Lubbock's population is still increasing!
I'm not sure if I have a good argument for how far into the future the estimates are worth looking at, but I think the ones for the end of the century are pretty useless. I'd love to see an evolution of the consensus 50 years out world population through time.
Ah, but here is a piece talking about the accuracy of UN estimate going back to the '60s. They show that they have been pretty accurate in the less than 50 years time frames.
It's easier now that we know where babies come from.
2024 is another year for an international census of storks.
Not closely related to this, but wasn't there supposed to be a drop in birthrates with COVID, in the US at least? I think it ended up being real but just a brief hiccup.
I thought it would be interesting to graph net new world population by year (absolute) and there's been a significant drop-off in just the past 5 years, enough to make me wonder if there are data issues.
In 1952, the world added 47m people. That number slowly increased until it peaked at 92m in 1990, then had a bit of a hump, dropping to almost 80m in 1999 then rising again to 90m in 2013.
But then: 2019 81m, 2020 76m, 2021 68m, 2022 66m. On a line graph, it's precipitous.
Maybe this reflects something anomalous like, China belatedly reflecting closer to reality in official stats? I think they see declining population growth as national weakness and have been faking their top-level stats for a while.
5. People who didn't have Covid couldn't go out, so they had to find some other way of amusing themselves.
On the general point, if global population is going to start declining, capitalist economists who have been locked into regarding growth as the only measure of economic health for 200 years are going to have to do some quick thinking.
7: Economic growth has exceeded population growth consistently for over a century, so I'm not sure why one would assume stasis would be fatal to capitalism in its current form.
Late capitalism is going to be a pain regardless.
8. True, but the pseudoscientists who populate economics departments are going to have to invent a new narrative to justify it.
Historical note: it is now 110 years since the start of "late capitalism", as defined by the German economist Werner Sombart. An insight into this author's general outlook can be gained from a quick look at his magnum opus, "The Jew and Modern Capitalism" (1911) which is very much as you might expect. The colour of his preferred shirt in the 1930s is similarly unsurprising.
I'm going by Ernest Mandel. Not that I'm going to read him either.
Ah, right, a *different* bloke who was looking forward to seeing millions of people murdered in order to build his perfect state. Gotcha.
I thought he was the guy who watched peas have sex.
Porn sucked before the internet.
But, staying with fin-de-siècle racism: the more ambitious/paranoid CCP cadres are looking at these same numbers (or there even worse less-cooked internal numbers), and I wonder how many of them are seeing a closing window of opportunity like the Wilhelmines and Nazis did.
The good news for them is that Russia is emptying.
Russian demography is like Narnian weather: always emptying, never empty.
I wouldn't be celebrating if I were an Israeli hostage or family member of one or anyone who wants to see them home safely and a permanent ceasefire in place. Yet another indication that Bibi has no interest in bringing them all back safely and another short term and short sighted Israeli tactical victory in the face of a catastrophic strategic defeat. I don't think Iran is going to go to the mattresses over Haniyeh but there will be some kind of a retaliation which brings everyone closer to a wider regional war which only Bibi and his governing coalition want.
This NABJ Trump interview was a total disaster for him
Good for his base I suppose (white supremacists)
White supremacists worried about birthing more white people and white supremacists trying to make sure the world ends because of an expanding war in the Middle East leading to the rebuilding the the Temple in Jerusalem.
Also the small number of cattle breeders still working on that red heifer.
As long as they aren't fucking the cow themselves, that's probably a subset of the second group.
Some prefer to wait until it's been used to cover upholstery.
I bet when Vance accepted Trump's offer to make him the VO candidate, he wasn't expecting it to mean that his Wikipedia entry would have to address couchfucking allegations.
There must have been hundreds of people making jokes about Vance having sex with inanimate objects. Why did that one spread? Was it a better joke? Is it mostly random?
They gave a very real-seeming reference to specific pages in the book. But much randomness.
I will admit to being an idiot, but I saw the original tweet and I fell for it for a couple of minutes. It gave a page cite to Hillbilly Elegy, and it sort of sounded like the kind of embarrassing thing he might have confessed to in passing in a memoir about what a mess his early life was. And I just didn't think about it too hard.
