The sooner the culturally inevitable decline of the US is accepted the better rest-of-world can succeed it. Needing the US for anything is a long hangover from WWII destroying real and potential competition.

The world should be doing its own research to keep the fruits thereof from Wall Street's grubby tentacles. I grew up through the space race but now see no reason the US deserves to hog research it can only use to benefit our owning kleptarchs.

Correct, the headline should be: Why is Fertility So Low in EXPENSIVE Countries?

The reality is that 'high income' more likely than not means high prices, constant pressure to keep earning money, because there are very few things in 'high income' (expensive) countries that doesn't cost money. We are constantly forced to pay taxes, never mind that in expensive countries large parts of the population live in dense urban areas, in cities and nobody has land that they can live off of. If you have no source of food other than the store and you cannot avoid paying taxes and paying high costs of owning or renting a property, then you are constantly under pressure to earn money.

In an expensive country you have expensive government and this government never ceases to pressure you to pay more taxes, makes things truly unaffordable by pretending to give it to you for free, basically in expensive countries you are forced to provide not only for yourself and for your children and maybe for your elderly parents, you are forced to provide for your expensive government.

An expensive government is obviously the cost of running the government itself, salaries, pensions, buildings, all expenses but it is also all of the laws, that are constantly adding more and more expenses to the system, thus mostly forcing the government to get deeper into debt and to steal your purchasing power through inflation (money printing).

Under these circumstances people who have access to contraceptives will use them almost always and this prevents almost all unwanted pregnancies. The other part of the population is just too stressed out and too tired from constant earning to pay for all of this 'high income' expensive stuff.

At the end children become a luxury for those, who can afford just a little more than the other guy or they become a way to suck money out of the system itself by getting onto various programs. They are an irrational choice for many, so to have them you either have to have a direct financial incentive or to be irrational or to be wealthy enough to afford them.

Controls should give tactile feedback because every moment the driver is distracted from the road is a safety risk.

The sole reason for zero-tactile feedback controls is lower manufacturing costs. That's also why automobiles do not use MFDs (Multi-Function Displays) like those on aircraft. Though they divert the eye they permit the user to place a finger over a screen-labeled button then press without looking at that button longer than necessary.

just play human music at 5% processing and keep the settings on auto, we'll deal with this later.

Are they really looking for intelligence in these LLMs or are they missing something else that slows down their progress? Is it intelligence, that we are trying to get out of LLMs? If so, I think they can be easily at least as 'intelligent' as anyone, they certainly have more information than any one person does. Maybe what they are looking for and not finding just cannot be found that way, that's because it is not intelligence they are looking for but some form of organic animal like behavior? In that case they will be looking for a while, not until we have robots everywhere that are more than a camera on a car, something that can touch, taste, smell, feel pain, hunger, consume to sustain itself, will the new level of 'intelligence' appear.

The 677K scrapped were not nearly enough to affect national used car prices over time because that was a drop in the proverbial bucket among tens of millions of new and used vehicle sales and scrappage. CFC did not target ALL used vehicles but select models.

Meanwhile the US total car fleet shrank by FOUR MILLION in 2009 (reflecting the 2008 recession far more than CFC

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thedrive.com%2Fnews%2F...

Meanwhile the 2009 total scrapped was over FOURTEEN MILLION.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgrist.org%2Farticle%2Fu-s-...

"In 2009, the 14 million cars scrapped exceeded the 10 million new cars sold, shrinking the U.S. fleet by 4 million, or nearly 2 percent in one year. While this is widely associated with the recession, it is in fact caused by several converging forces.

Future U.S. fleet size will be determined by the relationship between two trends: new car sales and cars scrapped. Cars scrapped exceeded new car sales in 2009 for the first time since World War II, shrinking the U.S. vehicle fleet from the all-time high of 250 million to 246 million. It now appears that this new trend of scrappage exceeding sales could continue through at least 2020.

