No, Bitcoin isn't "pegged" to any and all currencies, it's free-floating. Rather too free floating and volatile as the case may be.
The problem with Bitcoin isn't the absence of a central issuer, but right now the problem with Bitcoin is its extreme volatility. At the moment it's almost useless as a currency and it's being used as an instrument of speculation. It's far too volatile for any merchant (perhaps except the black market) to take seriously since it's value relative to all other currencies swings so wildly and so quickly and you have to convert BTC into your local currency to be able to use any funds transferred to you for the mundane things in life like buying food, electricity, housing etc. If I want to sell a thing worth about US$1200 in BTC, if I sold it at 9am today for 1BTC and waited a whole 15 minutes to convert this to USD, in the intervening 15 minutes I would have lost around $300 because of a wild swing in its value that happened over a period of just a couple of minutes.
Certainly in the Gulf of Mexico, the various platforms and structures provide a pretty rich environment for marine life. The best fishing spots are all near the various platforms since the underwater parts of their structures provide places for various plants and animals to make their homes (and thus attracting the fish that feed of this). I would imagine the mooring points for this barge will do the same.
Of course it all goes horribly wrong for this environment if there is a spill.
Then they ought to be interstate OR defense highways. Since interstate = 0 (always, in Hawaii) and defense = 1, interstate AND defense will evaluate to 0. Therefore it's still odd they are called interstates.
They work perfectly well with the lid closed. My MacBook Pro spends about 50% of its life with its lid closed. The "rats nest" of cables is just one mini-DisplayPort cable, one USB cable and one power cable, since my display works as a USB hub so everything else gets plugged into the display.
It works perfectly with the lid closed (it's a very recent machine with OS X Mavericks on it). Indeed the latest version of OSX improved its "working with the lid closed" ability - when moving from lid open and on the move to lid closed and plugged into the monitor/keyboard, there's none of the awkward five seconds of display resizing that used to happen.
It's a lot better than nothing. Let's assume the artist spent 100 hours of work just on that specific song and recording. 2336 euro then works out at 23 euro per hour pay, which is actually not bad, and so far we're only listing four months. There will be plays in July, August, September, October and so on, so the final hourly rate for making that song is probably going to be 50 or 60 euro/hr. That's a pretty good hourly rate for doing something that is basically fun.
Weather does affect range (wind always reduces it, unless you get a tailwind in both directions). The maximum airspeed of anything that flies has a limit. However rotor powered aircraft don't work as simply as you suggest. Once they exceed a certain speed (which is quite a low speed) they gain translational lift, and don't need to 'tilt' nearly as much as you would expect. My model T-Rex 500 model helicopter will do about 60 mph with very little visible forward tilt. A T-Rex 700 with an aerodynamic body will do about 80 mph without much of a problem. The limit to this helicopter's airspeed is not how much it must tilt, but retreating blade stall, when the angle of attack of the retreating blade must be so high that it exceeds its critical angle of attack. In a single rotor helicopter, the onset of retreating blade stall means that the half of the rotor disc which is retreating makes less lift than the half of the rotor disc where the blades are advancing (in most helicopters, this causes them to pitch up due to gyroscopic precession, so unless the pilot aggravates the condition by pushing the cyclic further forward, it becomes kind of self-correcting). If it goes too far and the retreating blade actually stalls the helicopter will start to roll and depart from controlled flight. With a multicopter you won't get the departure from controlled flight but you will have a severe loss of lift. This happens way WAY before the tilt angle gets great enough to significantly affect lift just due to pure thrust vector issues.
If you can only target high density areas of cities, you're already screwed, because for the forseeable future an octocopter isn't going to be able to deliver to a multi-occupancy building. It would need outdoor infrastructure (a multi item mailbox outdoors with a landing pad, in areas where all the space is already used up) since for many multi occupancy buildings you have to go inside the building just to deliver the mail. Without a lot of additional infrastructure (who's going to pay for it? Amazon?) drone delivery is only going to work where it's least suited - low density suburbs or rural areas which will likely be a long distance from the distribution centres.
I agree that it's impractical in the forseeable future (battery technology will need significant improvements - no one will tolerate a gas-powered version because it'll sound like a flying chainsaw; sense-and-avoid will have to improve very significantly to avoid collisions with birds, powerlines, people etc, failsafes will have to be better than "just shut the motors down" because that could drop the drone on a person or a moving vehicle and cause injury and/or damage. These are all hard problems that won't likely get fixed in the timeframe Bezos quotes. So I agree it's just a publicity stunt.
