In 1990 it was only 5% of Americans and now it's 50%. In the UK it's 85% but a better comparison is probably France who are in the Schengen Area so only 60% have a passport.
If I lived in France I doubt I would travel outside of the Schengen Area.
Where I live in Western Australia, it is perfectly normal for 10-year-olds to be getting on their bikes and going round to their friends' houses after school.
The swing towards "Fuck Around And Find Out" parenting has been going for the last ten years here, and everybody gives you rapturous applause when you encourage kids to have their own independent playtime.
I have also never seen a man at a playground get dirty looks, in fact there are more men out with their kids than women on the weekends (fewer during weekdays).
Absolutely. My kid just started high school shortly after our social media ban started, and they only interact with their friends outside of school via phone calls and text, without the interference of addiction-optimised algorithms. It's superb.
I always had it in my control go prevent my child using social media, but I couldn't control every other child in the school using it as the way to stay in touch. This is the kind of collective action that is beneficial for kids.
I will forever remember my experience with the development of a new tool in my job as an engineer in hazardous gas processing. We had a consultant who was developing this tool that worked in a double-act with one of our engineers, and they sat there watching us use the tool. Whenever there was something we found confusing or didn't work how we wanted it to, she just said "oh I'll change that right now, give me a sec... ok press refresh it should be working now".
This tool was mainly just a form with some free-text fields, some drop-down and email notifications of each workflow step. But the fact that it was developed by constantly iterating with the users, meant that it has been adopted universally and been incredibly efficient at managing this particular workflow.
It's the only example I can remember in my 20-year career where that happened. It is more typical that there's a vast disconnect between the people with the industry experience and the people with the skills to apply fundamental IT skills to product development.
In my particular example, the IT skills required were probably completely trivial for a professional, and all the value came from tight cooperation with users.
The Noongar calendar from the south west of Western Australia is, of course, a much better fit to the local climate. We are just starting Djeran, with probably the best weather of the year, then it'll be Makuru, with by far the most rain and plenty of rainbows, and coldest temperatures. Djilba is when it just starts warming up again and at the end of Djilba is wildflower season which is probably the most beautiful time in the region. Then it's Kambarang around October November which is perfect temperature again, and then we are into Birak which is "first summer" and Bunuru "second summer". Obviously it's linked to food availability rather than the weather but it does fit far better than the British four seasons.
I've got a 12 year old in Australia and the social media ban has been amazing. Since the algorithm-distraction-machine is parasitical on users' social network, the kids just have little interest in it because their social network is not there. They aree making phone calls to each other and riding round each other's houses on bikes.
Older teenagers who already has social media accounts have generally found workarounds, but the young teenagers are just not joining up.
It's been an excellent success story of collective action overcoming the harmful effects of private profit-motivated interests. The tech giants literally could not care less about the mental health of some teenagers in Australia, but their parents do.
It's easy to simply ban one teenager from using social media but removing a teenager from their social network is a date worse than death from their perspective. So once the parasite of social media has infected teenagers' social network and established itself, teenagers were really lumped with the choice of "do I lose contact with my friends or continue using this distraction machine specifically designed to get me hooked?" and they will always choose the latter.
I was skeptical initially, but having experienced the effects, I'm incredibly impressed that for once we have put a red line against foreign private companies harming our citizens.
My solution to this is that I ring my bell when I'm far from people, usually twice while I'm still a fair way away. It just gets pedestrians conscious that there's a bike around, while also being far enough away that it's not going to surprise them and I don't think they assume it's an aggressive bell.
My least favourite is when a cyclist speeds past and shouts "on ya right" (I'm in Australia) but they shout it when they're so close that there's no chance of hearing and understanding in time.
Sorry I didn't see your comment until now, apologies for the late reply.
A classic messy judgement call would be:
1. Input information includes some word of mouth info that I have no reason to doubt, but also absolutely no way of verifying against field data
2. A single piece of equipment is not functioning - the plant is reasonably safe to operate with the failure, but how safe? Are the other relevant protective layers in place and effective in the relevant scenarios?
3. If I decide to implement a really robust and good-quality solution that'll stand the test of time, will it actually take so long to implement that I would have been better off with something simpler but less robust?
