Word docs being the medium of exchange created enough of a network effect. I remember trying to use other programs but importing/exporting to Word wasn't perfect.
Windows 95/98 shipped with some kind of half-implemented Word, the name of which I forgot. So you could send a Word doc to anyone basically and they could read it, a great business strategy.
I bought one for my 2020 Toyota Sienna a couple months ago. The best analogy is that it's like upgrading to Tesla Autopilot. It's great for highway and freeway driving but not city streets.
I've found it works for suburban streets really well, and I've even used it for city streets with no problems. Nothing about city streets makes it not work except the need to frequently stop for lights and stop signs.
Intel's decline was obvious when I worked for them in 2010, their compensation package wasn't competitive with FANG and they consistently missed out or lost their better engineers.
What's wrong about migration policy? I am probably a fairly far-right person, or at least on the extreme right as far as programmers go, but what can be changed in migration policy to which will improve things without completely undermining the future of Europe?
We have experienced demographic change. Our birth rates do not, and never will, provide for support of our population numbers. We need immigration or we will live through "Japanisation" - with almost none of our cultures being as tight and homogenous from the beginning to do it as nicely as Japanese. The need for mass immigration - not only of qualified employees, but simply of "bodies" in numbers - is a fact. No amount of far-right wordplay can change that.
Nothing, but that doesn't stop people from not liking it. Turns out, when women have the option to turn off their reproductive capacity, people opt for "hmmm nows not a good time I think I'll do it later" often enough that the population goes extinct. It's never a good time to have kids. That's why evolution ensured we don't have a choice, made us irrationally horny and ensured that it happened by accident.
But people still see the drastic change within a single generation and don't like it. And you can't blame them, if you started settling white people in some African country by the million a year you can very much expect the same from the people who already live there. They'd call it colonialism. And they'd be right, and if they were facing a fertility rate crisis like the west is they'd be screwing themselves over, but you still wouldn't be able to convince them that they have to do it.
> Turns out, when women have the option to turn off their reproductive capacity, people opt for "hmmm nows not a good time I think I'll do it later" often enough that the population goes extinct.
Or we have a society and an economic system designed to push women into the workforce and makes having children an expensive luxury good? That is a policy decision that can be changed. If it were economically beneficial for a woman to have two to four kids instead of grinding 40-50 hour weeks in the office, a lot of women would reevaluate their choices.
And it's much better for us to figure out a sustainable solution now than to wait a generation or two for the world to have a general fertility crisis. Right now it is localized to first-world countries, so we have some time to figure out a solution before things get really dire.
The problem isn't localized to first world countries anymore, the process in all countries has already begun and cannot be stopped. Almost every country on earth has a replacement level or below fertility rate and every single country has a fertility rate significantly lower than 30 years ago. A generation has already grown with the lower fertility rate, which means a generation is already locked in that will age out of the workforce with barely enough young people to replace their productivity. It's done.
There might not be a sustainable solution, besides a brave new world, but I personally would like to preserve human dignity. It appears that steady state population sizes are a rarity in the natural world and that almost all populations are chaotic and fluctuate. https://fractalfoundation.org/OFC/OFC-6-1.html
This. Main point here: "this is not at all the failure of the West/Libs/Rich people/democracy/Jews/whoever else you want to blame. it's everywhere. don't look for culprits: it's just the natural process of economic growth and productivity improvement".
Well, that and the hostile response by natives to large migration is rational, to be expected, is naturally occurring and cannot be stopped either, regardless of the fact that it is unavoidable.
I don't know that the cause of reduced fertility is prosperity. It might even be the other way around: as population growth decreases people have more because less people to split the wealth with. Our father's dug the gold from the ground and only had 1 child between them. It's probably a bit of both, when you're prosperous you have more to lose by feeding hungry babies.
But it most certainly doesn't balance out. Either a population grows or it shrinks, when a population grows it can produce more but there are more to feed, when it shrinks it ages, at first you have prosperity from that but eventually you wind up poor and old.
For some people I know, the thought of more (mass) migration is negative because they think it will aggravate existing problems in other areas like a low wages (especially in low skill labour due to increased competition) or the FUBAR housing market in some cities (again, due to increased competition on an already strained market).