But I think the tweet hit exactly the note it would have if it were true, and so it spread for a bit before everyone caught on and realized it was funny.
And specificity of means. Very Portnoy's Complaint.
Here's an interview with the original tweeter
https://www.businessinsider.com/jd-vance-couch-sex-joke-author-speaks-2024-7
I loved this part:
"Perhaps, Rick said, whether Vance actually had carnal knowledge of one or more couches is immaterial. Rick suggested Vance making love to a couch may best be viewed as what Werner Herzog has described as the "ecstatic truth" -- in Herzog's words, "a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual," encompassing falsehoods that "make some essence of the man visible.""
I heard a joke wondering if it was an ongoing exclusive couch affair, or one nightstand.
Herzog's voice would make that joke better.
I have similar questions about the Weinstein or Cosby allegations. One day, something happens and what apparently lots of people knew but wasn't common knowledge becomes the story and everyone knows it.
24: This is exactly how every journalist should question him in every interview. But we won't see this elsewhere because requiring the truth is tantamount to taking sides and thus a violation of objectivity.
I was also refreshing to have an audience that was laughing at, rather than laughing with.
Trump has lost his juice. He's juiceless.
Why has no one told me that Tim Walz is a Nebraskan?
And not like a sophisticated Omaha-born Nebraskan, but born in West Point and grew up in Valentine and Butte.
34: it's in exactly the same tone as the rest of the stupid elegy, and no one read the damned thing beyond the excerpts, which were designed to attract media-liberal sympathy-gawking. Brilliant trolling.
40: and for that matter the Catholic church abuse scandal. Abuse by clergymen was a running joke for decades but it wasn't a story until suddenly it became one. Makes you wonder what else there is that everyone knows but no one really registers.
24 it was indeed. Why on earth did Trump agree to do it? For that matter, why on earth did they ask him?
49 whoever's idea it was should be given a gold medal
Not trying to be contrarian but has it actually harmed Trump? Are there many Trump voters who will be discouraged by his rudeness to eminent black journalists?
No because white supremacists are his base but it's going to hurt him with normies and even with some Republicans who don't like to think of themselves as racist. I mean they're going all in on Harris isn't really black right now
I have no idea what will hurt him and am always surprised by what does and what doesn't. That's why I'm going to keep making couch-fucker jokes.
https://www.msf.org/five-questions-about-mpox-outbreak-drc
The acceleration of the epidemic is worrying, especially as a genetic mutation has been identified in South Kivu province, with human-to-human transmission now uninterrupted for months. This had not yet been identified with the Congo Basin strain, unlike the West African strain that caused the global epidemic in 2022. In addition to this mutation, another cause for concern is that the disease has been recorded in displaced people's camps around Goma, in North Kivu, where the high population density is making the situation critical. There is a real risk of an explosion of the disease, given the huge population movements in and out of DRC.
That probably doesn't work any better than when I used "Swiper, no swiping" instead of a bike lock.
https://www.civilnet.am/en/news/790363/russia-and-iran-plan-to-build-gas-pipeline-across-the-caspian-sea/
Fortunately, new liquefaction terminals in the US will be finished first, thus preemptively filling South Asian demand and permanently weakening Russia. Unless the administration did something stupid, like refuse environmental permits.
Literally 50 years ago I read a thing in an "underground" magazine which recommended fucking couches. I had completely forgotten about it until the other day.
45-46: We figured you all knew each other.
Butte is one of those places that really emptied out. There's no high school there now.
Attn. (esp.) Doug:
https://feeds.podcastmirror.com/eurasian-knot
A book almost every episode!
61: Now less than half its peak population in 1940.
When we drove through Nebraska in May I amused myself in part by looking up the population trends of the towns we went through. The small ones in the Sand Hills were particularly stark, most at a quarter or even a fifth of their peak population--most of which occurred in 1920.
63: AIHRecommendedHB:
https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/spike-hokkaido-2/
Yeah. They had trouble before the Dust Bowl.
Boyd county has only one high school now. I don't know how much longer they can keep the lights on as a county.