Global population will begin to decline in 2080.

The best sort of problem : someone else's.

However, the population of people 40 and under *has already peaked* and is declining. That means *not enough people working* to pay for benefit programs for people over 60 starts *today* .

Ditto. I've paid my whack. I'll take what I'm due.

"after me the deluge"

This is Scotland. "Toujours le deluge!"

But having 5 billion seniors, 2 billion adults, and 1 billion kids isn't going to be healthy.

Someone Else's Problem.

I can tell you are a flat-earther type.

Nope - geologist. Firmly rooted in reality.

How do you arrange to use a word processor to handle text input on a web page form?

Doesn't necessarily happen on school premises. Indeed for application forms, the school doesn't have any duty of care at all.

Thinking back to a classmate who struggled to get around the Department when he was in his wheelchair, there being only one lift which didn't cover all floors of the Department. The uni didn't have any duty of care, because he broke his literal neck on the second day of his summer break, and first day of his holiday, in another country, and another nation. The "listed building" status of the college as well as pure economics made putting in additional lifts a non-starter. The short sets of steps between building phases had mostly been ramped away in the 1950s updates.

US politics is getting madder, and is probably more likely to get us all killed now than it was last month. Situation "normal", for insane values of "normal".

You've got to hand it to Putin - he's bossed the "getting an agent into US politics" achievement. One of these days, I really should watch the "Manchurian Candidate". That's the original - there was a re-make recently, I think, and they're never worth watching.

It doesn't stop cheating on homework with AI, but it does mean that at some point the information has to pass through the human's brain to get to the writing hand.

Corollary : handwritten application forms - against which your hand-written essays, papers, etc will be compared. So you need to get your handwriting reasonably stable several years before you apply.

OK - you've just broken your arm, or had it ripped off on the rugby field. That's OK, you should be able to get a medical release for that. Ditto if you don't actually have hands.

If that means that school kids have to start handwriting essay etc too, big deal.

Nonsense.

Current strategy is to encourage as much legal immigration as possible (about 10 times the current level of illegal immigration), and process the immigrants into SoylentCrete for building the nuclear plants (and a new palace for King BigEars the Second, whichever one survives the duel)

I don't know how much uranium and thorium they can mine in the UK

Oh, a geological question.

There are small deposits of uranium minerals in both the Lake District and Cornwall, but the net amount is somewhere between fuck-all and two-tenths of that.

I can't think of any reported uranium mineralisation at all from Scotland. There are pegmatite-y areas which were evaluated for various minerals in WW2 (and rocks are not renowned for getting up and wandering the landscape) but I don't recall a uranium report At the clearance level of the geologist walking the hills with a hammer in his hand, nobody would have conceived of it as being important for anything more than a source of yellowish dyes and pigments.

In some distant galaxies, they have detected both a redshift from the light emitted by the galaxy (measuring specific emission lines, and the Lyman Alpha break in the galaxy's spectrum) but they also have absorption lines from the light passing through a gas cloud at lower redshift, with some absorption. This is quite commonly seen in lensed galaxies, where there is a lensing galaxy (or galaxy cluster) around half-way between us and the object of interest. This imposed features at two different redshifts on these galaxies light. Which is very hard to explain if you're trying to have your redshift from a physical motion in the rest frame rather than a cosmological redshift imposed on the universe.

This galaxy isn't one of those dual-shift galaxies - it only has one set of redshifted features in it's spectrum - but in the 1950s and 1960s respectable hard core astronomers tried to make the case you're making. They failed, and kept on failing until they accepted the reality of cosmological redshifts, or they retired.

Penzias and Wilson's observation of the cosmic microwave background in about 1963 (Nobeled a few years later) pretty much killed that line of argument at about the time I was concentrating on potty-training. If you want to resurrect it, feel free to dig up papers from the time and do some new observations that will bolster the argument that failed in half a century ago.

You're going to go all Address Resolution Protocol on us now, aren't you? (This is a bad pun! If you know, you know, and if you don't know, you'll have fun finding out.)

Why?

You're never going to see even a small fraction of a single million years. By the time a million years has passed, no one will remember Einstein, or Newton names (though their maths would probably have survived, in the machines). Plato will probably have disappeared into distant history along with every author from Home to Stephen King. Most cities that you have heard of will have sunk into the mud they are (mostly) built on. The Atlantic will be a few hours sailing wider, and the number of comets making close approaches to Earth will be almost exactly the same as 65 million years ago.

Fireman Montag endorses this message.

Ha ha - that's the oldest actual letter in existence, isn't it? Some Assyrian dude complaining in cuneiform about a shipment of copper.

It's not impossible to have formed lead (Pb) this early - but it is challenging.

AIUI, the preferred locus of origin for the heavier elements (say, 3 iron-mass nuclei upwards) has shifted to NS-NS and/ or NS-BH mergers - where nuclei can get absolutely hammered with neutrons (as also happens in supernovæ) but without the newly formed (and relatively unstable) nuclei having to then plough their way through dozens of solar masses of H/He envelope before getting to see the outside universe - and indeed, for the outside universe (us) to see the nuclei.

But to do that you have to have a generation of stars form, evolve to boom-time, form neutron stars (or an NS and a BH, then find each other, and inspiral ; do the big crash-boom-bang, and spray out the lead (whichever nuclei you're interested in) - which then needs to get sufficiently excited so that we can see it's absorption (or emission) lines. Which is a lot to happen in 434 million years (what I'm getting for the age of the universe at red shift 14.44). It takes time for that neutral hydrogen to cool down from all that recombining (well, combining, really) of electrons and protons to for the CMB - which was the Cosmic Incandescent-hot Background when it formed.

Somehow you've got to get from a relatively homogenous universe (parts per million density variations at the CMB) to one where there are things which are LRD (Little Red Dot) galaxies and things which are visibly not LRDs. And that's got to fit into those few hundred million years along with all the star evolving, NS-NS inspiralling gubbins too. Thats' barely as much time as vertebrates have had jaws!

Up to 6 penalty points, up to unlimited fine, potential loss of your license for several years, after which you have to re-pass the current driving test. If there are multiple offences in the same event (e.g. "causing death by dangerous driving" in addition to DCA) you can get a lot more.

The exact sentencing guidelines have changed every so often, but the law has been essentially the same since the 1950s. When the problem was people trying to read the newspaper while driving and changing gear with a crash gearbox (a.k.a. "double-declutching").

Did humans suddenly gain several more quanta of concurrent attention focus in the last 30 years?

Over 90% of drivers cha handle stick. Less than 10% are the gimps and cripples who go for the retard-license for automatics only.

Humans being the same everywhere on average, it's the same in America, right?

Some of the resins used to make (glass-fibre reinforced) plastic circuit boards are pretty nasty chemicals if they don't react, or if they get cooked. So if it's one of those graphics cards with a human-carrying drone worth of cooling fans, you probably do want to wash your hands after handling it.