For the last part they're definitely right, IMO, and german politics must find a way to solve the housing problem in big cities. The government must find a way to break the "migrants take away part of your cake" narrative, and this is only possible by increasing the size of the cake.
In this case, we need to aggressively build (and incentivize to build) more housing. We're doing the opposite at the moment, if the german construction industry is to be believed, which is very very bad. Building a house became insanly expensive in the last 20 years, especially in the areas where it is needed most. Redistribution by moving senior tenants in big cities to suburban or rural areas will not solve the shortage, neither will "just go to rural east germany, there's enough housing".
We have to solve these problems and prevent the formation of zero-sum games where migrants are seen as (external) competitors, stat - it'll be an existential social question and a threat to the country (and the long-term perspective of migrants) if we do not, IMO.
A big issue with immigration in Europe is not about economics but about identity, society, and culture.
This is caused by too many people coming in from vastly different cultures. And so there is nothing wrong with being in favour of vastly reduced immigration numbers.
Your take is to accept high immigration numbers as an unavoidable fact and therefore to only look at how to deal with them, and still only in terms of economics.
This is the elephant in the room. I have two overlapping observations.
- The big one is Islam. Islam seems to be the only religion in modern times that is actually religious. The only religion that can muster up people to actually get really angry about defending it. It's also the only religion the locals are actually scared of in any meaningful way.
- Color. If you have a bunch of local-looking kids meeting up at the mall, nobody thinks anything of it. Get a bunch of brown kids, and people get scared. Walk around as a typical Polish person, nobody will think anything of it. Walk around while brown and people are alerted to the presence of someone who needs to explain themselves. This isn't always mean-spirited and aggressive, but if you're not white you will constantly be asked by curious people how on earth you ended up walking around Copenhagen. "Where are you really from?".
Put these together and many people constantly see that there's a pernicious foreign influence on their society. They feel it's visible, even though probably a lot of the brown folks aren't even religious.
I honestly don't think such analysis is really useful. It seems to me like the AfD voter base is a diverse "anti-mainstream" coalition. The AfD is strong in east Germany since it's traditionally more right-wing and more anti-mainstream.
The AfD is also strong in Baden-Würtemberg which is traditionally a place with a high population of... well... luddites(?).
These groups might not have the same goals or the same issues they are facing, but what unites them is the feeling that the AfD represents a true opposition to the mainstream political scene.
The crux of the matter is from where these "bodies" will arrive. There are relatively few problems with immigrants from Vietnam or Ukraine. They don't feel entitled and work hard. There are others, however, who just create problems. That's all.
It can't and won't help them. Unless you physically deprive women of rights and let them be married off against their will and others control their fertility, as it was in the "good old days" when the birth rate was sufficient.
It never worked in any country. Even in those with, to say the least, highly questionable human rights record and complete control of government over mass media: see China. Or with those with ample resources and willingness to spend them towards this goal: see Sweden.
Women are not having lots of children not because some evil forces are telling them not to, but simply because they can. They never wanted to procreate in "sufficient" numbers, they just didn't have a choice then. If we go as far as to deprive them of that choice, we will completely cancel everything we know as a civilised society - and also fail, because a huge emigration wave will ensue, and if we try to ban emigration, we will quickly fail into economic, technological and cultural irrelevance.
It's a choice between being Japan (controlled, predictable dieoff, slow but certain death), being Iran (nice population growth but...), and being America. To me it sounds like a no-brainer which one of the evils to choose.
Fertility isn't dropping merely because women have "rights", but it's also because women are being forced into labor markets where they never would have needed to work before, women are being told, over and over again, how horrible it is to be mutually interdependent with a man, be married, or bear children or have families, and how much happier they'll be as successful, college-educated empowered go-getters.
It's both impractical and unpopular for women to raise children and stay at home while doing it. These are the rights they've won; foremost of them is the right for their bloodlines to die out within a few generations.
Don't take my word for it, just look it up yourself, too tired to pull up the dozens of studies for you.
Clearly women want to have children. Nobody needs to force them to.
But rather, society is (indirectly) forcing them NOT to have them.
No need to deny human nature. Your caricature of a society that has children is complete and utter fantasy which has no bearing on real life. It is a product of aforementioned propaganda.
