I think you're right as far adults go -- adults are having fewer children because children are unaffordable.

Teens, OTOH, were almost never making a conscious decision to try to conceive children anyway -- if they got pregnant, that was an unintended side effect of having recreational sex. So if the teenage fertility rate is falling, the most likely explanation is that teens are either having less sex, or they are using contraception more effectively (or both). It's quite plausible that teens are simply spending less time in each others' physical proximity, and therefore having sex with each other less often.

Trump ordered the immediate surrender of Iran as well. What Trump commands and what Trump is competent to actually make happen are two vastly different things.

I mean, we could, but when the total expenses for building and running a solar farm are less than just the ongoing cost of buying more coal for an existing coal plant (never mind the maintenance or environmental remediation costs), that's almost literally lighting money on fire. It takes a pretty dedicated idealogue to hold out against the capitalist temptation of making more money solely to show the libs who's boss, and anyone who does so is likely to find themselves replaced by someone else who can "better maximize shareholder value". Hence the shift; even Trump can't stop an idea whose time has come.

Read your .sig

Maybe I don't read the Zeitgeist as well as I should, but AFAICT anything AI-related is seen as extremely uncool these days (at least, outside of certain tech-topian circles). So if Visa thinks "Adopting AI means people will think we're cool", I suspect they are in for a surprise.

If the only goal is producing electricity at the current minimum price per kWh, then you have a good point.

OTOH if you also have a long-term goal of figuring out how to effectively design and build fusion reactors, then it's worthwhile to build them as best you can even if wind is currently more cost-effective.

As for why you might have such a long-term goal, I can think of several reasons:

1. Future fusion reactor designs might be much more economical to build and run, once enough hands-on experience has been gathered to make them so
2. Fusion reactors could be used in situations where wind power isn't available (e.g. space exploration)

Certainly the Secret Service would love to have an automatic head's-up on the true identity of anyone walking into the room. Not that I would expect this implementation to be reliable enough actually to be used that way, but someday one will be.

If I was deliberately trying to cause a nation-wide backlash against data centers, I'm not sure what I'd be doing differently from what the AI companies are currently doing.

Has nobody told them that people don't like having their lives disrupted, particularly when they don't see any compensating benefit, or even a convincing reason for having any of it? If they were to ease off the gas pedal just a bit, they could probably do a boil-the-frog and get a larger number of smaller/less-obtrusive data centers built over a longer time period, and without the voter revolts and strict legislation that are likely to hobble them now.

Objective C's syntax is objectively terrible; it mixes Smalltalk syntax with C syntax, confusing everyone. Its implicit heap usage makes it unusable for real-time programming (e.g. even Apple had to fall back to C to implement CoreAudio), and ARC is only a partial substitute for RAII.

Apple was right to switch over to Swift.

That's true, but when it takes Joe Random Hacker 10 seconds to generate a plausible-looking pull-request, which requires Joe Project Maintainer to spend 30 minutes reviewing the code-changes in that request, and Joe Project Maintainer isn't getting paid for his time spent doing the review, you've got all the ingredients for a distributed-denial-of-service attack on your project's maintainers. Perhaps AI code-reviewers can restore the balance, but I don't know how many project maintainers would trust their codebase's integrity to them (yet).

I wish you were right, but I'm afraid history shows us you're much too optimistic. America isn't a nation of laws anymore, not even at the middling level it was before. I don't see how it can get back to being one. The situation reminds me very much of Yeats' verse: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity"

We've been in very similar situations before: Dubya started the war in Iraq to deflect attention from his failing presidency, nominated incompetent leaders based on loyalty to the GOP instead of ability, covered the loss of billions of dollars to corruption, mishandled the post-war Iraq - leading to the rise of ISIS, completely bumbled the Katrina aftermath (again because the person in charge was a Dubya loyalist not someone who knew what needs to be done).

The similarity with the current situation is obvious; I think we can extrapolate to what will happen after the next elections (assuming there will be elections: doubting there will be some was unthinkable not long ago, but it's not anymore). Just as nothing happened to Dubya, to the GOP or to anybody in the administration after Democrats won the presidency and Congress, nothing will happen to Trump, his administration, Republicans at all levels, corrupt SCOTUS judges or anybody who created this mess. There will be no consequences. Maybe a few rather low level hirelings will get token jail sentences, but there'll be no sweeping establishment of justice. The billions stolen from the people will not be recovered, wars started on whims, or in order to distract attention from the Epstein files will not be investigated, there'll be no punishment for criminals.

More importantly, there will be no significant changes that could stop ill-intentioned actors from gaming the system again - for example, the Electoral College will remain in place, jerrymandering will remain legal (as long as it's done by Republicans), the Supreme Court will be more and more politicized, obvious corruption will not be punished, all control and balance mechanisms will be dismantled, the constitution will become even more of a joke than it is now.

If they left them in place they might be used to collect data, which might in turn be used to show that climate change is a real problem. We can't have that, it gets in the way of maximizing oil companies's profits.

That's true; totally not worth designing your grid to handle such a rare event. I mean, how often do once a decade storms happen? Once every hundred years or so?

It's certainly possible to translate COBOL source into another computer language of your choice, although I'm not sure LLMs are the best tool for that job. An LLM might be able to give you more readable post-translation source code, but traditional machine translation would give you post-translation source code that works correctly, which is probably more important.

Another way to phrase that would be, "This is why C code is bad, because C programmers are expected to understand the rules about how to not leak memory, but there is no mechanism to enforce that requirement".

... and to their credit, eventually some of them do figure it out, and after that they (mostly) write good C code that doesn't leak. However, that doesn't change the fact that at any given moment there are millions of unseasoned C programmers out there who haven't reached that point yet, and who are nevertheless writing leaky code which gets put into production and causes trouble; and new C programmers appear every day. It's the Eternal September problem, applied to memory management.

So either (a) we ban C programmers from pushing to production until they've had at least 5 years of experience, or (b) we find some means to flag their errors at build-time, or (c) we live with the status quo messiness indefinitely. Linux is going with Rust as their mechanism for implementing plan (b).