If you want a replacement rate of 2.3 kids per woman its almost impossible to reach without some families having 5 or 6 kids.
Play with the math: assume 10 women.
2 won't find a suitable mate and won't have children,
1 (and a bit) won't be able to have a child.
2 will have only 1 child
2 will have 2.
that's 6 children among 7 women. So the last 3 women need to 5.667 kids each for your 10 women to have 23 children between them. Try other numbers. You realistically can't get to 23 children to 10 women without at least one family of 5 children

Our society makes it hard for people to start families at all. If you want more than 2 children you better start in your early 20s and you better be after tax rich. In Canada they eliminate all family support if you make to much. I've twice been screwed with an effective marginal taxation rate over 100% because, I assume, the government doesn't even consider anyone will have more than 2 children. Vacations and family outings are expensive. Hotel bookings often force you to pay adult rates for some of the children. Even if we fix housing, the s#@t opportunities for young people and the insane redirection of consumption from the working young to the retired elderly, we still won't get to the replacement level.

And coal doesn't get an even bigger indemnity? Coal plants spew fine particles, they spew lead and heavy metals, they have put 100x (likely 1000x) more radio active particles in to the atmosphere than all nuclear plants in the USA ever have. Yes, when nuclear goes wrong it could go very wrong* but coal, you know the thing nuclear almost replaced 55 years ago, always pollutes. If nuclear had replace coal, like most of people back in 1970 thought it would**, then we might not be totally f#$ked with global warming today.

*Three mile island was the worst nuclear incident in the USA and people within 10 miles of it received the equivalent radiation of a chest X-ray.
**Coal mines were going bankrupt in 1970 because the expected future cost of coal was going to be so low.

When there is a vote to certify who is eligible to vote? Is it anyone who signed up as a driver? Will the driver with 1 ride or even 0 rides have the same vote as someone with 5000 rides? This seems ripe for abuse.

That's my point. If a department has a policy of parallel construction then by that very nature none of the officers can be trusted. The judges should find be finding the officers assertion of probably cause in admissible and all evidence gathered fruit of the poisoned tree. A policy of parallel construction should be so damning to the DHS that DHS shouldn't be able to do any searches based on probable cause. Most of the DHS would need to be cut and an entirely new department created that wasn't tainted by this policy.

If a department has been known to use parallel construction as policy, I can't see how any judge would ever trust officers from that agency ever again. A defense attorney should be able to get nearly ever case that required probably cause for a stop or search to be thrown out. This seems like something that the justice department should instantly correct.

In Canada, when our RCMP was doing improper eaves dropping on people's communication our Prime Minister was so angry he took their power to do most eaves dropping away completely and create an entirely separate agency. I would assume the USA would function similarly.

The primary driver of negative prices is wind and political stupidity. In places like Ontario, Pennsylvania and Ohio the wind blows the hardest at night in late February early March, exactly when demand is the lowest but our politicians have guaranteed the operators of the wind farms that they will buy all the energy they produce.

Every aspect of the electric grid is governed by stupidity at a level unprecedented in any other industry. Fixing it is impossible as voters think electricity is easy and our media is terrified of math so there is no chance Joe public is going to get educated on it.

And the ROM only had 4K of addressable memory.

Let that sink in a moment. The graphics were not great but the games worked, were playable, were responsive and used 1/500 000 000 the power of the PC I'm writing this post on. Modern programs are bloated in every possible way, graphics, computations, messaging ....

Short term - tourism dollars and boycott red state products.

Longer term - show up for your primaries both Republican and Democrat and choose more moderate and economically literate candidates. In a normal world no one would vote for the majority of your corrupt, incompetent and out right insane options but when faced with two terrible options most people end up vigorously defending their lizard.

The C code at most large companies I've worked at has been total crap. My high school CS teacher probably wouldn't have accepted the code from my last company even to mark it since it lacked descriptions of the projects and comments. This isn't something that can be fixed with a new language. C at least won't compile if someone is an idiot so usually about 25% of the C devs are worth the air they breath which is far better than the JavaScript devs. The issue is managers wanting steady, easy to measure progress but not wanting to invest any time in understanding the project. Concurrency issues are solved by architecting the code correctly but if you only measure progress by how fast a jira ticket is solved by an engineer who has been on the project for 2 hours then you get people manipulation buffers in interrupts as well as in the single thread of the application. If there are no comments about what a buffer is then yes, pointers to it will be miss used. C code runs fast, has a small image size, I can bash memory directly, that's the point. If you don't plan your code, if the logic is never written out then it doesn't matter what the language is, your code will do the wrong thing. Memory bugs are just easier to find but making the language convoluted to stop stupidity just makes it harder to find stupid programmers and even harder to find incorrect logic. Rust is bad coders solving the wrong problems. If, as a manager, your devs can't simplify the architecture enough to explain how the code will meet the functional requirements then either the devs suck or you shouldn't be a manager..... and if you don't have a clear functional requirement, even if you know it will change next week, then you as a manager aren't doing your job.

