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So Elon just said he was "undecided" about whether he would vote for Trump. Umm...that should have been a hard "no". Full stop. Free speech is under the umbrella of democracy and anyone who has paid attention to the Jan. 6th committee hearings understands Trump is the opposite of all that.

Elon is losing his GD mind. WTF?
Musk actually thinks "both" Dems & Republicans are too extreme. He supports a "super moderate" position - whatever that means. Infact he wants to start a super PAC called "Super Moderate" PAC.

His positions don't seem to be all that different from other rich CEOs like Ellison or Bloomberg or Howard Shultz - irrespective of what party they actually support. Essentially what is called the "neo-liberal" position.

 
It’s too bad that Elon has put himself in the middle of the attempt to overturn a presidential election. We see more and more that Trump was pursuing a clear fraudulent scheme to overturn the election and Elon’s response is that he would have allowed Trump to stay on twitter to overthrow the election.

I’m a full supporter of Tesla but hope that Elon crashes and burns in his pursuit of Twitter
 
Musk actually thinks "both" Dems & Republicans are too extreme. He supports a "super moderate" position - whatever that means. Infact he wants to start a super PAC called "Super Moderate" PAC.

His positions don't seem to be all that different from other rich CEOs like Ellison or Bloomberg or Howard Shultz - irrespective of what party they actually support. Essentially what is called the "neo-liberal" position.


Window dressing.
 
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So this thread has had a lot of discussion recently about Elon's warnings about population collapse. I'm in the middle of reading my favorite geo-political/economic analyst's just released book, "The End of the World is Just The Beginning" , and I've just gotten to the point where he explains why we are staring at actual population collapse, not just a decline. Let me see if I can paraphrase it.

One of the things that people miss about our historical population increase is that in the past two hundred or so years, it has been fueled by longer lifespans, not just birth rates. If you double lifespans, but keep birthrates constant, then in one generation, you've doubled your population. And that is what we've seen as modern medicine has slowly spread through the world. But lifespans have basically hit a wall (except in some ever smaller regions of the poorest parts of the world which have yet to industrialize). So lifespan population boost has pretty much reached its end.

Meanwhile, global industrialization has resulted in people having far fewer children. There are many reasons for this (children meant free labor on a pre-industrialized farm, now they are very expensive luxuries), but the facts are undeniable. We have below replacement birthrates for much of the world (like 1.8 children per woman), and some notable countries (Korea, and China!) the latest 2022 data suggest 1.2 children.

So we've been living through a period where expanding lifespans overwhelmed the declining birthrates to give us a still expanding population, but that period is ending. So now in the 2020s, in almost all of the industrialized world we are running low of young adults which is the group that produces the most children. Unless something changes, like mass cloning technology, or WWIII throwing us back into pre-industrialization, this is an accelerating trend. Every generation going forward will be smaller than the one before it. That's why some people are worried about population collapse.

Is it inevitable? No one knows because the world has never seen this before. The industrial revolution has only happened once in human history. What comes on the other side of the population hump? We don't know, but one outcome is catastrophically bad.

Since we really don't know what the future will hold, people like Elon aren't calling for a mass forced re-population program. But he is pointing out that it is very dangerous to be thinking the opposite, that we have too many people, that we should be cutting back on having kids. It isn't obvious now, but China will absolutely be paying the price for its one child policy.
 
So this thread has had a lot of discussion recently about Elon's warnings about population collapse. I'm in the middle of reading my favorite geo-political/economic analyst's just released book, "The End of the World is Just The Beginning" , and I've just gotten to the point where he explains why we are staring at actual population collapse, not just a decline. Let me see if I can paraphrase it.

One of the things that people miss about our historical population increase is that in the past two hundred or so years, it has been fueled by longer lifespans, not just birth rates. If you double lifespans, but keep birthrates constant, then in one generation, you've doubled your population. And that is what we've seen as modern medicine has slowly spread through the world. But lifespans have basically hit a wall (except in some ever smaller regions of the poorest parts of the world which have yet to industrialize). So lifespan population boost has pretty much reached its end.

Meanwhile, global industrialization has resulted in people having far fewer children. There are many reasons for this (children meant free labor on a pre-industrialized farm, now they are very expensive luxuries), but the facts are undeniable. We have below replacement birthrates for much of the world (like 1.8 children per woman), and some notable countries (Korea, and China!) the latest 2022 data suggest 1.2 children.

