True. The decline has been in effect for a while, but as for recent chages losing reproductive freedom can't be helping, nor AI and legal weed as two new ways for people to opiate themselves.
I don't think any meaningful segment of the population is using AI to "opiate" themselves. AI is a useful tool but I haven't heard of it having parasocial effects on any meaningful scale.
"Meaningful" is quite the qualifier. It's possible http://reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI is entirely one person's work of fiction but also maybe not. From there you have to guess at how many people are doing that and just not telling anybody or posting about it online. So there's no data that proves it one way or the other, and all we've got to go on is anecdotes.
Eh, having lived in many other countries - lack of reproductive freedom definitely doesn’t cut back on sex. Same with public shaming, or other coercive control.
It’s not like there are 1.5 billion Indians because no one has sex there.
I don't think the overturning of Roe vs Wade was the key driver in trends which started long before that decision, but there's a big difference between a society where girls marry who they're expected to marry and have sex with him when he expects it and a society where girls get to choose whether to hookup or not and if and when to marry but don't get to choose how they deal with the results...
Both are true in large part there, at least in the cities.
Except Indian politics are at least 10x as crazy as current US politics on the ground, and probably 10x as potentially (violently) serious if someone ‘steps out of line’, so people are better at hiding what is going on.
Spent enough months in India to be aware that hookups happen, including ones parents would be very disapproving of and ones which were illegal at the time. Pretty much everything happens in India to some degree, but we're talking about the effect at the margin here, and I don't think India has a 1.5bn population because hookups are more of a thing there than the West.
Fair point - the population numbers are largely due to the (most common) marital structure, and societal expectations around having kids.
The amount of sex though definitely includes hookups and a lot of sex outside of the acknowledged marital structure. A large number of those kids may well be illegitimate, I suspect no one wants to look too hard.
I also suspect what is happening in the US is a combination of defacto ‘strikes’ from both sides of the equation, combined with general confusion as to what to do or why. Essentially a ‘why would I want to engage with this mess? What’s even in it for me?’.
I suspect that for all the attention certain politics and niche subcultures promoting disengagement get, it mostly comes down to spending less time in mingly social environments with the opposite sex, something young unmarried Indian men frequently expressed disappointment with and is also increasingly the case in the West for a different balance of reasons. The average reason may be different, but of course the US has its small towns full of conservative parents and India has its internet addicts and workaholics.
(Not sure if there are directly comparable surveys, but I wouldn't be surprised to discover that unmarried Americans were rather more sexually active than unmarried Indians, even with the downward trend)
I think custom ring tones were on their way out before the first iPhone was released. Personally, hearing a portion of a song you love daily is the quickest way to ruin the song. Ring tones were a fad IMO. A piece of bling that wasn’t worth the cost.
> Personally, hearing a portion of a song you love daily is the quickest way to ruin the song.
I sort of agree with you. A few years ago, I joined a new team at work that had a really bad on-call rotation (lots of tech debt, bad TSGs, etc.). I got paged in the middle of the night many times, and I was always stressed about how the hell to resolve the issues. So I developed a bad stress reaction to my ringtone.
After I left that team, I changed my ringtone to the theme from Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. It always makes me smile now when I get a phone call.
Ringtones didn't cost anything to anyone with 5 minutes which is all the time it took to take an MP3 and copy it to your phone. Songs getting tiresome isn't a problem when you can change it every week, but there's also no reason to limit yourself to songs either. Any sound or bit of audio can be saved as or converted to an MP3 and made into a ringtone. Personally, I'm fond sounds or BGM from video games and sound effects from old cartoons.
If you work the lowest paid job at Amazon 40+ hours per week, you literally cannot qualify for government benefits unless you have like 3+ kids and you're a single parent.
Holy cow. How are people downplaying something so revolutionary. Without those other tests SpaceX wouldn’t have done what it did today and they show progress each step. They are doing what nasa couldn’t (send stuff to space orders of magnitude cheaper) because they aren’t afraid to blow stuff up.
The boosters parachuted to the ocean and were reused. Only the external fuel tank was not reusable. However, you're correct that the Shuttle failed utterly to realize the point of reusability, that being low cost and quick turnaround.
Nobody has done anything revolutionary and nobody has gotten to space an order of magnitude cheaper. The best estimates of SpaceX's cost advantage per kilo put it at 30-50% better than a Soyuz.
The Starship program so far has soaked up as much money as SLS, and hasn't even left orbit.
Those all sound like incremental technology advances to me that have yet to deliver any real advances in capabilities. Which is nice - don't get me wrong - but not exactly worth rolling out the aircraft carrier for.
Someone else in this thread pointed out that Starship could get the ISS built in just 3 launches! It originally took dozens.
Quantity has a quality all of its own.
You should be familiar with this from IT: there’s nothing fundamentally different about the first computer that I’ve ever used to the one I have right now, other than the factor of a million difference in performance!
Starship today can't launch anything. Saying that it can launch the ISS in 3 launches is what Elon Musk says it can do. I don't trust Elon Musk's word for things until I see what someone does with those words. Generally, he is off by a factor of 10-100 on his promises.
Why not? With the capability demonstrated today, they can just as easily tweak the ascent profile to end up in a stable orbit outside the atmosphere. Their trajectory was suborbital on this flight on purpose.
> The Starship program so far has soaked up as much money as SLS, and hasn't even left orbit
There's a bit of nuance to what you are claiming here.
SLS cost $11B to develop, which is estimated to be in the neighborhood of what Starship will cost when development is complete. We don't know how much has been spent so far.
A huge difference is that producing and launching an SLS rocket costs over $2B, while SpaceX is estimating $10M for Starship. Now, I don't trust that $10M number, that's what they aspire for it to cost. To do it they need to be able to reuse the stages dozens of times. It could take a long time to achieve that or they might not make it at all. However, $2B+ per launch is a whole 'nother level of expense.
I bought one of the wwe wrestling games for my kid on my xbox account. Few years later there was a new version he wanted. After playing it he wanted to play the old version. The studio had removed it from the Microsoft store because they wanted to force people to new version. Even though I owned it I couldn’t install from Microsoft store. I contacted support and was told I had to copy it from the xbox it was installed on. I never bought anymore games from that studio. That was years ago and now there are more and more examples of not owning what you paid for.
This is really common with any games that need to license a ton of things in order to exist. The contract for using a wrestler's wrestler's likeness usually has a time limit. As well as the songs they use for their intro/outro.
Racing games have this issue too if they use real car brands. You can't buy the previous Forza games or some old Codemasters racing games anymore because of expired licensing.
At least on Steam they're still available for download if you previously purchased them. No clue what the experience is in console or other PC stores.
From a user's perspective that is incredibly hostile. They push digital goods as more convenient than physical media but don't make it clear that you lose the right to download it after a certain time. That functionality is sold as a benefit but the limited time isn't made clear.
What does “positive” mean in this context? What’s relevant is that Google has a tremendous financial incentive to prove fiber can be built cheaply, because it has a much more profitable product built on top of broadband. And they couldn’t do it.
I didn’t see a filter on the exhaust fan. He is so thorough I’m sure he thought of it but I think he needs a filter to keep the fan running long term unless he is filtering the air into the room and that is good enough?
According to the EPA: "Hot water dissolves lead more quickly than cold water and is therefore more likely to contain greater amounts of lead. Never use water from the hot water tap for drinking, cooking, or making baby formula."
The applicability of this advice is probably quite variable.
In addition to this, tank water heater systems include a sacrificial anode rod.
Water heater tanks include different metals in contact with the water, which creates a galvanic cell. Over time this corrodes the least noble metal. The rod is added in the design to corrode before pipes do. The rod is usually magnesium, aluminum or aluminum-zinc. It slowly but steadily leeches out the rod metal into the hot water supply.
Serious question: do we still install lead pipes anywhere? If no, when would be the threshold year where installation started to drop off for various reasons? I have heard that pex plumbing has taken over, but I have no idea if that is only for residential, but commercial use is something else entirely.
