Curious if there is a way to dip your toe into this kind of thing without dedicating years of learning. Maybe a home lab? I've always been interested in this because it seems hard/interesting, and enjoyed learning about it in school. Wondering how much time you'd have to invest to see if you like it. I assume there is a healthy amount of "this is hard/not fun" along the way before you find out.
This matches my experience. The company I’m at spent money on decent developers to get a project stood up and running, but will only hire cheap remote developers for the crud enhancement work that’s needed now. It makes sense until something important breaks or some thing new needs to be stood up. I’m not quite sure what to make of it.
I sort of see a parallel in the job market although it might be a stretch. Most of the work is easy to outsource/go cheap on, but a small core is incredibly important to get right. It’s not obvious when a job posting is looking for one or the other.
Every story about China should include a note that the government decides how many children its citizens are allowed to have. We've grown numb to how terrible this is.
This doesn't seem intrinsically terrible to me, particularly if it's done through incentives and doesn't involve say, murder or sterilisation.
If we accept that any biome will eventually have a finite carrying capacity while the possibility of human reproduction is exponential it seems inevitable that there must be some limits to reproduction. Regulation is crude but might be less bad than "direct environmental feedback" such as die-offs or drastically decreasing quality of life.
Of course it's a co-ordination problem, which is very difficult.
I can imagine many cultural and technological approaches to population control, some of which already exist, and might not be terrible.
It seems to me that in particular any engineered habitats with well-defined carrying capacities, e.g. mars, would have to deal with this quite early on.
It turns out that as countries develop their birth rates naturally decline and eventually turn negative without requiring the government to set the number of children you can have. Indeed Japan and others are doing almost everything possible to encourage people to have more children and cannot get their populations to return to growth.
I agree that market forces and cultural trends seem to be curbing population growth in wealthy countries.
I'm just not sure it's a sign of cultural maturity; it feels like we've quietly skirted a difficult conversation through low wage growth and expensive housing, health care and education (more humans are discouraged because of bottlenecks in key supports).
In theory if there were "smooth" environmental feedback the population would nicely sigmoid without too much overshoot, maybe that's what is actually happening. I wish I knew.
When there are too many deer and not enough predators in an ecosystem, the deer consume all the available food and many die from starvation, self regulating the population to a sustainable level. I see parallels to this in human economic systems.
But a country with a rapidly growing population will struggle to grow economically, e.g. due to the increasing strain on natural resources. The GDP per capita growth of China between 1960 and 2018 is almost 4000%, while some other third world countries even had negative growth[0].
I am not saying that I agree with China's policies or their implementation, but it seems that they worked.
> This doesn't seem intrinsically terrible to me, particularly if it's done through incentives and doesn't involve say, murder or sterilisation.
I do agree with the finite carrying capacity aspect you mentioned but if you think China's child policies weren't awful then you should read up on what it really means to live your life as heihaizi.
What about the rights or consent of the human that's life matters most here, the child? When did anyone thought if the child wanted to be born with those parents who might be poor, unhealthy, genetic diseases that come to child, who is forced in all these without any way out? Should we only care about the parents?
The most precious resource by far is human ingenuity. Home Sapients are not like other organisms. Every additional person increases the rate of innovation across the entire species. Because of cultural transmission there are increasing returns to scale that don't exist in other species.
For that reason, we are exempt from the normal laws of Malthusian ecology and carrying capacity. More people translates into higher, not lower, living standards. That's why over the past 200 years the population has increased seven fold, while the percent living in poverty has fallen to unprecedented lows. The greatest risk by far is not having enough people. Population control robs us of future Einsteins, Borlaugs, and Turings.
“Every additional person increases the rate of innovation across the entire species.”
This is a wild claim. Not everyone is a net positive contributor to the species. The world’s resource are already consumed beyond their replenishment rates, and hundreds of millions of people suffer from abject poverty and constant food insecurity. Total fertility rate decline curves are objectively positive for humans as a species and resource contention.
I’m a pretty staunch critic of China, but population control seems like a pretty good thing. I suppose ideally it would be promoted but ultimately voluntary, but I don’t think their single child policy was the worst thing they’ve done by far.
How about forced sterilization, forced abortions, and the interplay between the one child policy and culture that led to massive numbers of sex-targeted abortions and infanticide? Calling it "population control" euphemizes away the horrible human cost of the enforcement methods and the collateral damage.
I'd agree it's not the worst thing they've done so far, but given that they're actively committing genocide that's a pretty high bar.
