on the one hand, yes ecology and math bio is cool. On the other, the demographic transition does not fall out of these models whatsoever. Humans decided to do something very weird for whatever reason.

The actual population size during demographic transition looks very logistic-y. You'd be forgiven for thinking Verhulst applies. (though K is very much an empirical constant in that case, since you can't easily predict it from anything I don't think.)

I think the demographic transition overshoot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition#Stage_f...) we see is unexpected though.

Yeah the demographic transition is something nobody predicted (afaik). On the other hand, LTG (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth) is a neo-Malthusian prediction that seems to match early data, and a surprising number of people revisit it and find its conclusions seem to hold. We'll be finding out around 2040, give or take. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

aca di. implement a market, it's just that most people buy through their job, because if that's legal you obviously want to be part of a larger bargaining pool for buying.

Group plans suck away cream of crop risk pools. People with good stable high paying jobs tend to be a lot healthier than people working part time crap jobs or working in the trades for themselves.

It isn’t really bargaining power of the pool, but the risk assessment of the pool you are in. Being in a hodge lodge personal pool means you are sharing risk with people who will have more expenses. That’s why Switzerland throws everyone into the same pool, so no crème low risk can be siphoned away.

Kids are extremely expensive when you have to raise them to 18 with no return. We should have social security, but for the young.

What do you mean by "no return"?

We aren’t an agrarian society so children (and the labor they represent on the farm) are not a financial asset, they are a financial liability.

But couldn't they be considered an investment? For possible support (emotional, financial and other) in old age.

In practice? Very much no.

I strongly disagree. Around me I see a huge difference in old people without kids vs. with kids in how they are being taken care of.

reminds me of this article https://scholars-stage.org/uber-is-a-poor-replacement-for-ut...

Hard to take calls for endorsing the free market seriously from someone so clearly trying to form a monopoly on online shopping.

This should be a top level comment.

To Bezos, a market controlled by a single large capital allocator is a free market. Unless the allocator is government of course (unless there's subsidies to apply for!).

I'm going to be honest; How is Amazon seeking to do this? Are they suppressing other online competitors? I'm sure they buy lots of competition, but that doesn't stop someone else from setting up shop.

The idea to me is strange; I shop on Amazon, but also dozens of other online websites. It's really not hard to buy from some place other than Amazon if you desire.

Many of the same effects that make it extremely hard to set up eg. competing social networks are not present for online shopping - There's plenty of shipping companies, so you can ship anywhere in the world without capital investment; You can set up an online shop and send it to anyone, you don't need to have a huge customer base to make money (relatively speaking, obviously you need customers)

One example of market power abuse they engage in is requiring the price listed on their website to be the lowest offer that a merchant can list. You can't list a product on their page and then have a discount for that product on your own page.

Shopify runs on AWS so if Amazon is trying to take control of all online shopping they sure are awful at doing so. They actively enable some huge number of non-amazon online retailers to exist.

Creating a monopoly is the end goal of free markets?

if no one has ever pointed you at Seeing like a State, it's about the political and economic implications of this fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

There's also Bit's About Money describing this effect in banks https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/

> Perhaps the rigor that Medtronic and similar device companies are subjected to would apply, but I'm not sure those regulations cover information security and privacy.

As someone on an insulin pump they do. Iirc they have reps showing up at hacker conferences looking for red teams.

Definitely agree with your worries generally though.

Good thing the US doesn't have an administration that will happily criminalize any opposition

If this is your threat model, then VPNs are definitively not enough. Still a European VPN provider might be better than nothing.

I've seen a pretty massive uptick in usage among my non-techie friends in the past couple of months.

Tokyo is an example of incrementalism making a beautiful resilient city, while still maintaining safety standards.

Tokyo burned to the ground 80 years ago and got to be rebuilt from scratch then.

Kind of orthogonal to the point. It isn't a planned city in the same way that Paris is a planned city.

Also, most of the worst parts of American development have happened since 1945.

Tokyo also has 3 million cars, so walkable/transit city and car free aren’t the same.