I'm convinced that all of these people talking about AI "safety" and hyping the possibility of AGI and "the Singularity" are just doing gorilla marketing for the AI companies. The subtext is: Wow, this new tech is incredibly powerful! They've been talking about how "dangerous" these chatbots are since before the first public Chat GPT release. And then you actually use them...

Maybe "Mythos" is different, but I am highly skeptical.

With the exception of a few performers like Taylor Swift, a whole family is rarely going to see a major concert. The single people or couples who make up most concertgoers don't have quite the same concerns. Additionally, most artists are not megastars like Taylor Swift where some people are willing to pay anything to attend a specific concert. A Dutch auction for a relative unknown could just result in empty seats or cancellations as few tickets are sold until the last minute.

That may be true in theory, but many artists have goals beyond maximizing ticket revenue for a specific concert. Artists (especially less famous ones) may be more interested in building a fan base than squeezing every cent from their limited (to date) fan base. Other more established artists may just not care as much about the money and just want the fans to be able to have a good time. Pearl Jam famously tried to do a Ticketmaster-free tour with cheap seats and ran into all sorts of obstacles.

With the Dutch auction, people would try to avoid ever buying a ticket until the last minute, which would mean the venues and artists could not count on concert revenue.

It's still muggy and 90+ degrees in early October in coastal Texas. Things don't usually get comfortable until November. With the influence of the ocean, there is a big seasonal delay past the solstice. It usually stays nice from November until April or even early May.

Why are you worried about the quality of life of people who never existed? I also fail to see the problem with gradual extinction as long as those who are living are happy. If extinction were to happen, it would be centuries (probably millennia) from now. Eventually, humanity will go extinct one way or another- every species does. Simply failing to reproduce sure beats a giant meteor, nuclear holocaust, or a plague.

I believe bears are encroaching on lightly-inhabited places in Japan, but not that they are eating the elderly in any significant numbers. If anything, population growth would increase the incidents of bears killing humans as they encroach on bear territory. Nobody is getting eaten by bears in Tokyo or Kyoto unless maybe they jump the enclosure at the zoo.

There's a lot of hand-wringing about fertility because it implies a lot of changes coming in the future. But overall it is a good thing. Lower birthrates presage less pressure on natural resources, fewer conflicts, and better lives for each individual. The biggest problems will revolve around dealing with the aging population. Traditional social pension schemes will struggle without a large base of young workers. Care will be harder to find. But countries like Japan have been dealing with this for a decade now and have managed to stay desirable places.

It's mostly the megalomaniacal billionaires and religious fanatics that are so concerned about the drop in fertility. This is because they are worried it may impact their individual power. Billionaires need wage slaves and religious leaders need followers (much easier to raise children into a religion than convert adults). But for the rest of us, it means less need to slice the pie.

I don't think we are anywhere close to the maximum carry capacity of the land. China and India have 3x the population packed into less land (including less airable land). We are collectively far wealthier, so it's not that we can't afford it when India can.

Places like Hungary have done it, and it hasn't done much to boost fertility. Even if money is no object, most people like the freedom of not having a house full of kids when given the choice.

I've never owned a laptop that needed a display panel, keyboard, or motherboard replaced.

I don't think I've attempted to repair a laptop in 20 years. Few laptops these days are very serviceable. They are also sufficiently reliable that it's pretty rare for anything to break unless they are physically dropped.

It's every year.

Many of these road usage fees assessed on EVs greatly exceed the equivalent costs gas buyers pay. For example, Texas drivers pay $400 additional fee to register a new EV over what they would pay for a gas car. The gas tax is 20c/gallon. That would require buying 2,000 gallons of gas per year to equalize. That's like driving 60,000 miles in an average sedan getting 30mpg or 30,000 miles in a truck getting 15mpg. That's is absolutely punitive.

These numbers are for two different things. "Upper income" is just a measure of income. "Upper class" includes other factors that may influence a person's place in society. Someone making $170k (at least in 2022 dollars) is upper income in the context of Pew, but they would not necessarily have the indicators of being "upper class" (i.e. being in upper management or other influential position, significant property ownership, being close to political power) in a high cost of living area like Manhattan where that income might represent a blue collar couple. Class is impossible to measure objectively.

Manhattan (and NYC more broadly) is also a heavily distorted housing market due to subsidies and the fact that it was not a very expensive market until relatively recently (things started going up in the 1990s). There are a lot of middle class people living in Manhattan but they usually in rent controlled or public housing and don't pay market rates. There are also people who bought Condos/Co-ops 40+ years ago (or their parents did) who could never buy anything like the places they are living if they had to pay today's market prices.

It's doable above 120th. You can get a decent 2bedroom apartment for ~$3k/month north of 120th. That's doable on $130k.