Better than nothing, but the problem with that is that you can't construct a deep, lazily evaluated pipeline. JSON can't be outputted until all the data is collected.
That still limits us too much due to the rather severely limited available data types (although arbitrary types could be serialized into binary/string data, I guess...)
Funny that you should mention this. I just hit that problem yesterday. The lack of a binary type is a problem. This is the same thing that hit XML. Unfortunately (or fortunately), the best solution is still the MIME stuff.
When perl came along it killed the 'Unix one tool philosophy' dead as a doornail. And since then and people have just kinda ignored the smell coming off the rotting corpse.
I don't write complex scripts in shell anymore because it's insanity. But ad-hoc loops and crap like that... hell yeah. At least a few a day. Sometimes dozens.
People need to be reminded, I think, that shell isn't a programming language first. It's a user interface. And when I look at Powershell scripts and other things of that nature and think about living in Powershell day in and day out I don't see the big pay-off over something like fish.
'Is this going to make it so I can get my work done faster?'
'Is this going to be more pleasant to use as a primary interface for a OS?'
When I go into fish or zsh and use curl to grab json and 'jq' to get a idea of how to use the API in python or node...
versus running 'curl' in powershell against some random API I have never used before..
I get the distinct impression that 'This is fucking garbage' in that It would take me a lot longer to figure out how to use powershell in a useful way then the time I would save by doing so in the long run.
The irony is that the very attempt to be one tool for everything caused Perl's own destruction. Perl 5 is still used by some veterans for small scripts but who wants to use Perl 6?
Unix follows the KISS principle, and that is key for success. Albert Einstein said: "Keep things as simple as possible but not too simple". In that sense Unix and Posix are well done. However, that doesn't mean that good ideas like Nushell are not welcome.
Yeah, I tried using Powershell as my shell and that's when I found out Powershell is more about the scripting language than an optimized shell used for everyday use. I was confronted with this almost immediately because one of the things I rely on most in Bash is 'dirs -v', pushd and popd. I have dirs aliased to dirs -v and I usually have 15-20 paths on my stack. I'll leave implementing the same functionality in Powershell as a user exercise.
Im confused... Why doesn't Push-Location (aliased to pushd by default), Pop-Location (aliased to popd by default), and Get-Location -Stack (trivially aliasable to dirs) not work? You can even have multiple location stacks and, if you care about the registry, you can also use the same commands to handle registry navigation as well.
‘dirs -v’ shows an enumerated list of directories. If I follow that up with pushd +11 I will be taken to the 11th path listed in the prior dirs command. As far as I know this isn’t implemented out of the box in PS
An addition to `{Push,Pop}-Location` - `Get-Location -Stack` will show the current directory stack. I don't know offhand of a way to get the equivalent of `pushd +11` though.
There is no need for laws for this stupidity. Unless you want to consider the laws of economics.
Namely: Create a shitty business model that depends on treating your customers like shit and you can expect to out of business as soon as your venture funds dry up.
This is the sort of problem that solves itself.
Either that or people can keep giving these jokers money, wait for some lawsuit to happen and then in 7 or 8 years after the lawyers take their cut you can expect a check in the mail for 4 or 5 dollars.
Unfortunately it doesn't. If you've ever watched the UK TV series "Watchdog" you'll see time after time people set up businesses, rip people off, go bankrupt, rinse and repeat. Game theory trumps economic models here - and the rules of the game are whatever loopholes these people can find.
To be fair these cinema clowns haven't done anything much worse than a 'fair usage policy' on a mobile phone offering 'unlimited calls' would do. They were sly about it rather than upfront. They could have just introduced new terms as of the next payment. But the general point is about the free market sorting this sort of thing out doesn't work.
But it can still take a long time for a problem like this to solve itself, especially, in an area dominated by a monopoly. So the need for laws for this is not completely unnecessary.
I'm a lay person somewhat familiar with the terminology. I am going to be wrong on several details.
What they were talking about is phase weakening.
Think of voltage as 'electrical pressure'. Like PSI or Bar.
Think of amperage as 'volume per second' or 'amount of electrons (equivalent charge) per second'... like liters per minute.
Combine the volume per second by pressure and you get total energy per second; watts. Hence 'voltage * amps = watts'
Electric motors are also generators. When they spin they create their own 'reverse voltage', sometimes called 'Back EMF', that creates resistance in the windings of the motor.
