#Development of new technologies

[drchristophedelongsblog]

Baby boomers are likely to be more demanding medically than their elders.

Several factors converge towards this trend

Level of education and information

Baby boomers are generally more educated and informed than previous generations.

They have better access to medical information and are more likely to seek quality care.

They are more likely to ask questions, challenge diagnoses, and seek alternative treatment options.

High expectations for quality of life

Baby boomers grew up in a period of prosperity and have high expectations for quality of life.

They are less willing to accept age-related limitations and are more likely to seek solutions to maintain their autonomy and well-being.

They have a proactive approach to their health, they want to continue being active for as long as possible.

Familiarity with technology

Baby boomers are more comfortable with technology than previous generations.

They are more likely to use digital tools to monitor their health, search for medical information and communicate with healthcare professionals.

They are more likely to use telemedicine tools or medical monitoring applications.

Awareness of patients' rights

Baby boomers are more aware of their rights as patients.

They are more likely to hold healthcare professionals accountable and seek recourse if something goes wrong.

The financial aspect

Baby boomers often have better financial situations than their elders, which allows them to have access to more expensive care.

Potential consequences

This increased requirement could lead to an increase in demand for health services, which could put a strain on health systems.

It could also stimulate innovation in the healthcare sector, with the development of new technologies and new approaches to care.

In conclusion, it is likely that baby boomers will be more demanding in terms of medical care than their elders, which will have important implications for health systems.

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[sporesgalaxy]

no animal is evil

[yeoldenews]

I'm really loving your #tbt posts lately (which I assume might come from your queue). Thanks for keeping the historical interest flowing. One question: I'd love to know who the family is in the Minnesota photos. I assume you wrote about them in the past, if you have a personal source for the pictures. (My grandfather and his family were from Minnesota, and I recently viewed some photos of them.)

I wish I knew! Unfortunately this is one of several "white whale" albums I've purchased over the years with absolutely no written identification in them, and one of only two I haven't had any luck tracking down any individual people in the photos.

My current best guess is that the album is of a young adults group from the English Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in St. Paul, and was taken in the summer/fall of 1897 or 1898. There is one photo of a group in front of a church with a partial sign visible behind them which I was able to match to that church. I did some additional research and found that the church group did regular summer outings to many tourist spots and lakes in the St. Paul area.

I was able to additionally pinpoint the location to the St. Paul area due to the waterslide in the background of this image and a visible sign for the Nevers Dam (on the MN/WI border) in another.

I compiled a list of a dozen or so people who attended the church at the time (from newspaper mentions of various events at the church) but so far haven't had any luck matching any of those people to the individuals in the album.

It's a great album, about 40 or so pictures in total and I believe it was likely developed at home by an amateur photographer. None of the photos are mounted, being printed on very thin paper, and several have hand applied mats added to the exposures to change the shape - as seen above.

Snapshots from the 1890s are my absolute favorite photographs as personal photography was still in its infancy, and people were still figuring out what exactly to do with the cameras the now had access to. Many of the images are still posed like studio portraits, but you can see the very beginnings of people starting to get creative with what they chose to capture.

[sealrock]

febhyurary, day 5: color

23rd sun of the 2nd umbral moon, 1547

my pet project with a colored aethograph, or what I like to call an 'aethochrome', with aetherically enhanced ink to capture colors. featuring my friend and classmate, elaine tatlonghari. taken early morning, with a waxing crescent moon in the background. I accidentally mixed in too much red during the process, and it gives the impression that it's still autumn. —W.J.

[reasonsforhope]

"A net-zero power system is closer than we think.

New research, published by RMI, indicates that an exponential surge in renewable energy deployment is outpacing the International Energy Agency’s most ambitious net-zero predictions for 2030. 

That’s right: Surging solar, wind, and battery capacity is now in-line with net-zero scenarios. 

“For the first time, we can, with hand on heart, say that we are potentially on the path to net zero,” Kingsmill Bond, Senior Principal at RMI, said. “We need to make sure that we continue to drive change, but there is a path and we are on it.”

And that’s really good news.

Exponential growth in renewable energy has put the global electricity system at a tipping point. What was once seen as a wildly daunting task — transitioning away from fossil fuels — is now happening at a faster pace every year. 

Based on this new research, conducted in partnership with the Bezos Earth Fund, RMI projects that solar and wind will supply over a third of all global electricity by 2030, up from about 12% today, which would surpass recent calls for a tripling of total renewable energy capacity by the end of the decade. 

Global progress in the renewable energy sector

China and Europe have been leading the way in clean energy generation, but the deployment of renewable energy has also been widely distributed across the Middle East and Africa. 

