Indeed this is a problem that basically all rapidly developing countries have/will/are facing. Japan is famously struggling with their aging demographic right now, China is coming in 10-20 years, Russia is gonna have a particularly nasty time in about 30 years, Italy quite a bad one in just a decade. Plenty of emerging economies like Egypt, Philippines, and Rwanda are likely having their booms right now. At the same time many western countries have benefited greatly from immigration smoothing out their age demographic brackets since immigrants tend younger.

Here is India’s population pyramid.

There is a clear swell in the population aged around 20 years old which will be fantastic for the country in the next few decades as they will have a surplus of people in the most productive years of their lives, growing the economy massively. However, right after this glut of workers there is a rather sharp decline in population which means that once these boom time people start retiring, and therefore no longer producing economic output, they will then have to be supported by the suddenly much less numerous younger generation. Meaning there will be more people living off of the work of fewer, that won’t be comfortable.

That’s why they want more babies, to lessen the blow of an aging population.

My dude you are Dutch, if the russians make it to the Netherlands for you to shoot at then the west will already be ashes.

I really wonder how Hezbollah are going to take effectively ceding territory to the Lebanese Armed Forces(LAF). The agreement apparently mandates that after the 60 day transfer process that LAF, alongside UN forces, become the sole military presence in southern Lebanon, an area previously held by Hezbollah. While the two forces are “friendly” at the moment it also wasn’t all too long ago that they fought on opposite sides of the Lebanese Civil War, and to me it’s looking a lot like this agreement will push them closer to resuming that conflict.

The ship already is effectively detained. For the last week it’s been anchored in Danish waters surrounded by military vessels, at this very moment I count 5 German and 1 danish military/coast guard ships within a few km of of the Chinese Yi Peng 3. This article is basically just Sweden asking for the ship to be moved to their own waters so they can more easily investigate, the motivation being that the cable was damaged within Swedish maritime borders so they should be the ones leading the investigation.

Oh sweet I get to vent about The August Few: Amygdala by Sam Fennah.

So Sam is primarily a youtuber, he makes animations with these very unique and somewhat disturbing characters and over time he made a bit of a narrative using them, eventually he made it into a 1000 page book. As one might expect looking at his animations this book is very weird, it’s got some extremely interesting and alien worldbuilding which challenges the reader a lot. As a piece of art this book is incredibly effective in that it makes the reader reflect on it’s far reaching themes, but as a book I really kinda hate it.

At the core of the book is the question of what the ideal society is, but only one option is ever really presented, what I can only describe as anarcho-dawinism. When one character opposes this state and proposes the possibility of a kinder and more inclusive society she is betrayed, hung from a balcony over a crowd, she orgasms while choking to death, and “When the body was lowered, it was groped, defiled, spat upon, split.” This is not presented as a bad thing, simply as the people rejecting her idea, the language used is very “marketplace of ideas.”

At the start of the book Sam tries to disavow himself of what he wrote in an author’s note, part of which reads: “The views of the characters are not the views of the author. This book is not a promotion of ideas, but an exploration of ideas.” Sam did not need to make the characters orgasm when they died, he did not need to make them reproduce via necrophilic rape, he did not need to make every characters a literal baby eating cannibal, and he did not need to present social-darwinism as an ideal society, but he did, he choose to write these things.

I hate this book, I read it over a year ago and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, it is a great piece of art.

While ideally you’d want a column for serving size, package size, and per 100g, if you’re only gonna have one it should definitely be the per 100g since that’s the only one that allows you to easily compare between different brands and products.