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Cake day: August 15th, 2024

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  • Every since the end of WWII there has regularly been things happening that felt like we were steering towards WWIII. You have to learn to live your life, you have no idea in advance what will actually start WWIII. There are of course plenty of signs but you don’t know until after WWIII is over what were important. Even WWII when the first shots were fired did not have to become a world war, things just escalated in ways that you couldn’t be sure at the time they would.

    Don’t real the above as you shouldn’t work for peace, or that you shouldn’t prepare for WWIII. You should be doing both at the same time. The cost of peace sometimes higher than the costs of war - and war is expensive! (peace can sometimes only be had at the cost of becoming a slave - I’d rather my kids die in war than become slaves)







  • Driving is full of edge cases. Humans are also bad drivers who get edge cases wrong all the time.

    The real question isn’t is Tesla better/worse in anyone in particular, but overall how does Tesla compare. If a Tesla is better in some situations and worse in others and so overall just as bad as a human I can accept it. Is Tesla is overall worse then they shouldn’t be driving at all (If they can identify those situations they can stop and make a human take over). If a Tesla is overall better then I’ll accept a few edge cases where they are worse.

    Tesla claims overall they are better, but they may not be telling the truth. One would think regulators have data for the above - but they are not talking about it.



  • Deer on the road is an edge case that humans cannot handle well. In general every option other than hitting the deer is overall worse - which is why most insurance companies won’t increase your rates if you hit a deer and file a claim for repairs.

    The only way to not hit/kill hundreds of deer (thousands? I don’t know the number) every year is to reduce rural speed limits to unreasonably slow speeds. Deer jump out of dark places right in front of cars all the time - the only option to avoid it that might work is either drive in the other lanes (which sometimes means into an oncoming car), or into the ditch (you have no clue what might be there - if you are lucky the car just rolls, but there could be large rocks or strong fence posts and the car stops instantly. Note that this all happens fast, you can’t think you only get to react. Drivers in rural areas are taught to hit the brakes and maintain their lane.


  • We don’t need a growing population, but it can’t shrink fast. We can probably even handle a slow shrinking, but a birth rate of .6 (which some countries are getting to) is low enough to be a real problem. Stable population needs a birthrate of a bit over 2 (1 child for every adult, and a few extra to account for accidents - how much extra depends on factors like how good your medical care is).

    Of course the above is statistics. Some people have terrible genetics and shouldn’t have kids. Many people would be terrible parents (but few are willing to admit it is them - ironically many who will admit it would be good parents). And raising kids is takes a lot of effort (it isn’t as expensive as those without kids think, but it does take a lot of time) - all good parents have to give up a ton of things they currently do (in countries with the worst birth rates this is often working too many hours, but even countries with reasonable working hours are seeing concerningly low birth rates) .