Research from Systems Change Lab shows that eight countries (Uruguay, Denmark, Lithuania, Namibia, Netherlands, Palestine, Jordan, and Chile) have already grown solar and wind power faster than what is needed to limit global warming to 1.5°C, proving that a swift switch to renewable energy is not only feasible — it’s entirely achievable. 

In order to make that switch, globally, wind and solar need to grow from 12% to 41% by 2030. Denmark, Uruguay, and Lithuania have already achieved that increase in the span of eight years.

Meanwhile, Namibia, the Netherlands, Palestine, Jordan, and Chile have grown solar and wind energy at sufficient rates for five years...

The economic impact of climate progress

Not only is this an exciting and unprecedented development for the health of the environment, but this rapid transition to clean energy includes widespread benefits, like jobs growth, more secure supply chains, and reductions in energy price inflation. 

This progress spans both developing and developed countries, all driven to accelerate renewables for a number of different reasons: adopting smart and effective policies, maintaining political commitments, lowering the costs of renewable energy, and improving energy security. 

And with exponential growth of clean energy means sharp declines in prices. This puts fossil fuels at a higher, uncompetitive cost — both financially and figuratively. 

RMI suggests that solar energy is already the cheapest form of electricity in history — and will likely halve in price by 2030, falling as low as $20/MWh in the coming years. This follows previous trends: solar and battery costs have declined 80% between 2012 and 2022, and offshore wind costs are down 73%."

-via Good Good Good, July 12, 2023

Let me repeat that:

For the first time in history, we are on an actual, provably achievable path to net zero emissions

[kanhotep]

Alastor would love to have a computer because while he still thinky vinyl is the superior medium for music he can't deny that it's more effective to have a digital music library.

He could also built a computer easily, the hardware is no problem for him.

Unfortunately he stopped keeping up with programming in the 60ies, there was just so much going on. And now he can't get any software that is not in some way connected to Vox he doesn't want to admit it, because he's the radio demon, this frivolous digital technology is beneath him, but there is a little part of him that is pissed about it.

Definitely pissed.

And in no way whatsoever melancholic, reminiscing of a past when he and Vox would build them together, Alastor working on the hardware and Vox doing the software.

A past where such actions were meant to be a pleasant hobby, a nice way to pass the time and not a commitment to an unreliable lifestyle that chained itself to whatever new trend arose.

No, he could never miss this old flight of fancy. But he can admit, that he misses the old Vox. His old chum used to be a nice company rather than a persistent annoyance.

[yuri-is-online]

Azul “WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU SHOT PEOPLE INTO THE SKY TO A ROCK?!??!” Ashengrotto

I'd also like to bring up the point that while there's water breathing potions I doubt they have anything to protect from the crushing depth of the deep ocean so I think he'd as freak the fuck out over the fact that humans have been that deep underwater. Very much in a WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!? HUMANS CANT GO THERE!” kind of cay

YES

I think twisted wonderland might have something that would allow humans to transform into merfolk, which would allow them to go into the deep ocean depending on the type of mer they became, but the concept of humans going as they are in submersibles is just odd. Then again he supposes your world doesn't have magic or merfolk so they don't have to worry about bothering anyone. Same with going to space, Azul's hatred of flying cannot be understated the thought of going that far up willingly is just so beyond him.

Azul is a very profit minded person, but his specialty and passion lies in hospitality and fixing niche problems. Space and deep sea exploration don't seem like fields he would want to expand his business into. He might be interested in the logistics of investing in those sorts of things? But the actual mechanics would just mystify him. The moon in the fucking sky give him a break.

[cotl-eyesofdeath]

“My lamb wears protective gear while crusading and Lolita outfits while in the cult” I said before giving them a new outfit every time I draw them, including while fighting

[icqmuseum24]

🌐 In an effort to bring instant messaging on the go, ICQ developed a client for PalmOS. This move allowed users to stay connected even while away from their desktops. The PalmOS ICQ client featured the core functionalities that made ICQ popular: sending and receiving messages, changing statuses, and managing contact lists.

📲 PalmOS was known for its simplicity and efficiency, making it a favorite among mobile users. It offered a unique combination of a touch interface and a physical keyboard, which made typing messages quick and easy. Bringing ICQ to PalmOS meant tapping into a growing market of mobile professionals and tech enthusiasts who valued portability without sacrificing functionality.

✨ Key Features of ICQ for PalmOS:

➡️ Messaging on the Go: Stay connected with friends and colleagues by sending and receiving instant messages.

➡️ Status Updates: Let your contacts know if you’re available, busy, or away with easy status updates.

