TLDR; I have met quite a few very high net worth individuals, their spouses and offspring. Hundreds of them, actually. I have not been impressed overall with their intellectual capacity for learning important and lifesaving knowledge in preparation for life-changing natural survival conditions which are outside of their daily routine. The same has been true at the middle and lower income distributions under similar circumstances. I am neutral about the future IQ of the population of any of their descendants, poor or rich.. There are many other factors at play.

The long version:

That has not been my admittedly anecdotal experience among high, moderate, and average net work individuals and small to large congregations of those net worth groups in North, Central, South Americas, East Asia, the Pacific Islands, the UK and Northern Europe. I haven't found any specific factors resulting in concentration of above or below average IQ individuals within any of those groups. I have traveled much; been in direct leadership positions among high net worth individuals' on board of directors, and have been in direct contact with significant groups of low net worth populations in both labor and non-profit support roles. I do confess to not having conducted specific research in the IQ to net worth among those groups, so this is just an informed opinion.

So, I will yield on the sole point IFF net worth is assumed to be a strong proxy for high IQ; then we might be headed in a smarter direction in the portions of the general population resulting from those families. I do agree with the distinction that the proposed mechanism in the film Idiocracy is not what is occurring. It does however seem apparent that due to many different mechanisms we may be in for a significantly dumber future, and on that we also agree.

It may be that among the high net worth populations; there may be a factor within the high IQ subgroup that is aware of the complex difficulty for the planet due to excessive and wasteful overconsumption and the aggregate demand that additional population stresses the situation. That subgroup may be choosing to self deselect for reproduction, and that subgroup may be among the highest fraction of IQ. It doesn't appear that this aspect was in the study you referenced, nor in any of that study's sources' research. Did I miss that component?

I think it may be unclear that net worth and high education are a 1:1 proxy for IQ as many of the highest educated and highest earning individuals may be in that situation not because of raw IQ, but due to the other socioeconomic factors which lead to those conditions. Namely being born into high net worth households and being afforded extensive tutoring and supplemental education relative to their poorer peers. I accept the premise that highly educated households do correlate with high net worth, and the study's TFR findings relative to those points are interesting.

However, there is still a nonlinear relationship between high IQ and those factors, as well as between high IQ parents' offspring IQ levels. Not a few high net worth individuals choose mates based on factors distinct from having a similar or even a high IQ, if a strong correlation between genetic heritability and IQ is to be believed.

The study actually tracked high income with regards to increased TFR in the US and UK, while the correlation to high education was primarily in Sweden. This serves to weaken the connection between IQ and fertility as there are numerous high income situations which are specifically not correlated with high IQ or high education.

So, yes, having children is increasingly expensive especially in America, and wealthier people are more prolific. This does not appear, at least to my mind, to have direct bearing on observable trends in general population IQ in the short term, nor does it appear to be addressing future outcomes regarding the Idiocratic potential.

Yeah, these are worth exactly as much as they weigh in fractions of a short tonne.

Take this as a learning experience, and accept that al least for now, you may be in the position to afford your own Linux capable machine for personal use.

This may actually help you in the sometimes difficult task of maintaining a durable firewall between 'personal' and 'work' digital worlds. If your work machine is not even an OS you would use for personal projects, this can keep your personal productivity from creeping into the machine which is co-owned by work and their MDM vendor.

Later, when you have your own 'unicorn' idea, work won't have any claim on it being a product of employment, and the time tracking that comes with MDM can be your fortress of proof. All of your compensated time can be accounted for with the work done on the machine they own and none of your pet project will be in that time or equipment.

Also, if || when the (new) management approach reaches it's 'halt and catch fire' stage, you wont find your personal digital assets suddenly locked behind a user:pass that no longer function.

The reading at "4th grade level" is at yet another level of difficulty in French if i understand correctly. That may be where some of English' complexity has an origin.

I routinely explain to students and the curious that English is less a "core language" than it is the gradual accretion of words from many languages; primarily French and Germanic during the centuries of iterative conquest of the British Isles and the intermingling of the conquerors and the conquered in the market place, with the inclusions of Latin, Greek, Norse, Celts/Gaelic and various other lexicons through various means. It makes for a rather simplistic explanation of a complicated issue, but serves to resolve the "why are none of the language rules actually followed, and sometimes there are more numerous exceptions than adherents" family of questions.

