An unusual position, as historically governments have provided birth and death registries [0], passports, identity cards, etc, etc

[0]: or, earlier, in the West at least, the church

[I've been there for nearly all the relevant time]

The unemployment one is interesting because if you look at that graph, the universal pre-2022 pattern is basically a spike of unemployment during recessions followed by a gradual drop.

The recent pattern is a gradual increase.

I'm not a big fan of "numerical only / shape of graphs" analyses, but this does seem strange. Of course, the 2020 Covid spike is also unusual, so...

Film is a different matter of course.

This gets to the heart of my problem with Prolog: it's sold as if it's logic programming - just write your first-order predicate logic and we'll solve it. But then to actually use it you have to understand how it's executed - "understanding why Prolog is backtracking in the first place".

At that point, I would just prefer a regular imperative programming language, where understanding how it's executed is really straightforward, combined with some nice unification library and maybe a backtracking library that I can use explicitly when they are the appropriate tools.

Conveniently, for individual sports like tennis there's a guaranteed renewal mechanism - the near-term likelihood of 50 year old tennis champions is low, and that of 80 year old champions is not really worth discussing.

You're assuming a form of rent control where new tenants pay market rate. That's not the only form, e.g., Berkeley's rent control used to continue "forever", until California forbade that (Costa Hawkins act in 1995).

Switzerland has had rent control for a long time, and seems to have (rather successfully) avoided this economic basket case fate.

> i’m extremely skeptical that people move on

Historically, essentially everyone who lived long enough to have children had some of those children die [1]. So either:

- that wasn't traumatic

- they managed to deal with that trauma

- or they didn't move on, and everyone was somewhat traumatised

You can take your choice from the above, but on the whole this was the normal state of affairs for most of human history and prehistory.

[1]: from https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-an..., 50% of children died by age ~5

This is overly simplified. To a first approximation, bandwidth has kept track with CPU performance, and main memory latency is basically unchanged. My 1985 Amiga had 125ns main-memory latency, though the processor itself saw 250ns latency - current main memory latencies are in the 50-100ns range. Caches are what 'fix' this discrepancy.

You would need to clarify how manual memory management relates to this... (cache placement/control? copying GCs causing caching issues? something else?)

The French "dictée" is similar, but has you write down a spoken (coherent text). One that usually gets weekly practiced (and graded...) in primary school, but there's also spelling-bee-like events, e.g., https://dicteepourtous.fr/

French pronunciation is mostly consistent (more so than English at least), but there's several complications:

- multiple ways to spell the same sound (so you just need to know for that word)

- often silent terminal consonants (but they must be present, because they are pronounced in some contexts)

- the pronounced syllables don't always match word boundaries ("liaison")

The last two points also explain why a coherent text is a more useful test than just single complex words.