The faster the motor spins the greater this 'back emf'. It'll increase until the 'back emf' creates enough resistance that it effectively negates the voltage coming from the power source. At that point the motor has reached it's top speed. This is why DC motors don't try to spin infinitely fast.
The strength of the motor, the torque, is directly related to the amount of amperage flowing. When the motor is at it's top speed it's generating only enough torque to overcome the resistance of the bearings and other parasitic drag. So very little actual current is flowing, especially in a very efficient motor.
Field weakening is a technique that you can use to overcome some of this limitation.
What it does is change the shape of the voltage wave. Most of the time on a oscilloscope it would show up as a sine wave or trapezoid... But if you can change the timing and peak of the wave then you can effectively weaken the magnetic field at the right time that the 'back emf' isn't as strong. Sort of flatten out the peak and make the pulse wider then it normally would be.
So you end up flowing less peak amperage, but overall more amperage. Depending on the type of motor and speed the amount of extra torque/amperage you can generate can be very significant. The trade off is reduced efficiency.
A simple motor surface mount magnet may only see a 20-30% increase in top speed and decrease in torque at the low end. A more modern interior mounted magnet (were magnets are embedded inside of steel laminates) that combines the strength of the rare earth magnets with reluctance of the magnetic field flowing through the steel.. (think of the magnets providing their own force at low end and then providing a guiding path for magnetic flux as the motor speeds up) Can see many multiples boost in top speed while still maintaining significant torque at low end. Field weakening on some motors can produce increased torque across the entire RPM range.
This is going to be very strongly taken advantage of in EVs like the Tesla Model 3.
Although in the case of most motors this field weakening is done electronically, by changing the shape of the waves sent to the motor.
This design does the same thing, but by moving the drum's magnets out of phase with the magnets on either side. So it's mechanical field weakening.
It's not a super-new concept or anything. I expect their patents have to do with the 'H' shape of the spindle and the math behind how it is supposed to work.
I don't know if mechanical field weakening really provides any real benefit over electronically controlled one.
Very interesting, thank you! Do you have more information I can read about phase weakening and BLDC control algorithms?
I ask because I happen to be designing a BLDC motor controller, I am aware of using the back EMF to measure the motor phase, but never considered it as a force slowing the motor down. As a software engineer by trade I was hoping I could perhaps dynamically switch between the two control techniques to get low-end torque and high-end speed? I was also hoping to setup the controller to optimize the various parameters for the specific motor it is controlling by measuring the back EMF.
Check out endless-sphere.com. There are people there doin home-built motors and designing controllers. 99% of the content is just people messing around with their bicycles or arguing over silly things, but there are a few very highly technical people.
Also there is a open source motor controller called VESC from Vedder Electronics.
It's a modern controller with FOC modes and such things.
Originally designed for electric skateboards it has gone through many revisions and is a viable commercial product. The developer has a official vendor for buying the design, but there are many clones and variations of different prices and quality.
There are people on endless-sphere working on variations to scale it up for larger EVs.
The penicillin moment happened because penicillin actually came into existence and became widely available pretty rapidly.
Research and speculation is awesome stuff, but the hard part isn't discovering new concepts. It is actually making those concepts into a marketable and affordable good.
The evidence for this is that even though there is essentially a new 'breakthrough' discovery every other week for solar panels, or electric motors, or batteries.. We are still using what amounts to cutting-edge tech from the late 90's.
In the modern era this means we generally have to wait till the patents expire and market competition kicks in in order to get the price low enough and the product perfected enough to see widespread usage. If it goes anywhere at all.
It's also worth noting that Florey, the man who is largely responsible in making penicillin practical drug, refused to patent his early innovations to make it widespread as possible.
Penicillin had to undergo decade long R&D to go from Fleming's petria dish to a cheap practical drug - I cannot find the article now but I believe the investment levels from the US Military were compared to Manhattan (obviously poorly compared) but the point is this was not the "gosh what luck" story it is in mass media.
Having made that first breakthrough, world class teams across the globe fought to bring the efficiency up from "froth on the top of a brew" to "gallons of the stuff"
Florey was a big part of the story but so were teams in US and Europe and then the US military scaled it up beyond belief.
We spent money, targeted money, on the best teams globally and then put serious industrial might to it once they found the answers.
