Tootfinder

📉 Fears that falling birth rates in the US could lead to population collapse are based on faulty assumptions
https://phys.org/news/2025-07-falling-birth-population-collapse-based.html

Fears that falling birth rates in the US could lead to population collapse are based on faulty assumptions
Pronatalism—the belief that low birth rates are a problem that must be reversed—is having a moment in the U.S.

War is an unconscionable horror. The illusions of "international law" and "rules of war" have lead us to believe that war can be clean, managed, and "civilized."
But wars are fought by humans and humans are messy. Humans are not well suited to following orderly rules. Humans respond to their environment. Humans in extraordinary situations can be extraordinarily vindictive and brutal. Sufficiently traumatized humans can act without a conscience, spreading trauma like an infection. If humans respond to their situation, then there can be no "civilized" war because war is itself an situation outside of the society. It is a place that promotes antisocial behavior and punishes pro-social behavior. War cannot be expected to follow "international law" because it is what fills the void created by the failure of "international law" (so long as we rely on nations).
To call for war is to inflict atrocities on civilians. It is to kill the parents and children who serve, and to destroy the combatants who survive. It is to infect both sides with a trauma that will spread if untreated, when soldiers come home or when they become mercenaries in other wars.
And yet... there are times when the brutality, the incompetence, the evil becomes so unbearable that no other option exists, when taking up arms is simply bringing symmetry to an existing asymmetric conflict. There are times when the worst possible thing is inescapable, though it can never be justified.
In this new era of war, in the scramble of conflict under the collapsing of the (poorly named) "Pax Americana," I hope that we, the people, can understand that war is not a tool to fulfill an objective. It is not part of a larger strategy. It is not an extension of deplomacy.
War is a failure.
While it may be the only way to deal with the irrational - the genocidal, the slaver, the dictator - it is still a failure. It is a failure to build a world in which these people can't control armies and economies, can't turn populations in to cults and bend nations to their will.
And we will continue to have such wars until we unite against those who would use as as pawns, who would control our lives and lead us to our deaths. We will have these wars until we unite, as one world, against those rulers. This is what I mean, and what a lot of other people mean, when we say, "No War, but Class War."

Dr. Alejandra Sanchez-Franks notes: "The author’s conclusions refer to the European climate 200 years after an AMOC change and do not describe what will happen to European temperatures and sea ice in the years and decades following an AMOC collapse.
8/

"As we approach the coming jobs cliff, we're entering a period where a college isn't going to be worth it for the majority of people, since AI will take over most white-collar jobs. Combined with the demographic cliff, the entire higher education system will crumble."
This is the kind of statement you don't hear that much from sub-CEO-level #AI boosters, because it's awkward for them to admit that the tech they think is improving their life is going to be disastrous for society. Or if they do admit this, they spin it like it's a good thing (don't get me wrong, tuition is ludicrously high and higher education absolutely could be improved by a wholesale reinvention, but the potential AI-fueled collapse won't be an improvement).
I'm in the "anti-AI" crowd myself, and I think the current tech is in a hype bubble that will collapse before we see wholesale replacement of white-collar jobs, with a re-hiring to come that will somewhat make up for the current decimation. There will still be a lot of fallout for higher ed (and hopefully some productive transformation), but it might not be apocalyptic.
Fun question to ask the next person who extols the virtues of using generative AI for their job: "So how long until your boss can fire you and use the AI themselves?"
The following ideas are contradictory:
1. "AI is good enough to automate a lot of mundane tasks."
2. "AI is improving a lot so those pesky issues will be fixed soon."
3. "AI still needs supervision so I'm still needed to do the full job."

Josef Hader erhält Film-Preis
Josef Hader wird für seine Tragikomödie "Andrea lässt sich scheiden" mit dem Ernst-Lubitsch-Preis 2025 des Clubs der Filmjornalisten ausgezeichnet.
https://www.kabarett-news.de/News-vom-11.07.2025-josef-hader.html
…

NBC News Story
How a Harvard initiative studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict collapsed “Nobody came to our defense,” said Hussein Rashid, the program’s former assistant dean, who resigned from his post in January and left at the end of June. “Our students were fantastic — our administrators were cowards.”…The next day, Rashid sent his own scathing resignation letter, accusing Harvard of failing to intervene on behalf of the program against what he viewed as months…

Hussein RashidNBC News Story
How a Harvard initiative studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict collapsed “Nobody came to our defense,” said Hussein Rashid, the program’s former assistant dean, who resigned from his post in Ja…

T CrB - overview of the accretion history, Roche-lobe filling, orbital solution, and radiative modeling: #TCrB are mounting, initiated by the discovery in 2015 of a new enhanced mass-transfer phase (SAP), which is reminiscent of the one preceding the last recorded outburst in 1946. [...] SAP has been caused by an inside-out collapse of the disk, during which the mean accretion rate onto the WD has been ~28x larger than in quiescence. SAP ended in April 2023, but from May 2024 mass-flow has intensively resumed at disk inner radii while the collapse wave reached the outer portions of the disk; the consequent revamp in mass accretion could fill the gap inherited by the fainter 2015-2023 SAP and eventually lead the WD accreted shell to ignition."

"As demographers who study fertility, family behaviors and childbearing intentions, we can say with certainty that population decline is not imminent, inevitable or necessarily catastrophic."
https://theconversation.com/fear…

Fears that falling birth rates in US could lead to population collapse are based on faulty assumptions
While the changes in population structure that accompany low birth rates are real, the impact of these changes has been dramatically overstated.

I've noticed more Russian propaganda bots that just appear and get reported and banned within a few hours. The accounts tend to be around for a few days. They often have super obvious AI generated avatars, no posts of their own, and copy and paste replies with little to no actual content. The propaganda doesn't even seem like it's trying. Just the same painfully obviously false stuff about #Ukraine.
Meanwhile, LLMs exist that can make those types of attacks far more subtle. Has anyone seen an analysis of Russian bot behavior over time? It seems like they're getting worse, but it's hard to know if there isn't something else going on.
From my perspective, it just kind of looks like the whole machine is falling apart. It's really pathetic to see how even Russian propaganda, which is like... their main thing, seems to have collapsed. They used to try, now it seems like even the troll farms are phoning it in. At some point you gotta wonder how long Putin has left before he gets the Gaddafi treatment.