4. Is my decision making process clearly communicated enough for the decision makers involved? Which installation manager is on shift?
5. If the regulator audited my decision making process would they raise a recommendation? So what if there's a 0.1% risk that they'll raise a recommendation as long as people are safe?
These kinds of thought processes are where I add value as an engineer in a way that's irreplaceable by LLMs. I just hope that LLMs can really improve how quickly I can access data to make my human decision-making better based in fact.
I'm an engineer in the oil and gas industry. Some of my job involves messy judgement calls that I would never involve LLMs in, but some of my job boils down to integrating different items of data that exist across documents, drawings and a few databases that are in different formats and don't cross reference each other. At times I have used LLMs as a kind of "highly enhanced search engine" to do semantic search across documentation of every different types. My alternative was opening each document and using ctrl+f, along with my intuition of knowing what document titles to search for.
For a more concrete example, I have an interface to the data that comes from every sensor on the oil processing facility. It has a built in "AI" (I try not to use that term!) but it has a feature where I ask how to process data in plain language and it'll give me the calculations, then it'll also provide a plain language summary of all the calculations I conducted. That saved me 10 hours of work.
I am a negative nancy on LLMs in general but I still passionately believe that they're a tool which every white collar employee will need to learn to use effectively.
I cringe when I hear engineers say "I didn't know the answer so I asked ChatGPT" but I also do worry that I could be significantly outperformed by another engineer with 10 years less experience in engineering and 1 year more experience in judicious use of LLMs.
This reminds me of the opposite, which is how the cost of hydrogen for home heating is surprisingly high enough that there are several consumer goods that yield more Joules of heating value per dollar.
I once worked out that burning the IKEA LACK coffee table was better value for money than hydrogen.
Sadly international diversification is far less effective during downturns, which is exactly when you need it. It really turns out that the old adage "when the US sneezes the whole world catches a cold" is borne out by the evidence: https://earlyretirementnow.com/2017/08/23/how-useful-is-inte...
I started getting concerned about the US stock market being overvalued in about 2019. If I'd followed my gut and ditched the US entirely I'd have missed out enormously.
Unfortunately the "guys, it's getting a bit frothy" stage can last for years and years. If you pull out of the stock market whenever everything's looking irrationally overvalued you're probably going to fall behind the unthinking approach of continually investing the same amount every month.
Although I don't think investments are easy to "bubble-proof" I feel like your career choices can make you more resistant to catastrophe. The strongest strategy of all (if it's practical in your lifestyle) is to be nationally and internationally mobile so that your job search can cover the entire world, and you pick whichever employer is most desperate to find someone. After that, you can sometimes transfer internally to teams that are more robust (in my industry we have teams that design new facilities and teams that run existing facilities - the ones that design new facilities are far more vulnerable to ups and downs as projects get cancelled). Finally, you can make lots of casual contacts in your industry (we sometimes get together for coffee or beer with other people in our city who do a similar job at other companies) - then when you're made redundant, you've got the inside information of where new roles might come from.
On the cost side of the equation, your choices of "how big a house & car can I afford?" should learn towards being more pessimistic, but often there's not huge scope for choice there in the short term.
Long story short, the glib answer to your question "where do I put my money now, knowing that everything's going to blow up?" is "leave it in the S&P 500 and be aware that one day it will blow up"
I was interested to hear Trump mention Australia's retirement system the other day (amongst the endless stream of what he normally talks about, it really stood out).
In Australia you have a universal Age Pension which is a backstop against extreme hardship set at the equivalent of US$20.5k, but your rate of Age Pension reduces linearly with income levels between US$9k and US$44k.
Similarly, the rate of Age Pension reduces linearly with asset levels between US$213k and US$474k, but you don't count your own home in that.
The private retirement savings system is similar to the 401(k) and Roth 401(k) except the employer doesn't typically do a match, they are just legally obligated to pay 12% of your salary. You can then contribute an extra US$20k as an income tax reduction or pretty much however much you want after-tax.
Inside the superannuation system, the gains are only taxed at 15%.
In general, it's a pretty perfect system that just leans a little too far towards being a rich person's wealth preservation tool, but overall it enables self-sufficiency while also preventing real poverty in old age.