However, n-copters (n>=1) are not necessarily good-weather toys only. Even fixed-pitch types like the AR drone can withstand pretty gusty winds outdoors. You can also make a small something-copter VERY good in very gusty winds if it has collective pitch control on its rotors. Collective pitch rotor systems can react extremely fast. I have a number of RC helicopters, and even my tiny T-Rex 250 could be flown in 20 mph gusting winds because it was collective pitch (a fixed pitch heli would be lost with that much wind). I've flown my T-Rex 600 quite happily in gusty winds over 30 mph - I had to give up not because the heli was hard to fly, but the wind was blowing water out the tear ducts of my eyes and making the helicopter too hard to see.
The main problem with a drone (of any number of rotors) would have that was sufficiently powerful to lift a 5 lb package AND deal with potentially strong gusting winds is that it'll also be very powerful too. A blade collision with a person would likely lead to a pretty serious injury; the Amazon drone would need to be at least as powerful as a T-Rex 600, and model helicopters of this power have already resulted in deaths.
If you've got 150 bitcoins, with that sort of money it would be worth opening a bank account specifically to receive the funds from the bitcoins (and not risk your main day-to-day bank account).
It's set by the algorithm. The paper describing the mathematics behind Bitcoin is online, the clients are open source and can be examined to see how they work, all the information on how it works is freely available. No one is currently deciding "OK, today we halve the mining rate", the change in mining rate is an emergent property of the mathematics. Just like no one arbitrarily decides and has to control the shape of a graph of a log function, the shape of that graph is an emergent property of the log function.
The problem with Bitcoin at this moment is that it is in a period of hyperdeflation, so much so it's useless for anything other than either speculation or the black market. If Bitcoin was stable relative to other currencies, it would be useful. And I wish it were, and soon, because it means the possibility of ditching PayPal forever.
No. Other currencies are comparatively stable. The pound, dollar and euro hasn't changed in value relative to each other much over the last year or so. Even when the financial crisis hit, the relative values only changed by at most two digit percentages.
Bitcoin on the other hand is so volatile it's impossible for a normal business to really use it, because they would have to change their price list more than once a day since the fluctuations are so massive. Since April, for example, the dollar, euro and pound sterling hasn't really moved more than single digit percentages relative to each other, but Bitcoin's value has increased relative to the dollar by nearly 1000%. Until this extreme level of volatility settles down it's not going to be much use for anything other than speculation or the black market.
In theory it does. But until Bitcoin becomes stable, it's not really very useful as a currency to business because of the maintenance effort a business must expend constantly adjusting prices. Consider the guy selling Vectrex cartridges here: http://vectrex.playntradeonline.com/shop.html - he sells them for £34.99 in a "stable currency" which he can get away with updating perhaps once every two years. He's asking 0.6 BTC for the same thing in Bitcoin. This would have been a reasonable price just six months ago, but now it means he's asking $600 for something worth only $60 because of the wild swing in the value of BTC. In two months time 0.6BTC might be an absolute bargain if the price of bitcoin crashes again.
Until Bitcoin has the stability of the USD, GBP or Euro it won't be very useful to most businesses. Until it's useful for most businesses, it won't see much use outside speculation and the black market.
It doesn't surprise me. An Indian friend of mine told me of all the extra things Indians have to do to get a visa that British people don't, for example if an Indian has to go to the US Embassy to apply, they have to turn up in a suit or they get denied. British people can turn up in jeans and T-shirt. Immigration services (and this isn't just the US) are often filled with arbitrary rules made up by petty officials who enjoy being little Hitlers. I lived in the US for something like 6 years. The INS in the US wasn't a particular problem, but the US Embassy in London may have come out of the pages of Franz Kafka.
