I don't really get this one: https://ambigr.am/contest/sayings. The "up" is supposed to turn to "do" but I don't recognize neither the "d" nor the "o".
Took me a moment too - it's a capital 'D', at about the same angle as the second 'm'. The 'O' just has an extraneous line through it (which was the stem of the P).
She’s not doing either. In that same conversation, she goes on to talk about how we don’t live in that world and can’t return there, and what the implications should be for policy.
The thing is that if you depopulate by reducing the birth rate, you end up in a situation where you have a whole lot of old people and very few young people, which cannot be sustained.
However, in the intermediate stage, you are desperately short of working-age people to help support the massive aging population.
This isn't a theoretical - most of Western Europe has been in this boat for a long time, and relies heavily on immigration to fill the labour gap (despite however much political posturing about wanting to restrict immigration)
If we do this on a global scale, there is nowhere to draw immigrants from, and a bunch of old folks are going to be abandoned to die...
What's the alternative though? Creating new humans purely to be able to have them work and pay for stuff for other existing humans? That doesn't seem a bit dystopian for you?
The problem I have with this logic is that it seems to assume a binary of the population either staying at least as high as it is or massively reducing. The idea that there's no middle ground where the population goes down slowly rather than massively spiking all at once feels like it needs much more justification rather than just assuming it.
Oh, for sure, that alternative is not great either. We've built a society on the myth that infinite growth is possible, and at some point the chickens are coming home to roost...
I guess the question is just whether we want to be the generation that decides to try to do something about this problem or let it keep going on for a later generation to solve. Either way, we won't be the ones who actually are around when the pain starts to be felt, and it's not like as individuals we can do a whole lot about it anyhow. My wife and I have no interest in having kids, so I guess we're doing as much as we can, although our decision is pretty much completely unrelated to any opinions about population I might have.
Humans are humans, at the end of the day. Especially as someone who grew up at the height of EU open borders, I'm not real bothered which side of an imaginary line on a map someone happened to be born on
If the only argument behind why Europe should exist is that you don't like people who look like the people from Sudan or India, then maybe it shouldn't.
(If you instead want to claim that you're not trying to talk about ethnicity and are instead talking about economies or whatever, consider whether the ancestors you mention drawing those imaginary lines over places like Sudan and India were motivated by their desire to colonize and extract wealth from them at the expense of the local populations, and whether that's more responsible for the economic differences between them and Europe than the lines themselves)
In order to achieve this, though, we desperately need to get every country well below replacement-level fertility rate, and sustain that for a long, long time. Not sure it's possible, particularly when some political factions still consider "below replacement" to be a bad thing.
Look at the Soviet Union at the height of Stalinist oppression in the 1930s. Having the wrong book (not even necessarily a Western book but even a Soviet book that is no longer in good graces) could be a trip to the Gulag which for many was a death sentence.
A lot of it was driven by quotas that the police had to meet.
That is interesting. Have read his books but never seen videos.
What I was trying to get at is I argue that historically we had no reason to assume magnets to exist until we discovered them. (Sure, today we can explain them in terms of the effects of electrons traveling at relativistic speeds.)
It otherwise seems a safe assumption that we cannot move into a 4th spatial dimension (even if such exists) or do many other outlandish things. I don’t think we can prove them impossible but likely just don’t know how.
But imagine if Newton had been shown an electromagnet and asked to explain it… It would have been witchcraft!
The other interpretation that leads to 1/3 probably is also pretty intuitive. That's the fun part of this question is that it leaves crucial information unspecified.
I think this is a reasonable interpretation:
You meet a family at a party. They say "We have two children". You ask "Do you have any girls"? They say "yes!"
This will give you 1/3 probability that the other child is also a girl.
I think this interpretation is more intuitive because it doesn't make any assumptions about how you get your information. Usually in probability questions you assume any information you have is given to you from on high. For example, you just "know" that the family has two children, you don't somehow deduce it. Therefore I assume the same for "one child is a girl" information.
> I think this interpretation is more intuitive because it doesn't make any assumptions about how you get your information.
Do you mean “interpretation” or “alternative problem”.
Because if it’s an “interpretation” of the original problem you’re indeed making assumptions to fill the unspecified information.
If you mean that it’s an alternative problem which has a definite solution I agree. It’s a different problem and its relevance to the original one is to illustrate that additional assumptions were required.
The original problem cannot be answered without making additional assumptions about how you get your information. Different interpretations may reach different answers by making different assumptions.
But on the other hand... Some people open cafes specifically because they dream of creating a place for the community to hang out. At least that's what they say. I often see McDonald's fill that niche for older folks.
That can all be trivially fixed by style of seating and tables, removing all power outlets and so on. People who don't go there to work won't care.
I live in the country with probably the highest sit-down cafe density cities in the world (Korea), and this issue has been figured out ages ago. If you know any such cafe owners who don't understand how to deal with this, I'm happy to have a chat with them. Or they can come over here and I can show them a dozen cafes so they can see it with their own eyes.
You simply set up the cafe to accommodate the exact % of such laptop users as you're comfortable with, which can be 0%, 100%, or anywhere in between. If you do for some reason want to run a cafe where 100% of seating is usable for laptop workers, then the way to keep it all profitable is also straightforward: 1. you make your cheapest coffee (converted to Dutch CoL) 7+ euros a cup (use some single origin stuff that's still cheap when bought from wholesale). 2. As food, only offer small sweet bites and make those similarly overpriced. 3. Make the seating dense so you can fit a lot of these office workers. Bar seating is especially space-efficient for this.
The Netherlands even has an advantage; people can't just leave their setup on the table and leave for hours as it may well get stolen - this is not an issue in Korea so some people actually do this, the worst case scenario for cafe owners.
The $10 comfortable folding chairs that recently became available changed the equation for me. Rather than sitting in a cafe, I much prefer to take my laptop and a chair and go sit in a nice park, on the beach, or even in the woods.
The common non-tourist behaviour in a café in Vienna is to sit there talking for hours, buying a few cups of coffee total. It has been like that since before laptops were a thing. Yet the cafés remain viable.
> Some people open cafes specifically because they dream of creating a place for the community to hang out
Having people sitting alone looking at a laptop for hours while buying the minimum amount of coffee needed to not be just flat out loitering, I think it would be a problem both from a cold business perspective, and even more so from the human perspective.
I think it's pretty common today though. There are a number of cafes with a lot of seating where I see a whole lot of tables with someone seated working on their laptop.
Cafés as a place to be for cheap where the weather can't reach you while you read the newspaper you can't afford or a book or plan a revolution is quite old. Like centuries old, perhaps millenia if you count gossip and include inns.