That exact approach is what I am calling for again.
And as for patents - if enough global effort is put in, with enough government funds, the pressure to put the results "in public hands" rather than hold out for patents is really strong
If this is the case, then wouldn't "buy a bunch of patents and (with great fanfare) make them open-source" be a relatively low-complexity way for a billionaire who feels like making a name for himself to accelerate progress on fighting climate change?
No. Not a F-22 or F-35 are unlikely to actually be invisible. A B-2 bomber has a better chance.
The talking heads from the military may talk about 'invisibility', but they are full of shit. Just propaganda for the tax payer.
The problem is the physical size of the jet. In order to absorb the radar the material needs to be the proper size in relation to the wavelength. A B-2 bomber is large enough to absorb useful radar frequencies, but F-35 or F-22 isn't.
What the F-35/F-22 stealth does get, however, is invisibility in the XHF and higher frequency ranges, which is what is used for radar guided missiles. So they will have a major advantage against ground and air launched long range missiles.
The F-22 also has good infrared suppression, which protects it against infrared guided missiles. F-35s have a large IR signature, so they are probably not much better then other US jets. Traditionally speaking it's IR weapons that have caused losses for USA airplanes in modern times.
At VHF and lower frequencies the F-22 and F-35 can be detected, but those radars don't offer enough resolution to make them particularly useful for missiles. People suspect that with multiple angles and computer algorithms it may be possible to target a jet that way, but who knows.
So if you were Russia and you detected something with VHF long range radar and then you pointed a shorter range XHF radard at it... and nothing shows up then you can be reasonably certain that it's a American stealth fighter jet. That doesn't mean they can do much about it, though.
To combat this it is suspected that Americans use a technique that involves 'ghosting' commercial airliner traffic to mask the signatures of their jets against the lower frequency, longer range, radar.
> Americans use a technique that involves 'ghosting' commercial airliner traffic
You mean flying under commercial traffic? That's what was likely the cause of French jets downing a civilian plane over Italy in 1980 - while trying to hit a Lybian MIG "hidden" under it. Reportedly, Lybian planes routinely did that in order to reach their servicing bases in Yugoslavia.
> That's what was likely the cause of French jets downing a civilian plane over Italy in 1980
Note that the event is heavily disputed. The British Air Accidents Investigation Board claims that a missile strike does not match the wreckage analysis; instead stating a explosive device in the rear bathroom was the only possible cause.
It's highly disputed because the original allegation is not just France, but rather a French-led NATO joint force that included Britain. It's assumed that the British investigation can't be trusted.
The other investigations also doesn't explain the wreckage of a Libyan fighter jet, close to the wreckage of the airliner.
Multiple Italian soldiers were also found guilty of concealing evidence about the event, allegedly by the request of NATO.
Investigations from NATO sources simply cannot be trusted. They are not independent. The only supporters of the bomb scenario left, in Italy, are ultra-right-wing people who refuse to accept the fact that Italian autorities of the time lied.
It was even admitted by the Italian then-PM (later President) Francesco Cossiga, almost 30 years later, that he was told right away it had been a French jet. This was confirmed later by multiple sources, among them a retired US seaman who was stationed on the Saratoga and feared for his life (a lot of key witnesses have died in suspicious circumstances, including suicide). And the secret-war scenario is the only one that can explain a Lybian MIG crashing in the same area on the same day, which was kept hidden for weeks by Italian authorities.
The historical truth has basically been ascertained, it will simply never be admitted by the involved parties because it is still inconvenient (Lybia still being "in play" between France and Italy).
I did not know about this case, but good luck to the justice to know the truth. It might be a french or american airplane according to wikipedia.
The french army is called in France "la grande muette" for a reason: it never speaks or admits anything (e.g. Bugaled Breizh ship).
American also used this technique to fly military aircraft above french airspace while France was not part of NATO, it is only in 2007 with Sarkozy that France entered NATO (one of his many stupid move if you ask me)
France was always a member state of NATO since 1949. France was just not taking part in the integrated military command between the mid-60's to 2007, but did participate in all NATO mission (for instance Afghanistan, Bosnia, Serbia, etc.).
Indeed French authorities actively obstructed the search for truth over the decades, but to be fair, Italian and American authorities did exactly the same (or worse). Nobody wants to admit letting it happen, even if it was a mistake.