There is perhaps a survivorship bias in those studies, since divorce is so easy now, only people who are happy in marriage remain. i.e. reported happiness in marriage increases while everyone unhappy simply divorces and so the numbers would get swayed that way. Divorce rates have rocketed and women are very likely to leave marriages these days in many countries. So you end up with a tiny happy cohort that has no bearing on the wider population. So you should produce your sources to see how this is accounted for, ideally.
The problem with this is that women are of course happy when they have children, they love their children after all (father do too of course). But you don't love potential future unborn children do you?
Before having children they are a burden and a detriment to your lifestyle. After having them they are the best thing that could have happened to you.
On the last point, i am not even sure there is correlation let alone causation. Successful people i know hardly work a lot (or they do but in short extreme stunts, like 3 weeks of 80-100 hours a week and then almost idle at 0-10 hours a week for the next 6 months). They mostly just tuned themselves into ability to get "into right place at the right time" at a rate way more frequent than regular folks, by having and consciously developing right personality traits.
> by having and consciously developing right personality traits.
Which takes a lot of effort and hard work.
> They mostly just tuned themselves into ability to get "into right place at the right time"
Which takes a lot of hard work
> then almost idle at 0-10 hours a week for the next 6 months
You have been tricked into thinking so, they just work so much more efficiently at some point and delegate a lot - at which point they are already successful due to their previous hard work
I am not sure of thats really going to work. Another commenter here said it quite well. If you have the "choice" to have kids whenever you like, then you don't have kids because they are always inconvenient. And the time window for women is a lot smaller than they themselves often like to admit. The highest birth rates in Europe you always find in the "bible belts", in places where contraception is religiously prohibited.
Materialism has long been a driver of human behavior, and children are no exception.
The only thing that's changed is the migration of children from net capital assets for the family to net cost centers. The same thing has happened to animals. What used to be productive workers on the farm are now wholly decadent useless eaters, earning their keep only by being adorable.
Imagine how the calculus of couples saying "we can't afford children" would change if little Timmy could start defraying his own costs in only eight years by doing some basic bookkeeping, junior development tasks, running errands, cooking, personal assistant work, etc for the family. And then becoming a net capital asset from 12 to 20. That's how it was for most of human history, just with slightly less modern tasks.
About half of women never understand it having or not having children. They don't want to admit it because it's a shame to regret one's own children, but many of them do.
Vast majority of men never understand it (mostly because they are married off before they want it, if they married at appropriate age i.e. 45-50, they'd be ok with it, but this is not what women want, they want to take men before they understand they don't want it).
Key is choice. People are not having kids for one stupid simple reason - because they can.
This is why the problem is just the same in every civilisation or culture, it is not at all confined to "Western", "Christian", "Liberal" or "Rich" world. It's everywhere without exception, maybe (hopefully) except Israel. Because Haredim don't give their women a choice.
Have you seen the price and dearth of family housing these days? Why would you would think that propaganda is the main cause when just the economics are prohibitive?
What he's saying is incentives in these countries are just not aligned to creation of families and rearing of children. And it's true, when you expect women to go to school til they're 25, a home requires two incomes and then some, everything is taxed to the breaking point, and birth control is ubiquitously available, you can expect a decline in fertility to the point that you eventually have a demographic crisis.
Our countries resolve this by importing people from countries with more people than they can handle, but if you look at the situation globally, as countries become richer this appears to happen universally. It's a matter of 100 years until we can't play this population shuffling game anymore and we will experience a global fertility and demographic crisis. And what's more, it appears that it is unavoidable and it's not clear if humanity will stabilize to a population level or if these fluctuations are inevitable. See https://fractalfoundation.org/OFC/OFC-6-1.html
> I am probably a fairly far-right person, or at least on the extreme right as far as programmers go
In what way are you far right though? Based on what I read here (pro mass-immigration regardless of skill, against the family unit) I would classify you as far left.
I support gun rights (but also abortion rights), support criminalisation of homelessness, and support border walls/some other "hard" ways of regulating migration (simply put, illegal immigration should be punished severely enough to make people even from the most rundown places too scared to try). I don't think "asylum seekers" should exist (and government should be hard - "one bullet each" hard - with those trying to sneak in), unless it is in the interest of the country to invite them (e.g. Ukrainian refugees). "Choose your refugee" policy. I think it makes me pretty much right.
