Humanitarian technologist & big data wrangler, on a quest for evidence-based policy. Rational optimist, post-statist, contemplative humanist, mystery enthusiast, bardo tourist.

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  • 14 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
Cake day: August 2nd, 2023
  • DrQuickbeam@lemmy.worldtoEurope@feddit.de•First projections of EU Parliament election resultsEnglish
    8·
    24 days ago

    It’s far from perfect, but the European parliament is vastly more functional than the American Congress, just based on the amount of legislation that is crafted, compromised on, and passed. These laws, which have to be adopted by all the countries in the EU, are the most prosocial and environmental in the world.

    With these elections increasing the size of conservative coalitions, there will be more of a push against things like green regulations, immigration quotas, and support for Ukraine.

    More conservatives are being elected because right-wing nationalist/populist parties across Europe are fanning the flames of anti-immigrant hate, the burden of inflation, and EU regulations that might squeeze the ability of farmers (or other laborers) to make a profit, in order to sell their Make (insert country name here) Great Again rhetoric and whatever religious/corporate/fascist power dynamics that rhetoric conceals.

  • DrQuickbeam@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•10 Reasons You Should Switch From Chrome to Firefox.English
    1·
    4 months ago

    The main problems I have with it now are sometimes there are still issues with loading between browser and apps. Like it might open multiple tabs trying to open an app, and it leaves the app redirect pages open in your tabs list. Additionally, sometimes (like 3% of the time) website scaling doesn’t always work, especially on older sites or those made with janky CMS’s, and I’ve also rarely had problems with some dynamic content like inline forms and graphs.

  • DrQuickbeam@lemmy.worldtoWorld News@lemmy.world•Births in China slide 10% to hit their lowest on recordEnglish
    2·
    9 months ago

    Having continuous population growth leads to continuous economic growth. But…

    1. You can also achieve that by squeezing more economic productivity out of fewer people, by continuously improving education, diversity of thought, legally protecting creativity, fostering small businesses through seed money and tax incentives, and lots of other stuff.

    2. We have already been scaling the amount of productivity that comes out of a population since the invention of the steam engine and the factory line. Digital automation, AI and robotics are expected to keep that trend going for a long time.

    3. Not to mention, that it’s easier now to operate productively in areas of less dense population. Previously small towns would die, but with clever infrastructure that supports broadband everywhere, public transportation, self-driving vehicles, drone delivery, additive manufacturing (3d printing), virtual presence through XR, and so on, you can operate a rural population like a big productive city, and get the benefits of both.

    4. And at the end of the day, if your economy doesn’t grow, it just means that wealth in the country doesn’t grow.You can maintain that indefinitely. Or if an economy shrinks, society doesn’t come collapsing down until everyone gets poor enough that bribery and corruption overcome lawfulness. But if the society was already wealthy, that will take a long time, and you can mitigate it by doing things like spreading out concentrations of wealth among the population (taxing the rich), increasing immigration, and adopting socioeconomic sustainability planning approaches.

  • DrQuickbeam@lemmy.worldtoWorld News@lemmy.world•Births in China slide 10% to hit their lowest on recordEnglish
    8·
    9 months ago

    Not necessarily. Also this is already happening in many countries, and they don’t collapse into ruin. They just stagnate for a few generations.

    It doesn’t necessarily reduce population density though, because often what happens is that young people leave small towns and villages that have fewer opportunities and move to the big city, causing those little towns to die. That’s usually bad for maintaining cultural and linguistic diversity across a country’s landscape, but good for biodiversity, because as people go, the environment recovers.

    Also as population declines, land and resources tend to consolidate more and more into the hands of fewer oligarchs. But the oligarchs all own us already anyway, so NBD.