I've benefited a lot from my specialist area (energy industry) in which consultants and analysts will post genuinely informative and thought-provoking articles. It works to enhance their technical reputation and give them publicity, and it can be very informative for me.
But to achieve any usefulness from the platform I have to aggressively prune, by blocking every contact who ever posts something I don't find interesting. My block list is vast, and my threshold for blocking is incredibly low.
Ultimately, it's probably only a community of about 100 experts that post informatively on the energy industry.
So long as you don't mind doing the work, I find LinkedIn's algorithm to be the best of the main platforms at respecting my choices of who I want to hear from (although admittedly I should probably be using Bluesky instead).
I've also had tens of people tell me they really enjoy my posts on LinkedIn - I tend to post slightly against the mainstream opinions in my industry, and with humour, so I may not have developed a particularly professional reputation, but I've gained more publicity than anyone else in my company outside of the Exec level.
I was very surprised at how many statistical methods are taught in undergraduate psychology. Far more statistics than I ever touched in engineering for sure. Yet the undergrads really treated statistics as a cookbook, where they just wanted to be told the recipe and they'd follow it. Honestly they'd have been better off just eyeballing data and collaborating with statisticians for the analysis.
I don't own guns myself but I know someone who runs a gun club and a policeman. They are both in agreement that the latest legislation changes have introduced absolutely no improvement, for example a recent lifetime ban for somebody who renewed their license one day late.
Australian gun legislation already has every protection you would expect built in. As soon as a Violence Restraining Order is in place, guns are immediately removed. Your guns need to be stored in a locked safe where the safe is bolted to the ground. Background checks on every license application. You really couldn't name a practical improvement to gun safety.
However the "something must be done" approach is applied, which wastes time targeting clearly responsible gun owners.
The trend of firearms per capita and firearm related deaths per capita is relatively stable, although it might have increased from about 8% of USA's figures to 9% of USA's figures, although I haven't established whether the apparent trend is statistically significant (since gun related deaths are a small sample size so the numbers jump around per year).
Absolutely superb. The 'hot bricks in a box' concept of very high temperature thermal energy storage has been really coming into its own with the fall of solar PV costs, and it's quite suitable for industrial consumers of medium temperature heat. There's also a heated granite storage silo in Scandinavia that's recently gone into operation. The rate of heat transfer in the heat storage material is a classic constraint.
I think this niche of 'very long duration, very constant slow rate of discharge' is clever, and it would suit industrial heat consumers but could also suit district heating for buildings in a climate that's predictably in need of heating all winter long (Canada for example).
They seem to have a decent grasp of the fundamentals, both of the technology and how to commercially carve a niche. I wish them well, and thank you for the post.
Yes - I'm a senior member of my team too (to the extent that I've previously been the team lead of similar teams) and it's so freeing to be able to:
1. Give plenty of credit to the juniors when they do good work, even if they were reliant on support, with no need to take credit myself
2. Give up some time working on my own objectives to coach the juniors, even though there's no cost code to book the time to and nobody asks me to do it
3. Easily say, with zero guilt: "no sorry that can't be done in 2 weeks, that's a 6 week job" or "sure I can do my part of this job but I'm going to need you to commit XYZ other resources if you want it to be a success"
4. Interpret the rules in the way I think is best for the organisation, not trying to please the person with the most pedantic interpretation
5. I can produce convincing explanations of how my work performance is delivering value to the organisation (whereas juniors can sometimes work their arse off and get no recognition for it)
I'm also a middle aged white man which seems to confer a lot of unearned trust, but combined with my professional experience I seriously think I have it easier than the juniors in so many ways, and it's my responsibility to give back a bit.
In Australia you start with a birth certificate and photo, and that leads to passport and driving licence. The three of those are the holy trinity of ID (though you'd very rarely be asked for your birth certificate).
With passport and driving licence, you can do anything you want, but at least they are photo ID with some anti-forgery features.
The time to steal someone's identity is before they get their first driver's licence and passport!
The majority of car sales in China are EVs (which is more than the UK, the EU and the US) so locals are buying the supply right now.
Reference: https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales