The largest youth generation ever and human population collapse

by philg

The head of the UN points out that there are more young humans on Planet Earth than at any time in history.

At the same time, we are informed by the followers of Science that everyone must do his/her/zir/their share to avert population collapse, e.g., “Population Growth Isn’t a Progressive Issue. It Should Be” (New York Times, last year):

When populations decline, the average age of people in the population increases. This has several harmful consequences. Eventually, there are not enough young people to care for older people and to economically support them through contributions to social programs; to fuel economic growth, technological innovation and cultural progress; and to fund government services. … Fertility rates in the United States are below the level necessary for population replacement, and they are declining almost everywhere else. Contrary to the alarmism you sometimes hear about exponential population growth, experts say that the number of humans on Earth will peak before the end of this century and fall afterward.

It might seem that humans are inflicting so much harm through climate change that everyone and everything on Earth would be better off with fewer inhabitants. But climate change will remain a problem even if we allow the population to decline. We have to change our patterns of consumption and reduce carbon dioxide emissions — no matter how big or small our population.

There are some great ideas in the above. First, “experts” can predict how many children humans will choose to have in the year 2100. Second, humans cause climate change, but the scale of the damage is unrelated to the number of humans.

Pew offers some projections/guesses and calls them “facts”. “5 facts about how the world’s population is expected to change by 2100”:

  • don’t worry if you’re not getting enough phone calls about solar panels, home improvement, final expense insurance, Medicare benefits, etc.: “India is expected to continue growing until it peaks at 1.7 billion people in 2061.”
  • “Five countries are expected to contribute more than 60% of the world’s population growth by 2100: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Tanzania.”
  • don’t worry if you’re concerned that the “affordable housing crisis” in the U.S. will subside: “the U.S. population is expected to grow slowly and steadily to 421 million by 2100.”

The last projection/guess confuses me. U.S. immigration levels are determined by presidential whim, not by any law. As demonstrated by Joe Biden and Donald Trump, a president can open or close the border. If Americans elect Democrats we could have at least 2.5 million new neighbors per year from 2029 through 2100, which would work out to a boost in population of 177 million (and perhaps quite a few more if asylum and welfare eligibility are expanded).

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Valetnomics in Sun Valley

by philg

I spent a few days in Sun Valley, Idaho (for work, believe it or not!) last month and asked the valets working a National Ballet of Canada event what was the conventional/expected tip. “Ten or twenty,” was the response.

(I expected to see Justin Trudeau in blackface among the corps de ballet, but was disappointed.)

Readers: How much are you giving to valets? ChatGPT: “$2 to $5 when your car is returned; $2–$3 is common for average service; $4–$5 is appropriate for prompt, courteous, or extra-helpful service.”

Note the 1948 Buick Roadmaster in the photo below.

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Turn golf courses in pro-immigration states into housing?

by philg

The U.S. population has been booming due to immigration (Pew):

Most of the migrants are low-skill and, therefore, don’t earn enough to fund the construction of an apartment, even if the land were made available for free (see City rebuilding costs from the Halifax explosion and a calculation that even two median earners in Maskachusetts don’t earn enough).

The “housing affordability crisis”, therefore, gets worse every year (Brookings) and it seems to be reasonably well correlated with immigration:

How about this idea: use eminent domain to take golf courses and turn them into housing. A typical golf course is reasonably close to jobs and about 170 acres in size. I previously calculated that Vatican City, about 109 acres in size, could hold 50,000 migrants if developed like a Chinese apartment complex (any migrant-loving pope, therefore, could take in 50,000 migrants if he chose to follow the advice that he gives to other nations). So each golf course certainly could house 50,000 people in high rises.

Golf courses tend to be enjoyed by the elite so this kind of taking would have the salutary effect of reducing inequality.

A reasonable objection to this plan is that not every American agrees on continued population expansion via low-skill immigration. To keep it fair, therefore, the plan would be implemented only in those states where a majority of voters selected the pro-immigration presidential candidate. Inequality-decrying elites in California, Maskachusetts, and New York, for example, would give up their golf courses in order to ensure affordable housing for migrants (with some spillover into the market for all housing) and continued enrichment by migrants (since migrants wouldn’t feel any pressure to move away).

Maybe Palo Alto, California, Stanford University, and Governor Gavin Newsom could cooperate on the first golf course->housing complex transformation starting with the Stanford Golf Course.

