Why on earth would you want to crush a car unless it's too old or damaged to be usable? If you want to confiscate someone's car, that's fine, you can just resell it. If you want to crush cars, you need to do some kind of "cash for clunkers" program where you buy up shitty old cars and crush them, and I don't mean 10-year-old cars either like that last poorly-run program, I mean 70s-80s junkers which have terrible crash safety, poor fuel economy, and very high emissions. For poor people who rely on those junkers, give them one of the newer confiscated cars from the people driving without a license.
Long-distance rail isn't that bad in the US; we haul a huge amount of freight by rail. Trucks are used a lot because they're more flexible and can haul to the final point-of-use (like a big Walmart store), but there's a lot of freight that comes by container on a ship from Asia and then gets put on a train. Also, a lot of bulk cargo (like coal) is shipped exclusively by train.
As for trucks, how often do you see an accident between a semi and a car? They just aren't that frequent; it's stupid car drivers hitting each other where people get killed. The big difference is training and professionalism: truck drivers have lots of training, difficult driving tests to get a class-A license, and they're all professional drivers who do it almost every day for a living. They also have rules to follow like how many hours per day they're allowed to drive (which sometimes they fudge, but it's nothing like the way "normal" people drive when they might be very tired, drunk, etc.). Usually, the only time I see or even hear of truck accidents is in very bad weather.
On top of that *everyone* seems to think they are a 'good above average' driver. I personally am an average driver. I make mistakes here and there. I get distracted easily. etc,etc,etc...
Oh bullshit. I'd be willing to bet good money that you're a well-above-average driver. The fact that you recognize your deficiencies and know and practice all the driving rules you listed (2-second rule, signaling lane changes, etc.) proves it. It's the people who think they're great drivers who are usually the bad ones.
"Average" drivers are the ones like you describe: tailgating, not signaling, texting while driving, etc.
Yes, a software update IS a new model. Teslas don't have "model years", they make changes on-the-fly, whether they're hardware or software. (SW changes usually get rolled out to everyone that has the compatible hardware, HW changes are normally only done on the assembly line.)
-1 Stupid. You can easily buy a very nice used car for $8 these days. You don't *need* to buy new; as long as everyone is continuously moving to something *newer*, things get better. 10 year old cars these days are still very safe, far better than 20-year-old cars.
but I know personally two guys who backed over their children - killing them.
I wonder if, before they backed over their own kids, if you were ask them if backup cameras were a good idea, they would have scoffed at the notion like a bunch of moronic "technologists" here do. Honestly, I feel like this place is full of the nursing-home crowd sometimes.
I don't think any cars still use 3-channel ABS; that was a thing back in the 90s. As for pro drivers, I'm sorry, they can't out-brake ABS either. There's only one pedal for braking on any car (except tractors which have 2): ABS controls the brakes individually. It isn't physically possible to do that as a human. Nor is it possible to sense a wheel has locked up, even if you had a way to release brake pressure on that one wheel.
Blind spot monitoring should be mandatory. Lots of people suck at checking their blind spots, and can't even figure out how to adjust their mirrors properly to minimize them. Also importantly, modern car designs, because of aerodynamic requirements and crash safety, have absolutely terrible visibility to the rear and sides. BSM mitigates this greatly, and better than turning your head ever could. Also, BSM is frequently used also for RCTA: rear cross-traffic alerts. That's where you're backing out of a parking space in a parking lot and someone is driving by too quickly. There's no way for you to see that vehicle because you're parked next to some giant van or something, but the BSM sensors in the rear bumpers *can* see the oncoming traffic or pedestrians and alert you.
Tire pressure monitoring is necessary (and mandated now) because it's very hard to see if a modern tire has low air pressure, and basically impossible if it's a run-flat tire. Underinflated tires waste a lot of fuel in aggregate.