In any case, if this is what you have an intense passion to build, keep at it!

An example of how difficult and complex this is can be readily observed in a 40 year long research grade power plant at NELHA near Kona, HI. The OTEC process uses warm surface seawater to evaporate a working fluid ( ammonia water mixture) using the vapor to drive an electric turbine, and then uses cold deep seawater from 2200ft (~671m) to drive the condenser loop and recirculate the working fluid. The significant difficulties are the massive heat exchangers required to make it work and all of the seawater facing systems face continual bio-fouling and corrosion problems.

They achieve a minimal efficiency and struggle to compete on cost with solar and wind. This is the state of the technology, when mechanical operations are just above sea level and the only real problems at depth are pipeline collapse due to over-accelerated flow and the aforementioned bio-fouling.

Moving those operations to a greater depth significantly changes the pressure. OTEC's pipe only has to deal with 2200 feet / 66.7 atmospheres (~980ppsi) while the wiring and enclosures of the 'lava thermal' rig only survived a few minutes of operation at 5000 feet / 151.5 atmospheres (~2227ppsi). It is illogical to expect for any durable, low cost, renewable power to be reliably operated under those conditions.

This also risks destabilizing poorly understood ecosystems with organisms whose lifespans typically exceed the span of time we have been studying them.

Where these activities occur in international waters the UN International Seafloor Authority requires multi-year environmental baseline studies. Prior to any non-research installation, requirements include biodiversity monitoring, chemical outputs and impacts. before any structural installations are authorized. Contractors are required to continually map biodiversity (microbes, unique gastropods, and specialized crabs) and to monitor chemical outputs in order to avoid permanently impacting the ecosystem's natural dynamics.

So, moving into 'Exclusive Economic Zone' water of a kingdom without rigorous international oversight is an indicator of how this company views the potential regulatory market.

The image of 'saving Tonga from diesel' is a nice greenwash, but if this was economically motivated and truly viable, then locations much closer to megawatt scale underserved growing markets with investment potential and scalar consumer demand, such as the Azores, New Zealand, or Izu Japan would be where this happens first.

So, nice toy research and fancy press publicity with the opportunity to get "It works" headlines and unlock the next Series A tranche is all I can see from here. Hard pass, full stop.

enginnering <~ engineering conservastive <~ conservative

Normally, i just don't care about a person's spelling. In fact, in these days of LLM tokenized prose, a little random keyboard 'mahsup' can be endearing. However, proposing a spelling help product that was made with an LLM, and then either aren't using it or it doesn't work. Not a strong Show HN outing.

I like the semantic approach though. Using context to identify the words which are likely and checking those for correct spelling is novel, at least to my awareness. Perhaps look for options to 'de-Webster' the spelling as an user choice. The American version of English is not automatically the best in all cases, much like the Oxford comma rule is not always the right way to compose a long list of similar ideas within the same sentence.

Colourful and creative authors prefer to have freedom, to choose how they organise the spelling, prose, structure and composition of their verse.

While nearly half of all habitable land is used to some extent as agriculture, the total amount of land in active cultivation has actually been declining since the early 2000's and we currently abandon more farmland every year than we clear forest or convert to agriculture. Between 1992 and 2020, ~ 7% of all cropland was effectively 'abandoned' and much of the production capacity in the west is actually intentionally kept from being fully planted in order to control against overproduction of cereal crops which in the past has been justified by arguing that this control is necessary to prevent market crashes when distribution networks cannot absorb the full capacity of a harvest.

Globally, there are about a billion acres, 400ish million hectares, ~ about half the size of Australia, which sits unused according to FAO satellite and other observables datasets.

About half of the abandonment not due to cultivability at the simplest level, but rather that of transportation of the crops to market or of access to workforce (labor or equipment) to the land. Smaller, more distant crops without significant mechanization simply cannot compete at the prices possible through mechanization. With a lack of access to global niche markets and the higher prices for, say, premium organics, many successive generations of farming families have simply moved to town and left the land sitting, unused.

