That analysis is utterly wrong. Far, far worse than the smartphone theory.

It is, in fact, the almost exact opposite of the truth. The truth is that wealth is what causes fertility decline. Wealth and female education, actually, which come hand-in-hand. This story is strikingly visible everywhere around the globe. As a population becomes wealthier and its women become better-educated, fertility falls. Without exception, and the effect is so powerful it overrides culture, religion, everything.

This is the primary driver in the US, too. In fact, wages have not stagnated, not when you look at the full picture including government transfers, and every generation is wealthier than the one before. Somewhat surprisingly, given the current housing price bubble, each generation even has higher home ownership rates than the previous generations at the same ages. Houses and apartments are also significantly bigger and more luxurious (which explains most of their higher prices, actually; do some comparisons on a per square foot basis over time, then adjust for the higher quality and greater amenities we have today).

But if you look at how Americans spend their money over the years, the biggest change you'll find is that we spend less on housing, food and clothing as a percentage of our income (in spite of bigger, nicer houses, far more restaurant and delivered food, and much larger wardrobes) and much more on entertainment -- and that in spite of the fact that entertainment has gotten dramatically cheaper.

The US solved this problem 150 years ago. First with the observation that immigrants acculturate. Second with the acceptance that elements of their culture are going to get melded in to form a new culture. Culture is never static, anyway, it always drifts and morphs. Immigration just changes it a bit faster. But it's good! This ongoing immigrant-driven culture change is what made the US a superpower. Embrace it.

However, immigration is only a stopgap solution to the problem of population decline, because fertility is declining everywhere on the globe, fast. The global fertility rate is basically at replacement now, but the decline is continuing, and accelerating. We'll drop below replacement as a species in just a few years. Even then population will keep growing for a while due to the "filling out" effect, but then it'll start dropping, fast. And it will quickly become top-heavy (more old than young).

Probably not just our economic system, our civilization as a whole, though AI may change that. A highly technological civilization depends on having a large population because it depends on a vast amount of knowledge, which requires a tremendous amount of specialization. Some of this is the obvious sort, such as the scientists and engineers who are focused on increasingly-narrow areas of expertise, but a lot of it is not at all obvious, especially in industry, where everything we make requires a huge amount of knowledge that was learned by doing and isn't -- and maybe can't be -- taught anywhere but on the job.

To some extent we could probably manage with a smaller population if more of the population became highly educated (not necessarily in the academic sense, though we'd need that, too), but that transition wouldn't be easy, in part because there are lots of people who simply aren't interested in highly-technical work. We'd need a lot more of them to become willing to learn and do it anyway. Obviously the first step would be to bring the whole remaining population up to what the developed world considers a basic level of education -- that would enable us to tap new supplies of scientists, engineers and technicians. But the population reduction that seems likely to come means we'd need a lot more than that to be able to maintain our knowledge base and production diversity.

AI might change all this, of course. It could make it completely unnecessary for humans to participate in any of the above. But without something like that, it seems unlikely that our technological civilization could survive with less than a billion people or so, and technological progress would likely take a severe hit long before we hit that level of population reduction.

This is a wee bit bonkers. We just saw millions in the streets chanting his name and writing his name on buildings with their own blood during the massacres early this year.

Ding ding ding... tyranny out, democracy in. The IPP seeks to retain the vast majority of existing systems and positions during the transitional period minus IRGC "oppressive apparatus" ..etc.

Read the IPP. He is offering to lead a transitional government for the people to vote on a new democratic system and finally to vote to fill elections over the projected two year period. He isn't installing himself as a new king.

Are you stupid enough to think there are what, unpaid invoices?

NATO allies gathered at the Wales Summit in 2014 and signed the Defense Investment Pledge.

The commitment was explicit: All allies spending less than 2% of their GDP on defense promised to "move toward" that 2% target within a decade (by 2024). They also committed to spending at least 20% of their defense budgets on major new equipment and research.