Rear-view cameras are mandated in new cars starting 2018 IIRC, and for good reason: lots of kids are run over by people backing out of their driveways. This is partly aggravated by the terrible rear-view visibility I mentioned above, but even on a shitty little 80s car is easy to do because a small kid simply isn't visible from the driver's seat when he's directly behind the car. If you don't use yours much, it sounds like you're an old person who's likely to back into a pole even though it showed up clearly on your backup cam, because you're too lazy or unable to learn new things to get used to it. My car has one and I use it exclusively; turning around to look backwards is just dumb when I have a fisheye-lens camera showing me everything including lines to indicate exactly how much room I have. I've never been able to back up as accurately and safely as I can now, or to parallel park as well as I do now. I read an article about a long-term review for my car, in Car & Driver IIRC, and of course one of their long-term drivers managed to back into a pole with the car, causing $1500 in damage. Who was it? It was the old guy, of course, who thought he didn't need the backup camera. Maybe we should have mandatory driver testing of older people, where we stick them in a new car and see how fast they adapt. If they can't adapt to newer driving aids, they lose their license. Plenty of older people are great at adapting to new technologies, but a bunch of them are stupid curmudgeons who refuse, and have no business driving.
-1 Dumb. The statistics speak for themselves: the number of deaths per mile driven have fallen greatly over the past few decades. Obviously people aren't driving that much more recklessly than before. Maybe you're just getting old and have turned into one of those people who loves to drive 10mph under the speed limit at all times, and gets pissed anyone passes you because you're causing a traffic jam.
Another factor is: why do you want to seek out life? If you just want to find other living alien species, that's fine if you're a xenobotanist or whatever, but that's an entirely different goal from finding intelligent alien life, where presumably the goal is to make contact and communicate. You're not going to do that with alien plants and their equivalent of small insects. Just look at Earth: there's countless species, but plants are completely unintelligent, and there's only a handful of animal species that have any real ability to communicate beyond simple stuff like "I'm hungry and my food dish is empty". And out of those species, there's only one species which has created written communication and technology. If we find life teeming on other planets, it's very likely we'll find a bunch of planets with very interesting lifeforms, but nothing that's built a civilization or technology or advanced communication. Heck, if you make a time machine and go back in time 1 million years, you'll find humans, but they won't be all that interesting to talk to unless you want to talk about how to make a sharpened stick or something; we've only been really interesting for the past 10k years or so. So the point is: the incidence of intelligent, civilized life may be very, very low, and I think far more rare than life in general.
He was probably modded down because it's just dumb. Schoolchildren building a starship? Are you kidding me? Agrarian nations? What are they going to contribute, aside from food for the people doing the hard work? We already buy food from agrarian nations, so it's not like anything's going to change there. Finally, we simply don't have the technology for a starship. Warp drive doesn't exist except in theory (and that theory requires some kind of exotic matter or negative energy or something like that which doesn't exist), and we're so primitive that we can't even build anything in space except some simple modules in LEO (whoopee). So at best you're talking about a big-ass rotating generation ship given our current understanding of physics, fueled by nuclear reactors. We don't know how to do nuclear fusion yet (at least not in a way that nets energy), so we need to develop that. And we need to develop the ability to mine the Moon and asteroids and do construction in space, which of course is well beyond our current capabilities.
Basically, we need to do a bunch of things before we're ready to even think about building a starship. And we're not really doing them, we're just sitting on our asses bombing underdeveloped countries which have fossil fuel reserves. And fossil fuels aren't going to help any in space.
As for what mod points are for, there is a rating called "-1 overrated". That's perfectly suited to posts which are just plain dumb, and is exactly why that rating exists.
