But, if humanity stays below replacement rate, humanity goes extinct.

I don’t think this is a real risk. And if it were, it certainly won’t be anytime soon. Fewer people means fewer mouths to feed, fewer homes to build/maintain and less consumption in general, which given how the planet is struggling to continue balance with current human resource consumption, a gradual decline in human population would probably be beneficial in the long run.

To actually threaten humanity’s continued existence the number of humans would need to dwindle so low that the societial and the medical infrastructure that permits/causes the declining birth rates would completely collapse and people would naturally start having more kids again in order to keep up with the work on the farms that most people would need to work on at that scale of society

Edit: Put more susinctly, the current declining birth rates are a because of societal changes, not biological ones

My wife has one branch of her family where 4 generations occured in a 60 year period, the 5 generation photos are pretty neat, and also I’m really happy for the last generation which broke the cycle.

I knew someone who was by her own description baby-crazy as a teen and basically seeked out someone to knock her up. Hormones are wild things sometimes. Her child did not repeat the cycle fortunately

Oh I see what you’re saying! Does make me wonder how long until it cycles around again (assuming vehicle opinions do cycle around over time like fashion/design language preferences tend to)

Like I said, I got the crossover before I understood what actually gets you safely across unplowed roads and unpaved farm driveways in the winter, but I at least knew just enough that I went for a crossover and not some disgusting oversized SUV or truck like plenty of other folks around me go for.

Now that it’s been totaled (cosmetically) by hail damage it’s simply not fiscally reasonable to replace it until it’s entirely worn out so that’s just a past decision that I’m going to have to live with for the next decade or so

Part of this is because for someone in the process of obtaining citizenship in the US it’s actually much easier to legally start a business than it is to legally get a job. And with the decade or so that it can take to become a fully naturalized citizen in the US, folks have to make ends meet somehow so they’ll naturally start a business since that’s the one way they can legally make money until they get a work permit.

This is part of why there’s such a thriving restaurant scene for foreign foods across the entire US, a family will come and pool their time and money to open a small restaurant, and that will be how they survive until everyone gets work permits and eventually naturalized. There’s even a sub-industry of immigrants teaching other immigrants how to start a successful restaurant and what recipes work well for the American pallete. This is where some of the staples of Americanized Mexican and Chinese menus come from for example.

Those mansions and bunkers and yachts and private jets all require a surprising amount of working class labor to maintain. Often dozens of employees. The distribution center in the OP only had 8 employees at the time of the fire, so it would be comparably safer!

The factory window tint that’s now standard is also incredible for making getting into a parked car on a hot day so much more bearable

I recently inherited an older Toyota Sienna and it’s made me realize the current crop of 3 row SUVs and gigantic trucks is mostly sold to people who would absolutely love a minivan but just don’t know it.

• I’ve got more cargo space than any truck I pass on the road made in this century
• I can fit my entire family plus drag along multiple friends and still have space for everyone’s bags
• I can stand and walk through the interior if desired, even climbing to the far back from the front seat
• the sliding doors mean you can get in and out of the vehicle from any parking spot without a door in the way
• it’s got a turn radius so short that I can do a full U-turn without reversing on any road or parking lot
• the high seat+low nose means I can nussle up within inches of a vehicle in front of me and still see the bumper
• the engine is has enough power to be comparable to some small locomotives.

I would never have bought a minivan on account of the gas milage (~20mpg just ain’t great, and filling up the 25 gallon tank every week hurts the pocket book way more than my crossover that I got before I knew snow tires were a thing) but holy crap having this much space for people/stuff is incredible and I thoroughly enjoy playing bus/truck with it for all of my friends and family. For anyone who’s considered a truck/3-row SUV to be a requirement, they need to do themselves a favor and try out a minivan

This is part of why I was hoping the conflict in Iran would keep ballooning gas prices, we got so many small cars and creative approaches to save gas out of the 1970s oil crisis, and a new oil crisis could absolutely do the same thing again, except now a lot of that technology that companies were experimenting with in the 70s is far more viable, so just that small push of a couple of years of oil crisis (honestly just needs to be >$4/gallon from what I’ve seen) could easily push oversized vehicles off a cliff and usher in the bike revolution that New York, London and Paris have been experiencing across the entire US

Why does this just make me think of this banger?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/private-browsing-use-firefox-without-history

Private Browsing does not save your browsing information, such as history and cookies

There’s a lot of things private browsing does not do (partly because there’s a lot more parts of the stack involved in privacy than just your web browser) but deleting cookies on exit is literally one of the things private browsing specifically does and is directly controlled by the browser

This is the beauty of private tabs, they can set as many data harvesting cookies as they like, and the cookies are deleted when I close the window