Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

Higgenbotham wrote: Tue Jul 21, 2026 1:35 pm Like all con games, the con game of Stacking, after 55 years, is reaching its natural limits. The population is exhausted, depleted and, in many cases, infertile. The birth rate has been plunging, decreasing the pool of Stackees.

The US labor market may soon face a new crisis: Too few workers

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets ... 59d09&ei=7

Starting right about now, fewer Stackees will be entering the work force than the Stackees leaving the work force. Think of Stackees as like worker ants who put the extra crumbs they gather into the bank accounts of the kings and queens who own the ant hills. Fewer ant hills and maybe no organized ant hills at all is the so-called "crisis" incoming that is being labeled a crisis that is not.

Where to get new sources of Stackees? What to do? Greed is insatiable. By God, if Stackees can't produce new sources of Stackees, we'll produce them ourselves, dammit! Enter the new con game and wet dream known as Artificial Intelligence. The modus operandi has not changed at all. Build a huge bubble to suck wealth out of. Try to rinse and repeat using large scale pumps and dumps as a model. The twist is this bubble is by far the biggest and most untenable one in the history of the world (my opinion). I guess we'll see how well poking and probing a bubble of this size works out. My prediction is when this bubble bursts, the world will plunge into a new dark age and my personal and new modus

The US labor market may soon face a new crisis: Too few workers

Higgenbotham wrote: Wed Feb 07, 2018 10:49 pm My more specific predictions would be:

• There will be a major global financial panic and crisis. Supply chains will break, resulting in unavailability of critical raw materials and components. Global trade will begin to shut down. As it begins to become apparent that the supply chain linkages are permanently broken, the global interlinked financial markets will shut down and cease to exist. This will all happen very quickly. It will not take years from the initial panic.
• The focus of governments will turn to controlling their panicked and hungry populations. Due to lack of availability of imported goods and adequate storage "sufficient to reconstitute" a system consistent with nation state government, this will prove to be too little too late and most government will devolve to the local level as populations lose faith in their national governments and the national governments lose the resources and ability to control their populations.
• There will be no large scale nuclear war. Instead, the population will be culled through starvation, local strife (including settling of long-standing scores) and disease. Wave after wave of pandemics will sweep the world.
• Similar to national economies and governments, centralized utilities will fail or become so decrepit as to be unsafe and unusable. All centralized utilities including the power grid will shut down permanently.
• The initial worldwide kill rate during the first couple decades following the financial panic will exceed 90%. The global population will be in the range of a few tens of millions when the bottom is hit in two or three centuries. Similar to the last dark age, the world's largest cities will have a population on the order of 25,000 and a large town will be 1,000.
• Life during the coming dark age will be similar to the last dark age but worse due to environmental damage and pollution.

Guest wrote: Fri Jul 17, 2026 5:35 pm The third level knobs will be the ones that assure Sorites paradox.
They will never sit down since they never stood up for what should of been done.

List the most quoted living people in the world

AI Overview

There is no official global data tracking who is quoted the most. However, public figures with massive media coverage, global leaders, and prominent thinkers emerge as the most frequently quoted living people.

World Leaders and Politicians
Donald Trump: Frequently quoted across global news for his statements on policy, media, and politics.
Vladimir Putin: His speeches and commentary on international relations are widely cited by global media.
Pope Francis: His remarks on faith, social justice, and ethics are regularly quoted globally.
Narendra Modi: His addresses and social media statements are frequently referenced across South Asia and international platforms.

Tech Entrepreneurs and Public Intellectuals
Elon Musk: Widely quoted for his commentary on technology, business, space exploration, and future trends.
Noam Chomsky: Heavily cited and quoted in academic, political, and philosophical discourse.
Bill Gates: Frequently quoted regarding global health, technology, and climate change initiatives.

Cultural and Activist Figures
Malala Yousafzai: Her statements on education and women's rights are globally referenced.
Oprah Winfrey: Her media commentary and personal wisdom are staples in popular culture.

Rank the top 20 universities according to how many students in approximately the year 1980 (number of students, not proportion) scored 800 on the SAT math

AI Overview

There are no comprehensive, historical records or official statistics published by the College Board that rank universities by the exact number of incoming students who scored a perfect 800 on the SAT Math section in 1980.