The other ~ half of abandoned land is because of degraded production capacity through mismanagement; either through over-application of petrochemical fertilizers instead of crop rotation, or through mechanized tilling without careful erosion management. Many farms have neither the time nor the resources (or in the case of large industrial operations the long-term financial foresight on the part of management) to engage in multi-year regenerative practices necessary to reestablish the soil mycostructure and probiotic ecosystems necessary to recover productivity.

However, if demand were to rise sufficiently and if production instead of distribution was the driving force behind food scarcity, we do indeed have arable land reserves which do not require further destruction of uncultivated wilderness to meet a growing demand.

There is actually an inverse relationship to land productivity at scale; the larger farms do extract more gross tonnage of product at lower costs of per-unit equipment and labor, but actually those operations significantly underproduce volumes of harvestable food if measured in 'per unit of land' instead of labor hours. Fields with multi-level, interconnected plant communities significantly overproduce in terms or total volume. This has been demonstrated in nearly every place on earth using very simple techniques that have varied names and different approaches to marketing, but are all very much the same thing: call it Fukuoka's "One Straw Revolution", Bill Mollison's "Permaculture", Historic Food Forests in Africa and the Decca in India, or in the Middle East "Oasis". In the Americas it still is "Three sisters" gardening. These techniques simply are not mechanized and delivering mass volumes of single commodity product into a global distribution network and that's where the difficulty and disconnect between global populations and available nutrition originates.

If there was a technological and market incentives to connect abundant and diverse harvests in rural communities with Bodegas, restaurants, and grocery store chains in the big cities without ten middle-men adding cost for the consumer without improving the product in the least, then half of the land abandonment issue could unwind and small farms could thrive, not by delivering bulk raw indistinguishable commodity to food manufacturing, but by delivering farm fresh produce to kitchens and fruit stalls.

If that were both low-cost for the consumer, and high earning for the farmer while having quality control and assured provenance then the conversation could center around making better use of even less total cropland and restoring wilderness to a near-native sustainable state.

But as it stands now, we're not short on crop land to human population ratio so much as short on effective distribution and incentives for responsible production.

/todays-soapbox

... this is kind of my area of peculiar skill and work. I've tried to steer multinational, multimillion Euro/dollar agriculture operations that produce significant volumes of global "organically produced" harvests in the direction of cooperating with rural and indigenous farming communities in conserving soil health to the benefit of all. That's been a mixed bag, so the forward momentum is with the local rice production in rural Yamagata. Same objectives, more cooperation and long term planning.

The consequences of global supply chains.

Anecdotal but, I knew an original designer and owner of a Cali. based manufacturer of very high end audio equipment; the kind that gets used for tier one studios and audio reproduction reference, who had his chassis designs replicated and manufactured by unlicensed vendors. Not directly competing in the audio market, but as a very recognizable shape for some with the implied quality and appearance. He tried to make even an initial contact with them, mostly to find out of they could become a new resource as he was not fully satisfied with his present chassis manufacturer, and these unlicensed lookalikes were actually very well built. (We actually used one for his home media Slimserver) But at the very first email, they completely dissolved the organizational structure and vanished like smoke, only to have the exact same grey market devices appear under another entity within a few months.

Have seen all manner of grey-market Dell, HP, Asus, Cisco, Brocade (Silkworm), Qualcom, Foxconn, Liftmaster, ... the list goes on. I believe the terms for this are, unauthorised production, white branding, or three shift production in the cases where component subcontractors actually engage in overproduction of same or very similar devices.

In regulated markets; not being proactive about these issues can become quite risky. It really has been "buyer beware" pretty much the whole time.

They were almost done stitching me up when I came up from general anesthesia... I carry the 'red hair/viking' genes and a medical history of those kinds of medicines being less effective. So coming fully awake inverted in the chair with a surgeon tying flyfishing style knots with squeaking silk lines in my head was bit abrupt for all of us. Good thing I wasn't too combative. The anesthesiologist pushed the plunger and sent me down for the next little bit, but I still get laughs about coming to after it was all over and instead of waiting for a while in recovery "for my head to clear", just heading out of the lobby and walking across the street to my Grandmother's house where It was planned I would recuperate for a couple of days.