I had two run-ins with the US Embassy in London. The first was when getting my L-1 visa issued. They refused it, and told me I had to go to the Embassy for an interview. Since I don't live anywhere near London it's quite a trip, so I get there nice and early. Once you go past an airport-like security, you go into this large waiting room with all the other foreigners wanting visas. It's sort of a bit like a cross between a delicatessen and a railway ticket office - you get given a deli-style ticket with a number on it and they announce your number when they want to see you, and then you go to a train station style window to be interviewed (no privacy of course). I had no idea why they had refused the application, they just stamp it "224(g)" (IIRC) which means they need more information. The numbers don't seem to be read out in any particular sequence so you can't tell when you're going to be called, and you know if you miss your number they won't call it again and they'll make you come back another day, so you can't even get into a good book while you're waiting (typically 3-4 hours). They have these "newspapers" around the waiting room, I think they were called "Going USA". The first part of this newspaper was about happy emigrants who had left your country (and for some bizarre reason, the majority of them seemed to go to the US to run gas stations), how shit your country is and how wonderful the US is. The second half of this newspaper is dedicated to telling you how we're not going to give you a visa anyway.
Finally I got called for my "interview", the guy asked me one question: how long have you worked for your company? I told him, he stamped my passport and said "Your visa will be in the mail".
They could have asked me that on the phone. Or even an email. Instead of wasting money and time on a day going to London and waiting in that awful room for half of it.
The second time was when my visa was extended in the US. That part of it was pretty painless. However, I wanted to go and see my family and you have to get a new visa put in your passport. This should be a formality since the visa is already approved by the INS, so really it should be a matter of filling in the form, sending off the passport to the US Embassy in London, and a few days later getting it back. Oh no, not so easy. They refused it again! They said the form I used was out of date. So I went to the US Embassy website and downloaded the new form. It turned out to be IDENTICAL to the old form, except for the date printed at the bottom. That stupidity cost an airline change fee and an extra two weeks off work that I would have rather taken off when I chose to take them off.
Don't think I'm ragging on the US exclusively here. This kind of douchebaggery isn't confined to the US. My next door neighbour is Albanian, and exactly the kind of person we want coming to our country, she has an engineering degree, speaks three languages fluently and is a very smart person. However the British Embassy treated her as if she were a criminal, straight up saying to her "You're a liar" about her relationship with her husband. The treatment she was given in my country's name made me ashamed to be British.
The DHS quite obviously have access to sweeping surveillance information on anyone who wants to enter the US. This was obvious before the Snowden/NSA leak. A couple of years before that leak there was a British man who made national news here for being denied entry to the US (and being interrogated for hours) because of a tweet he made not long before he boarded the aircraft (the tweet was of the nature "we're gonna go out and destroy the town tonight" which in British slang means we're going to get drunk and party, but the DHS took it literally as if he were planning to bomb Seattle). To link someone's Twitter username with an actual living person in such a short period of time and have it ready on a border agent's computer when the unfortunate person arrives means they must have had pretty wide and detailed surveillance already capable of making all the links necessary to link a living person with a pseudanonymous Twitter username.
No, the amount of vehicles that Ford are recalling occurs roughly "undefined" times more than Tesla fires, since division by zero is undefined. All the Tesla fires have happened following a crash. The Ford recall is for vehicles that have caught fire without crashing. It is simply not valid to compare the Ford fires with the Tesla ones.
They didn't "reach out to Google", they contacted Google. Using "reached out to" in this context makes it sound like they are trying to make an emotional appeal to an elderly stroke patient. The perfectly usable verb "contact" is also one word instead of three.
No, I don't think you understand the Slashdotter's complaint in this case.
The issue here is the big copyright holders constantly try to get legislation passed and put in technological means (enforced by legislation) to stop people copying from them. They even go to the extent of trying to introduce "piracy is wrong" lessons in the school curriculum. But at the same time they are quite happy to pirate material off anyone they perceive to be unable to defend themselves, a classic case of "do what I say, not what I do". Quite rightly Slashdotters feel that those who constantly preach the "don't pirate our stuff" message and even go as far as getting legislation passed should be practising what they preach.
I don't buy that argument. We have hugely excessive amounts of food in the west (not to mention hugely cheap food in comparison to income). Yet the cheaper and more plentiful food is, the lower the birth rate.
For example, compare Germany which is a wealthy country with plenty of food to an African country on the brink of food shortage. Germany's population is actually decreasing (despite immigration), but the African country with low GDP and a food shortage has a very high population growth rate.
Curiously, I went through the heat gun phase with SMD but I've returned to using a soldering iron, I've found I get less bridges (jumpers) that way and I do it much neater and faster.
Slashdot Mirror
No, Bitcoin isn't "pegged" to any and all currencies, it's free-floating. Rather too free floating and volatile as the case may be.
