Interesting FP, but that's not the cause of the declining birth rate. Rather that is a more general problem linked to a broadly detached misunderstanding of how things work or how to fix the problems. Japan is still fishing for an economic solution.

Ma Nature has a simpler approach. Each couple is supposed to produce at least four children, but only the two with the best genetic luck are supposed to survive long enough to reproduce. That's the equilibrium status based on averages, but Ma Nature's version of progress would actually call for more dead children than that...

Me? I think we could do better using some amount of reason. But I can't recall having read any rational discussions of a human right to reproduce or to receive genetic counseling...

Now you seem to be contradicting yourself. Are you going to pay the blackmail or not?

Hmm... Naw, not worth the requote against the censor trolls. But I know that censor moderation is sometimes evidence of important points they lack other response for...

NAK.

But I think you're a racist, too, and not the first one in America's brief history.

Deserve Funny and the story got none. And I think we all need more funny these weeks...

Mod parent funnier. We all need more funny these [long] weeks.

Why fund the EVIL? That's my take on YouTube in particular and all things google in general.

However mostly surprised at the lack of interest in the story. So much room for funny. We need more laughs these weeks.

I understand you were under FP pressure, and I think it's a good faith comment, but it fell kind of short. Could you please be a bit more specific about who said what out loud? I hope that will also make it obvious why it wasn't supposed to be said out loud, but right now I can only say you've lost and mystified me.

However I want to branch a bit to the history of the insane xenophobia. Seems easy enough to describe the history, though hard to clarify how the "applied psychologists" are exploiting it for political power and personal profits... (These is also some room for funny in here since most of the worst exploiters are immigrants. If not themselves, then within their immediate family. (Zuck's wife's parents were immigrants, and Zuck's family appears to be the same degree of immigrants as yours truly. Even the YOB's own mother and primary 'dynastic' grandfather. And then there are super-pathological cases like Musk and fiends.))

Putting on my official historian's hat I'm going to focus on the biggest, baddest example of the country that succeeded "best" because of immigrants. (More room for funny defining "best".) America existed just fine before the southern border was militarized in the '70s. There were millions of undocumented Mexicans who crossed the river into Texas. Most of them did it twice a year. They came to the States during work seasons and went home for extensive vacations. Both countries benefited and were happy with that arrangement. The militarization in the '70s was mostly the work of a general who was extremely annoyed about losing in Vietnam. He blamed the porous borders of Indochina, and the Vietnamese would sort of agree. (More room for funny when the reasons are compared.) The border with Canada was also porous without "destroying" either nation. (New room for funny with jokes about a new 51st and biggest state? Even bigglier than Texas and Alaska and solving the "intercontinental states" problem?) If America was ever great (rather than just trying hard) it was not because of closed borders... There was no border problem that needed fixing. (Okay, now we need some jokes about actual German spies? And the Japanese paper balloons?)

(Another topic area for jokes: "Truth, justice, and the American way." Did you know that famous Superman line was a WW II meme? Before memes even became a thing.)

Other nations regularly poach in the Georges Bank? That's pretty crazy.

You're really triggering Poe's Law here for me.

It doesn't need to change the total catch. You can lower the minimum size if you impose a maximum size. Same fraction of the total fish allowed to be caught. Large fish tend to be much better reproducers than small ones, so you may actually be able to allow an even larger fraction of the fish to be caught each year.

You better put the word "findings" in quotation marks. This "study" is a preprint, has not been peer reviewed, and it's being widely mocked for its bad methodology. But the media is just loving to run with it. Even the lead author is complaining about the media's "LLMs cause brain damage!" hot takes.

(BTW, that's the reason why "Saran Wrap" is no longer made of Saran. Saran is a far better barrier polymer than the polyethylene that Saran Wrap is made of today, but Saran is polyvinylidene chloride, aka chlorinated - and almost invariably ends up in the trash, where it will get burned. The decision to switch to inferior polyethylene wrap was so that it would burn cleaner)

People usually assume that all the plastic they see around food is "waste", when in reality it's usually carefully engineered to maximize shelf life, and thus minimize food waste. And the energy / resources needed to make that miniscule amount of plastic and the issues with its disposal are well worth offsetting wasted energy producing, processing, and transporting a larger fraction of food that just goes to waste.

Plastic around fresh fruit? That's maintaining it at an optimal humidity and/or reducing the risk of scratches that lead to spoilage. Metalized plastic wrap around your cookies in a box? The alumium is applied to that plastic to decrease water and oxygen transport by orders of magnitude, veritably eliminating the main ways in which food goes bad. On and on. And you know what the alternative is to maximize the shelf life of foods? Preservatives. You want more preservatives in your food? No? Then be happy with better-protective packaging.

And we all would love all of the plastic to be "biodegradable", but the problem is that waste doesn't come with a switch that says "Okay, now I'm done with you, fall apart". There's a steady process of biodegradable polymers becoming weaker and weaker, and letting orders of magnitude more oxygen and moisture through them. Basically, by the time they're at your supermarket, if it's at all easy to biodegrade, it's already doing a crappy job. Some products reduce (but not eliminate) these problems, but usually via requiring special conditions for quick decomposition, such as particularly high temperatures - but most landfills don't reach those conditions. And again, we're talking about generally grams of plastic, or even milligrams. This just isn't the big issue people make it out to be. Just burn it. Have good pollution controls on the incinerator, and just burn it. Just avoid chlorinated and fluorinated polymers that tend to produce more problematic combustion products.

Sorting plastic is useful even if most of it is going to be burned.

  * Some types of plastic are much easier to recycle than others
  * Some types of plastic can't be easily recycled, but are good for downcycling (such as use as filler materials)
  * Most types of plastic are fine to burn, but you don't want to burn chlorinated or fluorinated plastic (at least not with very strong pollution controls)

So sorting your waste is good. In our system, we have four types: "hard plastic" (which is probably manually or automated sorted for things that are readily recycleable and to remove PVC, etc); "plastic packaging" (probably burned); "plastic foam" (probably densified and not burned); and "large plastic film" (such as from greenhouses, row covers, construction plastic, etc; I'm not sure what they do with it).

Also:

The low price of wind and solar allow them to be overbuilt while still being affordable - and if you do that, with a mix of wind, solar, and battery storage, you can affordably build a grid that provides e.g. 90%, 95%, 98%, even over 99% of your electricity - but you never get to 100%. You still need some sort of peaking, which needs some sort of bulk storable energy medium. Well, one possibility for that is waste - it's storable and can be burned. Waste / biomass commonly provides a couple percentage of nations' total power needs - which, in a high-renewables grid, may be most or all of your peaking needs.