Agreed. The comment I was responding to took issue with China dictating a number of children—I don’t have a problem with that. The specific enforcement (sterilization, abortions, etc) are grotesque. Conceivably you can enforce population control without resorting to those measures.
That only encourages those who have both the need and the abilityto prioritize budgeting/saving to think ttwice about having kids. In other words, that really only targets the middle class.
1. That’s still a net reduction in births, even if the reduction isn’t spread evenly among socioeconomic classes
2. You can means-adjust the fines to dissuade the rich. You can even redistribute revenue from these fines to the poor if your concern is inequality. I’m particularly curious about paying the poor not to have children since fining the poor seems likely to be unproductive.
China also isn’t the first country to screw themselves with misguided family planning policies. Singapore and South Korea have gone through the same thing also.
Would you be willing to pay for their excess population then? As a US citizen? Because the excess population puts more pressure on China's infrastructure and you're pushing for no birth control.
Not sure this article was more than a journal entry for the guy who wrote it, but I will chime in.
Given any anecdote about the economy going down and stock market going up, it is worth noting what is going on with the money supply. There is a huge amount of liquidity being pushed into the USD supply by the fed and treasury. It needs to go somewhere. The (government's) hope is that it will go into hiring/spending and the real economy. Even if that is what happens to the majority of the new money supply (debatable) a large amount will go into financial assets for people who want to preserve their wealth. The expected result (IMO) would be stocks to go up in USD purely because of demand for them. This can alse been seen as inflation or maybe financial asset inflation. The fundamentals of the economy are not good, but the new money has to go somewhere. After paying for living expenses etc, there aren't many places to put it besides the stock market.
A final thought is that if consumer price inflation remains low and financial assets catch all the inflation, the "rich" or invested benefit the most. However, its arguable that financial asset inflation without CPI is a better result for most people vs high CPI and a stock market crash. I would be interested to know if this a framework used by the Fed or just me as a random guy on the internet.
This isn't a full explanation, but might be worth thinking about. CS bachelor's education track is unique enough it is hard to switch into. If you are electrical/mechanical/aerospace engineering you're taking a lot of the same classes until your 3 year or so. You can change your mind and switch majors within the hard engineering fields. It is similar if you want to switch from biology to chemistry etc. At least in my experience a CS degree starts and ends there. If you want to switch into CS you almost have to start your courses over unless you were computer engineering. So out of the average % of students switching majors, some switch out of CS, but very few switch into it.
Electrical is fairly different from mechanical. Mechanical engineers do take some electrical engineering (and there are analogs between the two fields in areas like system dynamics although the examples are different) but there's quite a bit of fairly early-on coursework about fluids, material behavior, mechanical design, etc. Mechanical is closely related to aero and ocean but not so much electrical. (At least beyond basic core physics, calculus, etc.)
I purchased a motorcycle air filter at a price that was too good to be true. It arrive after almost 2 weeks (basically from China) damaged. I returned it waited another two weeks and it arrived damaged again. Left a bad review and got an email response asking about my experience. Can't really fault amazon too much. The price told me there had to be a catch. At the same time, I'm annoyed that was allowed to happen at all on the platform. Now There is always a thought in my mind to have a backup plan when I purchase something I really need on Amazon.
Very cool. This kind of work makes python and ML better for everyone. I'm not sure I have a use case at the moment, but I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this one.
I think some of the nuance here is that essential vs non-essential assumes a short time horizon. In the keyboard example, an "essential" service can probably operate with a broken keyboard for some amount of time before it is a major problem.(I hope) lawmakers are not trying to demand who can and can't stay open long term.
Can you expand on that a little bit. I started that book based on a very strong recommendation, but found the first 20-30 pages to be defining "art" as a sort of amorphous everything that felt like it wasn't going towards a point. I decided not to finish the book, but have wondered if it would have been worth it.
Stretch ~15 minutes a day. You don't need a special routine or a bunch of research. Stretch whatever is sore/stiff. If you can't think of anything start by touching your toes. Think of it as general maintenance on your joints. The effort compounds and starts to feel really good after a few months.
Overall good advice! But trying to touch your toes, while not inherently a bad thing to do, is one of the last things a typical person should be doing in terms of hips, shoulders, etc.* Similar kind of thing going on with planks, reverse planks are going to help a lot more for most people.
The stretches you get here are really mobility and warmup exercises. "Stretching" a muscle or tendon has pretty much no health benefits. If it feels better, it's because the muscle is weak and straining most of the time. The fix is not stretching but strengthening.
