I usually use Adobe’s Lightroom Mobile to take photos, but it has some issues. This photo was taken in the native iPhone camera app. The biggest issue with Lightroom is Adobe does not seem to be able to keep up with the iPhone hardware. I have a iPhone 16 Pro Max and it has 4 zoom setting, one for each of the three lenses it has plus an extra 5x zoom.
While Lightroom has, for a long time now, had three options: ultra wide corresponding to .5, Telephoto for 2 and Wide for 1. But, it’s been months now and no update to add the 5x option.
Adobe has been slacking for a while now. It took almost a year to release the iPad upgrade for Express, which broke my workflow. And now they are slacking on basic hardware features in Lightroom Mobile. What are they doing? They seem some obsessed with AI these days that they can’t push out basic app updates. Get your shit together Adobe, its a fucking subscription service, there should be updates every month or quarter at least.
The Trump administration is apparently looking to introduce a “baby bonus” —a cash payment to people who have babies— in an attempt to reverse the decline in the US fertility rate. The total fertility rate in the US is very low, 1.62 children per woman in 2023. And it’s been falling most of this century:
Replacement is 2.1, I thought the religious people in the US were breeding?
Higher than a lot of developed countries but well below the replacement rate for about 2.1 children per woman. I always thought the religious people in the US were breeding enough to make up for the others? Harvey Danger lied to me [youtube.com].
This sort of paying for babies has been tried a few times. Wikipedia has a page on baby bonuses that lists, some 11 counties. Most are piddling amounts but let’s look at two places where a similar sort of bonus as the US is discussion were introduced: Australia and Singapore.
Australia
Introduced a baby bonus in early 2000’s. $3,000 in 2004, raising to as much as $5437 in 2012. Slashed to around $2,000 in 2014. Did it affect the fertility rate?
Maybe? The fertility rate rose, a bit, from 1.76 in 2002 to 2.02 in 2008. But then it fell steadily from 2008 and was sitting at 1.64 in 2023.
Singapore
Singapore has a more complex system including cash gift, matching savings, tax credits and so on. The initial scheme was introduced in 2001, I don’t know the amounts at introduction but it has risen. In 2008 and 2012, when my kids were born, it was around a $6,000 cash gift, for first and second child (it goes up after that). Today the cash gift is $11,000 for first and second child. Has there been any change in fertility rate?
Hahaha! Singapore’s fertility rate in 2000 was 1.34. Today it’s .94. In a few generations there will be no Singaporeans.
China
As a bonus let’s look at China, because this week the Economist has an article on China’s attempts to pay for babies. Some local in China has offered up to $38,000 all-in (including things other than cash, like paid leave.) But, it’s unclear if it is helping any. One province saw a 17% increase in births in 2024 but a lot of that can be attributed to 2024 coinciding with the Chinese Zodiac’s year of the dragon, traditionally the most auspicious year to have a kid.
The best quote in the article is this one talking about our a particular local, Hothot’s, offering:
Wang Feng of the University of California, Irvine, thinks Hohhot’s policy will not “make a dent” in the city’s population decline. “Babies cannot be bought,” he says. “The cost is lifelong and it’s not just monetary.”
China, Singapore and Japan are bad, but Korea is leading the race to the bottom:
Australia not doing so bad, at least by comparison…
This is from GapMinder, you can play with it here [gapminder.org].
So, yea. This is a problem for a lot of counties. But how fucked is everyone? Seriously fucked. In fact, South Korea is so bad, it’s doomed, past the point of now return. At least according to this Kurzgesagt video:
So, this is an existential crisis, if you want your culture and/or country to live on, you need to find ways of encouraging people to have more babies. A lot more. Quickly. But really, most of the “first world” is doomed at this point.
One last thing, a lot of discussion around this the Trump Administration’s discussion of a Baby Bonus includes an unhealthy dose of modern dysfunctional politics. It’s sad that we have to talk about racism and the return of Nazi ideology, but here we are. The nasty, racist, christo-fascist streak in MAGA must be worried sick about the end of (white) America because empowered, woke, women aren’t having enough babies! Er mah gawd.
The Hill quotes Art Caplan, a professor of medical ethics at the New York University School of Medicine:
“If you’re really interested in babies, there are plenty of immigrants here whose kids are being deported,” Caplan said. “If you’re interested in babies, there are plenty of people who would come here and become citizens and bring their babies.”
Caplan argued that what the Trump administration wants is the “right kind of babies.” He called the notion “morally offensive.”
For years people have warned that mobile phones are marking every teenager depressed… but new research suggests older people who use smartphones experience less cognitive decline [theguardian.com].
Well, at least future old people will all be aware of how depressed they are and remember why they are so angry…
Late last year as I was rushing to get my 2023 Italy photos posted, I ran unto a problem. I was looking include a link to something I wrote a few months before, but for the life I me I could not find it using the editors built in search. The editor’s insert link tool allows you to enter a link or to search for links, usually used to find existing posts or pages on your site. But when I entered the actual name of the post it did not show up. I tried several different combinations, checked spelling, and finally gave up and opened the site in a browser to grab the link.
But the post was not there.