The problem here is that this isn't anything like programming, where anyone with a PC can do software development. Those $2 SoCs only exist because there's some fabs out there creating them in enormous quantities, and benefiting from massive quantities of scale. Building a fab, and then getting set up to create a $2 SoC costs literally billions of dollars (and still millions of dollars if you ignore the fab construction cost). And this depends entirely on this one company producing countless millions of these chips, all exactly the same. Someone can't just take a $2 SoC and then tweak some of the hardware on it, like you can do with software. They're stuck with it as-is, and to make a slightly modified design will cost millions, and more if they're not going to produce and sell them in enormous quantities. The whole thing only works because there's millions of people who want an identical copy of that $2 chip. Luckily, due to the nature of CPUs and SoCs, it's dirt-cheap to throw lots of extra hardware functions onto the chip (you're not going to save any money by leaving out one A/D converter), and the chip itself, having a CPU, runs software, so you can program each one differently, or modify or upgrade the software over time, but the base hardware has to stay the same.
You've got that backwards. It's ADD-addled people who want to watch videos, and especially make them because they're too lazy to write. Non-ADD people prefer to read and write, using their literacy skills.
Exactly. I'm at work, so I can spare a minute here and there to pop in and read something and make some comment, but I sure as hell can't sit through a video here. WTF are these morons thinking? Honestly, this YouTube generation is really annoying; have people forgotten how to type or something? I can read a whole wall of text in a fraction of the time it takes to sit through some stupid video. Maybe we need to be teaching kids speedreading in early grades.
Honestly, I think you're a lot more likely to die driving to the grocery store than you are from surgical infection. As for reactions, you should be able to tell if that's a problem if you've actually had any surgeries before; if you haven't, that may be a worry, but if you have, then you know you're not allergic to the anesthesia (they seem to mostly use propofol these days, according to my last anesthetist) and can tolerate the surgery itself. These days it seems like most people have had surgery for something.
What about a touchpad or trackpoint? Or trackball?
The thing about surgeries sounds just a bit paranoid to me. You've known multiple people with RSI surgeries that went bad? Or surgeries in general? And how far in the past? It might be worth it to find a reputable surgeon for RSI work and get it done, just to save yourself all the pain and aggravation. Heck, you could probably get it done in Belgium out-of-pocket for pretty cheap and enjoy a nice vacation there to boot. Belgium has the lowest surgical infection rates in the world.
So why does everyone else need to follow the schedule of a bunch of slow-ass corporations? That's now a month of time where your systems are wide-open to hacking. This may surprise you to find out, but not everyone is a corporation: there's actually people who use computers at home!
So if you have some critical security flaw in your Windows system, and they find it and make a patch for it by Wednesday, you have to wait around until the next Tuesday to get it? That sounds like a really stupid security policy which will leave you wide open for hacking for days at a time.
Sounds bad... why don't you just switch to using your left hand for the mouse? Lots of right-handed people do just this. It also makes it easier to mouse and type simultaneously, since one-handed typing is easier with the right hand.
Well even if they did any of that, Firefox is open-source, so for the Linux distros you'd see something like PaleMoon or IceWeasel simply strip those changes out.
Exactly; they should have just teamed up with Cyanogen or made their own Android version like that. We could really use an alternative Android distro which is super-easy to install. They could just concentrate on certain popular phones even.
"Libre" is the Latin/Romance-language word for free (as in liberty). You would know this if you knew any French or Spanish, as most kids learn in high school at the least. "Libra" is a Zodiac sign. And it's one word: "LibreOffice". I don't care if you're one of those curmudgeons who doesn't like CamelCase, you can at least get the name right. You got "OpenOffice" right after all.
Nah, yahoo is just trash. Always has been. Even in the old days of the interweb when they were considered so awesome, I still never used their service, and I'm not sure what the appeal ever was (their "search" often meant sifting through topics as they tried to catalogue the web, and their home page was so full of ads and graphics and shit that it was annoying to visit on a 28.8k modem.)
No, you're just too young to remember. Yahoo was a great service in the early days, but that was when we were using modems a fraction as fast as your 28.8. When Google finally came around, that made Yahoo completely obsolete, but before usable search engines were invented, Yahoo's cataloging was quite useful.
