You could probably count 100+ people in the death zone of the border crossing video alone. The final death toll will be terrible, with most never found.
One of the (many) areas in which China is doing great is industrial robotics. Not the fancy dancing dogs, but robots that replace workers in factories.
That why I said it either goes to robots or it goes away. Can the current robots replace something like this? I don't think right now but maybe they figure it out.
That factory looked like it employed a lot of easily replaceable manual work.
You don't have to replace 100% of workforce, replace just the ones whose work is the easiest to do by a robot.
Replacing 50% of workforce buys you enough time that by the time your available worker pool has shrunk 50%, robotics and AI will be much better and you will be able to replace another big chunk.
Production-wise, shrinking demographics are not such a big deal (they still have a lot of youth unemployment).
Shrinking demographics is a problem due to
a) the ratio of workers vs seniors,
b) shrinking overall demand pool -> shrinking economy
c) smaller overall talent pool -> less diversity, less 'geniuses', i.e. the real drivers of innovation, and less capability to mobilize for great projects
You haven't seem to have accounted for costs. Can the speaker still be produced at the same price? It remains to be seen. A lot of products will simply go away due to economics. Thats a reduced quality of life compared to today.
I didn't watch the entire video, but 90% of the tasks I've seen in that video are easy to automate. The hardest ones are the cable pulling, putting the coil on the insert and soldering directly on the conveyor belt.
It remains to be seen if that bluetooth speaker can be produced with advanced automation at the same price that they are selling it for at this time. If not, parts or the entire category of product (tiny LED bluetooth speaker) might just have to go away as it does not make sense economically anymore. That is the reduced quality of life I am talking about in the other comments here.
Yeah China bought out Kuka a while back and have done some amazing efforts in automation. Their pragmatic approach to AI and automation may win out in the end. We will have to wait and see.
The Ukraine is bleeding and getting destroyed, day by day. And things are getting worse, by Russian reciprocal responses, for every escalation success Ukraine has achieved.
Recent examples: Attack ships in Azov sea -> Odessa ports essentially blocked, attack Russian warehouses -> your warehouses are getting destroyed.
What path of victory do you see enabled by US (or EU, for that matter) actions? It is just prolonging the war, by giving the Ukraine (and gullible western audience) an illusion that Ukraine can win it.
> In that sense some choices are more worthwhile than others, even when they involve concessions to a bully.
So, despite recent Gallup poll showing that majority of Ukrainians are for negotiated end of the conflict a.s.a.p. https://news.gallup.com/poll/711992/ukrainians-sour-washingt..., it is worthwhile for European powers to give concessions to Trump, to achieve what? To bleed Russia more and hope that it somehow collapses (or suddenly decides to give up)? Despite the very real (bloody!) costs to Ukraine?
The countries of the south on the receiving end of US/western 'help' have been disabused of viewing US as 'a shining city on a hill' by their own experience, long time ago.
They saw Carney's Davos speech recognizing the hypocrisy of 'rules-based international order' as just another hypocrisy: you were quiet while those rules suited you, now you squeak, when you are on the receiving end.
But yes, the people in the west are waking-up.
I have gone through the fall of communism. From years when most people actually believed in it (I did not live through that, too young), to years where people knew the system is a sham, but things looked unshakeable, to years where 'something' was in the air, but a real change was unimaginable, to the sudden and very real fall.
We are in 'something is in the air' with the current western system. The problem is that for the communist countries, there was an alternative - the western system (yes, the west's soft power of jeans & coca cola worked). And the communist elites lost their will to power (or had already pre-planned path to oligarchy). Nowadays, there is no clear alternative, and the western elites seem determined to keep the system at all costs (see all the surveillance technology, the push for AI is also relevant). So, the change will be much messier and possibly bloodier than the fall of communism.
There are also other areas, maybe less abstract, but still very much of the same flavour
- emotional/social intelligence
- musical
- physical (as in being able to do various physical activities competently, without much, if any, training; understanding what your body can and can't do)
- etc
> Yes, it is, and the reason people fail with it is not because calorie counting doesn't work, but because people's maintenance calorie estimates are often poor.
I would have thought that it would mostly be because they can't resist that extra snack.
Or 'optimistically' underestimate the calories in the not pre-packaged food.
Serious question: Is there a significant variability in how the food calories are absorbed? Maybe different combinations are not absorbed equally efficiently (like with water/oil-based vitamins)
> I would have thought that it would mostly be because they can't resist that extra snack.
This is a pretty good inadvertent explanation for why a lot of people come into this discussion waving around morality arguments, lack of discipline, etc.
The average person gains a couple pounds a year. Adds up. How many calories do you think that is, amortized throughout the year? I'll help you with the math. It's 19. The average person eats 19 calories per day beyond maintenance.
It's not "weak willed slob cannot resist that extra snack."
Nah, what changed is preponderance of highly processed junk food.
When I lived, in my childhood, in communistic Bulgaria/Czechoslovakia, nobody was starving. Yes, we did not have bananas and Argentinian steaks, but there was enough basic food, including the protein-rich one (eggs, cheese, even meat, although the best cuts were 'under the counter'). Still, few people were really obese; those were obviously sick.
Nowadays, there is plenty of junk food. The food is not really cheap (especially with the recent inflation), even the junk one. Still, being obese is (almost) the new normal. You can see that everywhere.
Yes, people spend more time indoors - but even in the old times people tended to spend a lot of time behind TV.
My hypothesis is that the junk food just does not have enough real nutrients, just mostly empty calories. So the body signals 'I need more nutrients', to which the typical response is 'here you have more empty calories'.
Funnily enough, I also grew up in Communist Czechoslovakia and I have a Bulgarian father. Wouldn't expect anyone else here to fit into the same narrow box, but here we are, two of us.
The infected unfed ticks have few spirochetes in them. The numbers grow by two orders of magnitude as they feed - the reason why old bites are much more dangerous than the fresh bites.
You could probably count 100+ people in the death zone of the border crossing video alone. The final death toll will be terrible, with most never found.