> Governments aren't competent enough to do tech stuff well and they would never make something that works in a different country as well as credit cards do, but still.
There's some counterexamples: Postal systems, GPS and the internet were started as government projects that now interoperate and cover almost the whole globe.
Fertility in the migrant source areas is decreasing fast as well. At some point the books won't balance anymore, to provide a reliable flow of workers.
Yea, my comment was looking at it from a global point of view. We simply can't base the global economy on an infinitely growing population--it's ultimately a ponzi scheme.
Many countries don't have a Social Security equivalent, and people rely on their families instead. So not having kids can mean not having anyone to take care of you in old age, but it's maybe still ok if your siblings had kids. It's not that the economy overall relies on that.
Remember, these elderly will be most of us. IIRC many 20 and 30-somethings today will be still alive by the time shit hits this specific fan. How old are you?
> These days birth-giving mortality is very close to zero, also post-birth care is quite good
Also reliable and affordable DNA testing makes much easier collecting pensions from fathers that before would just vanish, or outright deny paternity. An underrated breakthrough in women and children rights enforcement.
If you want to reach the ground floor in a tall building, it makes a lot of difference if reaching it by elevator, or jumping from the window. Speed matters! A _very_ slow transition probably could be managed without disruptive impacts on the individual level. But we slam the brakes in ~2 generations, such a way a large share of people alive today will be still be alive to become destitute and unsupported by lack of replacements, both on macroeconomic level, and in the micro level. If a single kid today go childless itself, he/she is very likely to become a lone senior with no close family, eventually.
I believe it's the natural result of PAYG pension system. Let's be honest, they choose PAYG just to get votes immediately. (Or stabilize the society immediately in non-democratic countries, like china)
It's not better, because by the time people reach old age and understand the dangers of old age destitution and how dire is the lack of support from close family, they can't act on it anymore. Things need to be structured in a way people act while they still have opportunity.
One thing that makes me suspect the population crash will be much harder to fix than the previous population explosion, it's that there's no immediate fix. It takes ~20-30 years to raise a human being into a fully functional member of modern society, after the decision to conceive them was made. It's a long term investment. Back when people panicked on population explosion, some of the proposed "fixes" were brutal, like forced sterilization in India[1], or forced abortions in China[2], but they could be implemented and sometimes stopped quickly.
There's fundamental asymmetry. Time to terminate an unborn child is measured in hours to days (counting the recover time for the mother). Time to fully _raise_ a child is measured in decades. By the time people panic over it, it may be too late to avert the crisis.
More to the point, human's reproductive lifetime is usually about 30 years. So by the time you realize that you've fucked up your society, the cohort that could do something about it has now aged out of childbearing years. You're left with a much smaller cohort to fix the problem, but because there are now so many fewer women of childbearing age, increases in fertility rate lead to many fewer births.
This is actually happening with Millennials. Strauss and Howe predicted a "Crisis of 2020" that would lead to civic renewal and presumably a higher birth rate, but it now appears that 2020 was the beginning of the crisis and it won't be resolved for some time, perhaps a generation, and by that time Millennials (globally, the last big generation) will have aged out of childbearing years. Any baby boom will be led by late Zoomers, at best, and that's a small generation that's already affected by the collapse in birth rates.
My takeaway: the globalized, technologically advanced society we have now is doomed to collapse, and we should be working hard to take that advanced technology and identify simplified versions of it that can be run and maintained by a much smaller, localized workforce.
Wait until Shrinkflation meets AIflation, where most services once mediated by humans are taken over by dumb, error-prone, allucinating AI, with no possibility of recourse.
I find electric cars louder than the current engines most of the time. The space travel noises they put out while driving are louder than say a non hybrid Camry, not to mention ICE cars don’t make any backing up noises. Parallel parking of electric cars is so annoying. Hybrids too, I can hear the whining of a Prius coming down the street from half a block away.
This is not to say I’m against electric and hybrid cars, I’m all for them. But the fake noises they added are not a benefit.
Weird, my experience has been that EVs are much quieter and that's a real improvement in densely populated areas. Past a certain speed the main source of noise is the tires and then EVs aren't much better than ICE vehicles (wrt noise).
Im in a super dense area. Speed limit is really low. So tire noise is not that big of a factor and the WOOOOOOO of electric cars is prevalent over others. Obviously comparing apples to apples, a diesel truck is going to be super loud.
They’re a benefit to the lives they’re attempting to save.
You’re objectively wrong about the nose but it could be that the sound is particularly annoying to you for some reason, or that your brain has not yet been conditioned to automatically tune it out like it has with ICE engines.
> On average, cars moving at around 30 mph on local roads will produce sound levels ranging from 33 to 69 decibels.
> To ensure that pedestrians will hear electric and hybrid vehicles coming, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration requires these vehicles to emit sounds ranging from 43 to 64 decibels when they are moving at less than 18.6 mph.
> Results align with previous findings that EVs and ICEs exhibit similar noise levels at low speeds, particularly post-AVAS implementation. Earlier studies reported larger differences (3–4 dB lower for EVs than ICEs at 10–20 km/h), likely due to the absence of AVAS
> Additionally, a deeper investigation of how AVAS contributes to annoyance could inform improved design standards for EV noise emission, encouraging a balance between functional safety and acoustic quality in urban environments.
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