You probably don't even remember the pre-Google search engines like AltaVista.
Rich people buy nannies, pay for private tutoring, hire maids, and simply buy off all that inconvenient shit with their mega-billions
Multi-millionaires may be able to afford that. Middle-class (and upper middle class) people can't. This isn't India where servants are dirt-cheap.
During growth periods in the US, we had baby booms--sharp upticks in population growth. My model of economic scarcity limiting population growth accurately predicts this, while yours says it's not a thing; but my model is inadequate because the limiting impacts are not direct enough. I don't understand what, specifically, happens to your life as the economy tightens. I don't get why people suddenly realize more kids would lower their standard of living by causing a major upset in the economy when kids *always* lower your standard of living.
You're not accounting for changes in culture and values. People are much less religious now, and even mega-rich people have to spend some time with their kids, or else why bother having them? You're also missing what a pain it is to carry a child to term, and what a health risk it is. Back in the "old days", this wasn't an issue so much, as women saw it as their duty, and didn't have that much say in things anyway, plus reliable contraception didn't exist. Now if a woman doesn't want more than 1 kid, she's not going to.
Basically, you're trying to apply a model that accounts for far, far too few variables.
We've come a long way from spending 20 hours per week to acquire food for every 1 person; now 2% of the population does that work--around 25 hours PER YEAR per each 1 person--and the rest of us build space ships and iPhones.
What's the difference? The people building iPhones and such still have to toil away at work all day long. It's better in that they're not out in the fields doing back-breaking work, but instead (at least the people in this country who design them, not the people in China who physically build them) sit in offices (oh excuse me, "open plan work areas") at computers, but still, it's not like they have tons of free time since they're not growing food.
I'm not saying anything should be censored; that's obviously a double-edged sword. I'm pointing out that the democratization of communication that the internet has brought us has had some very negative side effects. I don't think it's possible to put that genie back into the bottle.
Slashdot Mirror
Why on earth would you want to crush a car unless it's too old or damaged to be usable? If you want to confiscate someone's car, that's fine, you can just resell it. If you want to crush cars, you need to do some kind of "cash for clunkers" program where you buy up shitty old cars and crush them, and I don't mean 10-year-old cars either like that last poorly-run program, I mean 70s-80s junkers which have terrible crash safety, poor fuel economy, and very high emissions. For poor people who rely on those junkers, give them one of the newer confiscated cars from the people driving without a license.
Long-distance rail isn't that bad in the US; we haul a huge amount of freight by rail. Trucks are used a lot because they're more flexible and can haul to the final point-of-use (like a big Walmart store), but there's a lot of freight that comes by container on a ship from Asia and then gets put on a train. Also, a lot of bulk cargo (like coal) is shipped exclusively by train.
As for trucks, how often do you see an accident between a semi and a car? They just aren't that frequent; it's stupid car drivers hitting each other where people get killed. The big difference is training and professionalism: truck drivers have lots of training, difficult driving tests to get a class-A license, and they're all professional drivers who do it almost every day for a living. They also have rules to follow like how many hours per day they're allowed to drive (which sometimes they fudge, but it's nothing like the way "normal" people drive when they might be very tired, drunk, etc.). Usually, the only time I see or even hear of truck accidents is in very bad weather.
On top of that *everyone* seems to think they are a 'good above average' driver. I personally am an average driver. I make mistakes here and there. I get distracted easily. etc,etc,etc...
Oh bullshit. I'd be willing to bet good money that you're a well-above-average driver. The fact that you recognize your deficiencies and know and practice all the driving rules you listed (2-second rule, signaling lane changes, etc.) proves it. It's the people who think they're great drivers who are usually the bad ones.
"Average" drivers are the ones like you describe: tailgating, not signaling, texting while driving, etc.
Yes, a software update IS a new model. Teslas don't have "model years", they make changes on-the-fly, whether they're hardware or software. (SW changes usually get rolled out to everyone that has the compatible hardware, HW changes are normally only done on the assembly line.)