I refuse to use antibiotic soaps either. I reserve the tools of sterility for the space in front of my laminar flow hood and the like when preparing live cultures for cheeses and brews. I lived where fluoridated water was a practice during my early years when my teeth had formed - as that's actually when the flouride has the most impact...once the teeth are built, there's little effect from consuming flouride on the enamel.

Later in late grade-school I lived in a place where fluoridated water had not happened, and so the school was doing a routine annual flouride mouth rinse-and-spit routine in the class. Was a 'conscientious objector' causing some chagrin for the teachers, they would pass out the little cup of chemical brew and start the timer, while i just stared at the paper cup and got threatened with having to write "I will ...." sentences as punishment. Even that didn't really have any impact on my actions. Adding another hashmark by my name on the blackboard as a tally of pages of meaningless repetitive sentences which I would never actually do or turn in. That had zero leverage against my test scores or passing any subject. So what if I couldn't go out to recess to sweat on a bare dirt playground with zero swings or other appeal. Fine by me.

But, by 3rd grade I already had my own two-stage steromicroscope and was acutely aware of the need for balanced microbiomes in all of life, learning about soil and aquatic microbiomes from my grandfather. So, very much not the normal kid.

All that aside, my gums could use more care, so I'm trying to be more diligent and brush daily with salt, baking soda and the tiniest bit of fennel and mint oil. Its showing some improvement.

Not having them out could have easily become a life threatening situation in a real short order. So, if i hadn't been removing them to comply with those rules, the teeth themselves would have enforced a removal at some unplanned time and at potentially life threatening inconvenience.

So, you still have yours, but I certainly wouldn't still have mine.

That's the rub isn't it. The real risk as exposed by the latest Navier-tokes situation is that they cannot fully guarantee that math solution producing model didn't use the work-in-progress of the researchers who were interacting with the system to then beat the researchers to the published solution. Can any of us expect that these models won't use our own work-in-progress either internally or indirectly to overcome any technical 'moat' we might imagine to exist? Sure, there is a setting for "do not train" but what guarantees can exist given the demonstrated failure to constrain models from engaging in other deceptive actions on their own or offsite systems.

It would seem that where a 'moat' might still exist in code is probably exactly near to kernels or hardware, or in a business aspect which is orthogonal to the actual code. As previously stated; the understanding of the pain point for which the code is a solution, the depth of relationships within the industry or consumers who are potential users of the code or the outputs of that code, the ability to gain exclusive access to some actionable inputs which no matter what other code is generated to address the pain point or what scale of consumer awareness might arise the outputs will remain unique, are pretty much the core moats which remain going forward.

The standalone tool/product which is a learning project doesn't appear to have readiness to access two of those three moat types, so probably not much opportunity left for learning a way to the top that is durable if you're planning on building with or competing with LLM generated codebases.

I guess another kind of moat is, a tool which makes your own internal process much more manageable/controllable/effective and gives whatever else you do some kind of capability that you could not access or get for less than or equal to the total cost (tokens and opportunity costs) of making that tool. This might not be a 'real' moat by the definition you are asking about, but if it gives you more capability than others working in the same problem space, it's still a moat and so long as you manage not to expose 'how the sausage gets made' it could be yours. But maybe I'm just leaning to much in the direction of a Dark Forest theory.

Livestock which are fed grain and leaf forage grown from soils which are deficient in cobalt may not produce sufficient B12 for their own metabolic health and thus most commercially reared livestock will have trace cobalt compounds in the salt lick or mineral amended grain supplements.

These generally do not actually contain B12, as these compounds do not directly pass through the complex digestion of ruminants and would not actually serve the muscle growth targets of the herd, whereas trace cobalt will get those results reliably.

In turn those animals are the nutritional source of B12 for humans, as the two primary bioactive forms, methylcobalamin from cellular cytosol (the internal gel in cells) and adenosylcobalamin from mitochondria.

