Absolutely horrible, it’s sad anyone had to live through that. I hope you are OK now.

force her to abort me.

Wow I didn’t know they did that! That’s horrible.

Also she got sterilized for giving birth to me.

Goddam, they were absolutely ruthless!
I think congratulations for being alive is in order.
It may have been OK to have a policy, but this kind of enforcement is absolutely not IMO.
I thought it was only about losing privileges like the ability for the children to get a higher education.

2 All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
6 All posts must be news articles.

As time has shown, they just never fucking do when they’re in charge.

Yes, the problem is that USA only has 2 right wing parties.

I’m hoping things are bad enough this time for democrats to actually do something. I’m not holding my breath, though.

That’s what I hoped under Bush, and his 2nd election was already a serious slap in the face. That Obama was elected made me somewhat hopeful, although he too was clearly right wing, and had clearly American exceptionalist viewpoints.
When Trump was elected, all hope was shattered, and now that Trump was elected a second time, I almost don’t care about USA anymore, except that USA is still a significant global power. And trends in USA have a tendency to spread globally. So we can’t ignore USA. But fuck they are the drunk bullying cousin you wish would have stayed home at family gatherings, because whenever he turns up, he ruins everything.

I also do still care, because despite USA being an asshole country now, there are a lot of Americans who are actually good people, and I do hope they will be able to turn things around. But as you say, I’m not holding my breath.

Isn’t it? If the population is growing too fast to be sustainable, who else can regulate this? Having many children is a disease of poor countries, having to few children is a disease of rich countries.

You can prevent people from having many children by taking away privileges. Problem is it doesn’t work so well the other way around. But would you find it equally wrong to stimulate child birth though giving privileges to families with children? Both are regulation to adjust behavior. Where I live we have incentives for people to get children, and we have free fertility treatments.
Would it be wrong if we had too many children to for instance remove free fertility treatment if you already have a child?
I don’t think it’s quite as black and white as you suggest. And almost ALL governments of developed countries have policies that influence how many children people get. Except those policies are to stimulate people having children rather than preventing it.

I just don’t see the one child policy as a good idea in any way because it’s too extreme. If they had to have a policy on this to stabilize the population, it should have been a 2 child policy. And realistically at the time they introduced the policy, the global population was increasing at a unsustainable speed, and the same was the case for China, and they had to do something to prevent people from having an average of about 5 children, simply to help the people get out of poverty. But they went to far IMO.

If USA falls completely it may be both a blessing and a curse. But yes USA is falling like an angry giant.
But I wouldn’t underestimate China, they came from next to nothing half a century ago, to now being a global power in many ways equal to USA, leading in production but also many scientific fields and having one of the worlds 3 biggest economies while still growing their economy faster than USA and EU. They have been doing just about all the right things, investing heavily in education and infrastructure, while also improving living conditions and creating a huge middle class.

I agree 100% that Russia is no super power, Russia is way worse off than China regarding incompetence and corruption, and they are merely the 4th biggest economy in Europe. IMO The only thing really scary about Russia is that they have nukes.

Best wishes to South America and Africa.

If we could have a world order built around the values of EU, based on the concept of prosperity through cooperation and mutual respect, that would be awesome. If we can agree among the different parts of the world on how to coexist, it doesn’t matter who is at the center of it or has the leadership. But as things are looking now, it can’t be USA. USA is way to disruptive to be a plausible world leader anymore.

How is that relevant? The problem in China now is that the policies worked for setting the number down, but now it doesn’t work for setting it up.
And it’s far from the government just “saying” so. The policy was enforced with privileges for those that followed it, and loss of privileges if you didn’t.
Notably whether your child would be able to get an education. And that shit actually works whether I would want to follow it or not.

I always found the one child policy weird, why wasn’t it a two child policy to maintain population stability?

since 1980, <snip> the number of enrolled students decreased from 9.9 million to 5.07 million.

That’s half the student in 45 years!

Korea’s birthrate ― the lowest in the world with the total fertility rate remaining below 0.8

Meaning it’s getting even worse!!