➡️ Contact Management: Easily add, remove, and manage your ICQ contacts.

➡️ Portable Communication:** Enjoy the flexibility of ICQ’s messaging capabilities right from your PalmOS device.

🔒 One of the standout features was the security ICQ provided. Even on PalmOS, ICQ maintained its standards for protecting user data, ensuring that conversations remained private and secure.

💾 ICQ’s expansion to PalmOS was a significant step in the evolution of mobile messaging. It showcased the potential of mobile devices to support full-fledged communication platforms, paving the way for the sophisticated mobile messengers we use today.

[iww-gnv]

The Unity Technologies’ downward spiral continues as the company intends to cut 25% of its workforce — or roughly 1,800 people — in a move it called a “company reset.” It’s the game engine maker’s largest layoff, bigger than all three of last year’s cuts combined. More than 1,100 people were laid off in 2023, preceded by at least 200 layoffs in June 2022. Unity said in a United States Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure that the layoffs come as Unity “restructures and refocuses on its core business, and to position itself for long-term and profitable growth.” The layoffs will be completed by March, according to a Reuters report. Unity is known for its game engine software, which is used across the industry on games of all sizes — from indie games to AAA blockbusters. It serves as the foundation for games like Hearthstone, Marvel Snap, Apex Legends, and Among Us. Beyond video games, it’s also used in film and animation, among other industries. Despite it’s ubiquity in the industry, the company is not profitable: It earned more than $1.3 billion in revenue in 2022, but did not make a profit. The company’s large-scale layoffs began in 2022, but Unity’s problems became larger in 2023 when it announced a controversial new pricing model that was universally panned by game developers. The new runtime pricing was announced in September, with Unity proposing a fee collected per game install after a certain revenue threshold was met. Unity eventually pulled back on those plans after widespread backlash, including a boycott and a “credible death threat.” But the damage was done. Unity CEO John Riccitiello stepped down in October. James M. Whitehurst, an advisor at the Silver Lake equity investment firm and former IBM president, was named interim CEO.

[llitchilitchi]

ngl while it's good that people are becoming more wary of new technologies and would rather take their time with integrating it into their daily lives I do fear that the climate of tumblr is turning many people into technophobes

[nr1-logo-design-inspiration]

Write your fav! 💬👇 1,2 or 3?

This letter design is for a tech startup. The main idea was to follow a monoline style.

[orcelito]

Had a moment of listening to music I liked back when I was a teenager (& still like) and having a whole. Realization . That I like myself as I am now sooooo much better than I like teenage me. And I started thinking about Why.

There's a lot to it I'm pretty sure, & most of it centers around the fact that I just... didn't really know who I was as a person. I didn't really have hobbies outside of what I did in school (aka orchestra) and like. Video games + anime. I did creative writing in middle school, but dropped off in high school for... some reason? I still made original characters and played around with them a lot, but it was mostly just in drawing and thinking about them. I never actually *wrote*, and I in fact didn't get back into creative writing at all until I was 23 years old. I was someone who had spent so long hiding behind others and just doing what I was told that I just... didn't have any real direction. I didn't know what I even *wanted*. I thought I knew, but in hindsight, I can confidently say that I didn't. I was just an insecure teen drifting through life and not thinking about things beyond what was immediately in front of me. Which is pretty standard for teenagers I guess, but not all of them. Not at all.

Compared to now, where I have Many hobbies, most notably being writing. As I am now, I am just Intrinsically a writer. And it's weird to remember that I wasn't even really *writing* before 5 years ago (besides text rps, which did a lot for developing my writing skill! But still aren't a replacement for writing individually). As a teen, I wasnt into dnd, I was incredibly out of shape, & I was a lot less aggressive and focused. I was the type to avoid sports!!! I hated them!!!! But as I am now, I Love biking and can easily bike for an hour+ no problem (I remember being a teen and trying to go on just 10 minute bike rides in the summer and just *dying* from it), & I love working out. I wanna be strong!!! I LOVE being strong!!! And I was an absolute mess with things like public speaking & working in groups, vs now where I can do an impromptu presentation no problem & I'm often the unofficial leader in group projects bc im typically the one who does the organizing and allotments of work. A side effect of working as a supervisor and then assistant manager for so long. I have a lot more confidence in my perceptions and judgements, & I have the self-assurance to assert these things. And this is only really the tip of the iceberg with all the differences.

I just feel like an entirely different person, almost. The cores are the same, or at least damn near similar, with the things I want out of life & the sorts of things I enjoy, but it's like. The difference between finding a random rock off the side of the road & then that rock when it's been sanded and carved and decorated to be something individual and unique. You look at them side by side and it's something dull vs something shiny and intricate. The origins can't be ignored and dismissed, & I certainly would never resent younger me for just doing the best with what I knew at the time. But it's just astounding how much difference time and experience will have for growing and developing as a person. Things I consider integral to my personhood weren't even thoughts in my mind back then. We are almost entirely different people.

