So, how does anyone enter the workforce?

They offer you more than minimum wage because of the existence of a minimum wage. Otherwise they'd offer you not $1 per year, but just enough to afford to return to work when added to whatever welfare they can squeeze out of government and society. Minimum wages do apply to salaried jobs as well. Check out what you can earn in countries that don't have them, and then thank a union. Or throw off the shackles of the minimum wage and get into a type of work that really doesn't have one, gig work, and let us know how that supply and demand thing works out for you.

The Luddites died in grinding poverty with all indications being that they were correct, it was their grandchildren who got the new jobs that came along as a result of the automation that ruined their grandparents. Wages and standards of living have been stagnant for a half-century at this point. There are people frantically applying to hundreds of jobs they're well-qualified for and not getting so much as an interview. Over 100 people are applying to each job opening these days, and likewise it takes over 100 job applications for an average applicant to get a job (both rather conservative estimates). If improving productivity led to rising wages, why are we not earning 40% more for the same number of hours people worked in the '70s? Why has going from mainframes and dumb terminals to present-day computing added approximately jack shit to ~90% of workers' pay?

Good for you! Especially if you work in tech. Sucks for the people who aren't part of your anecdote though.

Look up the history of the ones you don't think may have value and you'll learn about the workers who fought and/or died to get the laws in place that keep you from experiencing the same thing, which you now take for granted. Or if that's not enough, maybe you should experience a 996 work schedule in China, work alongside a nonexistent/laughably low minimum wage in a Caribbean country, or do some dangerous work in a Nigerian e-waste mine to get a taste of what happens without all those regulations.

One reason for quarterly reporting is that it gives greater transparency and insight into how a business actually works. Many businesses are seasonal. Most obviously, virtually all retail has its best quarter at the end of the calendar year. But many other types of businesses have key cycles each year that are tied to, for example, the buying habits of their largest customers. Suppliers matter, too; if farms have a bad quarter due to weather or other factors, for example, you're going to want to watch how that impacts food producers somewhere down the line.

Class 1 and 2 e-bikes limit assist to 20 mph, not 15. You can ride them faster than that, but you have to provide the power. 20 mph is well above what most recreational cyclists can maintain on a flat course, so if these classes arenâ(TM)t fast enough to be safe, neither is a regular bike. The performance is well within what is possible for a fit cyclist for short times , so their performance envelope is suitable for sharing bike and mixed use infrastructure like rail trails.

Class 3 bikes can assist riders to 28 mph. This is elite rider territory. There is no regulatory requirement ti equip the bike to handle those speeds safely, eg hydraulic brakes with adequate size rotors. E-bikes in this class are far more likely to pose injury risks to others. I think it makes a lot of sense to treat them as mopeds, requiring a drivers license for example.

Would treating them as mopeds be so bad?

What weâ(TM)re looking at is exactly what happened when gasoline cars started to become popular and created problems with deaths, injuries, and property damage. The answer to managing those problems and providing accountability was to make the vehicles display registration plates, require licensing of drivers, and enforcing minimum safety standards on cars. Iâ(TM)m not necessarily suggesting all these things should be done to e-bikes, but I donâ(TM)t see why they shouldnâ(TM)t be on the table.

I am a lifelong cyclist , over fifty years now, and in general I welcome e-bikes getting more people into light two wheel vehicles. But I see serious danger to both e-bike riders and the people around them. There are regulatory classes which limit the performance envelope of the vehicle, but class 3, allowing assist up to 28 mph, is far too powerful for a novice cyclist. Only the most athletic cyclists, like professional tour racers, can sustain speeds like that, but they have advanced bike handling skills and theyâ(TM)re doing it on bikes that weigh 1/5 of what complete novice novice e-bike riders are on. Plus the pros are on the best bikes money can buy. If you pay $1500 for an e-bike, youâ(TM)re getting about $1200 of battery and motor bolted onto $300 of bike.

Whatâ(TM)s worse, many e-bikes which have e-bike class stickers can be configured to ignore class performance restrictions, and you can have someone with no bike handling skills riding what in effect is an electric motorcycle with terrible brakes.

E-bike classification notwithstanding, thereâ(TM)s a continuum from electrified bicycles with performance roughly what is achievable by a casi recreational rider on one end, running all the way up to electric motorcycles. If there were only such a thing as a class 1 e-bike thereâ(TM)d be little need to build a regulatory system with registration and operator licensing. But you canâ(TM)t tell by glancing at a two wheel electric vehicle exactly where on the bike to motorcycle spectrum it falls; that depends on the motor specification and software settings. So as these things become more popular, I donâ(TM)t see any alternative to having a registration and inspection system for all of them, with regulatory categories and restrictions based on the weight and hardware performance limitations of the vehicle. Otherwise youâ(TM)ll have more of the worst case weâ(TM)re already seeing: preteen kids riding what are essentially electric motorcycles that weigh as much as they do because the parents think those things are âoebikesâ and therefore appropriate toys.