And no i am not at all against family unit. I only accept the objective fact that sustaining population through natural procreation is no longer possible in any halfway advanced society and that measures should be taken to do it otherwise. Anything that gives a chance of doing it through natural procreation will go way beyond acceptable for any Western political entity, no matter far left or far right. A simple proof to that is that it doesn't happen in any rich country anymore - except Israel because of a large chunk of their people bent on religion a lot more than any other free country could accept.
Most people who criticise immigration, housing or other policies in the view of demography, usually have their perception confined to one particular country and come to logical conclusion: "things are bad and getting worse and politicians seem to be moving them even further into wrong direction". If they looked at the world at whole they'd stop blaming their politicians, because same shit happens everywhere - and it is in fact mildest in Western, rich, Protestant, liberal countries.
Ok, more clear now on in what aspects you are more right-wing oriented and others in which you are more left-wing oriented.
Regarding your stance on immigration, I don’t know why we should try to keep replacement levels of population. Time will tell, but I suspect in the long run a country like Japan will do fine.
Keeping population always growing seems like a kind-of pyramid scheme to me. Especially if one wants the working populace to provide for the elderly (pensions).
Perhaps they favour small government and low regulations and taxes? The problem with left/right is that there are several axes of policy you can be on. Old school left can be socially conservative which is why a lot of left leaning people seemed to veer right. Free market + socially liberal folk that were previously right are now seen to be more central as the political gravity moves around.
Left/right is too simplistic, I am fairly left on many issues but I think making it so that people don't need to migrate is better than allowing unlimited migration which is not a good long term solution...
This is not weird at all if you ever tried to argue with the Left, making blatantly obvious false statements is their way to bait you into arguing semantics and accept the main narrative. E.g. in this case many went after the semantics of the "far-right" and not on the main claim of "birth rates can never recover".
The death won’t be natural or peaceful.
You can see this in current EU politics already — seniors expect pensions sufficient to maintain their existing standard of living, but this assumes that there exists the same amount of working people to sustain a sufficient surplus for the elderly to consume without meaningful contribution to the economy.
What your policy actually means in reality is a well-known pattern — increasing taxes on the young to shift their consumption power to the elderly, as the elderly become an increasingly larger voting bloc, perpetuating the cycle.
There’s only a few ways this can end — 1) retirees must have their living standards decrease as fewer working adults sustain them, 2) they maintain their standards at the expense of taking it from the young, who 3) will leave for other countries and make the problem worse, or 4) retirees exit retirement and actually work. You’re seeing the fight between options 1/2 happen in France, 2/3 in Spain, al four in Germany, etc.
The option that policy makers see is 5) bring in enough migrants to maintain healthy demographics and 6) making more domestic babies. 6 is, however, a mirage; no policy we have tried worked (see SK, HK, SG, TW, JP, and many more).
Awfully unlucky that ours is the generation that has to face the retirement pyramid scheme collapsing. But bringing in a horde of foreigners is like saying "fuck you, not my problem" to the next generation. It HAS to come crashing down at one point.
Do I have a solution to this problem? No. But there has to be a solution that doesn't include my country getting a Wikipedia article of it's own about a list of granade attacks commited, like Sweden has...
Going by current estimates, immigration can plug the demographics gap (by accelerating the problem elsewhere mostly) for a minimum of 100 years, probably 200 and maybe even 300+ depending on growth patterns and economic developments.
So yes, it’s going to be a solution for as long as America has been a country, France as a republic, longer than Germany and Italy united, more than many modern countries have existed. If that’s not a long-term solution, I don’t know what is.
There are no thousand year solutions here. We can only pass the problem to our (many-times) descendants and hope that they figure it out.
Only in the sense that there are enough people in aggregate, ie you don't care about anything other than the person being a person. It's not actually realistic to think European countries will just let in a bunch of people from another culture, forever, just to fix the demographic problem.
That’s why I’m, unlike most pro-immigration people, very pro assimilation —- language proficiency tests, an intentional strategy of educating immigrant young in public schools, dispersing large immigrant diasporas throughout the country, etc. I agree that immigration without at least some policy of assimilating them is a recipe for perpetual social unrest and instability.
