chances are high he also wouldn’t have been able to finish the talks in a meaningful way due to his health condition.

here, have some spare ones:

wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtd wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtd wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wrf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf wtf

i had them in stock.

also note that the Holocaust did not only target Jews, but also homosexuals and other minorities. Yet when talking about WW2 victims, you mostly learn about Jews. Why is that?

It’s because (some) Jews have perfected the art of victimizing themselves more than others, in the expectation to get more favorable treatment from the world this way.

i don’t really believe that because there’s a large number of people who would already want to go to mars. it’s not like they’re lacking willing participants.

Also, just to make this clear: There’s nothing wrong with the population shrinking again. Or growing, the earth is far from its carrying capacity if we’re doing it right. The trouble is shrinking too quickly, or for that matter growing too quickly. We should pine for two kids per woman, ±0.5, thereabouts: Don’t veer too far off replacement levels. And all that can be done by proper social policy, parental leave, good schools, work/life/family balance, sex ed, etc.

Yeah, i agree. Decline should be at an acceptable rate. Just that i think an acceptable rate for me is 0.66 children/woman. That would lead to an annual decline in birth rate of 3.6% (formula is: 1-(0.66÷2)^(1÷30)) assuming women give birth at 30 y/o.

Just to contrast this: The US’ population (excluding Native Americans) grew steadily by approximately 3% annually from 1680 till 1880. Source:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_United_States

I just want to notice that most people have been told by the economy in recent years that more people are needed to fulfill all jobs because the economists wanted to increase the supply of workers and therefore push the wages down.

Recently, economists have started understanding that this (AI) wave of automation/innovation might indeed be the last one, the one that reduces demand for human labor without creating more new jobs as a side-product. As such, the number of workers needed declines. Since economists would favor lower taxes, they try to limit Universal Basic Income to a minimum, but that implies fewer people to pay for. As such, they are taking a “lower fertility rate is better” stance now. We’re gonna see a lot of “news articles telling us that the falling birth rate is a good thing” in the near future. It just takes a significant effort to spread that message in the population.

i would upvote twice if i could, but i only have one account.

also: people have been worried about birth rate being too high in the past (around 1800) and population count going to infinity, consuming more resources than the planet can give and provoking a famine.

And the population count stabilized eventually in every country that they were worried about.

And now people are worried that the birth rate is too low and population count will go to zero.

I dare predict it’s bullshit and the population size will stabilize at some point.

“fear of decline”

also, your argument is based on the totally-nonsense assumption that there “has to be a certain number of workers to sustain the elderly” which is bullshit (frankly). it’s not about the number of workers; it’s about the productive output, and as we all know, that has risen tremendously the last few years. So there should be no shortage of workers regardless of how many workers there are. Everything else is bullshit the news (which btw are owned by billionaires) tell you because they want to sack a significant part of productive output for themselves - well ofc if rich take 90% of output it’s not gonna be enough for everyone. but that’s the rich’s fault and has nothing to do with “there not being enough workers”.

People aren’t just wageslaves. If there are many, it’s easy to see people as a “mass product”. If there are fewer, i hope that any individual will be seen with higher value.

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He also criticized EU product standards as “non-monetary barriers” designed to block American exports.

lol, lmfao even

product standards exist for a reason.

i suppose you’re also thinking that’s because we need steady output?

which is a fallacy; we had constant generation in the past so consumption adapted and became constant; consumption would not naturally be constant, it would be higher in the daytime.

Well yes there is a very good argument against nuclear and that is that it replaces solar energy.

solar energy might have been expensive in the past but now it’s the cheapest form of energy in history. we needed an absence of nuclear in the past to have a motivation to develop green, safe, efficient energy. and solar is the best way to do that.

i also ask you to consider the future. solar energy gets cheaper the more is deployed of it, so it will get even cheaper in the future. we have seen enormous price drops for transistors (computers) in the past, and solar panels are semiconductors, just like transistors are semiconductors. who says that we wouldn’t also see similar price drops for solar energy in the future? maybe solar panels will be cheap as paper in the future.

Thankfully planning and maintaining the electricity network isn’t done by people commenting on Lemmy. (btw i agree with you)

that’s a very whacky argument though

usually i would agree to the “increase supply to lower the cost” story, but in the case of energy it’s a bit different, because the Energy market uses the merit order principle, which means that whenever the nuclear reactors run, electricity is just as expensive as if nuclear reactors were the only source of electricity, and if they don’t run, only then prices drop.

so, you’re only getting cheaper prices by not needing nuclear energy. but, for nuclear plants, building them is a huge part of the cost, and that still has to be paid by somebody, even if they aren’t used later on to produce electricity.

add to that that construction is typically heavily subsidized by taxes, which means if you’re not using them, it’s just a huge burden on the taxpayers.

in retrospect, i understand France’s long-held stance around 2000 that it wants to rely mostly on nuclear. it wasn’t clear, back then, how long fossil fuels would be available (it was predicted they would last another 40 years) so they thought “oh well, uranium will be available for a longer time”. renewable energy wasn’t an (economic) possibility at that time. now that we have cheap solar energy, i suspect the last nuclear power plant worldwide will be shut down sometime around 2040.

I suspect that we will utilize a gas peaker plants for the last 5% for a long time; i couldn’t think of a much better option.

well yeah i agree that giving companies time to move back would have been better.