The problem with Bitcoin isn't the absence of a central issuer, but right now the problem with Bitcoin is its extreme volatility. At the moment it's almost useless as a currency and it's being used as an instrument of speculation. It's far too volatile for any merchant (perhaps except the black market) to take seriously since it's value relative to all other currencies swings so wildly and so quickly and you have to convert BTC into your local currency to be able to use any funds transferred to you for the mundane things in life like buying food, electricity, housing etc. If I want to sell a thing worth about US$1200 in BTC, if I sold it at 9am today for 1BTC and waited a whole 15 minutes to convert this to USD, in the intervening 15 minutes I would have lost around $300 because of a wild swing in its value that happened over a period of just a couple of minutes.
Certainly in the Gulf of Mexico, the various platforms and structures provide a pretty rich environment for marine life. The best fishing spots are all near the various platforms since the underwater parts of their structures provide places for various plants and animals to make their homes (and thus attracting the fish that feed of this). I would imagine the mooring points for this barge will do the same.
Of course it all goes horribly wrong for this environment if there is a spill.
Then they ought to be interstate OR defense highways. Since interstate = 0 (always, in Hawaii) and defense = 1, interstate AND defense will evaluate to 0. Therefore it's still odd they are called interstates.
They work perfectly well with the lid closed. My MacBook Pro spends about 50% of its life with its lid closed. The "rats nest" of cables is just one mini-DisplayPort cable, one USB cable and one power cable, since my display works as a USB hub so everything else gets plugged into the display.
It works perfectly with the lid closed (it's a very recent machine with OS X Mavericks on it). Indeed the latest version of OSX improved its "working with the lid closed" ability - when moving from lid open and on the move to lid closed and plugged into the monitor/keyboard, there's none of the awkward five seconds of display resizing that used to happen.
It's a lot better than nothing. Let's assume the artist spent 100 hours of work just on that specific song and recording. 2336 euro then works out at 23 euro per hour pay, which is actually not bad, and so far we're only listing four months. There will be plays in July, August, September, October and so on, so the final hourly rate for making that song is probably going to be 50 or 60 euro/hr. That's a pretty good hourly rate for doing something that is basically fun.
So we can discuss it.
Weather does affect range (wind always reduces it, unless you get a tailwind in both directions). The maximum airspeed of anything that flies has a limit. However rotor powered aircraft don't work as simply as you suggest. Once they exceed a certain speed (which is quite a low speed) they gain translational lift, and don't need to 'tilt' nearly as much as you would expect. My model T-Rex 500 model helicopter will do about 60 mph with very little visible forward tilt. A T-Rex 700 with an aerodynamic body will do about 80 mph without much of a problem. The limit to this helicopter's airspeed is not how much it must tilt, but retreating blade stall, when the angle of attack of the retreating blade must be so high that it exceeds its critical angle of attack. In a single rotor helicopter, the onset of retreating blade stall means that the half of the rotor disc which is retreating makes less lift than the half of the rotor disc where the blades are advancing (in most helicopters, this causes them to pitch up due to gyroscopic precession, so unless the pilot aggravates the condition by pushing the cyclic further forward, it becomes kind of self-correcting). If it goes too far and the retreating blade actually stalls the helicopter will start to roll and depart from controlled flight. With a multicopter you won't get the departure from controlled flight but you will have a severe loss of lift. This happens way WAY before the tilt angle gets great enough to significantly affect lift just due to pure thrust vector issues.
If you can only target high density areas of cities, you're already screwed, because for the forseeable future an octocopter isn't going to be able to deliver to a multi-occupancy building. It would need outdoor infrastructure (a multi item mailbox outdoors with a landing pad, in areas where all the space is already used up) since for many multi occupancy buildings you have to go inside the building just to deliver the mail. Without a lot of additional infrastructure (who's going to pay for it? Amazon?) drone delivery is only going to work where it's least suited - low density suburbs or rural areas which will likely be a long distance from the distribution centres.
I agree that it's impractical in the forseeable future (battery technology will need significant improvements - no one will tolerate a gas-powered version because it'll sound like a flying chainsaw; sense-and-avoid will have to improve very significantly to avoid collisions with birds, powerlines, people etc, failsafes will have to be better than "just shut the motors down" because that could drop the drone on a person or a moving vehicle and cause injury and/or damage. These are all hard problems that won't likely get fixed in the timeframe Bezos quotes. So I agree it's just a publicity stunt.
