The birth rates are low because of the terrible environment that doesn’t support having and raising children. All you’re doing is importing more people who will also barely have any children within a generation or so. Mass immigration is just throwing bodies at the bottom of the pyramid scheme. You can see this in action in Canada where housing is absolutely unaffordable, but large numbers of immigrants are brought in who have to work for shitty wages and live with multiple families in a single rental unit.

The screaming about low birth rate is because corporations want to keep a high labor pool so they can drive down the price of labor while keeping up demand for consumption.

Fighting for your home made more logical sense when the consequence of losing your home meant you most likely had nowhere to go and either were stuck under brutal occupation or left to wander for a place to live with a high risk of dying before finding anything. With how much more accessible distant travel is these days, I can’t imagine any piece of land worth dying for, especially when considering the typical lack of support that veterans get when the fighting is over.

I respect those with the courage to fight for defense, but I wouldn’t look down upon anyone who left.

This isn’t software that is exclusive to EVs.

Half-assed support from the US isn’t because of ammunition shortfalls, it’s because the US will only give just enough to drag out the war and drain Russia as much as possible.

If they’re not side-by-side then it may be harder to tell, but the smell should clue you in. If in doubt, just give it a taste.

What really started the ad war was the endless drive for greater profits. Let’s say I accept youtube’s terms and sign up for premium. Sooner or later they will introduce ads into premium as well. We’ve seen this process happen with many other services before. I didn’t start using an ad blocker until quite a bit after pop-ups were rampant and malware-infested ads became an issue. There’s a point where it becomes too much and people will seek out alternatives. An entire generation grew up with convenient streaming services and they’re generally less knowledgeable about piracy than the generation before them. That will likely change as those streaming services continue to jack up prices while making the experience worse all in the name of profit.

Again, there is an endless supply of entertainment these days. If companies think they can endlessly jack up prices and/or worsen the experience, they’re contending with practically infinite supply, the consequences of which are obvious in when it comes to supply vs demand.

I specified intrusive ads. They could have non-intrusive ads, like a little banner or something. Instead they put up multiple video ads before and during videos. No thanks.

I’d rather not use youtube than give them money for it or even sit through their intrusive ads. There are infinite ways to entertain myself.

Republicans claim to detest government waste and then do shit like this.

Supposedly AI is going to take all the jobs and yet it still can’t do this task which it seems perfect for. Sure, eventually AI will get good enough to do it in the future, but there is just way too much hype given the reality of the current situation. This is a job that fast food workers are already required to do in addition to other duties, so it’s not like it’s labor saving from the company’s perspective either.

Why is the US so worried to the point of applying a hilariously high 100% tariff? Don’t claim security concerns because if that was really the case then they’d outright ban them instead of resorting to tariffs.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8281100/

From the article:

Meat production from dairy cows is a significant component of beef production, accounting for almost 10% of U.S. commercial beef production.

10% isn’t “hardly any overlap worth mentioning”. Even if it was, it doesn’t address the overlap between milk and cheese.

How much of an overlap is there between milk, cheese, and beef? They’re all coming from cows, but are they being calculated separately here? There are also gelatin and leather and other non-food products that come from cows. If there is a way to reduce that methane output, then it would be a lot more reasonable and it seems possible since it’s impacted greatly by diet.

Uber’s costs are because of oversized compensation packages for executives and lots of R&D put into autonomous driving. The bulk of the actual cost of operation is on the shoulders of drivers who wear down their vehicles for the sake of Uber. All Uber does is provide an app, which is laughably cheap by comparison.

Are Chinese subsidies really excessive compared to American subsidies? Tesla owes its entire existence to the government giving it carbon tax credits among other subsidies. Every single qualifying electric vehicle has been getting thousands of dollars in the form of tax credits all the way up to $7500 and it’s only been more generous now since it can be used as a rebate right at the dealership. American car companies have taken that to mean they can jack up prices by those thousands of dollars and even more, because they still treat EVs as mainly premium products.

If you want to talk about artificially out-competing competitors, the 100% tariff is a prime example. The US has dragged its feet on technologies like EVs so they can juice profits and now it’s crying and shrieking about competition being “unfair” for providing customers with a desirable product in a desirable price range. This protectionist policy not only sets back the fight against climate change, but also tightens the screws on customers who are already feeling the weight of inflation, just to continue the record profits by the auto companies.

So true, things were much better when we had three channels on the TV.

Just keep jacking up rent, then you’ll be “producing” even more.

C is almost the perfect subset for me, but then I miss templates (almost exclusively for defining generic data structures) and automatic cleanup. That’s why I’m so interested in Zig with its comptime and defer features.

That’s true to some extent. I don’t agree with hard censorship like that, but there is also the risk of getting astroturfed and brigaded like reddit, which had a clear example as far back as 2013 where Eglin Air Force Base, FL showed up as “most addicted city”. The goal of censorship is to give your own opinions more space, so I’m not exactly upset if other instances are moderated in a different way when there are plenty of other instances moderated in a different way. The fediverse offers plenty of space.

The graph goes up for me when I find my comfortable little subset of C++ but goes back down when I encounter other people’s comfortable little subset of C++ or when I find/remember another footgun I didn’t know/forgot about.