Vegans can reliably get non-animal sources of B12 from nutritional yeast or from manufactured sources which make the two bioactive forms through bacterial fermentation (typically Pseudomonas denitrificans and Propionibacterium freudenreichii <~ which is the Swiss cheese bubble-causing species) and then stabilized as cyanocobalamin through the addition of potassium cyanide in the presence of nitric acid and heat, which converts back into those two bioactive forms through human digestion.

If we eat meat that was raised to be healthy, then we don't need supplements to get enough B12 to be healthy. If we choose not to eat meat, then sure, supplemental sources will be important to meet metabolic needs. But, dirty roots and cloudy water are not the natural 'wild' source of B12 for humans in any reasonable imagined version of the stone age.

... for what were then 'advanced' weapons capability in high-cost units produced and expended in relatively small numbers with high yield payloads.

The modern drone warfare version of expendable, high volume, high technology small units with two way communication via fibre-optic and RF jamming resistant multiple channels, and the ability to do on-device video object identification and terminal flight control when active electronic counter measures degrade operator control...

That seems like exactly the kind of gear using commodity DDR4/5 sodimm and dimm modules and literally burning them up at then end of nearly every sortie. Even if they are using much smaller units (smartphone grade RAM) it's still cooking the limited output of the global memory fab capacity, and from the fields covered in fibre-optic blankets, I think it's safe to say there is a significant volume of electronics equipment being consumed.

So yeah, AI might be ordering memory and putting it in datacenter, but eventually that material will be available for e-waste recovery (repurpose first, then recycle later). Both are competing for the same limited fab capacity.

I always though that it basically was conditions reduced supply (weather and politics), purchasers of the raw products basically get all of the available production at pretty close to standard prices for what limited amount there is, farmers who dont have product get no income, farmers with product get some - maybe a little more per unit but fewer units overall, and then the raise global prices was due to the tier 1 buyers/distributors needing to cover fixed processing and distribution premiums which do not fluctuate much even when supplies are low.

So, Madagascar by virtue of overwhelming percentage of production pretty much set the availability curve, but i expect farmers pretty much get what they get for the beans they grow, within a range and that's probably not more than 2x at most. But I could be way off and the 5x price differential is perfectly proportional, 5x cost of raw bean == 5x cost of delivered extract.

It isn't obvious that the SSW program itself is designed with abuse as an intended outcome. I also don't get the strong sense that these changes to the PR process, at least what actual documentation is on https://www.moj.go.jp, are going to have much real impact other than prompting those with a real long term commitment to life in Japan to look more closely at the naturalisation process and possibly motivate SSW1 workers to be more serious about upskill to SSW2.

Because SSW1 time no longer applies to the 10 year PR eligibility (which can be shorter with "contribution to Japanese society" https://www.moj.go.jp/isa/content/930003503.pdf), this makes staying at SSW1 for longer than 2-3 years a bit wasteful if the goal is PR.

Perhaps there is some room in this system for well-managed RSOs to take a more active role in helping current SSW1 employees take the necessary steps to prepare for transition to SSW2 and perhaps this kind of action is something that rural townships should look at as a mechanism to improve their local workforce options.

I wonder if there's any employers in your extended network who could gain from having access to workers already holding SSW1 visas with 2+ year remaining on visa and helping prepare those workers for SSW2 testing and retention along with long-term work contracts. It would seem to be a real opportunity for companies struggling to meet production objectives due to labor shortages without the potentially high initial capital cost of finding those workers from abroad and the cost of turnover and training that come from short term new workers.

I'm just kinda thinking out loud here; it seems to me that where there are avenues for abuse which appear to offer little recourse for the workers, then there may be an avenue to offer that recourse and in turn benefit from the ready capability and earned loyalty of those workers. Sure, your bed-pan example is a worst case job scenario, but that field of SSW is not restricted to only bed-pan level work, and surely there are companies who need quite a range of ready workforce for many tasks that would fit the same visa which can pay a decent wage for skilled labor which are not 'black companies'.

I'll try to introduce some of this into the discussions at my next informal soudan kikai. The shiyakusho team heree has been great at facilitating the network of contacts and interested parties which has enabled our current opportunities, and been very involved in every step from the moment we showed interest in living out here in the 'inaka'.