However, n-copters (n>=1) are not necessarily good-weather toys only. Even fixed-pitch types like the AR drone can withstand pretty gusty winds outdoors. You can also make a small something-copter VERY good in very gusty winds if it has collective pitch control on its rotors. Collective pitch rotor systems can react extremely fast. I have a number of RC helicopters, and even my tiny T-Rex 250 could be flown in 20 mph gusting winds because it was collective pitch (a fixed pitch heli would be lost with that much wind). I've flown my T-Rex 600 quite happily in gusty winds over 30 mph - I had to give up not because the heli was hard to fly, but the wind was blowing water out the tear ducts of my eyes and making the helicopter too hard to see.
The main problem with a drone (of any number of rotors) would have that was sufficiently powerful to lift a 5 lb package AND deal with potentially strong gusting winds is that it'll also be very powerful too. A blade collision with a person would likely lead to a pretty serious injury; the Amazon drone would need to be at least as powerful as a T-Rex 600, and model helicopters of this power have already resulted in deaths.
He may or may not be bullshitting, but he never mentioned BBC BASIC. He said he complained on a BBS's BASIC board.
If you've got 150 bitcoins, with that sort of money it would be worth opening a bank account specifically to receive the funds from the bitcoins (and not risk your main day-to-day bank account).
It's set by the algorithm. The paper describing the mathematics behind Bitcoin is online, the clients are open source and can be examined to see how they work, all the information on how it works is freely available. No one is currently deciding "OK, today we halve the mining rate", the change in mining rate is an emergent property of the mathematics. Just like no one arbitrarily decides and has to control the shape of a graph of a log function, the shape of that graph is an emergent property of the log function.
I've been in an anechoic chamber - it is quite strange, when you talk it feels like your voice is being sucked out of you.
The problem with Bitcoin at this moment is that it is in a period of hyperdeflation, so much so it's useless for anything other than either speculation or the black market. If Bitcoin was stable relative to other currencies, it would be useful. And I wish it were, and soon, because it means the possibility of ditching PayPal forever.
No. Other currencies are comparatively stable. The pound, dollar and euro hasn't changed in value relative to each other much over the last year or so. Even when the financial crisis hit, the relative values only changed by at most two digit percentages.
Bitcoin on the other hand is so volatile it's impossible for a normal business to really use it, because they would have to change their price list more than once a day since the fluctuations are so massive. Since April, for example, the dollar, euro and pound sterling hasn't really moved more than single digit percentages relative to each other, but Bitcoin's value has increased relative to the dollar by nearly 1000%. Until this extreme level of volatility settles down it's not going to be much use for anything other than speculation or the black market.
In theory it does. But until Bitcoin becomes stable, it's not really very useful as a currency to business because of the maintenance effort a business must expend constantly adjusting prices. Consider the guy selling Vectrex cartridges here: http://vectrex.playntradeonline.com/shop.html - he sells them for £34.99 in a "stable currency" which he can get away with updating perhaps once every two years. He's asking 0.6 BTC for the same thing in Bitcoin. This would have been a reasonable price just six months ago, but now it means he's asking $600 for something worth only $60 because of the wild swing in the value of BTC. In two months time 0.6BTC might be an absolute bargain if the price of bitcoin crashes again.
Until Bitcoin has the stability of the USD, GBP or Euro it won't be very useful to most businesses. Until it's useful for most businesses, it won't see much use outside speculation and the black market.
It doesn't surprise me. An Indian friend of mine told me of all the extra things Indians have to do to get a visa that British people don't, for example if an Indian has to go to the US Embassy to apply, they have to turn up in a suit or they get denied. British people can turn up in jeans and T-shirt. Immigration services (and this isn't just the US) are often filled with arbitrary rules made up by petty officials who enjoy being little Hitlers. I lived in the US for something like 6 years. The INS in the US wasn't a particular problem, but the US Embassy in London may have come out of the pages of Franz Kafka.
