No worries!

I gave the proper definition of the acronym where the article did not. I’m not making commentary on the article topic.

For the 2040s, if the pattern holds, local compute power will be come dirt cheap again, and there will be very few reasons to pay someone else to host your compute power remotely. Maybe it will be supercomputers on everyone’s wrist or something.

So, what prediction did Bezos make back then, that seems particularly poignant right now? Bezos thinks that local PC hardware is antiquated, and that the future will revolve around cloud computing scenarios, where you rent your compute from companies like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

This isn’t a new idea, and it certainly predates Bezos.

I’m older now, but throughout my life there has been a pendulum swing back and forth between local compute power vs remote compute power. The price of RAM going up follows the exact same path this has gone half a dozen times already in the last 50 years. Compute power gets cheap then it gets expensive, then it gets cheap again. Bezos’s statements are just the most recent example. He’s no prophet. This has just happened before, and it will revert again. Rinse repeat:

• 1970s remote compute power: This couldn’t really compute anything locally and required dialing into a mainframe over an analog telephone line to access the remote computing power.

• 1980s local compute power: CPUs got fast and cheap! Now you could do all your processing right on your desk without need of a central computer/mainframe

• 1990s remote compute power: Thin clients! These were underpowered desktop units that could access the compute power in a server such as Citrix Winframe/Metaframe or SunOS (for SunRay thin clients). Honorable mention for retail type units like Microsoft WebTV which was the same concept with different hardware/software.

• 2000s local compute power: This was the widespread adoption of desktop PCs with 3D graphics cards as a standard along with high power CPUs.

• 2010s remote compute power: VDI appears! This is things like VMware Horizon or Citirix Virtual Desktop along with the launch of AWS for the first time.

• 2020s local compute power: Powerful CPUs and massively fast GPUs are now now standard and affordable.

• 2030s remote compute power…in the cloud…probably

In an ideal world, as they see your knowledge is harder and harder to replace, they’ll start paying more for it

This is true and happens to me.

, and that will hopefully be encouraging enough to the current workforce to learn the skills.

Here’s the challenge. Someone new that doesn’t have the skills that is enticed by the money has to make two evaluations:

• How hard is it to learn the skill?
• How long with the skill be marketable?

For me to learn the skill wasn’t difficult because is it was modern and contemporary technology at the time. Training and support resources existed, and I was able to incrementally learn how those older technologies continued to evolve or be accommodated as new technologies arrived to replace them, but then didn’t. That won’t be the case for someone new. They can’t even use the old training material I used (assuming it was even still around) because that was written assuming the technology pervasive and well supported while the opposite is true today.

As for marketability, this is an even larger gamble. Many of these technologies should have been retired decades ago, but weren’t for a variety of niche reasons. No organizations are putting out new deployments of these old technologies. The customer base/employers wanting these skills decrease every year as old legacy systems are finally retired leaving even fewer opportunities for a new person to exercise these newly acquired old skills. Its a fact that someday there will be no users of them, but when will that be? It should have happened already so what new worker would want to try and gamble on going into extensive learning on technologies that should be dead by the time they master them?

I agree about people getting dumber about computers, but sadly you’re not the first to say it.

I see it in my IT work everyday. It makes for some good job security, but I wonder what happens when the last of us that know how to work the dark magics shuffle off our mortal coil.

The Direct Denial of Service (DDOS) assault,

That’s not was DDOS means: Distributed Denial of Service

…meaning it comes from so many different sources its very hard to block.

I’m 100000% convinced any politician that has a “token” is looking to scam people…

You shouldn’t be so cynical that is only to scam people. There’s also the possibility the politician is using it as a way to accept bribes.

I’m sorry to hear that. It sounds like yours is much farther along than mine (but I have older family that matches your current experience). Is the new diet at least addressing the reflux symptoms or even with the new diet is it still occurring?

What additional power would that give his goons?

Its not automatic with martial law, but has been granted along with martial law imposition at times in US history: suspension of the writ of habeas corpus

“The right to challenge one’s detention before a judge, known as the writ of habeas corpus, is a principle of the legal system that serves as a safeguard against unlawful imprisonment. It requires the government to provide a valid reason for holding a person in custody, preventing arbitrary detention.”

source

In other words, today you can be locked up, but the Constitution requires you have rights to go before a judge and challenge your incarceration, and the judge can choose to set you free.

With the suspension you can still get locked up, but now they can just let you rot without any legal recourse to get you out.

There is a lot of research on aging repairs, I wonder if I might benefit from it in time.

Most of that anti-aging stuff I’ve seen is close to moonshot type technology and even then with little gains. However, we’ve certainly found lots of things we like do to in our society that ages us faster that we can cut out. Sadly, some of the main contributors are expensive to avoid, such as stress. Just from my personal observation it doesn’t mean living a longer life as a numeric number of years, but instead those decades at the end become much closer in lifestyle to the lifestyle of our youth with regards to mobility, cognitive function, and overall health.

I’m on day 12 of a diet to control my reflux symptoms and I feel awful and run down.

I have a family trait of reflux too. I have been able to largely alleviate it not with diet restrictions, but timing of consumption of foods and specific triggers. I like chocolate, which is a very clear trigger. Not being able to eat chocolate again would be a huge challenge for me, but knowing I just can’t eat chocolate within 5 hours or going to bed helps immensely.

Was worried I’d never hit that ‘increased energy’ I had read about.

I haven’t heard of decreased energy as a consequence of reflux. Or does this mean an “increase energy” from an otherwise more healthy diet you’re on which you’re doing to address your reflux?

