quoting Nessari:

quoting Torco:

quoting Nessari:

The pension one is rather stupid, on second glance. You can't have plausibly-funded defined-benefits retirement schemes without a constantly increasing population, which is impossible to guarantee (especially when you have any form of immigration limitation.)

really? =/

It might work out with a perfectly stable population, ie birth rates perfectly mirror death rates [edit: or more accurately entry-into-contribution-scheme rates perfectly mirror retirement rates], but that's never going to happen, so not really worth working out the numbers. This is part of the problem (meaning issue which requires solving, not fatal flaw or anything similar) with retirement schemes; defined-benefits work great when you have a young worker glut, but they start to show signs of serious strain and even risk collapsing a couple decades after birth rates fall below replacement (as has happened in damn near1 every industrialized/1st World country.)

you don't need perfect mirroring, you just need a roughly replacement birth and death rate.... what kills today's pension funds is that the baby boomers are a lot and they had few children, so the pyramid looks like

.
....
......... <blob that's the last people who lived in pre-fertility decline>
.....
.....
.....

but after those fuckers be dead, the pyramid should stabilize in a pretty much blobless shape of

.
..
...
...
...
...
...

unless the region in question falls below replacement levels, which, indeed, would kill the whole thing. i don't see why you need perfect replacement, small differences to the one side are great, and small differences to the other side can be absorbed by a healthy system. I'm myself holding out for armies of robot slaves to grow my vegetables and bring me soup as i'm old and decrepit.

quoting Torco:

quoting Nessari:

quoting Torco:

quoting Nessari:

The pension one is rather stupid, on second glance. You can't have plausibly-funded defined-benefits retirement schemes without a constantly increasing population, which is impossible to guarantee (especially when you have any form of immigration limitation.)

really? =/

It might work out with a perfectly stable population, ie birth rates perfectly mirror death rates [edit: or more accurately entry-into-contribution-scheme rates perfectly mirror retirement rates], but that's never going to happen, so not really worth working out the numbers. This is part of the problem (meaning issue which requires solving, not fatal flaw or anything similar) with retirement schemes; defined-benefits work great when you have a young worker glut, but they start to show signs of serious strain and even risk collapsing a couple decades after birth rates fall below replacement (as has happened in damn near1 every industrialized/1st World country.)

you don't need perfect mirroring, you just need a roughly replacement birth and death rate.... what kills today's pension funds is that the baby boomers are a lot and they had few children, so the pyramid looks like

.
....
......... <blob that's the last people who lived in pre-fertility decline>
.....
.....
.....

but after those fuckers be dead, the pyramid should stabilize in a pretty much blobless shape of

.
..
...
...
...
...
...

unless the region in question falls below replacement levels, which, indeed, would kill the whole thing. i don't see why you need perfect replacement, small differences to the one side are great, and small differences to the other side can be absorbed by a healthy system. I'm myself holding out for armies of robot slaves to grow my vegetables and bring me soup as i'm old and decrepit.

The problem is, rates haven't stabilized at or just above replacement — they've gone negative in every case (again with the caveat).

quoting Nessari:

The problem is, rates haven't stabilized at or just above replacement — they've gone negative in every case (again with the caveat).

Oh, more lebensraum!

(…always look on the bright side of life ♪ ♫)

I read "lesbenraum" and was mildly aroused at the idea

Suddenly can't log into eBay for no fucking reason. It's acting like my account doesn't exist (it does, I can still view myself as a guest)  and tells me that my email address is not registered, and that the user ID I entered doesn't exist.

quoting Morrígan:

Suddenly can't log into eBay for no fucking reason. It's acting like my account doesn't exist (it does, I can still view myself as a guest)  and tells me that my email address is not registered, and that the user ID I entered doesn't exist.

This is an Ebay-wide issue, they're looking into it.

I was wondering, I was totally unable to confirm if that was the case.

OTOH, someone else seems to have tried registering an account for Vine with my main email address today.

That's kind of what I was worried about. Not that my accounts are really hackable, unless some douchebag website is storing them with a reversible hash, or plaintext.

quoting Morrígan:

That's kind of what I was worried about. Not that my accounts are really hackable, unless some douchebag website is storing them with a reversible hash, or plaintext.

Like my login and password for my insurance company. I asked someone about it once and they said it was to make the password retrieval process easier

I really wish I could get a different insurance company. Even that epic stupidity aside, they're holding me back from changing residency to Washington and all the things I want to do that require that. I need to find out whether Medicaid would be significantly worse for my myriad medical charges, if it's not too much so (fuck, is there a waiting period to be eligible? *researches*), I'm going for it.

Newest pet peeve: library staffers who can't tell the difference between Spanish and Portuguese.

dhok: shocking, kind of. Obviously portugese has all the words ending in -aõ, it's so simple.

Also, I kind of backed a moving van into a parked car a little bit. Just some denting, but I still feel like an asshole. No contact from the owner yet, though.

quoting dhok, Eques:

Newest pet peeve: library staffers who can't tell the difference between Spanish and Portuguese.

What about telling apart Castilian Spanish and Catalan?

quoting meficat, Cool Cat:

quoting dhok, Eques:

Newest pet peeve: library staffers who can't tell the difference between Spanish and Portuguese.

What about telling apart Castilian Spanish and Catalan?

Catalan doesn't do final -o on its masculine nouns, has <ç>, and doesn't break VL *ɛ ɔ.

The Romance languages are pretty easy to tell apart, honestly. I think something like Danish vs. Norwegian would be harder than any of the Romance pairings, and if you wanted to tell, say, Arabic from Persian you'd need a crash course in an entirely new alphabet.

This just in: person who has studied Romance significantly more than Germanic or Arabic/Persian thinks that Romance languages are much easier to tell apart than Germanic languages or Arabic/Persian and, furthermore, thinks all library staffers should share his limited expertise while not requiring of them expertise he does not have!

Btw I think everyone should be forced to learn the difference between centipedes and millipedes in school, but ehh I don't give a shit if anyone can tell oak trees from firs.

Well, it isn't that hard for Arabic and Persian- just start looking for instances of پ. So much of literary Norwegian is based on Danish, though...

quoting Morrígan, Baroness:

Also, I kind of backed a moving van into a parked car a little bit. Just some denting, but I still feel like an asshole. No contact from the owner yet, though.

Ugh, I did that too a few years back. Set me back several hundred. I really hope this doesn't cost you...

quoting dhok, Deacon:

Well, it isn't that hard for Arabic and Persian- just start looking for instances of پ. So much of literary Norwegian is based on Danish, though...

How is that in any way different from looking for ç/ã/õ?

And not all Norwegian literature is in Bokmål.

Furthermore telling Spanish and Italian apart, if you know next to nothing about them, is impossible. And Portuguese is closer to Spanish than either is to Italian.

quoting Cev, Novice Speaker:

Btw I think everyone should be forced to learn the difference between centipedes and millipedes in school, but ehh I don't give a shit if anyone can tell oak trees from firs.

The Torco approves this message

EDIT: also, on persian and so on: arabic script just looks like squiggles to the uninitiated: I, for example.