ahnesampo

Third party browser & JavaScript engine + ability to install web apps on the Home screen = third party app store that doesn’t have to pay Apple’s fees.

When Apple could force everyone to use Apple’s WebKit, web apps didn’t matter as much as Apple could limit WebKit features to push people to the App Store. E.g. it took ages to get push notifications on WebKit. If Google and Mozilla are free to make whatever improvements to their browser engines, the need to have native apps on the phone decreases considerably.

It’s not fewer people that’s the problem, but fewer people too fast. A society needs labor to provide the goods and services people need. If the share of people who do labor (working age) to people who don’t (children and the elderly) becomes too lopsided, the burden on those who work becomes unsustainable. (The Boomers had the opposite: they had a smaller older generation and didn’t have many children, so during their prime years the working age population was much larger than dependants on both ends of the age pyramid. That’s part of the reason why they were so prosperous.)

Going by total fertility rate (children per woman):

• 2.1 is enough for replacement. No problems.
• 1.8 means every generation is 10 % smaller than the previous. We can deal with that.
• 1.5 means every generation is 25 % smaller than the previous. This starts to cause problems.
• 1.0 means generation size halves every generation. This is not sustainable.
• 0.8 RIP South Korea

It’s cheaper. In Japan manga volumes are about 700 yen, which is about $5 currently. No budget for color printing there. Manga is often drawn by one person who is already massively overworked just to hit serialization deadlines, so no time (nor budget for assistants) for coloring.

You need an Apple developer account to even make software for iOS. Alternate app stores are distributed on the web, not Apple’s App Store. Since an alternative app store is an iOS app, Apple banning Epic’s developer account means they’re banned from making one.

The last name of the president of Russia is Пу́тин. Since people can’t read that without knowing Cyrillic, we need a way to map Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. However, neither Cyrillic nor Latin script have universal pronunciations: the phonetic value of letters change depending on the language. This leads to the romanization of a name being different depending what the source and target language is. Пу́тин is Putin for Russian-to-English, but Poutine for Russian-to-French. They’re both equally correct, and neither is a change from the other.

Cooking is art, baking is science.

My point is that despite Finland having a perfectly good third person singular for people we usually use the even more general one

The reason for that is because “se” as strictly a “thing” pronoun is artificial “book language”. When standard literary Finnish was being developed in the 19th century, its inventors wanted to have a person/thing distinction in pronouns like the “civilized” languages had, so they arbitrarily assigned “hän” as a person pronoun and “se” as a thing pronoun. That distinction is artificial, and has never stuck in spoken Finnish.

Originally there was a difference between “hän” and “se”, but it was grammatical: se was the general third person pronoun, hän referred back to the speaker (logophoric pronoun). Compare:

• Antti sanoi, että se tulee. (Antti said that someone else will come.)
• Antti sanoi, että hän tulee. (Antti said that he himself will come.)

I wonder if Ukraine is willing to lease Snake Island for that.

Next step: there’s a good argument to be made that the United States is not a nation. tldr: a nation is a group of people sharing ethnicity, language, culture. The United States is a country united by an idea, not an ethnicity.

The House is not needed to appoint justices, but the size of the Supreme Court is set by federal law, and you need the House to change that law to go beyond nine justices.