To what are you alluding?

They did, but it's never too late to cheapen how they're current stuff is produced.

Still, I think they know all too well that mainframe is "stuck" doing it the way they always have done it.

If you are diabetic, sure. Otherwise, you obviously haven't known anyone who has tried to get this as a weight control solution and deal with insurance that absolutely doesn't want to pay for that stuff.

Here's the thing, some folks do the discipline and keep a healthy weight, but they are basically always feeling hunger. Some people don't feel it but some people are having to constantly fight sensation of hunger, with a respite of a little bit after a meal, and almost never feeling 'full'.

If we had something to tame the rather depressive experience of constantly denying one's hunger because you know in your mind that you got the nutrition and caloric intake you need, but your body wants to eat your way to obesity.

It baffles the mind that Microsoftware - known for decades for being unreliable shit - is allowed on space missions at all, no matter how uncritical the role. The potential for malware alone is ludicrous. "Hey, pay us 2500 bitcoins if you want your space capsule back".

Then again, I figure the days when NASA did the right stuff are long past.

Basically everyone who lives in the area or studies the climate or hydrology would tell you that you're insane.

More like a once-in-a-millennium event. Though I suspect it's going to be considerably more common going forward.

Deserts have some amount of normal precipitation, too. And when you get a lot less than normal, that's called a drought. Yes, even in a desert.

We do have pretty good data from tree rings. Unless you think the trees came from somewhere else?

Problem is that the only viable market for mainframe are current mainframe customers, who are so change averse that if you even hint at breaking compatibility they will be triggered to start evaluating *all* their options if they are faced with a potential migration anyway.

IBM may love the idea of shuttering their in-house stuff in favor of massively cheap commodity stuff, but they would absolutely no longer command mainframe margins.

I have a distant family connection to Santa Fe and have visited a number of times. Lovely place.

What always strikes me is the history of the city and region. Founded in 1610, it's one of the earliest European cities in the Americas.

When reading the history of American Indian sites, so many of them prospered at times for decades (or more) and then declined with ecological shifts, i.e., droughts. The greater regional area had a population in the thousands or tens of thousands at most, and that fluctuated widely. The population of Santa Fe was as low as 5,000 people at the start of the 20th century. It was a small place! But, that's probably, realistically, a lot closer to the actual carrying capacity of the land.

Desert. Too many people. Not enough water.

Something has to give!

China has been a great success story in many, many ways, but they have now passed the point of "easy gains." Central planning, as with all things, works--until it doesn't. In retrospect, it seems like they held onto the one-child policy for too long.

China's population is massive and has historically been massive (relative to the rest of the world). When the Founders were signing the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia (population circa 30,000) and the 13 British colonies had a population between 1.5 and 2 million, China's population was probably over 300 million. Anything that happens in China is massive!

China should be commended for their efforts to grow the middle class, though I feel the evidence is not entirely there yet. China's population percentage that's middle class is still dramatically smaller than the EU, US, Japan, etc. Potentially even Russia. (The Soviet Union is another great success story for pulling an absolutely massive people out of literal serfdom and into the middle class.)

Today, China's total fertility rate is reported as one of the lowest in the entire world--0.93 in 2025. And that's if you believe the reported numbers. East Asia is being hit very, very hard by crashing reproductive rates. It's happening all over the world, but China, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, etc., have just crashed.

Stagnating can mean many things (population growth, cultural growth, scientific growth) and I'm talking specifically population as the rest is downstream of that.

Even worse is when they compromise the VPN operators and then monitor your usage until you do something that makes them decide to crack down on you.

People erroneously think of VPNs as privacy protectors. They aren't, not unless you have very good reason to trust whoever is running the server. If you don't, then they're concentrators for likely subversive traffic and its origins.

The solution to this is to join a party and get involved in the decisionmaking. It's a lot easier than you might think, and you can have a lot more influence that you might expect, precisely because not that many people do this.

Meh.

It would undoubtedly be very expensive at first, and therefore only available to the very wealth (probably not ultra-wealthy -- even without automation, caring for such a clone wouldn't be a full-time job, so call it maybe $30k/year -- within the reach of the upper middle class). But competition would drive automation, and we already have most of the techniques required, having developed them to deal with coma patients and the like, but at lower cost because this case would be dealing with a fundamentally healthy body. My guess based on some napkin math is that cost could be driven down as low as $10k per year. Maybe lower.

$10k per year is expensive, sure, but having an immunologically-perfect organ donor could absolutely be worth it for someone making as little as $200k per year.

If the cost could be driven down to $5k per year... then it's in the range where most middle-class Americans could afford it, even if it meant that they'd have to cut back a little somewhere else; maybe drive an older car rather than leasing a new one, or similar.

Tell me you haven't been paying attention to the actions of private equity without telling me you haven't been paying attention to the actions of private equity. Vulture private equity is a thing; the basic trick is:

1. Buy large, well-known company X with stable but not outstanding economic performance, low debt, and lots of real assets (read: Cheap enough to buy and take private, with lots of collateral available)
2. Sell all the real company X assets (buildings, land) to another company, company Y, also owned (directly or indirectly) by the private equity firm or its individual owners, with the theoretical idea that that money can fuel expansion.
3. Maybe borrow additional money from company Z (also tied to private equity firm) while you're at it, at above-market rates.
4. Lease all the assets back to company X, at exorbitant rates.
5. Don't actually expand, just pay all the money acquired from the asset sale to pay the leases and loans over a few years, extracting all of the value from the company as it becomes a hollow shell
6. Discover, to your great surprise, that company X, while profitable when it owns its land, is unprofitable when paying insane lease rates for said land
7. Regretfully have company X declare bankruptcy, sell off any IP or remaining inventory to squeeze whatever additional drops of blood are left in that stone
8. goto #1

They did it to Toys "R" Us, Red Lobster, TGI Fridays, Joann Fabrics, and more. They're doing it to hospitals and housing (but piecemeal, so aside from an occasional hospital failing, it doesn't make a big splashy headline). It's all 100% legal, and morally bankrupt. It's less ethical than the publicly traded companies because the reporting requirements are far lower, the number of interested parties far fewer (no shareholder activism here), and the regulations preventing egregious actions fewer to boot.

Yes, there are privately held companies that are forward-thinking and ethical. Largely because their owners are. Until said owners (or their descendants) decide to cash out, and look who comes swooping in with money to buy them out (hint: it's private equity) and destroy what they built for another quick buck. Saying "private equity is good because good people can do good things with it" is like saying "despotism is good because an enlightened despot can run things more efficiently and morally than a democracy", ignoring that it also gives them the freedom to behave terribly with little or no accountability.

Well, when a major collapse in private equity or cryptocurrencies takes out the retirement funding for millions of folks in the U.S., destroying the U.S. economy thanks to seniors no longer having money to spend, the resulting U.S. economic collapse is likely to affect the world economy. So, yeah, when the U.S. makes major changes that undermine its own economic stability, it's likely to affect the world.