. No children, no society, no problem.

It is a self-defeating problem. Once the younger people feel screwed by society (which they are), they will assume their children would be even worse off, and they may think twice about having children at all. No other country has been as deep into this problem as Japan, but we may follow their example with a few decades delay. So it is interesting to watch.

This. They are not really worried about a future for their country and their culture, they are worried that there are not enough workers born to support the increasing number of retirees with complex medical needs. And they are right: this is not going to end well.

There is another problem with lower work force participation: it is not stable in a democracy. Once more than half of the electorate is economically inactive, they will just squeeze more money out of the people who do, and working becomes less attractive. Japan already has pretty high taxes, and it is a very old society, so they are very much in danger of this.

The beauty is that all companies are doing this at the moment. The main driver for inflation is not the energy cost, but corporate greed.

And as a customer, you cannot even switch to a competitor, because it is happening across the board.

I mostly found the store ridiculously expensive.

Angry Birds was $5 when it came out. Then $1. Then free.

Angry Birds VR is $15. WTH? That is a non-casual price for a casual game.

...say it ain't so.