Augh

  • 0 Posts
  • 12 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 26th, 2024

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  • This isn’t a one-hour-summary topic, and you’re not going to find “unbiased” reporting on it. Not trying to be a dick, it’s just the facts. Anyone telling you they have the “unbiased truth” about it is lying or delusional.

    With that said, start with some Wikipedia browsing from the end of WW2, where the Allies started looking around for places around the world as Jewish refuges, and the struggles/ decisions made to plop Israel in the Middle East.

    From there, there’s a bunch of back-and forth action between the new state of Israel and the people who were already living there (Palestinians), which has a lot of video summaries on YouTube. You’ll hear “Nakba” (Catastrophe in Arabic) used a lot, if that’s any indication of how it went.

    All of that puts the Oct 7 attacks in more context, as well as the ongoing bombing in Gaza.

    Good luck in your search. If people are being rude with you, it’s because the tone of your post is basically “I actively tried not to look at this conflict that’s been going on for 4 months that’s killed 30,000 people, and now care because of a single guy (Aaron Bushnell) immolating himself.” I’m VERY glad that his message got to you, as I agree that it’s an important issue, but it also feels frustrating that it took this long (respectfully).





  • The thing about long-term predictions (at least ones that get publicity) is that usually the goal is to change them, so few have been “proven”. No one is printing stories about how an isolated set of rocks is going to be decayed by X% due to weather, because no one cares.

    Except birth rates aren’t physics that will progress if left alone, they’re dominated by cultural choices that are impacted by economics and governmental policy.

    Exactly. Those are the factors that are being considered when making these predictions. If economic factors and policies are making it harder to have kids, then birth rates drop, which is what we’re seeing now. What else is going to have as much of an effect?

    These predictions don’t exist to take bets on. They’re not scrying into the future. They’re just binoculars that point to where we’re going.


  • No, they just need to be kept in that context. We trusted science on chlorofluorocarbons impacting the ozone layer, and chose to fix it rather than let it keep going. Was the projection “wrong” because CFCs were regulated, or did we just interact with it in a practical way?

    The same applies here. There’s a population issue that (as you mentioned in another comment) without other factors, will come into effect. China can fix it, or let things play out and see if the “unknowns” can fix it for them.





  • Lots of tech companies saw huge growth during covid thanks to everyone having extra money to spend (see crypto and NFTs if you want clear examples that we just had too much laying around).

    Many of these companies then saw their revenue and userbase increase month-after-month and thought the growth was going to continue forever (or, more cynically, they knew it was going to crash but acted like it was going to continue). This led to a bunch of hires to “drive growth.”

    But obviously, pandemic spending habits have mostly stopped, and the money faucet is being turned off. Companies can’t afford all the workers they hired, so they’re “let go due to market downturns.”

    TL;DR Companies either thought they were going to have unrealistic growth and made dumb hiring decisions, or knew the growth was going to end and thus made cruel hiring decisions.