> The talking heads from the military may talk about 'invisibility', but they are full of shit. Just propaganda for the tax payer.
I think a distinction needs to be made between proverbial "invisibility" and stealth, and the technical definition. If general conversations included, say, backscatter coefficients you'd start seeing glazed eyes. Or perhaps area equivalence (square-footage? square-metrage?).
Yes, but that merely limits the damage to a small degree. Fighters need vertical stabilizers because they require higher maneuverability than flying wings. And current aerospace design capabilities can't overcome it, though bendable (wing warping technology) wings might eventually.
Yup, thrust vectoring will help add control authority. But vertical stabilizers don't necessarily contribute to the amount of G's an aircraft can pull. It depends on how they're measuring it. With an aircraft lacking VS, you could simply pull/push up down to get high G, or roll and do the same.
To combat this it is suspected that Americans use a
technique that involves 'ghosting' commercial airliner
traffic to mask the signatures of their jets against
the lower frequency, longer range, radar.
That sounds fascinating. A quick Googling bore no fruit for me. Can you elaborate, or point me in the direction of more information?
They can change their radar signature since the true signature isn't much of anything. They can mimic the signature of other planes and even move the signature making it seem like the spoofed aircraft is closer or further away than it really is. If you move the spoofed signature much closer to a radar installation, they might fire off a missile from another location that was previously hidden. Make the spoofed signature large enough and they may not see the anti-radiation missile heading towards them. There are also expendable versions of this tech that can be dropped from a plane like chaff, further increasing the distance between the spoofed signature and the true one.
Its a cat and mouse game between airplanes and radars.
Radars are usually arrays of small radars now that can move the beam without even moving, chirp the frequecy and do all sorts of weird things. I wrote OS software to help control them years ago, which was interesting.
A much more probable scenario would be of its airfield being blown up by something like Tochka or Luna even before most of the planes will have a chance to sortie.
This is why there is a natural scepticism of airforce centric warfare: a tank will not fall out of the sky the moment its logistic supply is cut.
According to Wikipedia, most recently shot down aircraft have been helicopters falling to small arms, or course Wikipedia is dependent on what people write, but as far as I can tell there aren't that many jets being shot down by IR missiles.
USA hasn't really fought people capable of shooting down jets in a while. So the latest is generally the early 1990's with the combat in Iraq.
The only stealth plane shot down that I am aware of was a F-117 shot down by short range SAM in the Kosovo war in 1999. It was a older 1960's missile design. Probably due to a large part of combination of dumb luck on the side of the SAM operator and the Airforce being lazy and having the jet fly predictable routine routes.
I wouldn't call that 'luck' per se on account of the Americans apparently flying like that habitually, as well as sticking to predictable flight plans. It's not like the Serbs fired into the blue on a whim and were shocked when they hit something.
It was not dumb luck. He placed his site where he knew the doors were more likely to be open and hence increase the signature, and waited for that moment to switch on the radar and fire the shot.
Most recent combat environments (Iraq war post-invasion, and Afghanistan) were not contested air space. The US has always had air superiority over those regions and the ability to fly AWACS planes, Predators, Reapers, Global Hawks and a whole bunch of other stuff around with very little risk of getting shot down.
Aircraft operating low to the ground and on approach to small airfields, and helicopters, are of course vulnerable to short range rifle fire and MANPADs. There have been losses to that in Afghanistan.
Modern NATO-equipped militaries haven't really encountered a semi modern air defense system since the brief bombing campaign against Serbia, in which they did manage to lose a F117 to a SAM.
Interesting how many of the fixed-wing shootdowns since the Gulf War were shot down by equipment made by the same geopolitical block (either NATO-on-NATO or Soviet-on-Soviet), either in the sense of literal friendly-fire accidents, or two regional combatants both being supplied by the same superpower. Turkish F-16 shot down by Greek Mirage 2000.
British Tornado shot down by U.S. Patriot. A-10 shot down by Iraqi Roland. Georgian Hermes-450 shot down by Russian Mig-29. Russian Tu-22 shot down by Georgian Buk-M1. Ukrainian Su-27 shot down by Russian Su-27. Ukrainian Mig-29 shot down by Buk. That's practically all of the combat jets on the list.