These numbers are insane, I’ve heard that South Korea is working like crazy to make robots that can help lift the burden of taking care of the elderly. But I wasn’t aware it was this bad!!

Calm down, now you are talking to yourself.

From the article:

This could be five to 50 times greater than the rate found in plastic bottles or metal cans, scientists say.

By normal formatting standards that means cans have the lowest average.

From the article linked by u/givesomefucks:

The study could not directly establish whether there was any health risk from the consumption of such beverages sold in glass bottles or not, due to the lack of toxicological data.

The plastic particles turned out to be contamination matching the paint of the caps, so it is different types of plastic, and that could be either better or worse.
Seems like cans are the safest option.

From the context it appears this is in UK, it would have been nice if they had started off early telling us where they are actually held.

But no matter where it is, this is sad, live to fight another day is a good motto. Hunger strikes rarely accomplish anything but harm to those that do it.

I 100% understand what you mean. I just bought a VW ID.4, and IMO they have a good balance. Everything needed for normal driving is handled with buttons, and although some are touch, they do have haptic feedback, and it works OK IMO.
I was looking at the Skoda Enyaq, because it has traditional buttons and more things operated through them.
But it cost about €5000 extra for the same features as is in our fully equipped ID.4 when used and 4 years old. But now I’m happy we chose the ID.4 instead of an Enyaq with fewer features. Because the ID.4 works way better than I expected.
It’s crazy and previously absolutely unheard of that the Skoda version of a similar car to a genuine VW is more expensive.

greece nearly drug down the EU when theirs popped off,

Erh no! Don’t trust the sensationalist stories about the Euro collapsing for this or that reason. Those stories are always without merit, my guess is they serve a purpose for speculation or are just sensationalist stories.

USD is the cornerstone to the entire western financial system

What are you smoking? It doesn’t make a hoot of difference to the rest of the world to trade in another currency. But more likely than not, it won’t be a single currency replacing USD, it will be a basket of currencies where USD will probably be a part.
In Europe the Euro totally dominates the financial market and has done for years. I think you mean the currency for trade, and for that the Euro obviously dominates in Europe.

You can PM me too if it comes to that.

I like how they start off with inflation, and show it’s not so bad.
Then second they show the interest rate is declining, something the steadying inflation makes room for.

Then third they show the jobs numbers are awful. The thing that might explain 1 and 2.
Because if the economy is in recession, it is normal for inflation to drop, the economy is cooling so no overheating causing inflation.
Finally GDP seems fine too, but we know this number is heavily influenced by AI growth that has absolutely nothing to do with Trumps policies, and that most think is a bubble.
Looking closer on the inflation curve, it shows a significant uptick from April and forward. Something that shouldn’t happen when the economy apart from AI seems to be slowing down. This increase in inflation seems to me 100% created by Trump making difficulties with for instance tariffs for the general American market.

So all in all IMO from an economic perspective this looks mostly like a C minus when considering the context of the numbers.
But that’s actually way better than expected, because I expected an F. I think without the AI bubble it most definitely would have been an F, as the declining interest rates have NOT kept the wheels turning, showing something with the economy is off.

USA already has widespread poverty, the longest work hours, lacks free healthcare and education, has the lowest life expectancy among economically comparable countries, has a dysfunctional democracy and AFAIK the greatest inequality among rich democracies.

So USA is already a shit-hole country, and among shit hole countries, totalitarian countries are the absolute worst.
If you think people have it bad now, especially below middle class, you just wait and see what it will be like if USA becomes a totalitarian country!

Oh I absolutely expected USA to be surpassed by China at some point. And for USA to gradually lose international dominance.
But the shit USA is making for itself is turbocharging that process by at least a factor 10.
Some might say it doesn’t really make much difference because the end result remains the same. But the problem is that this doesn’t give the world the same amount of time to adjust. Disruption is generally bad, and disruption of world power is no exception.
Of course the worst disruption is to USA, and that will have a serious negative impact on American business, and if the US dollar loses the position as the world reserve currency, the significance of the American debt will be way more serious.

And then lose control of numerous functions of your car.
It’s simply not an option in modern cars.