I would not be surprised if it becomes the most expensive drug on the market. Not that the high price is necessarily bad. Individuals will either pay or die but at least they now have a choice. And with time the price will come down and the availability increase.

Any complex system with variability will see the average values of its members rise and fall but if you take the standard deviation of the set you will see it is much more constant than the average. IQs have steadily gone up with better healthcare but the deviation in IQ has barely changed. The variability of a stock is fairly persist even as the price rises or falls. We have always had the occasional record high, low, most rain etc. However if you look at the variability of the weather, for instance in Southern Ontario Canada, 50 years ago, the chance that it would rain on Saturday used to be almost completely independent on whether it had rained the previous Wednesday (3 days earlier). 30 years ago their was a strong correlation. The average temperature didn't change, the average precipitation didn't change but the variability of the weather made a huge change. The change in variability indicates a significant change in how the system works.

The people of Europe are learning what the farmers on Southern Ontario learned 30 years ago. Even if the average doesn't change the weather has significantly changed. Average temperature is a terrible measure for climate change. It might be easy to explain but it lags the real change by 30 years.

The current international rules and norms favor the United States. We organized trade routes, pricing in US dollars and dispute resolutions in a way that slightly favors the USA. The world generally doesn't have tariffs on services and the USA is by far the world leader in exporting services. The rest of the work accepts American intellectual rules that significantly favor the USA.

The rest of the world accepted American leadership because in 1945 the USA was the world leader in trade, in promoting free trade, protecting trade, in trade and relations expertise. The USA was also paying to rebuild Europe and parts of Asia.

The world continued to accept these slightly skewed trade rules because negotiating new rules is hard and the USA, was in large part a reliable, trust worthy and intelligent leader in world trade that had spent 80 years building good will and making everyone rich.

Trump has blown up all that good will, he has destroyed the trustworthiness of the USA and no one thinks of American policy as intelligent. The USA still has by far the most vibrant economy in the world, they are the leaders or are second in almost every market that matters, farming, mining, AI, software... However, the rest of the world will slowly reconfigure trade away from the US. It will take a while. Countries will suck up to Trump during this transition but they will move away. It took 80 years (or 150 depending on who you are) for the current global system to be created. It will take a while to realign it but it will happen.

We will all be poorer when the existing system is replaced. No one else can fill the role the old, reliable, intelligent USA used to hold.

When I get life insurance I'm betting I will die. The bet pays my family if I win. Same with fire insurance. I win if my house burns down. Now suppose I live in a place with wildfire risk. I might be temped to bet that my community will be destroyed by a fire. It might be financially better for me to use a prediction market than a traditional insurance company. Predictive markets do have the potential to be used to mitigate risk.

I understand wealth is easier to measure than consumption but other than that why are so many, possibly a majority of people so focused on the wealthy having to much wealth? Wealth is the means of production. Why do you care who owns it? Shouldn't your main concern be that the wealth we have is well used? And that we are creating more wealth to make future generations more productive? What you should care about is how much consumption people have. A house is wealth, it provides housing. Personally I think it is more important to have housing for young people, housing that allows people to move and have geographic mobility and enough housing for everyone than have housing as the primary investment vehicle for the middle class. I think it is more important that people have inexpensive food, that they can conveniently buy regardless of who owns the grocery store. If you track consumption you will notice it isn't the top 0.01% of people that are competing with you for it. The rich don't eat more than you, they are not your main competition for housing in places you want to live. They don't consume enough healthcare or vacations or cars to in anyway have an effect on what is left for you. The very rich probably have the same cell phone as you.

In fact if you do think about consumption you might be able to figure out why our youth are so f#$ked and who is screwing them so badly. Unfortunately most people can't bring themselves to think like this because they want to be the screwers.

When I did pen testing, for the few products that seemed to have any clue what they were doing, I always scrutinized the random number generator. 2^40 is not that big that you can't run it for a short time, create say 2^32 numbers, sort them and look for patterns (in this case you would likely find a collision). Of the companies that seemed to care about security, I'm guessing 60% screwed up random numbers*. It is so prevalent that every tester should be looking at it.

And one entity, the US government, had a non-standard random number generator, that they couldn't explain in the original version of Open SSL (yes the US government paid for it). It did pass all the randomness tests I tried but it wasn't the algorithm they claimed. With random number generators you "merge" in entropy from a physical source into your entropy pool because your physical source could have a "bias" or uneven distribution to its bits.