-1 Stupid. You can easily buy a very nice used car for $8 these days. You don't *need* to buy new; as long as everyone is continuously moving to something *newer*, things get better. 10 year old cars these days are still very safe, far better than 20-year-old cars.
but I know personally two guys who backed over their children - killing them.
I wonder if, before they backed over their own kids, if you were ask them if backup cameras were a good idea, they would have scoffed at the notion like a bunch of moronic "technologists" here do. Honestly, I feel like this place is full of the nursing-home crowd sometimes.
I don't think any cars still use 3-channel ABS; that was a thing back in the 90s. As for pro drivers, I'm sorry, they can't out-brake ABS either. There's only one pedal for braking on any car (except tractors which have 2): ABS controls the brakes individually. It isn't physically possible to do that as a human. Nor is it possible to sense a wheel has locked up, even if you had a way to release brake pressure on that one wheel.
Blind spot monitoring should be mandatory. Lots of people suck at checking their blind spots, and can't even figure out how to adjust their mirrors properly to minimize them. Also importantly, modern car designs, because of aerodynamic requirements and crash safety, have absolutely terrible visibility to the rear and sides. BSM mitigates this greatly, and better than turning your head ever could. Also, BSM is frequently used also for RCTA: rear cross-traffic alerts. That's where you're backing out of a parking space in a parking lot and someone is driving by too quickly. There's no way for you to see that vehicle because you're parked next to some giant van or something, but the BSM sensors in the rear bumpers *can* see the oncoming traffic or pedestrians and alert you.
Tire pressure monitoring is necessary (and mandated now) because it's very hard to see if a modern tire has low air pressure, and basically impossible if it's a run-flat tire. Underinflated tires waste a lot of fuel in aggregate.
Rear-view cameras are mandated in new cars starting 2018 IIRC, and for good reason: lots of kids are run over by people backing out of their driveways. This is partly aggravated by the terrible rear-view visibility I mentioned above, but even on a shitty little 80s car is easy to do because a small kid simply isn't visible from the driver's seat when he's directly behind the car. If you don't use yours much, it sounds like you're an old person who's likely to back into a pole even though it showed up clearly on your backup cam, because you're too lazy or unable to learn new things to get used to it. My car has one and I use it exclusively; turning around to look backwards is just dumb when I have a fisheye-lens camera showing me everything including lines to indicate exactly how much room I have. I've never been able to back up as accurately and safely as I can now, or to parallel park as well as I do now. I read an article about a long-term review for my car, in Car & Driver IIRC, and of course one of their long-term drivers managed to back into a pole with the car, causing $1500 in damage. Who was it? It was the old guy, of course, who thought he didn't need the backup camera. Maybe we should have mandatory driver testing of older people, where we stick them in a new car and see how fast they adapt. If they can't adapt to newer driving aids, they lose their license. Plenty of older people are great at adapting to new technologies, but a bunch of them are stupid curmudgeons who refuse, and have no business driving.
-1 Dumb. The statistics speak for themselves: the number of deaths per mile driven have fallen greatly over the past few decades. Obviously people aren't driving that much more recklessly than before. Maybe you're just getting old and have turned into one of those people who loves to drive 10mph under the speed limit at all times, and gets pissed anyone passes you because you're causing a traffic jam.
Another factor is: why do you want to seek out life? If you just want to find other living alien species, that's fine if you're a xenobotanist or whatever, but that's an entirely different goal from finding intelligent alien life, where presumably the goal is to make contact and communicate. You're not going to do that with alien plants and their equivalent of small insects. Just look at Earth: there's countless species, but plants are completely unintelligent, and there's only a handful of animal species that have any real ability to communicate beyond simple stuff like "I'm hungry and my food dish is empty". And out of those species, there's only one species which has created written communication and technology. If we find life teeming on other planets, it's very likely we'll find a bunch of planets with very interesting lifeforms, but nothing that's built a civilization or technology or advanced communication. Heck, if you make a time machine and go back in time 1 million years, you'll find humans, but they won't be all that interesting to talk to unless you want to talk about how to make a sharpened stick or something; we've only been really interesting for the past 10k years or so. So the point is: the incidence of intelligent, civilized life may be very, very low, and I think far more rare than life in general.
