The posters and readers here aren't fixing the problem!
An economic system that can't function without continuous population growth was never sustainable in the first place.
Damn straight. Even 1% growth is still exponential.
Whatever the issue is, the solution is the same and should be done for many other reasons: Get the cost of living down. Cheaper property, higher wages.
I would expect both of these to happen naturally as a consequence of falling population, thanks to supply and demand. Less labour means increased demand for labour, therefore higher prices. Less demand for housing (fewer people who need to live in them) leads to cheaper housing. And reduced population through voluntarily reducing births is a helluva lot more palatable than achieving it through war, famine, eugenics or closing borders.
While also fostering programs that encourage and support child-rendering.
Either you made an unfortunate typo or you support melting children down into soap and petrochemicals
Countries with conscription/force military labor for men result in those men having a 5% or larger lifetime reduction in earnings.(citation below)
Conscription is not rarely used, and has caused a gender divide in Korea as men have a lifelong economic disadvantage from losing 1 year to forced military labor. Read about Korea and that is never mentioned that equality is demanded by women everywhere except for when it is forced labor, losing 1 year of starting a career and losing 1 year of freedom (my body, my choice).
We'll see how conscription of women works out for the Danes: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnn.com%2F2025%2F07%2F02...
I do seem to recall that US culture has spend quite a few decades absolutely vilifying teenage mothers. Pretty much regardless of whether or not they are in stable relationships, married, etc. So, among the various factors, that could be one.
Unless she is telegenic. Then an MTV film crew will follow the family around for season 27 of "Teen Mom."
A "bloated civil service sector" is the bogeyman of a lot of center-right economics
It's a damn shame that the public have swallowed this narrative and keep voting to cut public services. The clue is in the name!
Gendarmerie Nationale:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...
They are happy about it.
Good for them. With any luck they can show the other govt departments how to do it, and this time around it won't take two decades.
It's not a matter of usability, but rather the fear of change that is an obstacle.
This is true... but if you tell the users they are "sticking it to the Americans" you may find that they are actually quite motivated.
The MS-MiB were sent out worldwide to shut down the One Laptop Per Child initiative so that poor children around the world wouldn't be forced to use a Linux based laptop which could operate for 8 hours on a charge, be charged with a hand crank and was readable in full sun besides having built-in mesh networking.
This alone is enough to still make me angry at Microsoft over a decade later. That OLPC was amazing in so many ways. I really thought that cool dual-mode screen was going to take over the world, instead we have shitty non-repairable smartphone slabs with a touchscreen (that STILL doesn't work well in sunlight)
That's what: since these chromebooks are school issued, the school should do something like have them all connected to a school LAN server, but w/ no connection to the external internet. That way, everything is locked down. Even if one opens Chrome, one wouldn't be able to access anything outside the LAN
True, it would reduce the time spent playing games in the browser. It would also seriously reduce the utility the student having a PC. Good luck getting permission (or the hard drive space) to cache every useful academic source on the LAN. At which point, you might as well do what the Swedes have done - allocate proper funding to a library of good textbooks, and revert to pen and paper. It also makes it much, much harder for a student to have an LLM do work on their behalf... though if I ever hear of a kid building a pen plotter that is controlled by ChatGPT to submit work in a copy of their own handwriting I hope they get an A.
When they were introducing the chromebooks in the US it was a mess of assertions not backed by any facts I could discern, and competing motivations, I suspect the biggest among them was the idea that if the kids submitted all their work digitally it would be less of a chore to grade, and that kids could be more heavily tested and auto-graded if all the tests were computer-based.
All the benefits seemed to go to the teachers, administrators, and polititians, with little benefit to the students.
And Google. Those bastards got piles of money and even bigger piles of data to mine.
Maybe have them locked down such that students can't install any new software on them, and also ensure that they only have the programs needed by the course - electronic textbooks, maybe MS Office - Home & Student.... Maybe keep these computers on a LAN (so that school staff can communicate w/ them), but not connected to the internet! Then kids wouldn't be able to go to OnlyFans or play online games
When I was a high school teacher (2014-2019) most students had school-issued chromebooks. These were locked down pretty hard and I never saw students install unapproved software on one. But it didn't matter. There are plenty of games you can play in a web browser, or just watch youtube videos of other kids playing games.
Oh the Irony. a company whose business is built on other peoples works is suing for copyright infringement.
Poetic justice.
Remember? We've been actively trying to forget.
We didn't know how good we had it. Now, we wish the absurdities were just April Fool's Day nonsense...
I noticed this across *all* the news sites I read on April 1st. No "joke" news on any of them, that I noticed. I can only conclude that this is because the real news in 2026 is so batshit insane. Poe's Law and all that.
I hate to say it but until it can install solar onto an expensive "100 year" tile roof that is somehow also extremely fragile, I can't be bothered. My stupid 100 year tile roof would cost over $80,000 to replace, and "market rate" maintenance is about $150 PER TILE.
Until solar can be safely installed on THAT kind of roof (very common in my area), it's just something that other people do.
I have concrete tiles on my roof. They look a bit like terracotta tiles but they are just moulded concrete. They are just over 50 years old. In 2020 we hadd 5.6kW of photovoltaics fitted on the roof. The photovoltaics were mounted on rails about 100mm above the roof. The rails are attached to the same timber battens that hold the original tiles, which remain in place. We had to replace a dozen or so tiles after the solar panels we fitted due to the accumulated 50 years of damage and some additional damage from the contractors who fitted the panels.
The rest of the roof was left as-is. The roof doesn't look "new" but it keeps the weather out like it did when it was new. The solar panels shade the roof so we need less AC in summer. Barring some kind of never-before-seen-in-our-area weather event I expect to get at least another 30 years out of the roof + panels (The panels have a 25 year warranty) though we may add more solar and a battery before that.
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. -- H. L. Mencken