Among the trends that are keeping sales well below the annual figure of 15â"17 million that prevailed from 1994 through 2007 are market saturation, ongoing urbanization, economic uncertainty, oil insecurity, rising gasoline prices, frustration with traffic congestion, mounting concerns about climate change, and a declining interest in cars among young people."
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Being a Boomer I should stereotypically believe unsubstantiated drivel propagated by industry-illiterates but it happens I've been wrenching including scrapping cars and harvesting parts from salvage since the 1970s including the CFC era. Facts are fun. I recommend inquisitive learning instead of AssUming correlation is causation.

I read the rules and checked the numbers because we went to auctions where CFC cars were bought by authorized yards where self and boss went to harvest delicious parts (I got all I could pull free if we had room to load them which was nice) some of which came from vehicles like CFC Jeep SUVs (no loss since their transmissions put many otherwise sound ones into salvage and transmissions to repair those on the road were legal to harvest from CFC vehicles). After skinning them out the mandated hull and engine got scrapped with any unwanted leftovers, but the harvested parts kept many others on the road during that recession era.

The number CFC crushed was not even close to enough to change used car prices and (this may be terribly difficult to understand because OMG math is hard) the impact of the tiny few recycled IN 2009 is not what drove used car prices up from then until 2025. (Vehicle price) inflation did because used car prices lag new car prices while driving them upwards. As new vehicle prices rise so do used, there being no reason to sell things for less than market value.

US auto production in 2009 alone was ~5.71 million units (per DOE). Total sales were around ten million for that recession year.

CFC didn't target anything of great cultural value (and though this may be painful for people who REALLY want a special vehicle but not quite enough to do more than blame circumstance for not un-assing the couch and getting one they were too slack to track down as I do) the few pretty toys were exceptions not rules hence irrelevant.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffred.stlouisfed.org%2Fse... gives an idea of total vehicle sales over time.

Few understand 2009 also saw roughly 14 MILLION vehicles scrapped. People offed unwanted tradeable and untradeable (a few hundred for scrap cars moves a lot of iron) vehicles after the recession. That's where the "used" cars went in volume enough to briefly ripple the market then inflation did the rest until present day (when nearly every CFC vehicle would have been scrapped anyway).

Most vehicles taken to salvage could be repaired (burn jobs and utterly smashed excepted) but not at US labor rates so auction buyers send parts and complete vehicles offshore where people still know how to work on things, notably sheet metal/paint/interiors (sheet metal and interiors are easy swaps from other donors).

Used cars in the US supply export markets too and the auction system is highly efficient at moving cars/trucks/SUV/construction equipment/big rigs/etc from backwaters to seaports. That's far from new either since new vehicles are a luxury purchase.

2009 exports exceeded CFC, but I don't see anyone boohooing about that though UNlike CFC, exports send more valuable vehicles for the most part since the markup for the reseller is far more than some econobox they can get used from the EU then truck instead of ship by maritime car carrier.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.usitc.gov%2Fpublicat...

"Used Vehicles Are an Important Component of U.S. Passenger-Vehicle Exports

U.S. exports of used passenger vehicles averaged 762,000 per year from 2009 to 2013, with
many destined for lower-income markets. The large foreign market for these exports appears to
have propped up U.S. passenger vehicle sales and may have lessened the price premium for new
vehicles to U.S. consumers. This suggests that the current level of U.S. new-vehicle purchases
can be at least partly attributed to foreign demand for U.S. used vehicles. Estimated data are
used because precise data on some U.S. exports of used vehicles are not available.1
Used vehicles made up 34 percent of U.S. passenger vehicle exports by volume during 2009â"13
(21 percent by value). Major markets for U.S. used vehicle exports differ from markets for new
vehicle exports, particularly in terms of volume. Used passenger vehicles are often exported to
developing countries because they offer luxury options at lower prices, are not available new in
those countries, or match or exceed the quality of locally available new vehicles.
Estimated U.S. exports of used passenger vehicles rose 26 percent from 2009 to 2013, from
656,000 units to nearly 826,000 (figure 1). At the same time, U.S. exports of new vehicles
doubled to nearly 1.9 million in 2013, causing the share of used vehicles among all U.S. exports
of passenger vehicles to fall from 41 percent in 2009 to 30 percent in 2013. The growing global
economy drove a jump in demand for more expensive new vehicles as well as used vehicles.