So we've been living through a period where expanding lifespans overwhelmed the declining birthrates to give us a still expanding population, but that period is ending. So now in the 2020s, in almost all of the industrialized world we are running low of young adults which is the group that produces the most children. Unless something changes, like mass cloning technology, or WWIII throwing us back into pre-industrialization, this is an accelerating trend. Every generation going forward will be smaller than the one before it. That's why some people are worried about population collapse.

Is it inevitable? No one knows because the world has never seen this before. The industrial revolution has only happened once in human history. What comes on the other side of the population hump? We don't know, but one outcome is catastrophically bad.

Since we really don't know what the future will hold, people like Elon aren't calling for a mass forced re-population program. But he is pointing out that it is very dangerous to be thinking the opposite, that we have too many people, that we should be cutting back on having kids. It isn't obvious now, but China will absolutely be paying the price for its one child policy.
Thank you for this summary of the book...interesting ideas....I've got too many to read right now to try and start another one! haha.

The way our society works right now is part of the problem with this situation though. Childcare between 18 months and 5/6, College, etc... is way too expensive and it seems a lot of our politicians don't care about that. My wife and I are not going to go into debt just have multiple children, so we have one.

And maybe the Earth does need a lower population rate if the entire planet is not going to go 100% renewable energy....ever read

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate


So I would ask Musk this before agreeing with him. Fix our childcare system and you might have more people seeing it as a problem.
 
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The way our society works right now is part of the problem with this situation though. Childcare between 18 months and 5/6 is way too expensive and it seems a lot of our politicians don't care about that. My wife and I are not going to go into debt just have multiple children, so we have one.

That's exactly my point. Childcare is indeed expensive, so why do it? Economics shapes people's action far more than they think. It certainly shapes aggregate behavior.

Now maybe the answer will indeed be government incentives. We already have a bunch of programs in various countries like child care tax breaks, free childcare, mandatory parental leave, etc. I suspect these will all get ramped up over time as countries need them. The US isn't as far along in implementing these programs as other countries are probably because our birthrate is better than others (still low though), and we supplement through immigration.
 
That's exactly my point. Childcare is indeed expensive, so why do it? Economics shapes people's action far more than they think. It certainly shapes aggregate behavior.

Now maybe the answer will indeed be government incentives. We already have a bunch of programs in various countries like child care tax breaks, free childcare, mandatory parental leave, etc. I suspect these will all get ramped up over time as countries need them. The US isn't as far along in implementing these programs as other countries are probably because our birthrate is better than others (still low though), and we supplement through immigration.

It may not be feasible for some people to go single income while the wife stays home to take care of the kids.

Daycare is crazy expensive. Some actual numbers, daycare in Salt Lake is $750 per child per month. So 3 children = $27,000 a year. Painful but doable as long as either parent makes significantly more than 27k a year. Since the median income in this country is 70k these are difficult numbers to get past.

There actually has been some movement on the childcare front. There was a bill to subsidize childcare but it failed. Additionally there's an imminent supreme court decision that I don't want to name because, well you know why, but it will definitely have serious ramifications for the childcare debate in the next few years.
 
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What comes on the other side of the population hump? We don't know, but one outcome is catastrophically bad.
As you said "we don't know", i.e. we don't know that one outcome is catastrophically bad.
This growth curve does not look sustainable in the least:
1656014641323.png

Note the massive population collapse from the Black Death. Spanish flue doesn't even show up.
So lifespan population boost has pretty much reached its end.

US life expectancy is lower than many other developed countries and world life expectancy is even lower than that, so the idea that life expectancy has peaked is not true.
 
Thank you for this summary of the book...interesting ideas....I've got too many to read right now to try and start another one! haha.

The way our society works right now is part of the problem with this situation though. Childcare between 18 months and 5/6, College, etc... is way too expensive and it seems a lot of our politicians don't care about that. My wife and I are not going to go into debt just have multiple children, so we have one.

And maybe the Earth does need a lower population rate if the entire planet is not going to go 100% renewable energy....ever read

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate


So I would ask Musk this before agreeing with him. Fix our childcare system and you might have more people seeing it as a problem.
The US has expensive child care, health care and education. Fix that and it will be easier to have children.
 
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