The hip seems like such a bad example to me. First of all, who do you think needs hip replacements? It's not young people; surgeons don't even like to do them on young people (and to a joint replacement surgeon, "young" is under 60) since there's a good chance they'll outlive the joint itself. And it's a one-time cost for a surgery that increases an old person's independence vs an ongoing cost of palliative care (whatever that means) and having to provide more care for someone who has a potentially treatable disability. Hip replacement is considered "the surgery of the century" - the 20th century that is, because it is one of the most successful in terms of function and satisfaction provided to patients.

I gained insurance overnight because of the ACA after not being able to afford it.

I got a junk Precision workstation last year as a "polite" home server (it's quiet and doesn't look like industrial equipment, but still has some server-like qualities, particularly the use of ECC RAM). I liked it so much that it ended up becoming my main desktop.

My main desktop is temporarily a Dell server from around 2012 or so. Two were thrown out, each with two 2 GiB sticks of RAM, so I poached the other machine's RAM for a grand total of 8 GiB. I also threw in a small SSD for the / partition (/home is on the old HDD). The thing is dirt slow but I never notice, even YouTube video playback works fine. Even on hardware well over a decade old, Debian runs fine.

The math has a few problems then, because it seems rather difficult for me to have .1 child. Actually, it's impossible for me to have any children because I am a single man and it is not biologically possible.

>it seems rather difficult for me to have .1 child.

Hence, the "on average". For any 10 couples, they should have 21 children. If some have fewer, the rest have to have more.

>it's impossible for me to have any children because I am a single man

Sounds like a "you" problem.

> Hence, the "on average". For any 10 couples, they should have 21 children. If some have fewer, the rest have to have more.

This would seem to agree with "not everyone has to have children" - mathematically speaking you can quite simply put a couple zeros into the equation and still arrive at 2.1

> Sounds like a "you" problem.

I have no problem with the situation at all as I have never in my life had an interest in having children. I'm not sure I even see the changes in birthrate as a problem; people can adapt to demographic changes. But if it is a problem, then it must be some sort of systemic one and I doubt the answer is to try and apply pressure to individuals to have children by telling them to think of the economy or that it is some sort of societal obligation.

> They really are just that up their own asses.

I remember perhaps a decade ago, a coworker and I were watching a clip of Zuckerberg walking up to a group of employees and they started clapping for him. I mentioned how odd it was to see, and he thought it was perfectly natural to applaud the CEO of your company. We never applauded when our boss showed up, and I've never really been sure where the line is for which authority I'm supposed to cheer for merely from being in their presence. I haven't thought about it too much since then, but obviously it's stuck with me.

As a society, we've all had our lips pretty firmly pressed onto the asses of the oligarchs for quite awhile, so it seems pretty natural that they think it's the natural order of things.

Eventually human civilization breaks down to the point where we can no longer sustain the industry to extract the fossil fuels.

So just to be clear: if we burn all of the fossil fuels that we know about, then we are guaranteed to end human civilization, correct?

That is the plain truth, and we are going to keep making fun of climate activists until we get there?

I don't think civilization ends if temperatures rise dramatically. A lot of existing agricultural land gets destroyed, but some currently unusable/unproductive areas that are too cold become viable. So the regions will shift. Painful but not insurmountable if it happens over a 50 year time span. But even if there wasn't such a compensatory mechanism, modern problem solving abilities will find a way - yes really. Look at the problems already solved. Nuclear reactors, solar power, vertical farming, genetically enhanced crops, alternative food sources will be engineered if the need arises. We can really stop saying that we know for sure society will end. I don't know how poor people will be affected, and yes there woll be winnners and losers as always during massive disruptive change - but hardly the end of human civilization.

Given that the plan to accelerate covid vaccine development, "Operation Warp Speed", was a Trump administration program, this seems quite ironic.

I don't see where the GP changed their mind. They may not be ok with this particular action while still preferring the current administration to any alternative.

I've got a (probably former at this point) buddy who makes less than $15K/year. He seems to have lots of time to listen to right wing propaganda podcasts and likes telling "jokes" about how minorities are problematic. He was never really interested in politics when we were growing up and I suspect never voted before 2024. Poor people have interests and opinions too.

How much cheaper is a boring 3-year old Toyota versus a boring brand new Toyota? Why would the person who buys a boring new Toyota unload it for a significant loss after just 3 years of ownership?