Lower population in of itself is a good thing.

It’s the change that is disruptive and will cause suffering in ways that are unique to the suffering caused by over population.

As population growth slows, the younger generation needs to support more elderly. Which means we need some combination of:

Working population being more productive. Population making do with less.

However you approach it, there will be segments of the population that are very unhappy.

The library is appealing to me because:

Precedence: pre internet I could connect to the library over a landlines and access the library and community news.

Expertise: not necessarily deep tech expertise, but with information retrieval, curation, education.

Community access: libraries are a municipal service with brick and mortar locations, and are heavily involved with community/public engagement.

For clarity, on the fediverse instance aspect. I was thinking more read only, with users being more official organizations with a barrier of entry vs. The general public. I personally wouldn’t want libraries to be moderating public discourse - this should be arms reach. And wouldn’t want them worrying about liability.

Public information (like safety bulletins for example) shouldn’t exclusively be sitting on a for profit ad platform, it’s bizarre.

Libraries should evolve to play a larger role in the internet, theyve been trying to reinvent themselves and i think this best aligns with their spiritual purpose. Some ideas:

Caretakers of digital archives.

Caretakers of relevant open source projects.

Could I get a free domain with my library card?

Could I get free api access to mapping or other localized data?

Should libraries host local fediverse instances for civic users? (think police, firefighter alert, other community related feeds)

Maybe tough to get a concensus on where the economy is going to be, a bit of reading tea leaves.

Regardless, agreed on extended 0% being problematic. Out of all the factors dragging us down:

interest rate history, pandemic, demographic shifts, climate change, global instability…

It could be interest rates that are having the largest impact today. Considering it caused such a large wealth transfer, equity inflation, and a drag on productivity.

The economy is important. Rates will go lower to protect that.

Central banks I think need to consider a higher neutral rate. Interest rates were too low for too long to try and move GDP growth. In retrospect not a great policy, as it led to a decade or so of inflation in stocks markets and housing.

Why do anything of value if I can just leverage at low rates and dump borrowed money into stocks and real estate?

Central banks tend to be arms reach from government, but maybe they should be doing less and the government more.

GDP growth low? Invest in infrastructure and research. High inflation? Increase taxes.

CPI inflation is reported higher than ‘all items’ though…

Grocery is seeing lower inflation. Seems to have come back down to earth.

We need wage growth to continue to outpace inflation like it has been for the past year or so.

I like this - as a fan of democracy.

Democracy costs, I think it’s OK that it takes a bit of time, more representatives, more votes is OK.

More civic engagement is a positive. Hearing the viewpoints of your neighbour is positive.

A really interesting dynamic, is that you would be creating a strong pipeline of leaders/representatives developing bottom up.

A lot of things of value are very hard to measure.

X degree influences can be very hard to measure.

You may hit your target metric, but secondary effects may be making the whole system worse.

Ideally you could A/B a parallel universe to isolate your specifc change, but that is challenging.

For sure, happy to open up the conversation again later

Very little of the demand is demand to drive a car. It’s mostly demand to travel as effectively as possible.

When you build out road networks you make traveling by car more effective, increasing demand on that specific mode.

When you build out transit networks you make traveling by transit more effective, increasing demand on that specific mode.

When you have well designed cities, you reduce the demand for travel, period.

Higher population centers have favorable economics for transit vs. Personal vehicles. And are more impacted by pollutants.

Low population centers have favorable economics for personal vehicles vs. Transit. And are less impacted by pollutants.

That’s a description of the dynamics anyway.

I imagine vast majority of people would agree that folks that live in the densist cities need transit, and those living in a forest need a personal vehicle. The debate occurs somewhere in between of the extremes.

Personally I’m of the opinion that we skew too far towards cars, because the true costs/externalities are harder to see, so what seems like favorable economics is actually just socializing the costs.