That may just be a factor of modern warfare being largely one side with near-absolute air superiority in an area pounding on largely defenseless ground troops.
The first Gulf War saw nearly half of coalition casualties being from friendly fire.
I really don't think that this is a accurate statement at all.
There are a few dangers to vaping.
The biggest one is having a vaporizer that is malfunctioning and is burning things instead of heating them up. The complex chemical reactions are difficult to predict. But it has the side effect of tasting like shit.
The second biggest danger is the flavorings. However the community has been very good at self-policing and eliminating flavors that are found to pose a risk.
The last danger is a sort of being a idiot and using way too much nicotine.
On the flip side you can have zero nicotine. So peer pressure isn't really even a problem as you can get zero nicotine juices.
You can get zero nicotine, but not everyone does. I know a few people who accidentally got themselves addicted to nicotine by vaping too much without really thinking of the consequences.
Everyone knows nicotine is addictive, not everyone knows how much nicotine they are ingesting when they vape as you can take in much more way faster than you can by smoking.
There's so much unheated air accompanying the vapour, through the air vents, that my recollection of vaping is it wasn't even warm. I'm sure there is a temperature difference after the vaporiser, but I never noticed it. Completely unlike smoking where you often noticed it was hot.
Sounds like something for a Youtuber to measure. :)
I never tried a Juul, just regular mods and vape pens if that makes a difference.
The proportion of VG and PG, vegetable glycerine and propylene glycol, decides how hard it is on the throat. Known as "throat hit" on vaping sites. More PG gives more throat hit - it feels harsher, and more chance of a cough, but fewer clouds. I used to prefer the high VG liquids as I thought the throat hit part of the bad of smoking that I wanted to quit.
Maybe some of the flavours have impact too, I don't know. One thing that is different is it's "just" a cough from immediate irritation. None of the horrible green and yellow crap coming up from a coughing fit next morning that you got from tobacco.
That's ignoring Juul which works differently, I have no idea what goes on in those.
Sure. If you are willing to torpedo the economy you could accomplish a lot.
At least until people start showing up with pitchforks and torches.
And by 'torpedo the economy' I mean raise energy costs up to the point were all this energy pipe dreams becomes viable.
Of course if people were interested in actually solving the problem then we would be building nuclear power plants left and right and wouldn't have to worry about insanely long transmission lines.
Which is probably just not going to happen, for the most part. The people pushing this stuff are generally just lying about it (lies of omission in many cases), and they should be ashamed of themselves. And we as a whole should be treating them quite harshly for it, rather than accommodating them.
By way of example, lately they've been talking a lot about how melting permafrost will release lots of CO2 and methane (greenhouse gases), as biological activity kicks in which causes old organic matter to break down. But what they fail to mention (and this is an intentional omission on their part, in my opinion) is that pretty much as soon as that starts happening, other biological activity will kick in which mitigates those emissions, since a lot of things use that stuff for food. So while some extra CO2 and methane might very well be emitted, this will be far more limited in scope than they let on. It's just scare tactics, mostly.
No, I think most of the folks spewing this stuff are mostly just functionally incompetent, a position which you might agree with yourself if you'd actually read any of their research and understood the "data" which they try to use to justify it. (Don't get me started!)
But some of them are also clearly dishonest, too, IMO. Michael Mann, for example, who is generally considered an esteemed climate scientist, got caught some years back attempting to commit perjury by claiming in court documents that he was a Nobel Peace Prize winner, which he clearly was not. (The situation with him - and a few others who made similar claims - got so bad that the Nobel folks eventually had to step in and put a stop to it.) And those who looked closely at the tree-ring data which he used to help build his famous "hockey stick" temperature chart found a lot of problems with that data and how he used it, but I don't remember all of the details. I do remember it being stated that tree ring growth responds primarily to changes in precipitation, though, rather than temperature.
I recently read a paper where two of the authors (out of several) are considered to be among the most esteemed climate scientists in the world. And I just shook my head at how bad that paper was, the ridiculous claims that it made, and at how seriously it was being taken, at least at first. One of those esteemed authors has of late taken to making such outrageous claims that even his own acolytes don't really want to talk about it much, so I was a bit surprised to even see his name on that paper to begin with.
Of course, in the press the paper was being hailed as breakthrough research at the time. But I noticed that it kind of fell off the radar pretty quickly, so I guess a lot of other folks had quietly come to the same conclusion as to how bad it was. I have to see any public acknowledgement of that, though.