I had two run-ins with the US Embassy in London. The first was when getting my L-1 visa issued. They refused it, and told me I had to go to the Embassy for an interview. Since I don't live anywhere near London it's quite a trip, so I get there nice and early. Once you go past an airport-like security, you go into this large waiting room with all the other foreigners wanting visas. It's sort of a bit like a cross between a delicatessen and a railway ticket office - you get given a deli-style ticket with a number on it and they announce your number when they want to see you, and then you go to a train station style window to be interviewed (no privacy of course). I had no idea why they had refused the application, they just stamp it "224(g)" (IIRC) which means they need more information. The numbers don't seem to be read out in any particular sequence so you can't tell when you're going to be called, and you know if you miss your number they won't call it again and they'll make you come back another day, so you can't even get into a good book while you're waiting (typically 3-4 hours). They have these "newspapers" around the waiting room, I think they were called "Going USA". The first part of this newspaper was about happy emigrants who had left your country (and for some bizarre reason, the majority of them seemed to go to the US to run gas stations), how shit your country is and how wonderful the US is. The second half of this newspaper is dedicated to telling you how we're not going to give you a visa anyway.
Finally I got called for my "interview", the guy asked me one question: how long have you worked for your company? I told him, he stamped my passport and said "Your visa will be in the mail".
They could have asked me that on the phone. Or even an email. Instead of wasting money and time on a day going to London and waiting in that awful room for half of it.
The second time was when my visa was extended in the US. That part of it was pretty painless. However, I wanted to go and see my family and you have to get a new visa put in your passport. This should be a formality since the visa is already approved by the INS, so really it should be a matter of filling in the form, sending off the passport to the US Embassy in London, and a few days later getting it back. Oh no, not so easy. They refused it again! They said the form I used was out of date. So I went to the US Embassy website and downloaded the new form. It turned out to be IDENTICAL to the old form, except for the date printed at the bottom. That stupidity cost an airline change fee and an extra two weeks off work that I would have rather taken off when I chose to take them off.
Don't think I'm ragging on the US exclusively here. This kind of douchebaggery isn't confined to the US. My next door neighbour is Albanian, and exactly the kind of person we want coming to our country, she has an engineering degree, speaks three languages fluently and is a very smart person. However the British Embassy treated her as if she were a criminal, straight up saying to her "You're a liar" about her relationship with her husband. The treatment she was given in my country's name made me ashamed to be British.
The DHS quite obviously have access to sweeping surveillance information on anyone who wants to enter the US. This was obvious before the Snowden/NSA leak. A couple of years before that leak there was a British man who made national news here for being denied entry to the US (and being interrogated for hours) because of a tweet he made not long before he boarded the aircraft (the tweet was of the nature "we're gonna go out and destroy the town tonight" which in British slang means we're going to get drunk and party, but the DHS took it literally as if he were planning to bomb Seattle). To link someone's Twitter username with an actual living person in such a short period of time and have it ready on a border agent's computer when the unfortunate person arrives means they must have had pretty wide and detailed surveillance already capable of making all the links necessary to link a living person with a pseudanonymous Twitter username.
No, the amount of vehicles that Ford are recalling occurs roughly "undefined" times more than Tesla fires, since division by zero is undefined. All the Tesla fires have happened following a crash. The Ford recall is for vehicles that have caught fire without crashing. It is simply not valid to compare the Ford fires with the Tesla ones.
They didn't "reach out to Google", they contacted Google. Using "reached out to" in this context makes it sound like they are trying to make an emotional appeal to an elderly stroke patient. The perfectly usable verb "contact" is also one word instead of three.
No. It's only understandable if he had used MS Comic Sans.
No, I don't think you understand the Slashdotter's complaint in this case.
The issue here is the big copyright holders constantly try to get legislation passed and put in technological means (enforced by legislation) to stop people copying from them. They even go to the extent of trying to introduce "piracy is wrong" lessons in the school curriculum. But at the same time they are quite happy to pirate material off anyone they perceive to be unable to defend themselves, a classic case of "do what I say, not what I do". Quite rightly Slashdotters feel that those who constantly preach the "don't pirate our stuff" message and even go as far as getting legislation passed should be practising what they preach.
The snag with doing this, this also wastes my time too. I don't want to be tied up on the phone talking to these jackasses.
I don't buy that argument. We have hugely excessive amounts of food in the west (not to mention hugely cheap food in comparison to income). Yet the cheaper and more plentiful food is, the lower the birth rate.
For example, compare Germany which is a wealthy country with plenty of food to an African country on the brink of food shortage. Germany's population is actually decreasing (despite immigration), but the African country with low GDP and a food shortage has a very high population growth rate.
Curiously, I went through the heat gun phase with SMD but I've returned to using a soldering iron, I've found I get less bridges (jumpers) that way and I do it much neater and faster.