You're implying that people incapable of planning next Thursday are thinking about their pensions. Poor countries reproduce a lot because they still have a lot of people functioning on the level of biological impulses rather than rational thought.
That...may be pushing it a lot. People in poorer countries are just as capable of rational thought as anyone else. The difference is in the education they've received, the resources they have access to, and the rights individuals have. Mentally, there's little difference - minus effects of things like malnutrition in severe cases.
I grew up in the rural South (America's Third World) (N. GA) in the late 80s / early 90s and tons of children were born out of wedlock because kids were bored and fooling around. Bored, horny kids like to have sex. Now there are so many way to occupy yourself digitally that I think these is happening less. It's not that poorer areas are dumber, it's that they had less access to entertainment and sex is free.
Yes, exactly. I think the real reason why we don't see aliens is that once the population reaches certain level of intelligence and awareness, it takes only one generation thinking "this is not worth it" to cause dramatic population collapse which might wipe out entire species. And the thing is, "life isn't worth it" might actually be true, as much as evolution does everything to convince us otherwise.
But now that I think of it, there might be solutions. The problem is, they're incompatible with individualism. Imagine passing a law that everyone is obliged to take care of a child. Sure, this would cause issues, but would instantly solve the population crisis. The problem is, such a law will never be passed in a democratic society, because everyone votes according to what they believe is their own best interest, not the best interest of the group. But an absolute regime could potentially do this.
Now that I think of it, maybe the problem is that human societies grew too big too fast and our brains didn't adapt. We're capable of self-sacrifice, just in a group of max 20, not 20 million. We need a completely new paradigm of organizing the society.
Following your argument, another solution would be simply to enact measures to revert that "certain level of intelligence and awareness", and it seems that some countries are doing just that, if not exactly for the sake of reproduction :-) . So there's hope for population growth I guess?
> Now that I think of it, maybe the problem is that human societies grew too big too fast and our brains didn't adapt. We're capable of self-sacrifice, just in a group of max 20, not 20 million. We need a completely new paradigm of organizing the society.
What changed between then and now is that plastic cards stopped being the objectively best way to pay. Most countries already have online payment systems that are safer and easier to use than plastic cards - Wero is about putting them under one brand one network. Once this is done and people are familiar with the brand, you need to update terminals to accept Wero, then you roll out a software update that makes bank apps use virtual Wero cards or something like that.
It's not as much about replacing Visa/Mastercard, as it is about plastic card technology becoming obsolete, and the duopoly failing to react to the market because of corporate inertia. Had they created a modern online payment system, Wero would never take off.
Fun fact: until about a year ago it was not possible to pay using normal debit cards in most Dutch shops, you had to have a local card. I distinctly remember that AH, Vomar and Jumbo would typically reject foreign cards while Lidl and Dirk would typically accept them. Of course there were exceptions, but that was the rule of thumb.
Most Dutch people were unaware of the issue (because Dutch cards worked abroad), and those who were, were fully convinced that it's because Dutch system is objectively better (it wasn't, it was just a separate network). Then in like 2024/2025 Visa and Mastercard finally retired their special V-Pay and Maestro brands, and now most terminals in the Netherlands accept most normal cards.
For most people, preserving social norms is more important than pursuing the truth. "But freedom of speech, but artistic expression, but nobody was hurt" no. Everything even remotely related to pedophilia is inherently evil, that's it, end of discussion, stop arguing or you'll be grounded. You might be correct, but that's not relevant.
My problem with functional programming is that hardware is imperative, which means that functional approach isn't "just a different way of thinking" but an extra layer of complexity that needs to explain its existence.
In an ideal scenario, you want your employees to be fungible. You don't want any irreplaceable individuals who hold the entire organization hostage. One way of defending yourself from such individuals is ensuring that all members have enough knowledge to take other people's roles, at least after some brief training. The problem is, maintaining high level of competency and transparency is very expensive. The other solution is when your organization is a complete mess and nobody knows what they're doing anyway. Yes, this results in your organization being inefficient, but this inefficiency might actually be cheap in the grand scheme of things.
> I don't quite understand why one would waste so much resources and compute to expand some lazily conceived half-sentence into 10 paragraphs, as if it scores them some points.
Because it does. The goal here isn't to create good code, it's to create an impression of a person who writes good code. Even now, when software career is in freefall, for many people in poor countries it's still their only way out of poverty so they'll try everything possible to build a portfolio and get a job and the suffering of your little pet project isn't a part of the equation. Those people aren't trying to get Nobel prizes, they're trying to get any job that isn't farming with literal medieval-era technology.
My very radical personal opinion is that either we have small elitist circles of trust, or the internet will remain a global ghetto.
Yes, and I'm tired of pretending otherwise.
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