Its impossible to subdue a society little removed from the 7th century, unless you're willing to replicate the actions of Alexander the Great, Mohammed, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Abdur Rahman Khan:
That is, slaughter or enslave all males from any tribes who oppose you [1], take their women for your own [2], and enforce your own culture, language and religion [3].
All of that is rather politically incorrect these days, so Afghanistan and nations like it will remain unconquerable except for nations like China who are still willing to carry out that level of annexation and assimilation.
We would have to essentially recreate the Azolla event (a geological process that took place for 800,000 years) to undo the carbon we are putting into the atmosphere:
Basically, they found that Customer A spent $100 on games, and consumed 50 units worth of Piracy.
But Customer B spent only $30 on games, and consumed 10 units of piracy.
They then concluded that piracy lead to more consumption.
The obvious rebuttals are:
1. More voracious consumers of games will probably buy more and pirate more anyway
2. It sucks if you are one of the pirated games (eg. singleplayer, non-DRM), who loses out from this equation
3. Its great if you're eg. Fortnite or Steam, where pirated games serve as the enticement to join the ecosystem, and when customers do eventually spend, it comes to you given your huge size.
American population is driven solely by immigration, given that the average fertility is far below replacement.
If you don't want one billion Americans, then you need to propose and support:
- Ending refugee programs and withdrawing from the UN convention on refugees
- Sending refugees back to safe countries
- Building walls along the southern border
- Ending the H1B visa
- deporting illegal immigrants already in the country
- Disallowing citizenship by birth
- Ending chain family migration
The bigger issue here is that Americans are moving out of States with huge pension bills, into 'younger' states with lower taxes and fewer legacy costs. Its basically a death loop playing out at an inter-state migration level.
The fertility rate is significantly below replacement (currently ~1,637.5 births per 1,000 women) [0] and yet the natural population growth rate is still positive (~+3/thousand) [1].
The two are compatible, though over the long term, if lifespans don't increase over time, a sustained below-replacement fertility would eventually require natural population growth to go negative.
> It's the 3rd smallest number of the most recent 15 years. Smaller also than 1906, 1907, 1910, 1913 and 1914.
And the 3 largest were 1.27M, 1.18M, and 1.13M. For the last 20 years legal immigration was at an average of 1.06M/year, and the year-to-year differences were negligible (except for 2003) (yes, including during the notoriously anti-immigrant Trump presidency, that averaged 1.08M legal immigrants/year). So ranking them in terms of Nth smallest/largest makes little sense - you're studying noise.
> In 2019 the American population increased from 327.2 to 238.2.
That's...not an increase.
> In 2019 1.03million immigrants were granted permanent resident status.
That's kind of a non-sequitur. To make your case, you’d need net migration numbers, not number of immigrants granted permanent residency.
> The fertility rate is 1.73.
It’s actually 1.6375, but fertility below replacement isn't negative natural growth, though sustained over the long term with steady-state life expectancy it eventually leads to it.
They closed nuclear plants because of strategic-level corruption: Former German Chancellor Gerhard Shroder accepted a senior position at Rosneft as soon as he left politics:
Unlikely. Remember that birds are dinosaurs... they spent a significant portion of their evolution at a time when there was a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere. Bird's lungs are much more efficient than mammalian lungs, which is why some birds can fly up to altitudes at which humans would lose consciousness if they weren't in a pressurized airplane cabin! With that and their mobility, birds (at least a few species) are good candidates for surviving the 6th great extinction... given that some are also very intelligent, maybe dinos will get another shot at inheriting the earth after all! ;-)
The article says they've been seeing this illness spread since April. If it was caused by rising CO2 levels I'd expect its appearance to be much less sudden.
Its been the same with lockdown. Enforce totalitarian restrictions and tracking on the plebes, whilst the rich and connected routinely ignore or are excluded from the rules.
Its possible that Lockdown is a ploy to distract from the trillions of dollars of money printing that has gone on during the pandemic, to suppress the inflation generated, as well as to normalise location and biological data collection and arbitrary interference in personal liberty and private businesses.
