This letter is missing (willingly or unwillingly) the point of the original Pinker statement: Comparisons do exist and they indeed show us that we are better off, but are the comparisons numerically accurate? Probably not.
It might seem far fetched right at the moment but some thinkers and economists are already seeing a guaranteed basic income for EU countries during the next decades which in time should extend to the rest of the 1st world countries.
I know it looks a bit crazy now, but so did free universal healthcare 40 years ago if you think about it.
Depending in the leverage they used for betting against the HKD these people might be at a serious risk of loosing everything they put there in case the trend doesn't suddenly change or if they don't get enough money from other sources to hold their leverage.
I wonder if there is any project starting to re-write Emacs according to modern practices like we now have NeoVIM for VIM.
I really like editing in VIM but I moved to Emacs using Spacemacs to try and get the best of both worlds (org mode for scientific research seems a really cool approach).
Still I see Emacs as being quite more bug prone than VIM and VIM than NeoVIm.
Perhaps this is what's needed for someone to start a complete refactor of Emacs and bring it (I mean the code not the editor) to the modern age.
Since non Muslims in France have a natality rate of 1.70 per woman (in fact it's lower you can see why in the link) and Muslim a rate of 3 . And since there is a 0.1% of total French population yearly migration from muslim countries into France.
60 years into the future with generations of 20 years each and NOT increasing the number of yearly migrants you have:
Non Muslim: 65 x (1.7/2)^4 = 34 million
Muslim: (((5 x 3/2+(20 x 67/1000)) x 3/2+(20 x 67/1000)) x 3/2+(20 x 67/1000)) x 3/2 = 35 million
This, not counting the new increase you are having due to the extreme increase in migration this last year.
Not in the future no. If the Islamic population in France becomes the majority, and that's a reasonable possibility during this century, then it's perfectly acceptable that part of the population elects a radical islamic leader for president.
Many dictators got to power with free elections if you care to look at history.
Just look at all the migrants from North Africa flooding Europe right this moment.
It's not far fetched to think that during this generation or in the next one that will cause a massive implosion of society in Europe which would of course have vast influence around the globe.
Just think what would happen if France's military and nuclear arsenal would fall into islamic extremist hands.
Many people think that but archeological evidence says the contrary. Caries only started showing up in humans 3000-4000 years ago when we started doing agriculture and eating cereals.
Before that we practically didn't had caries (just like wild animals also don't).
Throughout human history humans would have the full set of teeth in the vast majority of cases, until we started settling and switched from hunter-gatherer to agricultural society (which is a very recent time in human species development).
My thoughts exactly. I'm in my 30's, I've never had dental problems and every time I go to a dentist and he suggests to remove my wisdom teeth, I change to another dentist.
These teeth exist for a reason, and mine - luckily - were developed in a perfectly straight way in line with the rest of my teeth. Suggesting to remove them seems just ridiculous to me and a greedy way for the dentist to make some hundreds of euros extra by butchering me off.
> This is incorrect. The blockchain requires miners to establish an unbiased ledger history. The difficulty parameter is tweaked so that the whole system can be future proofed against an adversary creating a convincing blockchain history (which was biased to double-spending or retracting a transaction).
What was the excuse in the early days of bitcoin then when the difficulty was orders of magnitude lower?
Difficulty is ever increasing just because of the financial model bitcoin tries to propagate. The author of bitcoin wanted to make it deflational and so it had to be this way.
That part has nothing to do with the integrity of the blockchain and you are mixing two concepts here: Blockchain, which was a great invention and bitcoin, a financial experience (nothing against experiences from my part) which turned out to be a waste of resources.
Good design: Then we are taken to a page with a banner so big that you have to realize that you need to scroll way past the bottom of the screen to actually reach the content.