Which kind of makes me wonder, what happens to the Republican Party when Trump croaks given they've now thrown out pretty everything they previously supposedly stood for (third term or no, his hold over the party won't end while he can still type semi-coherent sentences)? He's pushing 80 and that is really starting to show, so behind closed doors they've got to be thinking about it. Do they turn to Don Jr., who doesn't seem to have a particularly high profile, and try to revert the US to a defacto monarchy, turn to some other prominent Trumpist, switch to Elon Musk's new party (if it ever gets off the ground), or pretend the last decade-and-change never happened and try to reset back to the GOP of the GW Bush era?

Like post-Putin Russia, I'm not really seeing many good options here, for anyone in the blast radius. In both cases, I suspect it's going to make "Succession" look like some toddlers having a squabble over who gets to have a go on the swing next, and nearly everyone is going to have to deal with some of the fallout...

I did wonder about going there with a Soylent reference, but we're a *long* way from that point. We have the capacity to grow and distribute food to a population at least a few billion more than we have at present, and chances are we'll hit peak population before we get to that point anyway; it's only wasted edible food, distribution inefficiencies, financial greed, and politics that still allow people to starve.

Besides, the latest legal right starting to spread around the world is "assisted suicide" which, in principle at least, I can agree with for the terminally ill (there are a number of currently untreatable medical conditions I'd definitely want not to suffer through), given suitable safeguards. However, it's also a slippery slope that is absolutely going to get abused to remove some of the perceived dead wood within the population, and most likely that is going to be in a way that will help smooth out the old age heavy demographic curve.

It's down across the board according to the graph in TFA, but Africa is still way above it (a touch over 4) and Oceania appears to be pretty much spot on the 2.1 threshold. Every other continent is below 2.1, with Europe at the bottom on 1.4, and the overall average is 2.2, so we're not far off a net global population reduction.

Be careful what you wish for though. What this creates are further societal problems in the form of a geriatric-heavy population in the 75% of countries with a negative population growth, meaning a higher burden on the younger generations to support those that have exited the workforce due to age, and increased local resource pressure in the remaining 25% where the population is still growing. Given that is essentially Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa in particular, which is likely to bear the a good deal of the pain of climate change, we can also expect a lot of that additional population to try and relocate elsewhere as living conditions worsen and resources become more scarce. Some will see that as a good thing, since it will fill gaps in the workpool elsewhere and, at the other end of the scale, the bigots will - obviously - have a very different view, so there's absolutely going to be a lot of political and socio-economic friction coming along with this.

Below a certain age they're not going to be going to a concert without a responsible adult, or at least an older sibling/whatever, that is old enough to have an acceptable form of ID. That doesn't have to be a formal government ID either; it could be just be the smartphone with the number provided when the ticket(s) were bought, or any other form of "what I have" information that was provided during the original booking that has some form of proof of name/address/etc. Noted that many concerts have rules on smartphones in the venue though.

In practice, it's still not quite foolproof though. Oasis tried pretty much exactly what Ledow suggested recently with their comeback tour in the UK, and there were still quite widespread allegation of ticket fraud and people claiming they had legit tickets bought through official channels yet were still denied entry to gigs, although subjectively the level of fraud/resales does not seem as bad as it was Swift's Era tour. There was also some "backdoor entry" issues, apparently, but that's a security issue for the venue, not a ticket problem. Some of that could well be teething problems and loopholes that can still be closed, though but as Ledow said; this has been a solvable problem for many years, it's just not been something the industry has cared about because they've grown accustomed to getting their cut regardless and the touts have not - until recent artist pushback - been their problem.

TFA says they were probably (they didn't check) poor machine translations due to the volume of languages, it being fairly likely that whoever uploaded them does not, in fact, speak more than 300 languages. Given the previous spamming of references to David Woodward into other totally unrelated articles, this seems highly likely, but it's also possible he has a website and asked native speakers of different languages to do the translations for him and they were actually fine by the Wikipedia guidelines. That's a volunteer-based approach I've seen used succesfully by several software tools to generate multilingual dialogs, menus, and other documentation, but a total of 335 languages seems a huge stretch - I'd be surprised if even an artist with a massive following like Taylor Swift has a fan base that geographically diverse, let alone someone as fringe as this.

There's definitely a lot of article spamming and other rule-bending/breaking going on here, but that doesn't preclude arbitrary decisions and subsequent enforcement being made by Wikipedia editors as well.

I get the obvious bias issues with "autobiographies" in Wikipedia, but there are still a number of scenarios here that are legit. Maybe all the articles were written by a harcore fan (OK, that would most probably his Mom/partner if so), or even if the original article was genuinely written by someone else and David Woodward then thought to do the translations himself without editing the content. Ideally it should be assessed on the content alone, and if that's accurate and has suitable citations, then who really cares on the rest, especially if it's flagged it as "possibly self authored" or something? Storage is cheap.

Sure, there are language translation tools. But let's say I'm browsing a list of "music artists specialising in idolising extremists" on Wikipedia because reasons. By the sound of things, the only way I'd now have of finding out about David Woodward would be to do that in one of the 20 remaining languages; as far as all the other language sites are concerned, he now does not exist and I'm not even going to get the chance to use a language translation tool to convert it. Taken to extremes, that should mean you'd need to be browsing in English to find out about Donald Trump, Russian for Vladimir Putin, Parceltongue for Voldermort (a rather small and niche site!), and so on.