In the US, successful assimilations look mostly like this. Kids go to American public schools, start forgetting their parent’s language and culture, leading them to look pretty much like every other American. The Chinese do it much more harshly without a drastic increase in efficiency, so the soft route seems to be the sweet spot. There’s no reason to think that you can’t assimilate them. Discourage mosques, try to disperse high concentrations of non-assimilated cultures, it’s not new and it mostly works.
No policy lasts forever. We’re not looking for the next thousand-year solution to the demographic crises; immigration is the 100-year plan, so to speak. We can’t — and shouldn’t —- try to write policy for the next thousand years. There is no other area in which we demand solutions for more than a century. Eventually this policy too will wear out and our descendants will have to go back to the drawing board.
Yup, and in almost every country in the world fertility rates are dropping. We will face a global demographic crisis within a century. We are either going to have to start having kids again or we are in for a brave new world type future, or extinction.
One solution few people mention but that can probably work, is direct solution: hire women to have children, and pay them a wage conditioned on the kids' physical and mental health. Put no limits on those children's numbers, accept that they will be half-literate, traumatised folks - ok they will make perfect post-industrial serfs, but at least they will be there.
This has never happened in history. If the land your people are on has resources and is accessible, you'll get subsumed and assimilated by another one, one way or another. If you want your nation to survive, you have to 1) have a healthy rate of admixture fast enough to prevent inbreeding but slow enough to protect the culture, 2) get to fuckin'. The latter may require some reorganizing of the labor and housing market to make raising more than one or two kids feasible. But if you think your people can fizzle out, you're going to be disappointed whether you like it or not. And it doesn't matter what the government does, they can try to stop it, at some point there's just not enough able bodied of you to utilize and protect your resources. Building a wall around fertile land and staving off migrants who want it til the last one of you dies out is just not going to happen.
War and genocide are options, even if they are horrible ones that shouldn’t be considered. Throughout history, however, cultures assimilating others have often been violent (either through great defense or great offense). European assimilation of the Americas was extremely violent and destructive.
True. Who would ever want to live in the US, with their abysmal GDP and lack of innovation. The US is a prime example that people of multiple cultures or ethnicities can't even be in the same city, let alone the same corporation or government.
The US has been the top performing economy for quite a while, yet only became truly multicultural about 50 years ago. Before that it was all European immigrants, assimilating to white american culture, and the native black people and some natives from the previous era scattered around. You had some cross border cultural transfer along the southern border and carribean, that's it. The amount of multiculturalism the US had until the mid to late 70s was about what you'd expect anywhere else in the world with land borders.
So we can say, the multiculturalism is not the cause of the wealth. The truth is, the causes of the wealth are the sizeable population, regardless of origin, and the vast natural resources it controls. The US is a westphalian state, run like a business. The European nations once were nation states, but have also adopted this model. It works, if your goal is economic output, and unfortunately your goal must be economic output because otherwise you can't compete militarily with a rival who's goal is economic output and you'll get subsumed.
It's also important to consider that the US, prior to the modern era, was a "melting pot" of a somewhat select group of immigrants. We routinely turned away handicapped, poor, sick, mentally deficient, or otherwise "unfit" potential citizens.
The "New Colossus" that adorns the Statue of Liberty is a fun little poem, but it does not in any way reflect the actual policies of the United States for much of its early and middle existence. We were a country that was happy to import wealthy people, scientists, conscientious hard workers, etc, while keeping the riffraff out.
Nyc is hardly representative of america, thank god. And plenty of racisim and inability to adapt by a few cultures endemic to the area. Take your accusations of racism elsewhere.
After a decade as a software engineer I became a nurse. It has its pros and cons. The defining difference is shift work vs project work. In California the pay is similar to tech which is a plus. Also watching all my previous teammates get laid off during the tech downturns is a motivating factor.
International travel. My bank (credit union) and cell phone provider (AT&T) both block non-US access. I also use it to get around Vietnam's blocking of websites e.g. BBC.
+1, this was essential for me while living abroad. Even if they did allow access (e.g. PayPal), I’d have to jump through hoops to verify my identity. Easier to just turn on a VPN.