It seems unlikely that the motivation is really the health of the populace, when deaths and ill health from air pollution and obesity, and from the interrupted medical treatments during Lockdown itself, are routinely ignored.
You can follow the same logical pattern for all the other major issues of our time. Are the massive migration inflows of violent military-age males into Europe from MENA really about humanitarian aid, or about injecting cheap labour into the continent and providing justification for giant intelligence agencies, tracking and banning of encryption?
The same for critical race theory - is the goal the betterment of humankind, or to set the working class against eachother and to distract from insane wealth capture of the 1%?
I don't understand people who think that, at hundreds or thousands of municipal and state levels, political leaders were secretly in meetings with robes nodding excitedly over the opportunity to oppress the masses. Or that an unknown, highly contagious respiratory disease causing hospitals to overflow with no vaccine available didn't warrant some kind of mandates against public interactions.
It boggles my mind what kind of conspiratorial, Truman-Show-like mentality people must have to find bad faith so common in life.
It is the party of those in America who were against lockdowns, masks, vaccines, or any kind of precautions who are also against any kind of regulations or limits on the causes of obesity or climate change or pollution. So your comment about "why do 'they' care about the virus but not pollution" is moot.
I disagree with GP's conspiracy theory, but still I can see how it could be theoretically possible. Those "hundreds or thousands of municipal and state levels, political leaders" they are not necessarily a part of real elite. Instead, they are brainwashed during their college years to think what they masters need them to think. And then, when the actual pandemic happens they simply do not have enough critical thinking skills to reject the official narrative. Also, it is safer for their political careers to just go with the flow.
There was no hospital overflow. I live in Ukraine and even with a totally rudimentary health system and routinely ignored lockdowns, the health system functioned like any other flu outbreak. The temporary hospitals setup in the USA and UK were never used.
If anything I am quite sure that the few lockdowns we did have worsened the spread of COVID, or at least concentrated it over a shorter timeframe, since people were now packed into shopping centres at reduced hours, were forced to socialise in smaller 'speakeasy' venues, and had a greater interaction with grandparents given the closure of schools. Without lockdowns, the virus would have spread slowly and steadily, and been concentrated in younger groups who have more social interaction with eachother, like influenza each season.
Even under a 'best case' scenario for Lockdown, and using Sweden as an example, we have spent about 50 months in Lockdown in order to save 1 month of life - statiscally for someone of advanced age and with serious existing health problems:
Well, you're factually wrong that hospitals weren't at the breaking point - several in the United States were, as well as healthcare systems in Italy. The relative lack of use out of notable expansion sites was due, IMO, to mis-steps in the bureaucracy and prep, not in the lack of help that additional beds could provide.
Just flipping through your source of "50 months of quarantine", and without (yet) reading the entire article, it is citing an extrapolated number from a hypothetical, which you cite as a statement of fact. Covid has been around for 18 months. You are being misleading, or English may not be your first language.
In any case, I'm not saying certain measures or lockdowns were overkill. I believe governments and experts, in a transparent fashion, should be discussing what went wrong and right at all levels, and how we can do better, quicker, safer the next time a pandemic hits.
I strongly reject the notion that this was a massive conspiracy to test the reach of government restrictions.
Correct. That was wrong of him to do. However, do you think that because of that, it is impossible for the directive to limit public events was completely without justification or public health benefit? Could it be that he was a wanker, and it was a good decision?
Believe it or not, this is exactly what happened. I'm lucky enough to live in a country that didn't went with the lockdown madness (Japan), so I know for a fact an alternative way was possibly. It's sad to read people so brainwashed they defend the ruling class who robbed their liberties (and which didn't followed the rules themselves, as shown in France with ministers going to secret restaurants in Paris[1]).
That is, slaughter or enslave all males from any tribes who oppose you [1], take their women for your own [2], and enforce your own culture, language and religion [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banu_Qurayza
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susa_weddings
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuristan_Province
All of that is rather politically incorrect these days, so Afghanistan and nations like it will remain unconquerable except for nations like China who are still willing to carry out that level of annexation and assimilation.