Birth rates decline as societies develop out of pure agrarianism, by virtue of the fact that unskilled farm labor is no longer as valuable.

If anyone else wants to hear a whole song and dance sideshow to this, see the above. 👆

Okay, that was condescending. Elitist just didn’t seem like the right word to me.

Won’t your donation be even more meaningful if it turns out they don’t have much now?

Why do you need to know that they already have a good library before you’ll help improve their library?

I don’t think it’s elitist to say that you should read books before you build a library. That’s just good advice. And it’s fair to wonder if someone who cannot string a sentence together reads many books.

Oh my god it’s the same person who made me think I was having a stroke with the Rodney Dangerfield post. For fucks sake, I think we’ve found a use for AI at last.

OP, allow me to help:

“Rewrite this as if your brain is not melting like a crayon that’s been farted on a thousand times a second” (and then paste in what you want to post).

The professor seems to understand the difference between the full complexity of the real world and a limited educational exercise with a manageable scope. Mr. Melon does not understand this and seems to only be able to engage with the real world at full complexity. The professor is completely open about the fact that he’s running an artificial scenario with a limited focus. Mr. Melon just lobs confounds at it repeatedly. I will have to say that the professor is in the right here.

But because the professor has a british accent, glasses, and a bow tie, he’s coded as an elitist prick. And Mr. Lemon’s vernacular, colorful clothing, and casual style is supposed to contrast with this in a classic “book smart” versus “street smart” trope. In fact the entire movie is built on this premise: real world wealth and popular appeal help Mr. Lemon triumph over age, social hierarchy, institutional rules and many other obstacles to achieve social success and the attention of eligible young women. Therefore, in the language of the film, Mr. Lemon is most obviously “right.”

I wrote this mainly to reassure myself that I was not in fact having a stroke while reading the OP’s title.

I think you are asking, essentially, why there are no retail non-profits. Operate them like a charity for the common good, etc, but all you do is sell stuff. No fancy human rights work or animal rescue. Just sell stuff. Cheap. As a non-profit.

Here’s the best possible answer to this: good idea - go do it.

I think what you will find is that you can’t get any kind of investment to help you, not even a small business loan. So it’ll be hard for you to compete at all. And in the beginning you’ll be so small that you probably won’t be able to sell for less than the big stores. They buy at special lower prices because they are so big. You don’t get that. And even if you frame the whole thing as a charitable enterprise to help the poor, who will your donors be? Why would anyone give their money to this cause over something that helps the most vulnerable directly?

Oh… so it’s kind of like taking something that’s few-to-many and making it many-to-many, and the number of connections is what costs you.

You seem to know more than me so can I ask you a question? I have a general sense of what the context window is / means. But why is it so small when the model is trained on huge, huge amounts of data? Why can the model encompass a whole library of training data but only a very modest context window?

Locales differ but in my experience:

1. no one is required to eat the cafeteria food
2. the cafeteria food has a cost
3. the cafeteria food quality was low when I was young but not terrible, and is much improved now
4. many kids absolutely do bring their own lunch. My kids look at the monthly menu and decide if they want to bring something from home or eat what’s being offered at the cafeteria

To be honest I find your question confusing. It seems to start with the question of whether everyone has the option to buy items or eats at the cafeteria, but then jumps suddenly into “is the food that bad.” I don’t honestly understand quite what it is you want to know.

Bullwinkle!

Yes yes, I know you see everything through the lens of the disappearing middle class narrative.

But you’re unarmed with the basics. Agrarian societies run on family farms, where human hands mean more output. Developing countries have absolutely shit standards of living but they have the most kids. This is in direct contradiction to the way you see things.

The reason more developed countries have fewer children is because in a more advanced economy, workers need to be more educated and trained to produce value. They don’t begin contributing to the economy at age 5. More like 18 or 21. That is expensive. Nothing to do with boomers tanking the economy. This is fundamental and true around the world.

Don’t get so attached to a narrative that you become blind to everything else.

I don’t know how European solidarity works, but will people from France pay double for a shirt because it comes from Portugal instead of India?

Actually yeah I was just talking about this in a different post. Renewables are indeed big now and China is a leader.

BUT there is one catch with this. Liquid petroleum has never actually been that big a part of electricity generation. So all of China’s renewables, great as they are, are primarily reducing their usage of coal (which they have domestically in abundance).

Natural gas is also used for electricity, and they may have had to import that before.

But no matter how energy independent they get, it doesn’t free them from oil, which is still incredibly important for plastics and fertilizers.

A China that can’t manufacture cheap plastic crap is a China brought to its knees. A China that can’t feed its people is a China in revolution.

You seem genuinely unaware that countries like Germany legitimately have less than replacement birth rates. I don’t discount your point about paying people more, but I can acknowledge both these realities and you can too. While the class struggle with billionaires rages on, there actually are real demographic challenges.

What’s actually wrong with Indians?

I kind of suspect this is the entire point of this conflict. The US is not immune to global oil supply disruptions, but we are a net exporter now, while China relies very heavily on foreign imports. I would not be at all surprised if this was a way to put the hurt on China and the rest of the world, while blaming Iran for it. Of course Epstein distraction too, but not only that.

Women commit more infanticides but we would talk about that as a collection of cases of mental breakdown or criminal intent, not as an essential female quality. Similarly, this supposed “trend” with vanishingly small numbers should be looked at as a collection of cases of gross neglect or criminal intent, not as an essential male quality.

I definitely agree the language issue is much more solvable at home. Going back to the OP, their goal was to counteract depression by going out to a movie. I’m not sure that watching TV at home is going to fulfill the goal. Maybe - watching a DVD together is better than doomscrolling at least.

Maybe if you’d held your tongue instead of making that apparently worthless comment about plastic, we’d all have an example to learn from.