NEW populationforecasts from the United Nations point to a new world order in 2050. The number of people will grow from 7.3 billion to 9.7 billion in 2050, 100m more than was estimated in the UN's last report two years ago. More than half of this growth comes from Africa, where the population is set to double to 2.5 billion. Nigeria's population will reach 413m, overtaking America as the world's third most-populous country. Congo and Ethiopia will swell to more than 195m and 188m repectively, more than twice their current numbers. India will surpass China as the world's most populous country in 2022, six years earlier than was previously forecast. China's population will peak at 1.4 billion in 2028; India's four decades later at 1.75 billion. Changes in fertility make long-term projections hard, but by 2100 the planet’s population will be rising past 11.2 billion. It will also be much older. The median age of 30 will rise to 36 in 2050 and 42 in 2100—the median age of Europeans today. A quarter of Europe's people are already aged 60 or more; by 2050 deaths will outnumber births by 32m. The UN warns that only migration will prevent the region's population from shrinking further.
Reads
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
👓 Small Businesses Cheer ‘New Sheriff in Town’ After Climate Pact Exit | New York Times
Local firms’ leaders around the country remain widely supportive of President Trump, even as some chief executives of big corporations pull away.
This may be the definition of mediocre reporting, and possibly worse because it was one of the biggest stories of the week. It’s nice to have a story telling us what the other parts of the country are feeling. What they’re completely missing here is “WHY do these people who really have no experience with the science think this is the correct direction?” Other than repeating sound bites they’ve heard (most likely politicians say) on television, what are their reasons for cheering? They need to be prodded several questions deep to find the real underlying reasons.
I suspect that most small businesses don’t have very solid reasons, if any at all, for their cheering.
Addendum: Even worse, I heard the head of the EPA reference this particular article to support his own arguments on Meet the Press this morning. Because of this it would have been even better if the underlying reason for their joy was covered.
👓 Cast Update: Experimental JSON Feed Support | Cast App
A couple of weeks ago, Manton Reece and Brent Simmons announced JSON Feed, and I was immediately intrigued. Like a lot of software, much of Cast’s internal data is stored in JSON, and publishing JSON data directly would be pretty straightforward as a result.
👓 Fuck Facebook | Daring Fireball
Treat Facebook as the private walled garden that it is. If you want something to be publicly accessible, post it to a real blog on any platform that embraces the real web, the open one.
Content that isn’t indexable by search engines is not part of the open web.
👓 Three Strategies to Defend GOP Health Bill: Euphemisms, False Statements and Deleted Comments | Pro Publica
Since the passage of the American Health Care Act, Republican members of Congress have tried to swing public opinion to their side. ProPublica has been tracking what they’re saying.
We really do need more transparency in government. A bit of truth wouldn’t hurt either.
👓 Where Countries Stand With Donald Trump: A Crib Sheet | The Atlantic
The American president tells the man behind a brutal anti-drug campaign that he is doing a “great job.”
👓 What Trump Reveals By Calling Terrorists ‘Losers’ | The Atlantic
Why is the president putting ISIS in the same category in which he places Rosie O’Donnell?
👓 White House Discloses Ethics Waivers For Presidential Aides | NPR
The White House Wednesday night released 14 ethics waivers — documents that exempt some top presidential aides from important ethics rules. The disclosures came after a quiet but tough battle between Trump administration officials and the Office of Government Ethics. The waivers are considered public documents but for weeks after President Trump took office, they weren't made public.
Whatever happened to “Drain the swamp!”? Not only has it apparently disappeared, but now we’re going against basic ethics rules to boot?!
“So sad. Incompetent.”
“So sad. Incompetent.”
Continue reading 👓 White House Discloses Ethics Waivers For Presidential Aides | NPR
👓 What to Remember Before Watching ‘House of Cards’ Season 5 | New York Times
Character and plot synopsis of prior seasons
👓 New era, new blog | AltPlatform
Friends,
Welcome to our new blog here on the Internet. AltPlatform is a co-op nonprofit tech blog infused with the spirit of Open Web. Richard summed up our goals in his manifesto.
We realize that the world has changed a lot since our good old ReadWriteWeb days. Web 2.0 is no longer relevant. Things are changing so quickly in tech that even Marc Andreessen’s “software is eating the world” mantra is no more. As Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang puts it, now AI is eating the software.
We’re in the early stages of a new period of humanity, where bots and robots will take over not only labor-intensive jobs but also artistic ones. Computers have been fixing punctuation and grammar in our writing for some time now. But soon, well-trained networks will be able to consume the latest news articles and generate an opinion article in a snap. A decade from now, Saturday Night Live jokes will be produced not by a factory of writers, but by neural networks. Need proof? Just look at what the Prisma app can do without human intervention.
👓 Introducing AltPlatform & our manifesto for the Open Web | AltPlatform
Welcome everyone to AltPlatform, a non-profit tech blog devoted to Open Web technologies. What do we mean by “Open Web”? Firstly, we want to experiment with open source (like this WordPress.org blog) and open standards (like RSS). We’re also using the word open to signify a wider, boundary-le...
👓 New open web social apps to check out | AltPlatform
People love sharing on the internet and the technology is always evolving. Enthusiasts recently flocked to Kickstarter to back a new blogging tool, Micro.blog, RSS and podcasting pioneer Dave Winer released a new open source app, 1999.io, and the old bones of micro-blogging phenom identi.ca are bac...
👓 The Future is Meow! A Bakery in Japan Makes Cat-Shaped Bread | Nerdist
There’s just no limit to the wonderfully weird pieces of cuisine that Japan comes up with. They’ve made cream puff desserts into drinks, put Kit Kats on sushi, turned meat into cakes, and even made it possible to bathe in maple syrup! And their latest foray in overtaking internet searches and Twitter trends might be their cutest yet. Yes, we’re talking about cat bread.
Just what the world needs!
👓 The Coat of Arms Said ‘Integrity.’ Now It Says ‘Trump.’” | New York Times
The emblem used by the Trump Organization in the United States had to be changed in Britain, since it belongs to another family.
Donald Trump stole a British coat of arms and ironically removed the word “Integrity” and replaced it with “Trump.”
You really just can’t make this stuff up…
👓 Jared Kushner’s Role Is Tested as Russia Case Grows | New York Times
It is unclear how Jared Kushner’s high-profile woes will affect his hard-won partnership with his father-in-law, perhaps the most stable in an often unstable White House.