For the first seven years of that decade, Europe largely dragged its feet. The numbers tell a story of persistent shortfall:
- According to European Commission data, if EU member states had actually met the 2% threshold between 2006 and 2020, it would have injected an extra â1.1 trillion into European defense.
- By 2021â"just three years before the deadlineâ"only 7 out of the 21 EU countries that were NATO members at the time were actually meeting the 2% target. Major economies like Germany, Italy, and Spain were hovering between 1.2% and 1.4%

You're retarded, by the way.

Governments are supposed to correct market failures. When a technology has a trajectory to be an eventual winner but faces short-term obstacles that the market isn't handling, that's an appropriate time for government to step in.

/me thumbs through his copy of the US Constitution looking for this amongst the limited, enumerated responsibilities of the Federal Govt.....

I need to get my readers, I'm just NOT seeing it....

Even that isn't true. The correct statement is that it's a crime to falsely shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater in circumstances where doing so is reasonably likely to incite a panic that would cause death or injury.

If you shouted "Fire!" in an American theater today, odds are that everyone would just ignore you, and a reasonable person would expect that to be the outcome. That's because fires in modern theaters are (1) quite rare, (2) much more likely to be announced by an alarm and (3) not difficult to escape safely due to the plethora of clearly-marked exit routes that are required by law. So everyone knows that in the event of a fire trampling people in an effort to escape is not necessary for self-preservation, that calmly walking to the nearest exit is better.

It's worth noting that the truth or falsity of the shout isn't really even much of a factor in the legal question. What matters is whether a reasonable person would expect that the shout would be likely to cause unnecessary death or injury as opposed to not shouting. The original Schenk v. United States case opinion in which Holmes used "Fire in a crowded theater" as an example, did argue that truth was an absolute shield, but later rulings, especially the 1969 case that overturned Schenk, removed that protection. If you shout intending to cause real physical harm and expecting that to be the result of your action it's a crime, even if what you shouted was true.

I just turn on the radar detector and don't bother looking at the speedometer anymore....and just drive....fast.

If 30 seems safe to him, who should argue?

Then he needs to get the fuck OFF the highway and drive regular roads with lower speed limits....until he can earn his "big boy pants" and learn to drive at highway speeds with the adults.

If you can't hack it, then you don't belong there impeding other people with the proper driving skills.

Maybe they're trying to compensate a little for all the fentanyl they've been flooding the US and rest of the western world with...?

And now....time for another thrilling episode of:

TEMU Hospital....

Today on Temu Hospital we see Dr. Nick.......

You don't have to be all over your partner(s) all the time to result in a childbirth.

It certainly HELPS!!!

Geez, then I was a teen (way before cell phones and internet).....my girlfriend and I were fucking constantly, basically any time opportunity presented itself.

This was the "norm" for most of my peers in my HS years....

So if not cell phones and social media....what's the explanation for such a drastic change?

The number of accidents you have depends far more on how you drive than how fast you react. If you and Claude are correct about AVs having slower reaction times that just highlights the importance of driving style over reaction time, because AVs have fewer and less severe accidents than human drivers.

The main thing you can do -- and AV systems do, generally -- is leave yourself more space and therefore time to react, which includes driving slower in areas where sudden incursions into the roadway are likely.

That said, I expect AVs to react faster as their systems improve. All of our AI is excessively compute-heavy right now, but we know that isn't essential because our brains do more with less in spite of the fact that our wetware runs on a significantly inferior substrate. As we learn how to build more efficient AI systems, that should reduce AV compute requirements and make it feasible for them to "think faster", and therefore react faster.

The one thing that is clear is that AVs will continue improving on their already better-than-human safety records.

Declining population is solved rather easy. You just open a border here and there.

And then, you lose your country....the culture is lost, what makes your country YOUR country....disappears.

And if that's the fate.....I'd rather have it die slowly of population decline than see it evaporate and become unrecognizable in my lifetime .

and irrelevant to the future?

Do real people ACTUALLY think that way?!?!?

I mean, once I'm dead and in the ground, I don't give a flying fuck what the 'future' holds for earth....I won't be here and I won't know anything about it.

That's why I'm all for having as much fun and enjoyable life experiences while I'm above ground and processing oxygen.

Those in the future? I dont give a fuck....why should it?