He was probably modded down because it's just dumb. Schoolchildren building a starship? Are you kidding me? Agrarian nations? What are they going to contribute, aside from food for the people doing the hard work? We already buy food from agrarian nations, so it's not like anything's going to change there. Finally, we simply don't have the technology for a starship. Warp drive doesn't exist except in theory (and that theory requires some kind of exotic matter or negative energy or something like that which doesn't exist), and we're so primitive that we can't even build anything in space except some simple modules in LEO (whoopee). So at best you're talking about a big-ass rotating generation ship given our current understanding of physics, fueled by nuclear reactors. We don't know how to do nuclear fusion yet (at least not in a way that nets energy), so we need to develop that. And we need to develop the ability to mine the Moon and asteroids and do construction in space, which of course is well beyond our current capabilities.
Basically, we need to do a bunch of things before we're ready to even think about building a starship. And we're not really doing them, we're just sitting on our asses bombing underdeveloped countries which have fossil fuel reserves. And fossil fuels aren't going to help any in space.
As for what mod points are for, there is a rating called "-1 overrated". That's perfectly suited to posts which are just plain dumb, and is exactly why that rating exists.
The problem here is that this isn't anything like programming, where anyone with a PC can do software development. Those $2 SoCs only exist because there's some fabs out there creating them in enormous quantities, and benefiting from massive quantities of scale. Building a fab, and then getting set up to create a $2 SoC costs literally billions of dollars (and still millions of dollars if you ignore the fab construction cost). And this depends entirely on this one company producing countless millions of these chips, all exactly the same. Someone can't just take a $2 SoC and then tweak some of the hardware on it, like you can do with software. They're stuck with it as-is, and to make a slightly modified design will cost millions, and more if they're not going to produce and sell them in enormous quantities. The whole thing only works because there's millions of people who want an identical copy of that $2 chip. Luckily, due to the nature of CPUs and SoCs, it's dirt-cheap to throw lots of extra hardware functions onto the chip (you're not going to save any money by leaving out one A/D converter), and the chip itself, having a CPU, runs software, so you can program each one differently, or modify or upgrade the software over time, but the base hardware has to stay the same.
You've got that backwards. It's ADD-addled people who want to watch videos, and especially make them because they're too lazy to write. Non-ADD people prefer to read and write, using their literacy skills.
Exactly. I'm at work, so I can spare a minute here and there to pop in and read something and make some comment, but I sure as hell can't sit through a video here. WTF are these morons thinking? Honestly, this YouTube generation is really annoying; have people forgotten how to type or something? I can read a whole wall of text in a fraction of the time it takes to sit through some stupid video. Maybe we need to be teaching kids speedreading in early grades.
Honestly, I think you're a lot more likely to die driving to the grocery store than you are from surgical infection. As for reactions, you should be able to tell if that's a problem if you've actually had any surgeries before; if you haven't, that may be a worry, but if you have, then you know you're not allergic to the anesthesia (they seem to mostly use propofol these days, according to my last anesthetist) and can tolerate the surgery itself. These days it seems like most people have had surgery for something.
Ok, after all that rambling, I still don't see your point here.
What about a touchpad or trackpoint? Or trackball?
The thing about surgeries sounds just a bit paranoid to me. You've known multiple people with RSI surgeries that went bad? Or surgeries in general? And how far in the past? It might be worth it to find a reputable surgeon for RSI work and get it done, just to save yourself all the pain and aggravation. Heck, you could probably get it done in Belgium out-of-pocket for pretty cheap and enjoy a nice vacation there to boot. Belgium has the lowest surgical infection rates in the world.
