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If you think facts persuade people then you do not understand how people work. That delusion is what is frustrating you.

Facts require three things:

- observation (the temperature is 15°C),

- omission (the temp outside my home, omitting the rest of the universe), and

- trust (my thermometer is probably working).

Almost all disagreement about Facts is really about what we’re omitting & what we trust, not the observation.


These results are not ergodic.

ensemble average != time-series average.

In order to make this claim you need to follow the same people and survey them throughout their lives, as opposed to a group snapshot in time.


Bitcoin is a public ledger. I dont understand how a zero-privacy blockchain would be the biggest enabler of ransomware? Isnt TCP/IP a bigger enabler?

SHA-256 came out of the NSA. Didnt the FBI retrieve the Bitcoin from the pipeline ransomware attack? They have lots of tradecraft at their disposal that we cannot know of.


Hustlers gotta hustle.


I heard there are more realtors in the US than listings.

That'll do it.


It's not clear how that would explain that UK house prices are soaring.


I just mean that generally when supply is limited and demand goes up (which I think is the case in the UK as well), prices rise.


Realtors are not the ones driving demand in the end, anyway.


Good luck.

With a shrunken generation of family to help due to 30+ years of one-child policy, and almost no social support (China does not really have socialized healthcare in practice) there's no one to help take care of larger families. But there is a HUGE number of rapidly aging parents and grandparents to take care of.

Add a culture that puts accumulating wealth as the #1 virtue, and it becomes nearly impossible to reverse a low birth rate.

In Canada Quebec has been paying French families to have more kids for a very long time. Today Quebec has the lowest provincial birthrate in Canada.


> Today Quebec has the lowest provincial birthrate in Canada.

Not remotely true. As of 2016 Quebec has a fertility rate of 1.59 children per women which is higher than the Canadian average (1.54), Ontario (the largest province by far, 1.46) as well as BC (1.40) and the Atlantic provinces (1.42-1.58).

See https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/91-209-x/2018001/article...


Ah that's new to me thanks! I recently saw numbers showing something different (wish I could find that link), and I was remembering this interview from 2019 - https://www.tvo.org/video/the-worlds-shrinking-problem

I found it interesting that the authors looking at the history of efforts to financially simulate birthrate found that it has never worked to reverse the decline. @21:15


Your comment is a bit bigoted, the government has been paying families, not "french families", to have more kids. This isn't segregated by language at all. Everyone gets their child allowance payments, whatever their origin.


Is the origin of the policy a desire to preserve and increase Quebec’s unique culture (“French families”), or not? If so, is it bigoted to say so?


It had its basis in the anglification of Montreal and other cities. After 1763, Quebec was a French province ran by the Brits, and due to immigration policies and family sizes, cities like Montreal became more English than French. When the French came into power after Dominion, they and the catholic church incentivized French people to have more children. After a few generations of very high birth rates (think 4 or 5 children per women), Montreal was once again more French than English. Nowadays, that policy is extended to all families, regardless of language.

Source: Something we learn in Canadian History classes.


It's not meant to be bigoted (that's you mind reading) - it's meant to give context to non Canadians. But I probably should have said "Quebec Families".


If you omit the part about the one-child policy I would think you were talking about the USA.


US has one of the best demographics in the Western world. Millennials are larger than Boomers. Plus the US can use immigration to decide what population they want. Countries not built on immigration cannot really do this in practice. see Japan.


In a lot of ways Ottawa is hard to beat.

But dont tell anyone, the "boring" reputation is a feature not a bug.

Watching the value of my house double recently suggests the word is getting out - although I get it that it's also that there's more realtors than listings, and of course money printer go Brrrr.


Is it a cold place?


Not in July :P It can get very hot (>40C) & sticky in the valley.

Can be very cold in Jan/Feb, but often too cold to snow so it can be more sunny than say Toronto, and there's a ton of outdoor activities nearby to enjoy like ski hills & trails, snowshoeing, and skating.


Belarus controls 20% of the world's potash, so nope.

Geopolitics is much more a game of Go than Call of Duty.


Does this not just drive people to organize their finances to have less income and more capital gains?

Sweden has a Gini coefficient of 0.867. Only Russia and The Netherlands are higher - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_in...


Theoretically it’s supposed to include capital gains, but according to German Wikipedia we use the net salary.


Ah so it's worse for poor people than rich people. Unintended consequences I guess.


It’s still better than flat amounts.


As a web developer, I might have billed 3x more hours thanks to IE 6. :P

I hated it but it made me a lot of money for many years, mostly thanks to governments requiring IE 6 support. LOL


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