People will compete for those negative awards to get famous.

Source: look at the fucking internet.

For now. If the trend continues across the globe those museums will be treated the way the US has been treating it’s “never forget” monuments, holidays and classroom curriculums.

That’s the neat part, you’re already in it!

That’s basically all modern commercial fabrics and clothing, it’s not designed to last. Even hand-washing is going to wear it out because of how cheaply clothes are stitched together or how thin/low-density the fabric is.

Fun fact, most modern microwaves are fine if you leave a metal fork or spoon on your plate, sometimes sharp tips of knives can arc a little but for the most part, modern microwaves are tuned to not turn into Terminator time-traveling if you leave a metal object on your plate.

Maybe some people have problems with their pores, but most people don’t. The hype and fear around antiperspirants is a bit overblown. As with everything, excess is never good but it’s also not going to like, turn your sweat pores into little overinflated water-balloons ready to spray pit-juice on unsuspecting bystanders…

“Just bathing” is fine, for about an hour or two, some people have worse problems with BO and need more than a shower or bath to combat it all day long.

It’s like when you try to shake people in a dream to get them to realize it’s a dream, but they’re not real so they just stare at you.

This is an overly simplified take on a potential coming tragedy, which is a rapid population collapse.

I’m not saying anywhere that we need constant growth or even stable population levels where it is now, we would absolutely do better with about half as many people on Earth.

But if that drop happens too fast, you have no idea how much harm and suffering it will do to society. We’re talking great-filter scenario where there’s simply not enough people to maintain the systems that deliver food to stores, maintenance supplies to the machines that keep your roads paved, antibiotics to impoverished nations, cornmeal to livestock and on and on and on.

And the left is broadly nodding on in agreement with the deranged fucking anti-natalists because we think it’s conservation. When right-wing people like Musk scream about birth rates and fertility, they’re using the coming problem to start seeding racist ideology around the problem and nobody seems to get what they’re doing.

South Korea is going to be one of the first major population centers that ends up with abandoned cities in a couple generations, the only short-term answer is open immigration, but it’s so dire in so many places that there won’t be anyone to enforce borders anyway.

This should NOT be painting a picture in your head of pastoral countrysides and empty cities where you can do all your reading. Think more in terms of millions of starving migrant families, children, lots and lots of elderly people, all walks of life, no resources being moved, no infrastructure being supported. Whole swaths of nations basically being amputated to consolidate manpower where it’s needed to maintain defense, and you better believe there will be wars.

You and people who raise this notion are all for rapid depopulation when you aren’t imagining it’s you dealing with the impact of billions of people not having enough resources. It sounds a bit entitled.

I think I’m going to trust the reporting from actual people in China over someone who’s moderation comment I can fucking SEE so don’t pretend shit around me. I will never see your stupid comments again.

I am using a 7-year-old video card on a 5-year-old machine and have been notified my health care premiums are going up 1000%.

I’ve been playing small, cheap, low-res social games with friends and family like Misery or RV There Yet and those are nice. But I feel like gaming broadly is starting to recede in my rear-view mirror. Too many real-world problems and stresses and not enough pay.

I am not sure what all these huge companies are going to do when nobody can afford anything anymore.

That may be it, I am expecting something more grand or epic or complicated to start uncovering, not really realizing that what I’m already doing is “it” and the rest is just exploring for the sake of exploring.

I really really really want to like this game

Same, when it comes to games with vast scope and scale of a universe, it’s either this, Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen.

Elite Dangerous feels very “cockpitty” even with recent updates, it’s just not very pretty or engaging and I’ve tried several times to launch myself into it. VR was amazing for a little while, but still felt very “yellow cockpit” after a bit and a dark field of stars everywhere you look.

Star Citizen was very engaging for a bit, the open-world PVP, realistic scale, social, busy world and hyper-realism and absolutely beautiful environment have sooooo much potential, I log in annually and stand in a viewing area on a space station and just look out at the universe… but that’s it, I don’t like the janky, unpolished controls, the broken missions and lack of personalization/incentive to survive. I would even take very basic survival mechanics like base making, farming, upgrading skills and devices and places to loot and gather furnishings like No Man’s Sky. There should be a reason you want to get a crew together and hang out in a personalized ship.

No Man’s Sky feels a lot like “less intuitive minecraft” and I think I rather just play minecraft if I want to dig and build in a colorful, cartoonish world. The whole "harvest oxygen and swamp gas and process it with tungsten dust and then turn that dust into widgets which you refine into super widgets… it gets grindy and off-putting because it’s not comfortably accessible, it’s not intuitive, and that’s where my biggest beef with NMS is, the lack of an intuitive direction or goal and the feeling that there’s just too many lonely planets and not enough rewarding experience in spending so much time landing on each. Even if it was an actual MMO it would be more engaging.

I really would like to love the game. Everytime a new update drops I try to pick up the game

Are you me?

I have it installed right now, I logged in to play all this new, raved-over content and found myself on some planet with too much air-traffic making noise overhead, needing to collect minerals to power my ship, and a base with some minecraft-like chests of loot.

I know the game is vast and deep and full of surprises and such, but I have the hardest time connecting with it enough to feel like I want to explore several hundred hyper-colorful planets.

How many humans should we aim to have, long term? 20 billion? 50 billion?

That’s not what this issue is about, this isn’t “pro-growth” this is about averting economic and logistical collapse across much of the developed world.

Sure, we could do with a reduced population, but it needs to be reduced slowly enough that we don’t see mass casualties and so that our infrastructure, production and logistics aren’t suddenly unmanned, or many, many people will suffer.

We have to understand that the argument for continued population upkeep is about stability not some desire to perpetually increase population. There’s not a sharp, two-sided binary here, the problem is that many, many people in the developed world are having either no kids or not enough to keep up with expected decline and longer lifespans. When we run out of young people to run our cities, our roads, our offices and our shipyards and rail systems, we end up with collapse.

Look into South Korea for a vision of the worst case and think about what will happen broadly when the same syndrome hits other major world powers and logistical hubs.

no… they canceled that

This shit is so easy to check before you click “reply” I have no idea why we can’t be asked to spend several seconds on a basic google search before spilling whatever is on our mind. You can hate China for whatever reasons, but let’s not share factually incorrect information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-child_policy

edit: why am I not at all surprised your mod history is filled with hate towards Asian people.

The solution is to pay workers enough so that the government doesn’t need to shift the burden of paying for children to those who don’t even have any.

I know you’re banned, and this comment tells me a lot about why that probably happened without me having to dig through the mod history.

This is some pro-capitalism slop even if you think it’s so far left it has tank treads. This is a surefire tactic to put a nation’s healthcare in the same situation the US is in now. Without a total reform of the entire economic foundation of a country, you are simply NOT fucking getting a government who will tax their wealthy to keep up with whatever the healthcare system is charging for their procedures.

This is why healthcare is more complicated than lopping off the heads of the elites and spreading that money. We have to make systems that ensure no single person or institution is left on the hook for figuring out what to charge or pay.

edit: the comment gets worse the more I reread it.

doesn’t need to shift the burden of paying for children to those who don’t even have any

This is the very fundamental principle of having healthcare, whether it’s private or public, it’s very expensive and resource-intensive to keep people broadly alive and healthy, you absolutely cannot start deciding who gets this funding and who doesn’t deserve it if you want a fair system, and it feels like everyone (people like you) really get bent out of shape about this right up until YOU are the special case who needs society to pool our resources to help you with your stupid problem. Then suddenly the “social contract” that made you so mad previously seems like a pretty good idea. FFS I am so fed up with narrow-minded children weighing in on shit they have no understanding of.

You’re right, falling birth rates are affecting people in rich and poor countries alike.

I think the answer is more complicated and has a lot to do with our collective psychology as a species, what we’re consuming and what we’re feeling about our futures.

That said, money and cost do play a huge role in this. People have complicated feelings on having families right now, and the barrier of cost is a great idea for the brain to seize onto as a validation for avoiding continuation of the species.

Sadly, when it comes down to it, children are necessary for society to function long-term.

It shouldn’t be sad, this is basic reality. We should love kids and want kids and pressure our own countries to make it easier to have families.

I am really getting worried that the left broadly is turning soft anti-natalist and there is no faster way to end your movement than by not having more people. I feel like “birth rates” and “fertility” are terms that we feel have been co-opted by the right because figures like Elon Musk and the manosphere bros.

China is thinking long-term and practical. If they lose their young work-force it won’t matter what those “other people” are doing or not.

Someone in China told me once that one of the biggest differences between China and Europe/USA is that in the west we think in terms of years or decades. In China they are making plans for the next several centuries.

This isn’t a glowing endorsement of the heinous shit China has done, but it should at least make you understand that this isn’t a social welfare program designed to help families as much as the first of many measures to fight the forces that are eroding the power and production capability of other countries. If you want to see how bad it can get, look into what the future holds for South Korea.