So why does everyone else need to follow the schedule of a bunch of slow-ass corporations? That's now a month of time where your systems are wide-open to hacking. This may surprise you to find out, but not everyone is a corporation: there's actually people who use computers at home!
So if you have some critical security flaw in your Windows system, and they find it and make a patch for it by Wednesday, you have to wait around until the next Tuesday to get it? That sounds like a really stupid security policy which will leave you wide open for hacking for days at a time.
Sounds bad... why don't you just switch to using your left hand for the mouse? Lots of right-handed people do just this. It also makes it easier to mouse and type simultaneously, since one-handed typing is easier with the right hand.
Well even if they did any of that, Firefox is open-source, so for the Linux distros you'd see something like PaleMoon or IceWeasel simply strip those changes out.
Exactly; they should have just teamed up with Cyanogen or made their own Android version like that. We could really use an alternative Android distro which is super-easy to install. They could just concentrate on certain popular phones even.
It's LibreOffice, not "Libra Office".
"Libre" is the Latin/Romance-language word for free (as in liberty). You would know this if you knew any French or Spanish, as most kids learn in high school at the least. "Libra" is a Zodiac sign. And it's one word: "LibreOffice". I don't care if you're one of those curmudgeons who doesn't like CamelCase, you can at least get the name right. You got "OpenOffice" right after all.
Nah, yahoo is just trash. Always has been. Even in the old days of the interweb when they were considered so awesome, I still never used their service, and I'm not sure what the appeal ever was (their "search" often meant sifting through topics as they tried to catalogue the web, and their home page was so full of ads and graphics and shit that it was annoying to visit on a 28.8k modem.)
No, you're just too young to remember. Yahoo was a great service in the early days, but that was when we were using modems a fraction as fast as your 28.8. When Google finally came around, that made Yahoo completely obsolete, but before usable search engines were invented, Yahoo's cataloging was quite useful.
You probably don't even remember the pre-Google search engines like AltaVista.
Rich people buy nannies, pay for private tutoring, hire maids, and simply buy off all that inconvenient shit with their mega-billions
Multi-millionaires may be able to afford that. Middle-class (and upper middle class) people can't. This isn't India where servants are dirt-cheap.
During growth periods in the US, we had baby booms--sharp upticks in population growth. My model of economic scarcity limiting population growth accurately predicts this, while yours says it's not a thing; but my model is inadequate because the limiting impacts are not direct enough. I don't understand what, specifically, happens to your life as the economy tightens. I don't get why people suddenly realize more kids would lower their standard of living by causing a major upset in the economy when kids *always* lower your standard of living.
You're not accounting for changes in culture and values. People are much less religious now, and even mega-rich people have to spend some time with their kids, or else why bother having them? You're also missing what a pain it is to carry a child to term, and what a health risk it is. Back in the "old days", this wasn't an issue so much, as women saw it as their duty, and didn't have that much say in things anyway, plus reliable contraception didn't exist. Now if a woman doesn't want more than 1 kid, she's not going to.
Basically, you're trying to apply a model that accounts for far, far too few variables.
We've come a long way from spending 20 hours per week to acquire food for every 1 person; now 2% of the population does that work--around 25 hours PER YEAR per each 1 person--and the rest of us build space ships and iPhones.
What's the difference? The people building iPhones and such still have to toil away at work all day long. It's better in that they're not out in the fields doing back-breaking work, but instead (at least the people in this country who design them, not the people in China who physically build them) sit in offices (oh excuse me, "open plan work areas") at computers, but still, it's not like they have tons of free time since they're not growing food.
I'm not saying anything should be censored; that's obviously a double-edged sword. I'm pointing out that the democratization of communication that the internet has brought us has had some very negative side effects. I don't think it's possible to put that genie back into the bottle.