After much scratching of the head and reloading the list of posts that are published, in draft, and even trying the recently deleted I could not find the post and another one too.
I know I posted them as I linked to them via social media posts. But those links now 404.
I think I know what happened. The editor app —Jetpack— has an annoying habit of showing posts having “local changes” when I draft posts and edit them at some point in both the Jetpack app and in the WordPress admin interface. The thing is the app is convenient but not full featured. There are things I cannot do in the app that I do in posts. So I often start the post in the app and finish it in via the webpage. I also move between devices a lot. And the post showing up in the drafts section with “local changes” in the Jetpack app is annoying. So I deleted them. I’ve done it before but —as far as I know— I’ve never lost a post, but this time I lost two.
I have automated backups of the DB but they are 10 day rolling and this appears to have happened longer ago than 10 days. I don’t remember when I did it, other than it was a while ago…
I checked the Wayback Machine, but it did not seem to have the posts either. It has several site craws between when I published when the missing posts were uploaded and when I searched but the ones that load didn’t show the posts and several didn’t load. The Internet Archive was a bit rocky at the time due to the hack they suffered. So after a few days I checked again and the missing posts were there. So, after a temporary bout of amnesia, once again, the internet never forgot. [confusion.cc]… Though there is so much uncrawlable material on “social media” that I really should revisit that statement… the open internet never forgets, capitalism does strange things to that memory.
In any case, the missing posts were restored from the Wayback Machine’s crawl. And I doubt anyone noticed they were ever gone, such is my readership ;-).
This seems like a good time to remind everyone that the mission of the Internet Archive is valuable. Not so I can restore a few missing posts, but for long term historical preservation and promoting open access to information. So much of what is hosted on Archive.org would otherwise be lost or hidden just because it was hard to find.
Once again, for my birthday, I’m going to look back at the past year briefly. I don’t like to dwell on the past but it’s good to take stock as I celebrate another revolution around the sun.
The best of the year was both my daughters passed their big tests. Olivia passed the PLSE with results she was happy with and got accepted to the secondary school that was her first choice. And Victoria did well on her O-Levels, more than good enough to apply directly to a foundation year program she wants. Congratulations to them, they did well and made it through a stressful year (for them as well as for my wife and I!)
I also visited America for the first time since 2017. I went home for a simple ceremony to bury the ashes of my maternal grandparents. It was the first time I have been home, to Charlottesville, since my dad died in 2017. And the first time I’ve been to Pipestone, where my mom grew up, since 2014. I saw a lot of people, family, I have not seen in years —several decades in some cases. My family is very spread out with people living or working in the far corners of the US —Minnesota, Oregon, Arizona, Virginia, even Alaska. And I don’t know if any are there these days but for a while there were some in Europe, both the eastern and western parts.
On the way I also got to see two old friends in New York. I had planned to see A█████, which was great. We met up in the city and caught up on each other’s lives after a long time. It was great to reconnect with someone I haven’t really spoken with in years. Then I had the most random encounter. While I was sitting in the café of the TWA Hotel [twahotel.com] at JFK, someone came over and said “hello”. I wasn’t paying attention, reading a book so I didn’t notice until they said something. It was M███! Of course! It could only be M███ (see here [confusion.cc]). She just so happened to be in the TWA Hotel as a friend was flying through and had a long layover (the result of M███’s years as a flight attendant). M███ was waiting on the café to brew a new pot of coffee and only saw me because she was waiting around, had there been a fresh pot she would have never seen me. The last time I saw M███ was in like 2013. We spent a few hours chatting before she head to head out and I needed to get ready for my flight.
Anyway, I will put up a proper post of my trip to the US once I get a chance to clean up the photos I took. Nothing much but a good excuse for some photos and a post.
I’m not going to talk about the alarming (in my opinion) shift to the right wing on global politics. I’ve said enough what I think of right wing populism and its evils focusing on the US election (here [confusion.cc], here [confusion.cc], here [confusion.cc], here [confusion.cc] – and even in a timely book review here [confusion.cc]) and more post over the last year that are at least, tangentially, political. It is what it is. Four more years of Trump as president. I hope the world survives.
What else?
I read a lot more last year than I have been. I worked at incorporating a daily 30 minutes or so, many more than I review on Confusion. Let’s see, in 2024 I read:
Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, by Edger Allan Poe (it’s a long book, over 1000 pages I started it in mid/late 2023!)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by J. R. R. Tolkien
A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay
Gene Mapper by Taiyo Fujii
The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
The Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
An Instance of the FingerPost by Iain Pears
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer
The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer
Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The White People and Other Weird Stories by Arthur Machen
Absolution: A Southern Reach Novel by Jeff VanderMeer
Colorless Tsukuru Tanzanian and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami
I also too the time to play some video games. I spend several hundred hours exploring The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and I replayed Hollow Knight getting past 100% (it’s a thing, it goes to 112%).
And of course, as usual, I took an end-of-year holiday. Back to Japan this year to Kyoto and Osaka. I’ll get around to that. Sometime.
Ok this post is long enough. That’s a decent summary of my 2024, focusing on good things. The world might be a dumpster fire but I’m not doing too bad.
