I find this all framed a little oddly.

What I see here seems to be people arguing from the predetermined biases without regard for the topic.

For example, claims of it having to do with abuse in any direction would require some substantial evidence.

But then, there's also bias in this:

"If you want to somehow tie feminism into the declining birth rates, especially given the relatively recent MeToo movement, a less tenuous tie would be the increase in awareness that women have to how abusive men are ..."

And in this:

"But it's the womens fault still?"

The idea of "fault" here seems to imply that falling birth rate is something that is wrong that needs to be blamed on somebody.

The available evidence of falling birth rate can actually be "tied" to feminism fairly easily, but in terms of women having choices and tradeoffs, including women becoming more educated and building careers. I don't think anybody would argue that these choices didn't emerge as a result of feminism. I don't know that anybody, or very many, would say that is a bad thing. Rather, an consequence of staying in school, going to university, and building a career is that marriage and having children is delayed, and having more children would mean more time out of their career.

For example, the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) summarizes the research nicely in their article, "Why is the birth rate declining" (May 6, 2021): "Between 2007 and 2020, the TFR in the United States declined from 2.12 to 1.64.3 This decline may signal a longer-term drop in lifetime fertility shaped by broader social factors, including postponement of marriage and childbearing to older ages and long-term increases in women’s educational attainment and labor force participation. Although most American women say they expect to have at least two children, many women delay childbearing whether by choice or circumstance to the point that they may end up having only one child or no children at all."

Refs:

Martin O’Connell, “Childbearing,” in Continuity and Change in American Families, ed. Lynne M. Casper and Suzanne M. Bianchi (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001).

Eve Beaujouan and Caroline Berghammer, “The Gap Between Lifetime Fertility Intentions and Completed Fertility in Europe and the United States: A Cohort Approach,” Population Research and Policy Review 38 (2019): 507-35, https://link.springer.com/arti....

You'll also note that while fertility rates declined for women of most ages, the rates actually increase consistently from the late 1970s to today for women in their 30s. That is, women have children much later than they used to, and have fewer of them total.

That is inconsistent with any links to abuse (in any direction). It a simple matter that the changing role and available choices of women -- which of course has a lot to do with feminism -- is a trade-off. There's finite time available. Women can't have children at the same rate as they used to, and stay home with them, and go to school, and build careers. That's impossible.

Instead, what we've learned is that when the choices are opened up, a very large portion of women prefer education and career over having children, or having them while young, or having as many. Is that a bad thing? It certainly has consequences on populations and demographics, but would it be better to declare the outcome "we" want and then force women to do the bidding to get that outcome?

By "we", I mean collective discussions about what "should" happen in society. A free country means the outcomes can't be dictated; if you want to dictate statistically outcomes, you have create an unfair, unfree society where individuals are forced to do what is necessary to get that outcome.

This is fundamentally the result of freedom along with the rapid increase in standard of living. People aren't forced into things by circumstance, government, or social pressure. (Sure, I've heard some objections that women have been pressured to not stay home and have children, but at the scale of whole population that would require a lot more evidence than pointing to a few feminist leaders who have said women shouldn't do that.)

It is what it is. It isn't a "fault" or a blame. It is an outcome of freedom and choice.

There isn't really any proof that Waymo vehicles are driverless, only that the driver isn't in the vehicle. If you compare a dozen dubiously driverless vehicles to a million collecting data every moment and already doing a pretty good job at autonomy, which do you think will succeed?

The fact that the driver is not in the vehicle does not mean that there is no driver.

I believe that this was figured out in the amateur observer community before NASA confirmed it. I saw it go by in my twitter feed. Not sure I can find it now...

Linear Energy Transfer

It's not radioactive. When high-energy particles strike it, they break apart into lower-energy particles that are more harmful. So, you need enough shielding to catch the particles that break apart in the top layer of your shielding.

While radiation mostly results in transient errors, it can also cause latch-ups that blow a gate off of the die. For rad-hard equipment in space this is mitigated by silicon-on-insulator fabrication, so that you can't have a latch-up between the substrate and a silicon feature.

We could have REAL ZOMBIES! YEAH!

:-)

I hear you. Going to be an interesting future, if we live.

Someone who broke their neck and was suffering from paralysis. You can control a chair or exoskeleton. People who can not hear today have cochlear implants, this is not all that different and might (eventually) work better. Or speak, or see. Other people who are disabled in various ways.

Oops. To continue: I'm just not seeing that it is so hard to access. But then, I use a Linux desktop, which has always come with a proper PDF renderer, there has never been a need to download "Acrobat".

Web pages use SVG to render vector graphics. It uses the exact same imaging model as PDF and is implemented in all modern browsers. The web in general has taken a lot of lessons from Adobe because Warnock and Geshke, in the PostScript Red Book, got so much right about how to build an image model that many GUI developers are still learning today. If you start with a PDF, it should be possible to machine-translate it to SVG and present it as a web page.

PDF exists because it is trivial to generate it from the document renderer meant for printing. Although I have once in a while run into an improperly scaled PDF meant to be printed 8-up, I'm just not

Lithium battery fires are in the news because they are new. There are many more gasoline fires every day.

Pistons? We don't need no stinking pistons! Next thing, they'll be adding a bridle and a bit!

Consider that it is evangelism. Saying "We did this, we're a big investment bank" implies "It's OK, and you should do it too". I've heard people refer to arguing a vendor to lower a price as "jew them down". Enough with that.