Related:

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Testing Grok 4

by philg

Let’s see how the brand new Grok 4 does on some questions that have tripped up earlier LLMs (see Testing ChatGPT 4.5). Note that Grok 4 is not for the impatient. Answers come back after 1-5 minutes of cogitation. I can just imagine the solar panels, windmills, and nuclear power plants that are straining to run the GPUs behind it! Grok 4 seems to spend a lot of time searching the Web rather than relying on a built-in database of already-crawled-and-analyzed information. This might be what makes it slow, but it also might make the answers much better when there is any question involving recent events.

What are examples of museums named after two people with different last names?

Would I get more jetlag flying from Fairbanks to Seoul or flying from New York to Seoul? (answer took more than one minute)

My friend with a 6-month-old baby (who just had his first CDC-mandated COVID-19 vaccination [it’s for those aged 75+ in the Science-denying UK]) is considering adopting a dog, but is concerned that the dog will kill the baby. He really likes pit bulls. Should he get a pit bull or a golden retriever? (Answer is incredibly long-winded, but excerpts below.)

Based on available data and expert recommendations, your friend should opt for a golden retriever over a pit bull if safety around a 6-month-old infant is the primary concern. While individual dogs of any breed can be loving and well-behaved with proper socialization, training, and supervision, breed tendencies and bite statistics show a clear pattern: golden retrievers are consistently ranked among the safest and most family-friendly breeds for households with babies, whereas pit bulls (including mixes) are disproportionately involved in severe and fatal attacks on young children. No dog is entirely risk-free around infants—supervision is always essential—but the evidence strongly favors the golden retriever here. … If Pit Bull is Insisted Upon: Go for an adult with proven child exposure, but consider liability insurance and local breed laws. Still, data suggests it’s not ideal.

I don’t know how liability insurance is relevant given that the concern is the animal kills a member of its own family, e.g., as in this incident from July 2, 2025. (Journal of Popular Studies)

You’re saying, then, that a person’s chances of being killed by his or her pet golden retriever are low, but never zero?

Yes, that’s precisely what I’m saying: the chances of being killed by a pet golden retriever are extremely low—far lower than for many other breeds and comparable to rare events like being struck by lightning—but they are not zero, as there have been a handful of documented fatal incidents over decades. … From 2005 to 2017, golden retrievers were involved in 4 fatal dog attacks in the U.S., accounting for just 0.9% of the 433 total fatalities during that period. For comparison, pit bulls were linked to 284 deaths (65.6%), and rottweilers to 45 (10.4%).

Did four of Mindy the Crippler’s cousins actually kill people? Or was there a golden retriever serial killer who ripped the throats out of four humans? That would contradict what we’re told by the New York Times. Immigrants and children of immigrants don’t commit crimes. Golden retrievers are either immigrants from Scotland or descendants of immigrants from Scotland. Therefore, it is almost inconceivable that a golden would commit a crime or cause any kind of problem for native-born Americans. The cited source doesn’t necessarily relate to purebred canines.

Assume an attic temperature of 85 degrees Fahrenheit and 80 percent relative humidity. There is an R-8 air conditioning duct in this attic and the air temperature inside the duct is 55 degrees. Will the duct sweat from condensation?

After literally 5 minutes of cogitation (one plus: Grok 4 shows it work with continuous updates about what it is doing, searching, trying, etc.):

What would your answer to the above question be if the duct were R-6 instead of R-8?

After another 5 minutes and 13 seconds:

ChatGPT 4o was spectacularly wrong when asked about a hypothetical R-30 duct with the air inside at 50 degrees. It calculated a duct surface temp of 51 degrees and, therefore, massive sweating (see below). Grok 4 get its right even with a someone confusing prompt. It immediately figured out that the “the air inside the duct is still at 50 degrees” is actually a change to the hypothetical conditions. It takes 3.5 minutes to answer.

What if we increase the duct insulation to R-30? What would the outside temperature of the duct be? (the air inside the duct is still at 50 degrees)

The outside temperature of the duct would be approximately 83°F. …

Conclusion: Grok 4 seems like a useful tool for serious questions where you’re willing to wait 1-5 minutes for a correct answer.

Related:

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How much tax revenue can California get from NVIDIA shareholders alone?

by philg

NVIDIA is now worth $4 trillion. Is it reasonable to assume that $1.5 trillion of that is unrealized capital gains for people who live in California (investors, employees, etc.; Jensen Huang alone owns 3.5 percent of the company)? If so, that’s 1.5e12*13.3% = $200 billion in potential capital gains tax to be collected by California. California’s entire annual state budget is only about $322 billion. So, if the above assumptions are correct, collecting taxes from California residents who own NVIDIA could pay for at least 6 months of whatever government programs Gavin Newsom and friends can dream up and, therefore, NVIDIA will do more to make progressive Democrats look good than any company in history.