BTW, I read somewhere that there are something like 200x as many climate papers being published today as there were a generation or so ago. So if there is a research bandwagon that someone might want to jump on in order to get funding and get their papers published, that's probably a good one to go for. But it turns out that an awful lot of so-called "climate experts" publishing such papers actually have little to no formal training in matters of climate, which I find very telling. Some of them have little to no STEM training at all, in fact.
These are exactly the same arguments that creationists offer against evolution. I find it extremely unlikely that the entire climate science community is less competent in climate science than you. If it were that easy to refute, don't you think that the billions of dollars that the fossil fuel industry spends on lobbying would be more effectively used for publishing refutations?
> These are exactly the same arguments that creationists offer against evolution.
That's a rather bizarre association to make! I suggest that you refrain from making any further comments on the matter until you've done a little digging for yourself - looked at the backgrounds of the so-called "experts"; read some of the history of the matter, going back decades to centuries; and read some of the papers and critiques of those papers - instead of just depending on whatever the headlines tell you.
This is just a microcosm of problems governments are going to face with shrinking populations.
Another, related problem, is the issue of maintaining state pensions and other entitlement programs.
Social Security in the USA, for example, has a negative ROI. For it to work the government has to take money from younger working people in order to pay for older retired people. As the population shrinks you have less and less young people being forced to support the larger number of retired people.
All these sorts of programs have the same problems. They were designed in a era were it was assumed that people died off as a higher rate and people were born at a faster rate. As those trends gradually reverse then all welfare/entitlement programs are becomingly increasingly insolvent.
....
This sort of stuff is why the Soviets had to institute travel restrictions and a sort of passport system in the USSR; you can't have effective long term government planing with a rapidly shifting population.
Yeah no. We have plenty of shrinking cities in France. The water system is still in perfect shape.
My old grand mother city is one of them: streets are full of closed shops, but the infrastructures are in perfect shape. Roads are pristine. Water is clear. Electricity is never ever missing.
Scale and time matters. How many of those cities have lost over 60% of their population since their peak?
The general decay in France is going to be at a much slower rate then some place like Detroit. This means that the increasing tax burden, crumbling infrastructure, and financial crisis not only are much less noticeable, but governments have more time to react and mitigate the issue.
The reason why places like Flint are impressive in their decay is because the rate of change in population is so extreme.
> Social Security in the USA, for example, has a negative ROI. For it to work the government has to take money from younger working people in order to pay for older retired people. As the population shrinks you have less and less young people being forced to support the larger number of retired people.
You can solve that entire problem with a few years of inflation. There's nothing, in principle, wrong with a guaranteed return-until-you-die investment, as part of a retirement strategy.
It's a smart part of a diverse retirement portfolio (Especially when compared with a 100% commitment to the guaranteed-contribution, variable-return investments of 401ks). I wish I could invest more than 3% of my income into SS - and I expect to take a haircut on that investment.
SS isn't an investment though, even says so in its name -- Federal Insurance Contributions Act -- and like most insurance, it's expected that you will pay more into it than you receive in benefits.
There are inflation indexed annuities that you can invest in. Most 401ks don't have them directly, but when you retire I advise my friends to move some of your saving into them: enough to cover the basic life expenses (insurance, food, rent). Because they are for life they are typically lower return on investment, but they lower the risk of living wrong so they should ensure you can afford at least the basics of life.
Sure, and I'll probably look into them, if, by retirement, the world doesn't turn into a Mad Max hell-scape. (Which I am not optimistic about.)
The thing is, all the same risks of Social Security (People living longer than expected, investment returns being lower than expected, a prolonged recession emptying out the fund, inflation turning your guaranteed returns into 'only-good-as-toilet-paper-money') apply to them, but even moreso (Because they cannot count on continued buy-in, unlike Social Security).
The situation with water infrastructure isn’t sustainable even ignoring cities with shrinking populations. Many cities, like DC, are growing but have bad problems with their water systems, because of the extreme aversion to raising rates to the necessary level.
You would just shift the costs away from maintaining pipes to treating massive amounts of water that would never get used by anybody.
And you will still have to maintain the pipes. Your solution would reduce costs per mile, but you still have a lot of mileage to maintain with a shrinking population.