[khayal12345]

japanese scientists have created a hydrogel that reverts cancer cells back to cancer stem cells in 24 hours

[callgespenst]

So far as I can tell today’s youth can be divided into two groups:

The first one has never touched a physical keyboard in their whole life

And the second one has a laptop that’s constantly on the verge of exploding from overheating, seeding a batch torrent of the entire Sega Saturn library, and has contributed to fifteen different Github repositories.

[reasonsforhope]

"If I wanted to convince you of the reality of human progress, of the fact that we as a species have advanced materially, morally, and politically over our time on this planet, I could quote you chapter and verse from a thick stack of development statistics.

I could tell you that a little more than 200 years ago, nearly half of all children born died before they reached their 15th birthday, and that today it’s less than 5 percent globally. I could tell you that in pre-industrial times, starvation was a constant specter and life expectancy was in the 30s at best. [Note: This is average life expectancy, old people did still exist in olden times] I could tell you that at the dawn of the 19th century, barely more than one person in 10 was literate, while today that ratio has been nearly reversed. I could tell you that today is, on average, the best time to be alive in human history.

But that doesn’t mean you’ll be convinced.

In one 2017 Pew poll, a plurality of Americans — people who, perhaps more than anywhere else, are heirs to the benefits of centuries of material and political progress — reported that life was better 50 years ago than it is today. A 2015 survey of thousands of adults in nine rich countries found that 10 percent or fewer believed that the world was getting better. On the internet, a strange nostalgia persists for the supposedly better times before industrialization, when ordinary people supposedly worked less and life was allegedly simpler and healthier. (They didn’t and it wasn’t.)

Looking backward, we imagine a halcyon past that never was; looking forward, it seems to many as if, in the words of young environmental activist Greta Thunberg, “the world is getting more and more grim every day.”

So it’s boom times for doom times. But the apocalyptic mindset that has gripped so many of us not only understates how far we’ve come, but how much further we can still go. The real story of progress today is its remarkable expansion to the rest of the world in recent decades. In 1950, life expectancy in Africa was just 40; today, it’s past 62. Meanwhile more than 1 billion people have moved out of extreme poverty since 1990 alone.

But there’s more to do — much more. That hundreds of millions of people still go without the benefit of electricity or live in states still racked by violence and injustice isn’t so much an indictment of progress as it is an indication that there is still more low-hanging fruit to harvest.

The world hasn’t become a better place for nearly everyone who lives on it because we wished it so. The astounding economic and technological progress made over the past 200 years has been the result of deliberate policies, a drive to invent and innovate, one advance building upon another. And as our material condition improved, so, for the most part, did our morals and politics — not as a side effect, but as a direct consequence. It’s simply easier to be good when the world isn’t zero-sum.

Which isn’t to say that the record of progress is one of unending wins. For every problem it solved — the lack of usable energy in the pre-fossil fuel days, for instance — it often created a new one, like climate change. But just as a primary way climate change is being addressed is through innovation that has drastically reduced the price of clean energy, so progress tends to be the best route to solving the problems that progress itself can create.

The biggest danger we face today, if we care about actually making the future a more perfect place, isn’t that industrial civilization will choke on its own exhaust or that democracy will crumble or that AI will rise up and overthrow us all. It’s that we will cease believing in the one force that raised humanity out of tens of thousands of years of general misery: the very idea of progress.

Changing Humanity's "Normal" Forever

Progress may be about where we’re going, but it’s impossible to understand without returning to where we’ve been. So let’s take a trip back to the foreign country that was the early years of the 19th century.

In 1820, according to data compiled by the historian Michail Moatsos, about three-quarters of the world’s population earned so little that they could not afford even a tiny living space, some heat and, hopefully, enough food to stave off malnutrition.

It was a state that we would now call “extreme poverty,” except that for most people back then, it wasn’t extreme — it was simply life.

What matters here for the story of progress isn’t the fact that the overwhelming majority of humankind lived in destitution. It’s that this was the norm, and had been the norm since essentially… forever. Poverty, illiteracy, premature death — these weren’t problems, as we would come to define them in our time. They were simply the background reality of being human, as largely unchangeable as birth and death itself...

Between 10,000 BCE and 1700, the average global population growth rate was just 0.04 percent per year. And that wasn’t because human beings weren’t having babies. They were simply dying, in great numbers: at birth, giving birth, in childhood from now-preventable diseases, and in young adulthood from now-preventable wars and violence.