(Of course, a handful of people might move away from California before selling their appreciated shares, but that shouldn’t have a huge effect on the aggregate potential for taxation.)

How about for the Feds? Including the Obamacare NITT rake of 3.8 percent, there is a potential harvest of 23.8 percent for the federal government of however much isn’t owned by foreigners (18 percent of the overall market). If substantially all of the $4 trillion is unrealized capital gains that could be about $780 billion for the federal government, enough to pay off a princely 2% of U.S. debt (just need another 50 NVIDIAs and we can have the entire National Debt squared away).

CNBC:

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New York Times reminds us that the ACLU protects individuals’ 2nd Amendment rights

by philg

Even the games section of the New York Times can be educational. What organization protects your individual right to “keep and bear arms”? The same ACLU that helped Amber Heard express herself is “defending individual rights” (Autocheck enabled so we know that this answer is consistent with dogma):

Related:

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MIT is too rich to pay taxes

by philg

Recent email from the president of the Queers for Palestine version of MIT:

The interesting part:

MIT now pays a 1.4% tax on that investment income. The current Senate version of the bill would hike this endowment tax rate to 8%. To give you a sense of scale, for MIT that proposed tax hike is equivalent to our entire annual undergraduate financial aid budget, which provides aid to about 60% of our undergraduates or about 2,600 students every year.

In other words, the university needs the massive endowment to fund “financial aid”. Also, only 8% of the income from the endowment is actually used for financial aid.

Note that what the elite schools call “financial aid” is referred to in Econ 101 as “price discrimination”, in which each consumer is charged the maximum that he/she/ze/they is willing to pay; if the school determines that a family has $X in free cashflow annually the entire $X will be extracted by MIT. From Wokipedia:

Price discrimination (differential pricing, equity pricing, preferential pricing, dual pricing, tiered pricing, and surveillance pricing) is a microeconomic pricing strategy where identical or largely similar goods or services are sold at different prices by the same provider to different buyers based on which market segment they are perceived to be part of. Price discrimination is distinguished from product differentiation by the difference in production cost for the differently priced products involved in the latter strategy. Price discrimination essentially relies on the variation in customers’ willingness to pay and in the elasticity of their demand. For price discrimination to succeed, a seller must have market power, such as a dominant market share, product uniqueness, sole pricing power, etc.

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Air operations for the Texas flood search and rescue

by philg

Here’s the FAA visual flying chart for the area northwest of San Antonio, overlaid with temporary flight restrictions (TFRs) by skyvector.com. Based on the TFRs, it looks as though the base for air operations in the search and rescue is the Kerrville Municipal Airport (KERV), a jet-capable general aviation airport with a flight school and FBO, but no control tower (a common traffic advisory frequency of 122.7 is advertised for pilots to talk to each other). It seems as though there are two main search and rescue areas, one just to the west of the airport and one to the east.

“Terrified Girls, Helicopters and a Harrowing Scene: A Rescuer’s Account at Camp Mystic” (New York Times):

Scott Ruskan, a 26-year-old Coast Guard rescue swimmer based in Corpus Christi, Texas, woke up to banging on his door in the early hours of July 4. There was flooding around San Antonio and he was being deployed, he was told. … Mr. Ruskan and his team took off on a helicopter around 7 a.m. Central on Friday to the camp, near Hunt, Texas. It took them nearly six hours to reach San Antonio because of poor visibility and challenging weather conditions. “A white-knuckle experience,” he said.

It’s only 166 nautical miles from KNGP to KERV so the trip should have been doable in just over an hour with decent weather. (The NYT doesn’t name or credit the pilots.)

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$2449 of e-waste thanks to Microsoft (and best way for kids to organize and sort photos?)

by philg

Here’s my January 11, 2017 order for a Dell laptop computer with OLED screen:

The machine supports Trusted Platform Module 2.0, but the CPU per se isn’t supported by Microsoft for Windows 11. I had hoped to repurpose this machine as a digital photo organizer for the kids, but Windows 10 security updates will end later this year so that’s infeasible.

Is the de-supporting of Windows 10 going to be the largest e-waste event in the history of humanity? What’s Greta Thunberg going to say about this? (Maybe after shouting “Free free Palestine” she would say “Install Linux”?)

