And that’s nothing. You know how they’re pushing for washing machines, dishwashers, etc. to be internet connected? Currently they’re forcing this for data mining purposes. But I have no doubt their real goal is to eventually make these devices like printers, with expensive consumables locked in by internet-connected DRM. They’ve already gotten people used to using dish and clothes detergent pods. How long until they’re putting everything in plastic cartridges, locking things down with DRM, and charging like printer companies do?

These people deserve to burned at the stake.

It’s easy to forget just how much money a billion dollars is, let alone hundreds of billions.

You could hire three hundred people at a very generous salary of $250k/year. 8 hour shifts, that gives you 100 people guarding you 24/7. That would $75 million/year. You could do that off the investment income from a single billion dollars. Pay them the salary more typical of a security guard, like $50k/year, and Musk could be surrounding 24/7 by one hundred thousand security guards, and it would cost him $15 billion/year. He has enough wealth to afford that if he really wanted to. The man could take a cue from ancient Rome and commission his own army if he wanted to.

We need to eliminate billionaires. No one should have this type of power.

Well, we’re going to have to figure out how to level off or shrink our population eventually. Might as well do it now while there are still some wild animal species that haven’t gone extinct.

Yeah, people forget that there are some real hard limits on how far population can fall. What people fail to realize is that our level of technology is actually a function of our population. Mass production and industrial society requires a certain minimum population level and population density. If things fell so far that there were only 100 million humans on Earth, that would have profound implications on the level of technology we able to deploy and maintain. Past certain points, you by necessity start regressing technologically. At a population of 100 million, we would probably end up with a technology level more like the early to mid 19th century. You just can’t maintain complex supply chains with so few people. Economies simplify, and you end up back in an agrarian state. At that point, most of the population is working on farms again. Suddenly children become an economic boon for a family farm, a source of labor as they were historically. Then the birth rate soars again. And of course at some point you can’t maintain factories that turn out millions of birth control pills.

I don’t think we will actually hit these kind of hard limits. I think cultural factors will cause the birth rate to recover long before we start seriously regressing technologically. But it shows that we’re not at any risk of extinction here. Even if cultural factors never cause the birth rate to recover, eventually technological regression will serve as a hard limit.

I can’t predict what exactly those numbers are where these limits kick in, but it’s pretty intuitive they exist. If your population density falls so far that you’re back at hunter-gatherer population levels, well you’re going to be living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Because all forms of poverty are not the same. It’s only confusing if you insist on measuring things in dollars instead of stability. If they own their own land, a subsistence farmer in rural India has a much more secure and stable life than a precarious retail worker in the US. Yes, the precarious retail worker might have more trinkets and consumer goods than the Indian farmer, but the Indian farmer owns their own livelihood.

Having a child is ultimately an act of selflessness and generosity. People have children when they are fairly confident that they will be able to ensure those children will enjoy a quality of life that they find acceptable. And “acceptable” is context dependent. If they own their own land, a subsistence farmer in rural India can have a couple kids and guarantee that their children will have a secure future. If nothing else, they can pass the farm onto their children. At the worst, the farmer’s children will have the same standard of living as the farmer. Most such farmers would hope their children would get an education and do even better than they did. But if nothing else they can always just take over the farm. The same isn’t true for a wage slave working for Walmart. The Walmart worker knows their existence is incredibly precarious. If rents spike again and wages don’t keep up, they will be living on the street. Their existence is precarious, and few people want to bring children into such a precarious life.

Stability is the key to birth rates. It has nothing to do with dollars earned. A US retail worker makes far more dollars in wages than the market value of the Indian subsistence farmer’s crops. But the US retail worker has to live in a much, much more expensive country. And the Indian subsistence farmer owns their own land, a plot that’s been in the family for generations. They don’t have to pay rent. They don’t have to worry about getting fired. The only thing they have to worry about is crop failures. But farmers have had to worry about those since the dawn of time.

The market. This is why I’m really not too concerned about falling birthrates. There’s a lot of bullshit jobs out there. Consider the typical office. It’s damning that despite all the increases in efficiencies of computer technology we’ve had over the last several decades, work hours haven’t changed at all. If anything, they’ve increased. And the number of people working in offices hasn’t declined. The efficiencies of digital technologies didn’t decrease work hours, the work simply expanded to fill the available space. Items that in generations past would have been resolved with a one page memo written on a typewriter have been replaced with 50 page reports full of charts and graphs. We have huge numbers of people preparing documents that no one ever reads. There is an absolutely absurd amount of fat and inefficiency in the modern workplace.

Or consider corporate vanity projects like RTO. Workers are on average more productive at home. But executives tend to be sociopathic narcissists who simply need people to constantly praise and validate them in person. They just don’t get the same narcissistic supply from remote work, so they demand thousands of people waste colossal amounts of resources to come into an inefficient office just to appeal to their depraved egos. Oh, and for many executives, the ability to coerce sex from their employees is a primary job benefit, and that goes away with remote work.

