It turns out that after the One Child Policy was changed to the Two Child Policy, the birth rate continued to decline. It then changed to a Three Child Policy, and the birth rate continued to decline. State-run media then started cranking out articles encouraging women (especially young women) to get married and have children, and the birth rate has continued to decline. And then 2020 happened, and the birth rate declined some more. So everything they've tried, hasn't started working yet.

First-world countries can generally compensate for reduced birth rates fairly easily, by allowing some amount of immigration. But if China wanted to do that, they would probably have to tone down the extensive xenophobic propaganda that they use to deflect blame for anything bad that happens, from the ruling party onto foreigners. And then they would have to find some other way to disperse all that negative energy, or it could turn into social unrest, which the CCP absolutely Does Not Want.

So they either have to find some way to reverse the trend and get the delta birth rate aimed upward again, or else they're going to have some serious population shrinkage. And it's worse than the raw "total number of people" number makes it look, because most of the population is already too old to have children. So even though it's going to be six or eight decades before it finishes happening, the population is going to dip to somewhere around half its current size, unless they can get the birth rate to *explode* upward. Raising it from its current value (1.16 births per woman if you believe the official figures, which may be padded, possibly significantly so) to 2 or even 3 births per woman, at this point, will still leave them with a very substantial population decline in the medium term (a few decades), and _then_ it would stabilize or start to rebound.

At this point, they know about the problem. It took them way too long to realize it, but now they have. They either just haven't figured out what to do about it yet, or they're hesitating to do it for fear of backlash. (At some point, I suspect, they will at least seriously entertain the option of making birth control illegal. And if that doesn't work, there are even more drastic measures that I wouldn't put past them.)

Some combination of social inertia, network effect, bundling, and the fact that most people are either not technically inclined enough or not brave enough to try installing an operating system themselves.

I agree with you but don't underestimate DeBeers.

They have enough diamond reserves that they can steeply discount natural ones for long enough to put synthetic diamond makers out of business.

LK

So one will be able to cut travel time between two destinations that I can't imagine wanting to ever visit.

Wake me up when there's a bullet train to Mos Eisley. Now there's a real den of iniquity.

> Just throwing solar panels up on a roof without batteries seems to be a rare thing these days.

That is probably for the best, honestly. Energy storage capacity on the grid is something it's pretty hard to have too much of.

> No, they really are producing too much.

Yes, but with qualifications. It's not too much in any absolute sense. It's too much for the current grid infrastructure, and in particular, the amount of energy storage capacity that is available on the grid.

In other words, as usual, they got the cart before the horse and did things in the wrong order.

It's important to understand that statistics are statistics. Individual cases vary, widely.

My high school English teacher eventually (end of senior year) confided to me that he had been in the habit of grading my papers last, so he could have at least one good paper to look forward to and finish on a positive note. (He liked my writing style; not everyone does, but he did. My papers always got good grades from him.) My surname starts with E, FWIW.

My point is, your grade isn't mostly determined by your position in the alphabet. It's mostly determined by other factors. Position in the alphabet has a statistically significant effect (and yes, the nature and extent of that effect almost certainly varies from teacher to teacher), but it's a secondary effect; other factors have a bigger impact. I expect it's not especially relevant at either the top or bottom end of the grading curve, but in the middle of the curve, where there are a ton of average students who produce just about equally mediocre work, it could be a bigger deal. Sometimes. Up to a point. The first paper the teacher graded that was a comparison/contrast between Barbie and Ken, two weeks after that movie hit theatres, probably got a better grade than the thirtieth such paper, especially if all thirty of them made basically the same points. But the student who didn't see the movie and turned in a comparison/contrast between the Illiad and Beowulf probably got an A, and the student who spent five minutes right before class hastily scrawling a short incoherent paragraph about smoking weed, got the low grade it deserved. Probably.

If there's a take-home point, it's probably this: software that collects student assignments and then presents them to the teacher (or TA or whatever) for grading, should probably present them in a randomized order each time. Well, pseudorandomized. No point making it cryptographically sound; if you're going to go to that much trouble, skip the randomness and rig it so that each student's position in the order is as close as possible to an even distribution over time.

It depends.

If the workers were fired for having opinions outside of work on their own time (e.g., on social media that they were using from home while not on the clock), then they have a valid grievance. That's, at least arguably, a form of discrimination.

On the other hand, if they were busy protesting all shift instead of working, while being paid to work, that's entirely a different thing altogether and falls under "refusal to perform job duties", which is a valid firing offense in any jurisdiction.

Pharmaceutical research (i.e., the search for new medications) is also (and has been for decades) disproportionately funded by America. Europe and a few other countries (e.g., Japna, South Korea) do also contribute, but their contributions are consistently a much, much smaller portion of their GDP.

They already have that. The Youth Unemployment Rate is so high they've stopped even publishing fake numbers, because any number low enough to publish, would not be believable.

Yeah. The Chinese economy is facing some "challenges" at the moment.

I don't know if that's going to work, given that the youth unemployment rate has gotten so high they've stopped publishing numbers for it, because either they'd be too high to publish under Chinese law, or else no one would believe them. Granted, that's not tech-sector-specific, but a *lot* of those unemployed young people are college educated, and STEM fields are quite popular over there. Employers may in fact be in a stronger negotiating position than the prospective employees.

I didn't say possible. I said practical. Strong crypto is hard. Secure key exchange is hard.

Governments have been breaking codes for as long as we have had codes.

LK

Even the most professional of officers would be tempted if he was was cheating on him or if someone delivered a credible threat to the safety of his children.

The best way to prevent this kind of abuse is to make it impossible.

LK

Edward Snowden showed that this is not as true as you seem to think it is.

LK

Then, let them serve the warrant.

What is different is that for the first time in human history, it's not only possible but it's practical to have encrypted communications that no one can access except for the intended recipient.

All of "the most heinous of crimes" take place in the real world, there is some physical action that can be detected and punished. I don't care if this makes the job of law enforcement harder. I want law enforcement to be a difficult and time consuming job. Idle and bored cops tend to find ways to fill their time and it's never good.

LK