If Russia is any indicator it is not prosperity but education and the availability of contraception. Russians are by and large very poor and yet despite basically free childcare and 18 months of subsidized income after birth they are approximately in line with the rest of much more prosperous Europe on not breeding to replacement.

I support free speech. You and I should be able to say whatever we want. But the listener also has the right to know who is talking. I believe anonymity and free speech are usually destructive when paired. In circumstances like they have in Russia where speech is criminalized, a little destruction is a good thing. But here, where speech is well protected, it's not protecting the speaker from the government and simply prevents the effective feedback of social pressures to the speaker. Which promotes the self-organization of extremist echo chambers. And it looks to me like those chambers are eating our society alive.

I said hundreds OR thousands, not hundreds OF thousands. You and I are making different assumptions about the amount of time required for some xenophobe to get our genetics, craft a super bug to wipe us out, and deliver it to earth's atmosphere. That aside, we also make different assumptions about implied directionality inherent in evolution. Ineffectiveness is just not the deterrent to long life and reproduction it used to be. I have read studies suggesting both the Victorian age and the Helenian age as the peak of human intelligence. And if you just mean knowledge, while we do know more than we did, there are signs all around us that the ineffectiveness counter is weakened for ideas too.

You don't think there will be "people" here in hundreds or thousands of years? That seems awfully pessimistic. Biodiversity will probably be down and life will likely be less pleasant, but it seems likely we'll still be around and have roughly the same genetics.

Ninja'd. I came here to say exactly this. It's easy to imagine how this could come back to bite us in the ass but not so easy to see how it could profit us. Doesn't seem like sound reasoning at all.

That is a good point. I hadn't thought about that. Yes, we do bring our devices with us when we travel. Though, we have static devices at our farm and our home in the city.

We have a family of 6 and 2 houses and family that we visit annually in another country (They don't speak english and would have no use for our password). We don't password share but I am afraid we are going to look like we do.

They can't invest in their space program. The money will just get stolen. It's the trap Putin and his KGB buddies have created for themselves. Their historical method for funding themselves (I don't just mean personally, this is an institutional behavior) has been to siphon money from other programs behind the scenes. It's how they survived the fall of the communist party as a functioning organization. Unfortunately their playbook has been picked up as standard practice so now it's built into every layer of the system. It's so endemic and impossible to bypass that even when people get called out the system attacks the accuser rather than the crook. It's a sad place to be. I don't envy them.

Certainly, but the title is a attempting to manipulate you into being scared instead of allowing you to arrive there naturally through simple arithmetic as you did quite easily. A lot of people see that manipulation and stop right there and start rebelling. I think that this tendency to try to scare people into doing what we think they should instead allowing them to come up with their own conclusions has backfired.

It should read
Almost a Third of Recovered COVID-19 HOSPITAL Patients Return To Hospital In Five Months, One In Eight Die
I know about a dozen people that have had it and only one of them was in the hospital so without that word this can easily mislead someone who isn't looking for that hook.

GMAIL supports CALDAV, CARDDAV, SMTP, IMAP and POP3. They are totally open. You don't need to use their apps.

So I don't see how you can make the comparison. The Spanish flu did not specialize in killing immune compromised or unproductive people. It in fact specialized the other way.

It's also the universal underwater hand signal for all being well and plenty of air left when SCUBA diving.

Perhaps it's more accurate to say we will benefit disproportionately due to a sort of IP hegemony, but that will still be salt in a wound to all the people who can't duplicate our success. The end result will be ugly.

Also, they left out Russia. Russia mostly doesn't use google or facebook. They use homegrown vk and yandex. So at the very least they aren't data points for us and at best they may be a third (though probably lesser) success story. It all depends on how well the Putin regime does keeping it's hands off it's own little tech boom.