Oh, and don’t forget credential inflation. We demand people have bachelors and masters degrees for positions that 50 years ago would have been handled by someone with just a high school diploma. I’m all for education for those who want it, but the fact that you need a bachelors for anything other than food service and retail is a massive drain on our society’s productivity.

As birth rates decline and the population ages, the market value for the labor of the workers that remain will soar. They will be able to demand higher wages. Think the equivalent of a $100k salary for someone with a high school diploma. This will force companies to either adapt or die. Those that insist on inefficient workflows, require excessive credentials, or demand employees come into the office for the sake of executive egos will simply go bankrupt. They will be replaced by companies that are run more rationally.

Anyone who has ever worked in an office can tell you just how stupidly inefficient corporate America is. And Japan’s business culture is even worse.

I don’t think we’re going to have any problem getting by with a declining population. We can maintain our standard of living quite well just by squeezing the fat and inefficiencies out of our existing systems. There won’t be some grand government bureau deciding what jobs are “made up.” Companies that insist on hiring people for bullshit jobs will simply be driven into insolvency. And the world will be better for it. Working a pointless bullshit job is not good for anyone’s mental health. People need a sense of purpose in their lives.

And while apoplectic doomsayers might say, “where does this end, won’t the population eventually collapse to zero?” This isn’t a realistic scenario. Cultures are not a monolith. Different groups have different birth rates. Over time, those groups and cultural practices that encourage higher birthrates will be selected for through natural selection.

For example, in many countries, the general misogyny of the population is a major reason young women don’t want to get married and have children. They don’t want to lose their careers and end up the stay at home wife to a salary man who arrives home drunk every night at midnight. They want a more equitable sharing of parental responsibilities. Some men are better at providing this equitable arrangement to their partners than others. Those that are will be more successful at finding wives. And those couples will pass their egalitarian values onto their children. Misogyny will be evolutionarily maladaptive and will be removed from the cultural gene pool. Those that insist on their wives doing all the child rearing will not find partners and will not be able to pass on their outdated beliefs to the next generation. In time, the birth rates will recover.

Or, alternatively, countries will move more back towards multi-generational households instead of the atomistic couple+kids that has become the norm today. Multi-generational housing was the historical norm, and it may be again in the future. It could be selected for through similar cultural evolution. Regardless, below replacement birth rates will not be maintained indefinitely. Eventually things will stabilize. If nothing else, eventually your population gets so disperse that you can’t mass produce effective birth control anymore, and well things take care of themselves at that point.

TL:DR: how I learned to stop worrying and love the declining birth rate.

Land grabs are more common now than in the 19th century? That’s just completely false. That was the age of Manifest Destiny and overt colonization by European powers. Conflicts like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are so notable because they are so rare in the modern era. Today, global powers are more about economic influence, trading relationships, and economic spheres of influence. Turns out it’s a lot cheaper and more efficient to just trade with people than to pay for the huge expense of maintaining an old-fashioned colonial empire. Look at China. They’re expanding their influence through their Belt and Road Initiative, not through outright conquest and imperial subjugation. Or look at the US trade and influence machines it built after WW2 like the WTO, the World Bank, etc. It is very very rare for the great powers to outright seize land anymore. The US doesn’t need to conquer Congo and become responsible for its people in order to gain access to its resources. It can just cut a check for them.

And no, it really isn’t the same government. The federal government in 2025 has an entirely different relationship with the US population than it did in 1867. Hell, the entire way the US conducts military and diplomatic policy changed after WW2 and the dawn of the atomic era. The US hasn’t formally declared war on anyone since WW2, when previously it was the norm for every conflict. Programs like Social Security or policies like anti-drug laws would have been unfathomable to a US citizen in 1867.

And if you want to say it’s the same people, it really isn’t. We’re not the same people we were then, culturally or genetically. Even just ethnically, we’ve had so many waves of immigrants that our ethnic admixtures have completely changed. That’s to say nothing of how much our norms and culture have fundamentally shifted. Try explaining gender nonbinary people to someone from 1867.

Look, I get it. It’s tempting to adopt the old world-weary saying that nothing is new under the Sun, but I don’t see how one can possibly look at the monumental changes in global technology, history, and culture over the last century and a half and conclude that things are basically the same. If nothing else, the introduction of nuclear weapons fundamentally changed the way the great powers manage their affairs.

Yes, you can be incredibly pedantic and say that, “well, human nature is the same, so fundamentally nothing has changed.” But at that point you might as well be arguing that the US and ancient Babylon are the same country.

It’s not the same government though. The Alaska purchase was in 1867. The US has an entirely different kind of government than it did back then. And we’re in an entirely different historical era. You can’t just blindly assume what worked in 1867 is going to work or be remotely applicable in 2025.

Yeah Greenland is actually in a tough spot. It has a lot of economic potential, but it can’t unlock it without completely upending its own society. There are only 56,000 Greenlanders. If they wanted to expand mining enough to be economically self sufficient, they would need to bring in so many people that the existing population would become a minority. They would have to become an Arctic Dubai.

