This is surely part of the story historically, but not recently. Women’s labor force participation rate peaked in the late 90s in the US, while total fertility rate is down ~20% since then. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002
There could be a rubber band effect, where it takes time to get a feel for things like paying for childcare. The reaction is going to come from those who are observing what's happening to the "early adopters".
You're comparing an average, but the demographics are different. If you compare, say, native-born-white to native-born-white, they fit those inputs much closer.
Total fertility is down because a smaller fraction of the population are immigrants from Mexico and Central/South America now and those immigrants have a higher birth rate. Their children regress to the mean.
The fertility rate has decreased significantly for US-born women of every race and ethnicity since the 1990s. I couldn't quickly find good stats on trend in birth control usage or labor force participation by race, ethnicity, or immigration status, but I'm skeptical that the trend is in the opposite direction for any particular demographic.
So I expect the claims in my previous comment still hold even for, e.g., native-born whites as a subgroup: flat-to-decreasing birth control usage, declining labor force participation, but still declining fertility rate. Obviously the magnitudes of those changes may be different at the subgroup level, but I don't see how the data is compatible with the claims of the comment I initially replied to.
I don’t think the evidence either way is strong enough to call that one a myth. There are lots of other differences between the two countries that could offset the impact of Austria’s childcare subsidies.
Civ III is still my go-to activity for long flights with no internet - I've yet to find a better way to instantly time-travel forward 12 hours.
I haven't tried OpenCiv3, but I'm glad it exists - getting vanilla Civ III running on MacOS is a hassle and still has issues with e.g. audio and cutscenes. I also hope it leads to a way to improve worker automation. Managing your workers well is important, doing it manually is tedious, and the built-in Automate feature is really bad.
where do people derive replay value in factorio? I found It got entirely formulaic after my first run, and with SPM as the common measuring stick- its just "who sank the most time into a map."
I understand many people self sooth using it, and thats fine. Doesn't make it a good game for replay.
-- Somebody with more hours in ONI than Dosh has in Factorio
For me its optimization and scale. Make resources farther, recipes 8x or whatever scale, try and make a factory that can eat and spit out insane amounts of materials. Try to keep up with the expanding need for raw ore and power against the increasingly powerful biter raids. Also there are some achievements for like not using lasers or using mostly solar, or go all out with the technically optional nuclear power plants.
2) I guess I can see how some people would like that. But, that's adjacent to what killed factorio for me- It feels like a "Low Code"/"No Code" programming solution to me.
Slightly tangential but recently I've gotten into the Ilwinter Game Design games Dominions 6 and Conquest of Elysium 5. I was surprised how similar but how different they are to Europa Universalis and Civilization respectively. Very interesting studies in horizontal game design where every faction has dramatically different gameplay strategies.
It used to be Factorio for me (I live in Australia, so long flights happen a lot). The problem with Factorio the flight isn't long enough! and the game bleeds into 100+ hours post-flight.
DF gets all the news (rightfully so, it's an epic game that I've dumped a ton of hours into) but if you haven't already, consider checking out Songs of Syx. It's like DF but multiplied by 100. You can have tens of thousands of citizens, doing most of the things they do in Dwarf Fortress, and a lot more, including waging huge wars against the neighbors. The limits of DF kinda made me sad, actually, that you are limited to so few Dwarves (and don't say it's because you want to know the story of all of them, because after 30 or so you lose track of who is who anyways, so might as well up the limit from 100 to 50K, or more? ;) Songs of Syx has also routinely been getting massive updates since 2020 and I have a feeling the code is a bit cleaner so the solo dev can add features faster (unlike DF's code base which is, according to one of the new devs a nightmare to work with). It's a game that is never talked about but deserves a whole lot more love from gamers.
I don't mean to cast shade on DF, I really do love it, and am happy for its existence, I just think that DF fans should also look into Songs of Syx.
The defining difference for me are the generated stories in DF, which often are a lot of random trash but still give a feeling of a deeper meaning.
> I've yet to find a better way to instantly time-travel forward 12 hours
I find it very hard to use a computer in the cramped tables of the plane. And the person in front always ends up aggressively reclining only when I have a laptop out. Plus I feel bad that maybe my bright light is disturbing the people sleeping next to me.
Qantas offer premium economy, about 39” leg room and a few extra inches of width.
If I travel long haul personally I will always go business, booked wel in advance. It’s rare enough that the extra cost is worthwhile. Others spend the money on fancy cars instead.