It was only with the progress of industrialization that we broke out of [this long cycle], producing enough food to feed the mounting billions, enough scientific breakthroughs to conquer old killers like smallpox and the measles, and enough political advances to dwindle violent death.

Between 1800 and today, our numbers grew from around 1 billion to 8 billion. And that 8 billion aren’t just healthier, richer, and better educated. On average, they can expect to live more than twice as long. The writer Steven Johnson has called this achievement humanity’s “extra life” — but that extra isn’t just the decades that have been added to our lifespans. It’s the extra people that have been added to our numbers. I’m probably one of them, and you probably are too...

The progress we’ve earned has hardly been uninterrupted or perfectly distributed... [But] once we could prove in practice that the lot of humanity didn’t have to be hand-to-mouth existence, we could see that progress could continue to expand.

Current Progress "Flows Overwhelmingly" to the Developing World

The long twentieth century came late to the Global South, but it did get there. Between 1960 and today, India and China, together home to nearly one in every three people alive today, have seen life expectancy rise from 45 to 70 and 33 to 78, respectively. Per-capita GDP over those years rose some 2,600 percent for India and an astounding 13,400 percent for China, with the latter lifting an estimated 800 million people out of extreme poverty.

In the poorer countries of sub-Saharan Africa, progress has been slower and later, but shouldn’t be underestimated. When we see the drastic decline in child mortality — which has fallen since 1990 from 18.1 percent of all children in that region to 7.4 percent in 2021 — or the more than 20 million measles deaths that have been prevented since 2000 in Africa alone, this is progress continuing to happen now, with the benefits overwhelmingly flowing to the poorest among us.

Vanishing Autocracies

In 1800, according to Our World in Data, zero — none, nada, zip — people lived in what we would now classify as a liberal democracy. Just 22 million people — about 2 percent of the global population — lived in what the site classifies as “electoral autocracies,” meaning that what democracy they had was limited, and limited to a subset of the population.

One hundred years later, things weren’t much better — there were actual liberal democracies, but fewer than 1 percent of the world’s population lived in them...

Today just 2 billion people live in countries that are classified as closed autocracies — relatively few legal rights, no real electoral democracy — and most of them are in China...

Expanding Human Rights

All you have to do is roll the clock back a few decades to see the way that rights, on the whole, have been extended wider and wider: to LGBTQ citizens, to people of color, to women. The fundamental fact is that as much as the technological and economic world of 2023 would be unrecognizable to people in 1800, the same is true of the political world.

Nor can you disentangle that political progress from material progress. Take the gradual but definitive emancipation of women. That has been a hard-fought, ongoing battle, chiefly waged by women who saw the inherent unfairness of a male-dominated society.

But it was aided by the invention of labor-saving technologies in the home like washing machines and refrigerators that primarily gave time back to women and made it easier for them to move into the workforce.

These are all examples of the expansion of the circle of moral concern — the enlargement of who and what is considered worthy of respect and rights, from the foundation of the family or tribe all the way to humans around the world (and increasingly non-human animals as well). And it can’t be separated from the hard fact of material progress.

Leaving a Zero-Sum World Behind

The pre-industrial world was a zero-sum one... In a zero-sum world, you advance only at the expense of others, by taking from a set stock, not by adding, which is why wars of conquest between great powers were so common hundreds of years ago, or why homicide between neighbors was so much more frequent in the pre-industrial era.

We have obviously not eradicated violence, including by the state itself. But a society that can produce more of what it needs and wants is one that will be less inclined to fight over what it has, either with its neighbors or with itself. It’s not that the humans of 2023 are necessarily better, more moral, than their ancestors 200 or more years ago. It’s that war and violence cease to make economic sense...

Doomerism, at its heart, may be that exhaustion made manifest.

But just as we need continued advances in clean tech or biosecurity to protect ourselves from some of the existential threats we’ve inadvertently created, so do we need continued progress to address the problems that have been with us always: of want, of freedom, even of mortality. Nothing can dispel the terminal exhaustion that seems endemic in 2023 better than the idea that there is so much more left to do to lift millions out of poverty and misery while protecting the future — which is possible, thanks to the path of the progress we’ve made.

And we’ll know we’re successful if our descendants can one day look back on the present with the same mix of sympathy and relief with which we should look back on our past. How, they’ll wonder, did they ever live like that?"

-via Vox, 3/20/23

Note: I would seriously recommend reading the whole article--because as long as this post is, this is only about half of it! The article contains a lot more information about the hows and whys of human progress, and it also definitely made me cry the first time I read it.