Am I misunderstanding something here? Yes, it's (allegedly) self promotion since it *could* have been a hardcore fan doing this, which isn't great, but surely the ultimate goal for articles on Wikipedia is to have every article replicated into as many languages as possible? It's entirely possible that David Woodard (presumably) may just have been trying to make it easier for any international fans to find out more about him in their own language, and the moderators jumped to the wrong conclusion. Or is there some seach ranking system doing this somehow games, because the league table they're talking about seems to be something only Wiki contributors looking to stroke their ego or Wiki admins are even going to know about, let alone care about?

If I wanted to use Wikipedia to read up on some music artist I'd just discovered, I know I'd certainly prefer to do so in my mother tongue - English - rather than whatever native language they might speak and had an article written in, for instance. If that kind of language translation is going to be blocked, I'm not seeing how this benefits native speakers of the 315 languages (in this case) that don't make the cut.

Similar here. During the early days of Covid, since we were quite frequently targetted for phishing (spear and general), the engineering team got into the habit of posting to the group Teams chat about any suspicious looking emails so everyone else could be extra wary until its legitimacy could be confirmed since our HR and finance departments sent some phishy-looking emails on occasion. Needless to say, Corporate IT was oblivious to this until we trashed their Phishing test, at which point they kicked off about it (wasted time & expense, blah, blah). A rather pointed Teams call to the CIO along the lines of "forewarned is forearmed", "many eyes make all bugs shallow", and the frequent need to vet our own HR/finance emails soon shut that down. :)

The Teams posts continued, the Phishing test did not get re-run, and I believe someone must have had a quiet word with HR & finance too.

Clarke's vision of Rama in 1973 predates O'Neill's eponymous conceptual station design by one year, but it's a completely different model to this. Rama did not spin for gravity and was (internally) infinite in size, so probably wasn't really anything intended as something actually buildable so much as a fantastical McGuffin to facilitate the plot.

This design is much more akin to Gerard K. O'Neill's proposal for an *actual* space habitat consisting of two counter-spinning concentric shells to provide spin-gravity, mechanical stability, and increased habital surface area; this is where jms and Harlan Elison got the basic design of "Bablyon 5" from, although the basic idea of habital cylinders in space goes back even further; Hermann Oberth used the idea 1954 and also Larry Niven included the idea in 1970's "Ringworld", but AFAIK O'Neill's was the first actually designed as a potentially viable construct (once suitable tech was available), e.g. calculating that it was mechanically and physically viable, hence the reason the basic design concept is named for him.

It's theoretical - more an attempt to get potential ideas that might one day form the basis of an actual ship than anything else. Hypothetically speaking, before you would actually build something this you'd expect there to have been a few technological advances to both shorten the trip and confirm whether or not Proxima Centuri b is habitible or not.

Despite their issues, I think China supplanting the US as the world's largest economy is pretty much a given at this point. While the remaining western governments, quite rightly, have reservations over how trustworthy and reliable China might be as an economic partner, the reality is that's just a matter of degrees and ultimately every country is mostly looking out for #1. The only difference is the lengths they are prepared and able to go to achieve their aims; some much more so than others.

Establing sensible international trade agreements without loopholes you can sail a carrier group through don't happen overnight, no matter what tariff threats you might make to expedite the process, and similar timescales are needed to remodel global trading routes at scale too. With the US now demonstrably proving that as long as MAGA has any meaningful say in US politics they are no longer either a reliable or trustworthy partner to the west, any western government not already making overtures to re-arrange their exports and establish trade agreements around a more China-centric global economy in fairly short order has probably left it too late, IMHO.

Climate = tide coming in.
Weather = extent of individual waves.

You've also got the waste heat from power generation and transmission required to power all the ACs that plug into the mains and draw their power from the grid. If an AC is powered by locally connected solar or whatever that's going to be pretty insignificant, but the rest are going to add up. The laws of thermodynamics totally apply, which means you are not magically moving heat from A to B in a zero sum game, you're consuming power to do it, and that means more waste heat in addition to the losses in the system through inefficiencies.

Cities are already microclimates and mass AC adoption is absolutely going to cause an aggregate, and almost certainly measurable, temperature increase across that microclimate, and especially so in narrow streets where there is limited airflow to disperse that extra heat. If the heatwave is already making outside temperatures unhealthy then adding another degree or whatever on top of it to help keep interiors cool via AC is going to really suck for those who are forced to go outside in it for whatever reason.

A better solution, given climate change has been a thing for decades, would have been to look at how pre-AC civilizations in equatorial regions built very efficient ways of keeping interiors cool passively in extreme heat and adopted those techniques in anticipation of hotter summers for any new builds over (realistically) the last 20-30 years. Hindsight, and naive optimism the Paris Agreement et al would work, is a wonderful thing though and here we are - putting a band aid in place that will actually make the overall problem slightly worse.

You should post that on Truth Social for the Lulz. I hear Donnie likes big simple charts. :)

It does, but there's a slight issue with that. In terms of the world's largest economies by GDP the BRICS countries rate as:

#2: China
#4: India
#10: Brazil
#11: Russia (sanctions not withstanding)
#17: Indonesia
#28: United Arab Emirates
#38 South Africa
#42: Egypt
#44: Iran (again, despite the sanctions)
#66: Ethiopia

Now it's not like these countries are doing absolutely nothing to mitigate things, but it would be really interesting to see some numbers on exactly how much of a proportionate contribution they are making to "fund mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions in poorer nations" when even lowly Ethiopia still has over 130 poorer nations to choose from.