This is also why they don’t want to be annexed by the US. (Even if the US still had sane leadership.) Once you’re part of the US, any American that wishes can move there. Any American company can set up shop there. The existing society would be completely overrun.

Why so stingy? The Greenland population is about 56,000. You could offer every Greenlander a million dollars, and it would only come to $56 billion, still a bargain in the grand scheme of things. If you actually want to buy someone’s country out from under them, that’s the kind of money you need to be talking about.

I expect them to use nuclear weapons in a strike against Iran’s nuclear program. Iran’s enrichment facilities are buried so deep in the hearts of mountains that it’s probably the only way they could actually take it out. And they’ll probably drop a few on Iranian military installations that happen to be right next to or within major cities as well. 80 years of respecting the nuclear taboo, shattered because of one fool’s pride. See nuclear bunker buster.

Honestly, at this point I trust the Ayatollah with nukes a lot more than I do the US president.

Sorry. Just some shitpost trans humor. One part of me is Thai! Well, made in Thailand at least.

Just don’t do it! If you’re not a Thai person then what business do you have with the monarchy anyway

What if you’re part Thai, or specifically, one part of you is Thai? 😆

And why would you assume there aren’t some pro-Zionist Democrats that voted for Kamala BECAUSE of her stance on Gaza? Every decision a campaign makes both gains and loses them votes.

I think the issue, in terms of its effects on the election, is largely a trivial matter that’s been blown way out of proportion, largely by AIPAC itself. I just don’t think there’s a very large population that cares about Palestinian issues that wouldn’t also vote vote for the optimal outcome for Gaza. Are there some? Sure. But I’m incredibly suspicious of anyone pushing the narrative that this had a substantial effect on the election. We’re talking about people educated enough on world affairs to care passionately about the plight of a small population on the other side of the planet, but also ignorant enough to go and vote for Donald Trump? How many people do you think actually meet both of those qualifications? It’s a tiny rounding error.

It seems like a disinformation campaign by AIPAC intended to sour the public on the rights of Gazans. The people who care about Gaza are primarily on the left side of the political spectrum. What better way to alienate the American left to the plight of the Gazans than to convince people on the left that the Gaza issue cost Kamala the election? The whole thing absolutely wreaks of an Israeli propaganda campaign.

If it’s not an AIPAC campaign, it’s largely just a self-serving story on the part of white voters. Trump won because white people voted overwhelmingly in favor of him. Even the concentration of Muslims in Michigan is completely irrelevant, as Trump would have won without winning Michigan. If it’s not an Israeli intelligence operation, blaming Kamala’s loss on Palestinians is ultimately just subtly veiled racism.

The numbers bear this out. Muslim voters voted for Kamala 46% to 43%. White voters voted for Trump 56% to 40%. Muslims voted for Harris at far higher rates than white people did.

Blaming Arabs and Muslims for Harris’s loss is just a way of scapegoating a racial and religious minority group. Trump won because white people overwhelmingly voted for him. Everything else is a rounding error. It’s just plain old racism, nothing more.

Honestly, at this point I’m convinced that it’s AIPAC that is still spreading the meme that disillusioned Palestinians and their supporters cost Kamala the election. The really pro Palestine leftists are the type to either never participate in electoral politics anyway, or were strategic enough to vote for Kamala. Trump won because white middle America voted for him, not due to a handful of student protesters. I think AIPAC is still pushing the “Palestine protesters lost Kamala the race” as a means of making the Palestinian cause more unpopular. And frankly, it’s working. Any story on Gaza will have people gleefully celebrating it

We’re talking about citizens here, Chungus. Citizenship imparts a set of rights and responsibilities. It’s not an easy thing to get. And we’re not supposed to have different tiers of citizenship, where some citizens are more equal than others. Legally speaking, a naturalized citizen is supposed to be indistinguishable from a native born one.

But with actions like this, you are saying that isn’t true. You can immigrate to a country, leave your whole family and life behind, and dedicate yourself fully and passionately to your new home. But it doesn’t matter. You’ll always be a second-class citizen. You will be treated differently by the legal system than a native born citizen. A native citizen won’t be punished with exile for an act of petty vandalism, but you will be.

This shows that Germany has truly abandoned, at a fundamental level, the idea of equal justice under the law. It is once again going down the path of Fascism, where citizens receive different rights based on their ethnicity, religion, and immigration history. Once you start having different tiers of citizenship, with different levels of protection, things get dark very quickly.

And while the injustice starts with immigrants, once you’ve established the precedent that the protections of citizenship can be arbitrarily stripped from people based on political convenience and pressure? It’s a short ride to the gas chambers. This is literally the legal foundation of the Holocaust.

You learned nothing from history, and you are doomed to repeat it.

So arrest them and charge them with a crime?

He probably did something similar in his past. Maybe raped a drunk girl at a party or similar while in undergrad. Never got caught for it, and never went on to do it again. So he figured if he can learn his lesson and not repeat the crime, why not this kid? Justice to the victims isn’t even considered.