I remember being a high paid techie getting 19 hours of paid work done between Melbourne and New York, on a laptop in economy (and a long layover in LAX due to a storm). It was fricking glorious, most productive day of my life.
When I fly transatlantic I don't mind paying to get an exit row or bulkhead seat, but even just premium economy is a much more significant increase in cost over economy, at least flying from Canada.
Business class flights from Sydney to San Francisco cost A$6k, 6-10x as much as economy. Flights from Sydney to Europe are more like 3-4x (A$7k vs A$2k) but still ludicrously expensive. Good luck convincing your company to expense that for work trips, and most of us don't have SV salaries. Honestly, I still manage to get some work done on long flights, the more annoying thing is flights which don't have power outlets or WiFi.
If you are a point hacker you could spend the points on upgrades (which tend to give you better rates than buying base tickets) but then you're paying for a minor comfort improvement that you wouldn't pay for normally -- which is a textbook example of induced consumption and is playing into exactly how airlines want you to use points.
13" Macbook Air, I rarely use a mouse to begin with. Trans-Pacific flights usually have a few extra inches of legroom compared to domestic flights, so it's not that cramped even in economy (and obviously a non-issue in premium economy or business).
The total war games are like civilization but with actually good combat. Especially if you get mods like DEI for Rome 2, RTR for Rome 1 remastered, etc. It's regrettable that we let the grimdark warhammer crowd define the series.
The paradox grand strategy games are like civilization but with real agency and at times straight up historical accuracy.
Meanwhile I have to deal with Ghandi actually nuking everyone (the bug is ACTUALLY REAL IN CIV 5, the best modern civ game!). Not sure why Indians aren't mad as hell at the whole series.
I have found paradox games to have uneven game mechanics; some run miles wide, some of them run deep, and many others are just very superficial, and there is no reliable indication which will be which when you are playing fresh.
I've put a lot of time into the Total War series. My favourite is probably Shogun 2. I will say that the combat is quite fun at first but once you learn ranged combat, artillery, and the "sweet spot" it falls apart.
Gets to the point where only defensive battles are any fun at all. Attacking just means you sweet spot your way to a flawless victory.
This exploit seems to be present in every TW game I've played, including Rome 2. It's totally ruined the series for me.
No, but if you run a shadow or offline camera-only model in parallel with a camera + LIDAR model, you can (1) measure how much worse the camera-only model is so you can decide when (if ever) it's safe enough to stop installing LIDAR, and (2) look at the specific inputs for which the models diverge and focus on improving the camera-only model in those situations.
Exactly: they convert video into a world model representation suitable for 3D exploration and simulation without using LIDAR (except perhaps for scale calibration).
OpenAI models in general, yes - `opencode auth login`, select OpenAI, then ChatGPT Pro/Plus. I just checked and 5.3-codex isn't available in opencode yet, but I assume it will be soon.
I don’t think that statement was missing the point. As you point out, what matters is the total cost of ownership of the system. The cost of launching mass into space today isn’t the only reason terrestrial data centers are more cost effective today, but it’s the main one. If you make it cheap enough to send giant solar arrays and radiators to space, the other costs of operating in space may start to look like a small price to pay to eliminate the need for inputs like land and batteries.
Driving to work is the most common way of commuting everywhere in the US except NYC. So in that sense, no, taking a taxi to work daily is not normal, just as walking, biking, and taking public transit aren’t normal.
When I worked in San Francisco I took Caltrain to the city, but I took Waymo from the train station to the office. San Francisco, like almost all US cities, has poor local transit coverage. In my case there was a bus that took a similar route, but it only ran every 20 minutes even during commute hours and wasn’t coordinated with the train, so if everything was running on time it would have been a 17 minute wait (plus an extra 5 minutes walking). I was busy and well paid enough that spending the extra $10 to save ~20 minutes of travel (and the uncertainty of when the bus would arrive, and how strongly it would smell like piss) was well worth it.
Natural gas, not coal. From Wikipedia [0], "The electrical energy generation mix in 2024 was 40.7% natural gas, 31.8% coal, 15.5% nuclear, 4.5% solar, 3% wind, 2.9% hydroelectric, 1.4% biomass (including refuse-derived fuel), and 0.2% other." The new generation capacity being added is 1.4 GW natural gas and 1.1 GW solar [1]. New coal plants aren't economical under any reasonable market assumptions anywhere in the US.
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