However, looking at historical SAT score data from this period, the top universities that enrolled the largest absolute numbers of perfect math scorers generally fell into two groups: massive engineering powerhouses and the most elite Ivy League schools. Based on historical class sizes and 1980 math score distributions, the top 20 universities that enrolled the highest count of 800-Math students would have looked approximately like this:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley)
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
Stanford University
Purdue University
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Cornell University
Carnegie Mellon University
Harvard University
Princeton University
California Institute of Technology (Caltech)
University of Texas at Austin
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)
Yale University
Columbia University
University of Pennsylvania
Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech)
University of Wisconsin-Madison
University of Chicago

Why this list?

To generate the highest total count of students with an 800 in SAT Math, a school needed two things: very high average math scores (placing a large portion of the admitted class in the top 99th percentile) and a massive undergraduate student body.

While elite schools like Caltech and MIT had the highest concentration (or proportion) of perfect scores, their small class sizes limited the absolute numbers. Conversely, major public research institutions like UIUC, Purdue, and UC Berkeley admitted thousands of engineering and physical science students, resulting in high total numbers of 800 scorers despite having slightly lower median score percentiles than the Ivy League.

Realizing early on that I had a head for math was a critical step in my story. In his terrific book How Not to Be Wrong, mathematician Jordan Ellenberg observes that “knowing mathematics is like wearing a pair of X-ray specs that reveal hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of the world.” Those X-ray specs helped me identify the order underlying the chaos, and reinforced my sense that the correct answer was always out there–I just needed to find it. That insight came at one of the most formative times of a kid’s life, when the brain is transforming into a more specialized and efficient tool. Facility with numbers gave me confidence, and even a sense of security.

There’s quite a lot about his years as a student at Harvard, especially about the freshman-year Math 55 class he took, which was taught by John Mather. This brought back a lot of memories for me of my experiences there a couple years later. Gates arrived as a freshman in the fall of 1973, which was two years before me. Something we had in common was not being the best students in Math 55, but somewhere in the middle. Our reactions to that however were very different, since Gates was extremely competitive:

In our Math 55 study sessions, even as we were helping each other, we were also subtly keeping score. That was true in our broader circle of math nerds as well. Everyone knew how everyone else was doing, for instance, that Lloyd in Wigg B aced a Math 21a test or that Peter–or was it someone else?–found an error in Mather’s notes. We all grasped who among us was quicker that day, sharper, the person who “got it” first and then could lead the rest of us to the answer. Every day you strived to be on top. By the end of the first semester, I realized that my ranking in the hierarchy wasn’t what I had hoped…

By most measures I was doing well. I earned a B+ in the first semester which was an achievement in that class. In my stark view however it was less of a measure of what I knew than how much I didn’t. The gap between B+ and A was the difference between being the top person in the class and being a fake…

I was recognizing that while I had an excellent math brain, I didn’t have the gift of insight that sets apart the best mathematicians. I had talent but not the ability to make fundamental discoveries.

"There's nothing wrong with asking for SAT scores," Bezos says. Several of his employees blew away his 1,450, in fact. SATs are one minor metric in an elaborate assessment of job candidates. "If you start out with A's, you get to keep A's," he says. "If you start hiring B's, B's hire B's."

Jeff Bezos decided not to become a theoretical physicist during his time at Princeton University when he encountered a particularly difficult partial differential equation. Despite being a strong student, he and his roommate struggled for three hours to solve this problem without success.

They then sought help from their friend Yasantha Rajakarunanayake, considered the "smartest guy at Princeton," who solved it in seconds by recognizing it as analogous to a problem he had solved three years earlier.

This moment of realizing he could not excel as a theoretical physicist was pivotal for Bezos. He later said, "That was the very moment when I realized I was never going to be a great theoretical physicist." This experience contributed to his decision to shift his focus from physics to entrepreneurship, which eventually led him to found Amazon.

This story is well-documented from an interview Bezos gave at The Economic Club of Washington in 2018, where he humorously recounted this episode and its significance in his career path.

"Elon Musk, a Canadian: How Tesla's man was shaped by ...
The Globe and Mail
https://www.theglobeandmail.com › business › article-el...
Sep 10, 2023 — On his second round of the SAT tests, he got a 670 out of 800 on his verbal exam and a 730 on math.