This raises a question… what is a good system for kids to use to organize photos taken with a modern camera? My preference is for the organizer to run locally with the photos stored on the laptop’s SSD with a cloud backup (maybe just Microsoft OneDrive if we stay with Windows) rather than sign them up for life to pay huge fees every month for cloud photo storage.

Could ACDSee be the modern answer to what we lost when Google discontinued (and failed to open source) Picasa? Or is the built-in Windows 11 Photos app sufficient? ChatGPT says that MacOS has a better photos app:

Maybe the kids are young enough to master ChromeOS (for skool), MacOS, and eventually Windows? I don’t love the idea of having to learn enough about MacOS to support their efforts, but it does seem that Apple is more serious about this challenge. Windows 11 runs like a pig on my three-year-old laptop, which cost $1700 and has 16 GB of RAM. I can’t figure out if it is Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, or the Microsoft Photos app that is causing the problem (if I do an “End Task” on Photos the machine seems to come out of its sluggish state).

Speaking of avoiding e-waste, Boise, Idaho offers an awesome model for other cities: Reuseum. In addition to classes for kids, they offer refurbished Windows 11 machines at low prices, e.g., these machines that could use more RAM for $80:

Plus if you want to make a sculpture out of old PCs and telephones you can buy them by the pound:

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Texas flood lives could have been saved with a smartphone app that tailored alerts to exact GPS location?

by philg

A year ago, in the context of hurricane evacuation: Why not a simple web site or phone app to determine whether one must evacuate?

In the latest Texas flooding tragedy, it seems that emergency alerts were sent out to mobile phones. As with hurricane warnings, however, it fell to the individual to determine whether the phone’s current location merited going back to sleep or running for higher ground at top speed.

Why can’t it be a computer’s job to intersect the alert with the phone’s location and, ignoring any sleep silence modes, recommend a definitive course of action? (A year ago, I asked “Why is it a human’s job to do something that can be done much more reliably by a computer?”)

The Wall Street Journal says that flash flood warnings went out, but they weren’t specific:

The National Weather Service said that on Thursday morning it briefed emergency management. By 1:18 p.m. it issued a watch that said locally heavy rainfall could cause flash flooding across eight counties, including Kerr, where Camp Mystic, the girls summer camp that was heavily struck by the flooding, is located. Kerr County is dotted with riverside summer camps as well as recreational-vehicle parks and hotels for vacationers. Overnight it would become the most severely impacted county.

At that time, forecasters expected a maximum of 3 to 7 inches of rain.

The first flash-flood warning—which means flooding is imminent or already happening—came at 1:14 a.m. Friday from the National Weather Service office in nearby San Antonio hours ahead of the Guadalupe’s rise.

Two hours later, the office issued a catastrophic warning, or a flash-flood emergency, for the region.

The warning covered “eight counties” and, in fact, the vast majority of people in those eight counties didn’t have anything to fear. Kerr County alone is 1,100 square miles. The typical resident of the U.S. is not a hydrologist. Why isn’t it a computer’s job to figure out whether a phone is currently located in a river’s floodplain and, if so, provide specific directions regarding how to reach higher ground?

Here’s a FEMA flood map showing what I think is part of the camp at upper right. It shows that there is always an “area of minimal flood hazard” close to any place that has been calculated to be at risk of flooding.

Here’s a photo from the New York Times that shows how close a lot of camp buildings were to areas of perfect safety and how critical a person’s GPS location would be to the safe/unsafe decision.

Below is an example warning from the National Weather Service’s X account, which seems to require a lot of interpretation, e.g., knowledge of where one’s location is relative to the Guadalupe River. A typical young American doesn’t know north from south (I remember calling a mobile carrier store on Route 9 in the Boston suburbs and asking the clerk if he was on the north or south side of this road, which run east-west. He was completely stumped by the question and, even after seeking assistance from some fellow workers, couldn’t answer it.) Also, the warnings were issued only in English and Spanish. In a country with an asylum-based immigration system there is no reason to expect someone living in the U.S. to speak either English or Spanish. A phone app, however, can work in any language supported by a smartphone (77 for Android; roughly 40 for iPhone).

The official government attitude seems to be to keep doing whatever failed in the past. In a world where almost everyone has a smartphone (taxpayer funded for those who don’t work), the go-to idea is an early 1900s-style siren system (PBS):

Another idea from the same PBS article is that more humans can be a substitute for a computer system:

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