Not using Plex is the gift that keeps on giving. Why so many people went for it when there were better open-source alternatives available, I'll never know.

That's the press doing its usual lousy job of communicating science.

The predictions aren't absolute, they are sets of scenarios for which probabilities are calculated. The longer we drag our feet, the more the set of plausible outcomes narrows. Take Syria -- Syria was a wheat exporter in 1990, but since 2008 or so has been unable to grow enough wheat to feed itself because of climate change when it had become dependent upon imports from Russia and Ukraine. This was early enough that likely we could not have prevented it even if we heeded early warnings in the 1990s when the current scientific picture solidified. We're not going to lose the entire planet in one go, it's going to be one vulnerable population after another.

It may seem like the climate crisis has completely fizzled to you, living in a large, wealthy, and heretofore politically stable country, but it is catastrophic for the people who have got caught. That's how the climate crisis is going to unfold: the rich and comfortable will be able to adapt to the continually changing status quo by moving their financial assets and supply chains out of the way, although you may be paying more for coffee.

At this point it's a matter of degree; we can't avoid problems now like countries being destabilized by climate change and generating millions of refugees. The question is how fast and how big a problem we'll have.

It seems pretty plausible that sub-recreational doses of psychedelics could reduce anxiety, but we have to be mindful that anxiety evolved in our species for a reason. Like inflammation, it’s a natural and critically important protective process that gets out of control in modern lifestyles. It’s unpleasant but pharmaceutically banishing it could leave patients vulnerable.

One of the biggest risks psychedelic therapy will expose patients to are the therapists overseeing their treatment. Psychedelic therapy has an appalling track record of abuse by therapists, including both sexual and economic exploitation. Advocates for psychedelic therapy claim it will “open you up” and I think they’re absolutely correct. But there are other ways to say “open you up” that mean the same thing but set off alarm bells: becoming more suggestible and compliant for example. If the therapist uses psychedelics himself he may have “opened himself up” to some bad ideas about therapist-patient boundaries.

Likewise people microdosing to enhance creativity should exercise caution. Psychedelics absolutely can in some instances unlock creativity by turning down excessive self criticism, but those criitical facilities play an essential role in the parts of the creative process that come after coming up with out of the box ideas. Self reports of microdosing effectiveness should be taken cautiously, due to their potential negative impact on metacognition. Those might be like the drunk who feels more confident driving after a few drinks.

No doubt these drugs have tremendous potential to treat extreme crippling anxiety. They probably even have nootropic potential. But their beneficial effect s come by suppressing natural mental processes that serve important purposes, and the promising results we have come from self reports or clinical reports from advocate researchers. I’ve been following this because I’ve been interested in experimenting with psychedelics for years, but what I have learned has convinced me to hold off until there is evidence and protocols for safe use that would persuade a skeptic.

Trade deficit as an emergency, I think that's the economic equivalent of declaring the color of a T-shirt to be an emergency.

There are quite a few Vinfast cars going around, I wondered if people were importing them individually but then I spotted a Vinfast dealership off the highway (401 I think?) next to a Lotus dealership.

Chile seemed to be making something similar work with early-'70s computer technology, until Henry Kissinger decided that democratic socialism was a threat worse than Soviet communism and had the regime overthrown and replaced with a murderous right-wing dictatorship:

https://thereader.mitpress.mit...

I thought you should be able to find the link to the data in the news article, but since you can't, here it is:

https://www.pewresearch.org/so...

While the planet could support more people with properly managed resources, this idea that innovation comes from pulling the genetic one-armed-bandit enough times to hit a few jackpots and pop out a few Einsteins is ludicrous. Einsteins aren't born, they're made and enabled. If you want new ideas and innovation, support and empower the people who are already there to do it. We already have lots of people who could generate new ideas including lots of potential Einsteins, they just don't have the time or conditions to make a breakthrough like he did. They're scrapping away at a shitty job that eats all their time to make an already rich person richer instead of having the time to study bleeding-edge physics etc. in their generous downtime at a chill job in a patent office. Or they've gained the skills to make breakthroughs but are wasting them on making Facebook more addictive or developing Grok.

Per capita GDP isn't even a good measure because it isn't a measure of average wealth at all, it's a measure of total national income with no regard for how big the average person's slice of the pie is at all. I think what you're looking for is median household income or median personal income.

It's not society, society doesn't care too much about population growth, it's the economic system. Capitalist economic systems require infinite compounding growth in a finite world (so that capitalists can at any time turn their money into more money without doing any work), and so far the main driver of that growth has been population growth.

In a related problem, most pension/retirement schemes work like a long-running intergenerational ponzi scheme that will only avoid collapse as long as the next generation is bigger or at least wealthier than the last, and now we have two generations that are smaller and poorer.