Normalizes after a few weeks.

I’d have to go back to the paper, but I believe I read that they do two weeks of the restricted diet protocol, then return to their normal diet. So they may not be able to benefit from the many-weeks long acclimation.

We prepared, portioned, and provided all meals and snacks for the study. Both diets emphasized minimally processed ingredients

I was initially concerned the results could possibly explained simply by calorie restriction. However in the full paper they have a mechanism which does well to address this.

Participants were not instructed to intentionally restrict caloric intake; instead, they were allowed to request additional study foods when they needed, without any limits.

Full paper here

I would have liked to have seen if any participants actually did request more though indicating they understood the option, but I recognize the limits of the study for trying to control this one variable.

My bold claim was saying that Denmark chose the side of Western imperialism and now will have to suffer the expected consequences of it?

Are you trying to say your claim isn’t a negative thing? In all accepted parsing of the English language, I don’t know any other reasonable conclusion from your statement.

Since it is negative, you’re implying there was a better choice. So what was your implied better choice?

And I never said they made a mistake?

Oh? Then are you now clarifying that Denmark made the right choice?

But what Soviet aggression could they have had if they had been Soviets themselves, for instance?

Look at the history of Soviet actions in Poland, Lithunaina, Lativa, and Estonia for your answer.

You don’t need to answer. I think I’ve seen enough to lose hope in your posting in good faith.

they cozied up to the big baddy like the rest of Europe did, and now we’re alone, solely at their mercy.

In 1945 Denmark was liberated from Nazi occupation by the British. Britain itself was in no shape to rebuild continental Europe after itself suffering from the Blitz and toward the end of the war repeated V-1 buzzbomb attacks. The USA was the untouched ally that helped rebuild Europe with the Marshal plan. Up until trump, the USA was a good ally to Europe even in modern times especially against Soviet aggression. To say the Danes made a mistake “cozying up” to the USA is to deny actual history and reality. There was no better great power ally to Europe during the post-war years.

And I don’t have to provide better alternatives for something that could’ve happened in a different version of history

Yes you do when you’re saying the Danes made a mistake. Otherwise your criticism and your argument are empty if you can’t say what they should have done instead.

You know, you argue like the troll user UniversalMonk. You make a bold claim divorced from reality, then when challenged with facts you handwave away any parts that completely invalidate your original claim. Is this a coincidence or do you need to cycle out to a new alt again?

What I’m saying is pointing to the old vs young imbalance is disingenuous because ANY system that attempts to limit population growth will experience the same “sudden change”.

You’re treating this as a binary situation “growth” or “decline” but its not nearly that simple. The important factors are the amount of growth or decline and at the rate that is the problem with China’s implementation.

We shouldn’t discount all systems that want to limit population growth like this because ones with better metrics could actually work.

No one is suggesting that.

And as we’ve seen, this program DID WORK. It lowered population. Just not in socially healthy ways.

…and…

It’s just not logical to complain that if you have less of a growing population that your elderly population outnumbers them. That’s LITERALLY THE PURPOSE OF POPULATION CONTROL.

That is empty logic, because it follows the letter of the goal* while entirely violating the spirit of it. Using that same logic we could fix global climate change just by murdering every human on the planet. See? It “DID WORK”. Climate change fixed, but like China’s situation, the cure is worse than the disease because in fixing climate change this way would mean there would be no humans around to benefit from the fix. But hey, it “DID WORK”, right?

Of course the elderly from before will outnumber them - you weren’t controlling their population!

Again, binary thinking. A complete stable system is okay if the elderly outnumber the young by a small consistent percentage over time. That isn’t what is happening in China. They are falling off a demographic cliff! Both match your statement of fewer young to elderly, but one is a sustainable controlled decline and the other is a crisis!

In the absence of God, Europe could’ve been a continent of commies and maybe some fraternity, solidarity and class conscience would have been built amongst these ever-warring nations, maybe?

That sounds like a cop out answer to your comment above. You’re criticizing Denmark of allying with the USA. What was their better ally? Here’s your chance to back up your claims.

Are you suggesting Denmark would have been better served joining the Soviet Union, which were the closest “commies” around them?

It should be obvious that if you suddenly cut population growth you’d end up with this elderly vs young imbalance eventually as the generations that reproduced freely age out.

The problem is they did it too quickly. There’s a huge number of aging people that won’t be producing anything, but they will be consuming in their old age. The amount they consume will be far greater than the younger, smaller, population can produce. Additional, the young must produce goods and services for themselves to live their own lives.

This additional preasure on the younger generation is already also reducing birth rates accelorating this demographic crisis to a worse degree. The young aren’t having kids in any significant numbers so there won’t be enough to support the current young when they get old.

This is part of the adjustment as things reach equilibrium.

That is a massive understatement for what will be the hell that the aging population will encounter when they go unfed or uncared for when they need it the most and have no option to do for themselves.

Ideally you’d have a 2 child policy to actually replace parents 1:1 with kids. But the point is, this imbalance was bound to happen regardless and you really won’t see equilibrium until every person alive was born under the restricted policy.

2 child policy would still result in population decline. Equal replacement rate is 2.1. Some kids will die before having kids of their own. Others will grow to adulthood and choose not to have kids. So you’ll need some sets of parents to have more than 2 kids themselves to make up for these shortfalls.

This is still too early to call it a failed experiment. It’s right at the most crucial part.

The “soft landing” point was a couple of decades ago probably back in the late 80s or mid 90s. Its going to be brutal in the future for China.