ciphol

The areas where the counter-reformation (i.e. theocracy) was strongest had the most secular populations. Do you call that religion or not-religion?

Why would the climate/weather changes stop right at the French border?

Modernization drew a lot of people away from traditional religion. But Hasidim and the Amish etc are "post modern". They have developed various cultural features to "immunize" themselves against the temptations of modernity. There is no reason for this to start failing at any particular point, except perhaps when they become too much of an imposition on the rest of society, which pushes back on them.

how can he pin down the demographic decline as caused by the Catholic Church’s decline ?

He gives several data points for secularization, such as the language people chose to use in their wills. Since there is a strong general correlation between low fertility and low religion, it seems likely that these are causally linked in 18th century France, rather than coincidentally happening at the same time.

It's a harder question why France in particular secularized at this time. The argument he very tentatively proposes is that freedom from religious coercion leads people to tend to become more religious (as can be seen by comparing the US to Europe over the last few centuries) and that France, due to its strong counter-reformation, had an unusually high level of religious coercion.

Why wouldn’t it the other way round, with the core causes of the French decline also triggering less religiousness ?

What do you mean by "French decline"? Its loss of status as a superpower starting in 1815? That postdates the decline in religiousness.

Presumably a pharaoh who ruled for decades would indeed have lots of kids, if he wanted to and (as most are) was physically able.

The capacity of airships is miniscule compared to transatlantic shipping. The article suggests a 450m long airship carrying approximately 800 tons. For contrast, a single container ship is about the same size as that airship, but can carry 230,000 tons. Why would you replace your current system with a new system having 300 times less capacity? A brief estimate suggests that the container ship only uses 100 times as much fuel, so it's roughly 3 times as efficient as airships to boot.

There aren't many such children, and it's complicated to get them in an ethical way.

USSR was poor, we're talking about rich countries.

That's exactly what I said - "if something other than money is contributed".

But not every man (or woman) does these things, and likely their spouse will be doing them as well. If I do half the child care and chores, while my wife does half the child care and chores AND earns all the money, how much is she going to like the arrangement?

Imagine you get home, plug your car in, the car runs your home heating for the remainder of the evening for free, then you go to sleep and the car recharges for cheap. Sounds like an attractive proposal?

Charging at work seems like the thing to do. Not only is there excess solar energy at that time, but workplaces are more concentrated than homes so the installation costs for chargers should be less.

If you're no longer going to be contributing income, what will you contribute instead to the family? Nobody respects or appreciates a freeloader as a partner. But if something other than money is contributed, it's more likely to work.

You can't become a sovereign entity without territory on which you can enforce your norms. Amazon doesn't and (for the foreseeable future) won't have sovereign territory.

Actually, the biggest roadblock is ChatGPT's hallucinations which mean that any answer it gives to a complex question is highly likely to be completely wrong.

Haha... Seriously? This is the narrative that was pushed indeed. Now it turns out that many people ravaged their health with these untested mRNA treatments. Search for myocarditis (even my GP now knows about this).

Conspiracy theories much? Myocarditis is extremely rare after mRNA vaccine. Since it's much more common after covid infection, and mRNA vaccines have a significant (though not perfect) preventative effect against infection, these vaccines have significantly decreased the incidence of myocarditis, not increased it. And mRNA vaccines weren't "untested" in 2020 - they'd been under development for nearly 50 years at that point, and the covid ones had been through a series of clinical trials (aka "tests") before becoming available to the public.

ChatGPT isn't even close to being able to consistently act like a single human being with interests, plenty of long term memory, and a life outside a chat room.

Wait until GPT4 comes out next year...

Trains have major weather issues much less frequently than planes.

NYT is not the government. It's a private business that looks at profit first, politics second, and impartial justice last if at all. The financial lure of a panel with SBF post-scandal must have been too much to resist. It's not even clear the panel (did it happen in the end? I'm not sure) would do SBF any good, given his tendency to self-incriminate. On the other hand I'm sure it was incredible for NYT ratings.

We haven't seen any meaningful increase in real earnings in the last 50 years

Who's "we"? The world as a whole has experienced rapidly growing real earnings throughout the last 50 years. Real earnings worldwide have doubled since 2001 alone! [1] Of course, most of the growth has happened in developing countries (where, honestly, it's most needed) rather than in rich countries where you and I live. But even in rich countries real earnings are rising, just more slowly. [2]

In America, go to any city and you'll see a massive number of homeless people

Only in the rich cities, not in poor rural areas. And that's because homelessness is a result almost solely of high housing prices due to political building restrictions, not low incomes (or mental illness or drug use). [3] Increasing incomes won't actually decrease homelessness significantly - higher income just means housing prices will have to rise higher before poor-er people are forced out. The same number of people will be forced out either way, because a fixed number of housing units can accommodate a roughly fixed number of people, meaning that everyone additional person has to leave.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=c... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=c... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/homeles...

That's true in mathematics, but I find for any other subject it's a great reference for anyone intelligent enough to understand the subject.

(One might remark that I'm just not intelligent enough to understand advanced mathematics, and they might be right...)

Where are people going to keep that second device? In their wallet? The wallet is just as likely to be stolen as the phone.

I've been using a shiny metal dongle to lock my door for my whole life. Why would carrying a different shaped dongle be a problem?

I had a SSD fail not long ago. It was used regularly, but one day I noticed that reading a large file failed. I went into panic mode and stopped using it and attempted to copy everything to a new drive, but copying many of the large files failed. These large files consisted of things like music which had not been edited for years. This sounds like neither of your scenarios - not thermal bit flipping, and not overwriting. How common are failures of this sort?

Colloquially, "dark age" means an age when the people are unenlightened, backwards, etc

None of that is unreadable. You can always download a browser from a few years back and open the page with that. So while there may be some inconvenience with old information, there is no loss of content.

Imagine, someone whose parents are both Stanford professors might have a family connection to other highly successful professionals.

This is typical NYT reporting on tech.

"I literally heard it from NYT reporters at the time. There was a top-down decision that tech could not be covered positively, even when there was a true, newsworthy and positive story. I'd never heard anything like it." [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192

5km per year is higher than any European or North/South American city (except maybe Moscow), I believe.

It's an interesting question how Europe would look if all the white Americans and Australians and so on had stayed in Europe. But the answer is not obvious.

India's going on a massive metro rail spree and also massively improving intercity rail. Things are significantly improving, though there will always be traffic in a city the size of Delhi or Mumbai.