> The researchers took account of factors such as people’s age, sex and education, but cautioned that they could not rule out the potential influence of other factors that may have an impact on the brain, such as lifestyle and social engagement.
Perhaps it's just a correlation. Number of spoken linguages may correlate with income, frequent travel, sociability, or other factors that improve or filtre for health, brain health included.
> Actually raising a child costs more than $1.2M - just $20K/year invested in S&P500 over the last 20 years would have grown to more than $1.2M.
The future markets of a shrinking world, with consumer and worker cohorts dwindling year after year, will be very different from the last 20. This is paradoxal reasoning. Your're counting on going childless, while the market remains the same, other people keep having children to grow the market. But if everybody else does the same it doesn't work. The mean investment probably will give negative returns, in a fast shrinking world.
> If you don't have children to inherit your fortune to, you can retire with full exhaustion of capital - that will yield way more than 4k$/month.
As a lone elderly person you're likely to be scammed and lose a lot of that capital near the end, without close people that like and support you. Elders are incredibly vulnerable to financial scams, specially those enabled by technologic means they are not familiar with.
> when a world power seems to be supportive of actions that an international body considers negative, what structure can help resolve these?
Apply the Apartheid South Africa treatament. Gather the larger number possible of complying members, and apply a coordinated boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign to put pressure in the party engaged in genocide, ethnic cleansing or other abhorrent actions.
I wonder if such cases are a gift from our Neanderthal forebears, from the few % of Neanderthal DNA that still lingers in most humans alive today. They spent hundreds of thousands of years amidst ice age glaciers, what are the odds they developed the ability to hibernate? It would be a good explanation on how H. Sapiens Sapiens took over later. They couldn't defend their shelters while in torpor.
Not practical in research. Doesn't solve the blackbox reproducibility problem. Also it makes the act of publishing a paper under your name practically a crime confession, as it's easy for companies to comb the literature to seek people publishing results obtained with software X without a license.
> If you are going to be super-strict with type-checking, wouldn’t it be best to switch to a statically typed language and get the performance gains as well?
People from the 70s are in their 50s today. Approaching retirement age, but most still able and employed. Things will get interesting in those countries as they hit old age and quit the workforce in a large wave.
> Unlike the metric system that actually has a clear logic behind it and makes handling scientific numbers more easy
The clear logic behind soccer is low barrier of entry. A vacant lot, some friends and a makeshift ball gets any child started. Even the poor can play it with minimal inputs.
Perhaps it's just a correlation. Number of spoken linguages may correlate with income, frequent travel, sociability, or other factors that improve or filtre for health, brain health included.