You should only be comparing the working age population or maybe even the ratio between that and retirees since absolute population is a deceitful metric.

> haven't "done enough",

The people who are over 100 probably had enough kids but in a few decades the generation that will start getting close to that age will only have themselves to blame since they didn’t have enough children (tax contributions can’t really compensate for that).

> In comparison, China is the least

You only know of two major countries in the world?

They obviously could start methodically destroying civilian infrastructure to cause a huge humanitarian crisis which might force the Iranian government to collapse. They have clearly chosen not to commit to that approach so far.

These kinds of arguments are obviously vacuous: The US could also "win" any war with a non-nuclear opponent by nuking every major city. But the fact that they don't is not something worth calling restraint.

It’s definitely worth appreciating. The world could have looked very differently and might still fall into that trap.

They did that btw. Is there any railroad bridge still standing in south Iran?

> would look like today that would take us back 200-400 years technologically.

If those technologies were concentrated amongst the elite and only a handful of palace scribes could write most people would have no or little contact with writing. Same with most people living outside of the palaces (overwhelming majority) and who had no access to the amenities.

It’s hard to say what happened but these collapses sometimes have paradoxical outcomes e.g. we have evidence that the quality of life and health improved for Western Europeans at least in some places after the Roman Empire collapsed (less population pressure, no crippling taxes etc.)

> It’s hard to say what happened but these collapses sometimes have paradoxical outcomes e.g. we have evidence that the quality of life and health improved for Western Europeans at least in some places after the Roman Empire collapsed (less population pressure, no crippling taxes etc.)

The collapse of the Western Roman Empire was not an instantaneous collapse of civilization altogether, just of Rome's control over the empire being snuffed out for good. Already long before the final collapse the people in charge (which were not necessarily the Emperor) had only very tenuous control over large parts of the empire.

Full civilizational breakdown happened in a few places only, like Britain or southern Germany. Italy was widely depopulated because of the various wars between the Goths and the Eastern Roman Empire trying to recover the western half.

Not making any GPUs worth buying makes you immune to export restrictions.

Logically one would expect it to be relatively more expensive and less performant because it does not have to compete with Nvidia’s hardware.

I'm not sure I agree. The market pressure for this innovation might not have been there with Nvidia chips still available. In this case it is coming from necessity.

Well yes in an imaginary world everything is possible. We are less close to what you’re describing than to having flying cars.

Gotta love the bot accounts here

Transparency is obviously not the only change they added with this liquid glass thing.

2G -> 3G -> 4G were all massive jumps that all enabled new use cases.

I doubt majority of phone users who have a decent 4G connection would notice the difference if they upgrade to 5G.

It's either that or people complaining about "Now I can run out of data much faster". But what people forget is that not all the new tech is to improve it for a single subscriber. A lot of it is to utilize the spectrum better and in that way get more capacity for everyone. Basically, if everyone was on 4G, it would be clogged and slow for everyone.

In Germany telcos using 700MHz for 5G a lot (also for LTE in non-5G regions and sometimes with DSS). So they can create a lot of coverage on rural areas or building penetration.

Telefonica didn't set their signallevel-to-bars-parameters on their SIMs correctly yet. Even directly next to a antenna you only see 1-2 bar although the signal level is maxing out.

700MHz is a mixed bag for rural coverage. Great for punching through trees, but need very tall towers to overcome destructive fresnel lens losses. Higher frequencies are usually better here + more gain!

For rural areas, lower frequencies are better because they mean longer distances ↝ fewer cell towers but also less density.

Conversely, higher frequencies mean more density, shorter distances and more cell towers. The ROI in the rural scenario in this case is lower.

I feel like 5g is worse

In terms of signal level?

Well.. that amount of bars you can see depending on the real signal level is just a SIM configuration. In the "newer" networks they aren't configured properly yet.