- China’s declining population and debt burden will limit its growth rate to 2-3%: Breakout’s Sharma CNBC Television
- China’s deflation risk: Spillover effects will be ‘greater in Europe,’ strategist says Yahoo Finance
- China Weakness Suggests Reduced Trade Dependency, Nagel Says Bloomberg
- We need to prepare for a negative shock from China, says IIF’s Tim Adams on weak China economic data CNBC Television
- China State Planner: Persistent Economic Recovery Faces Risks and Challenges Including Insufficient Demand, Sluggish Momentum and Weak Confidence Forex Factory
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: Declining
Covid, flu, RSV declining in hospitals as ‘tripledemic’ threat fades
But no such surge materialized. The RSV wave has receded in Connecticut and across the country. Flu cases have rapidly dwindled. Covid hospitalizations rose briefly after Christmas, only to fall again.
“We are seeing the normal busy, but not the very busy that I thought we would see,” said Juan Salazar, physician-in-chief at Connecticut Children’s in Hartford. “I’m just so pleased we are now able to be back to normal staffing. Busy staffing, but not anything near to what we saw in the fall.”
It turns out that early waves of respiratory syncytial virus and influenza peaked before the new year, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And the expected winter uptick of coronavirus is nowhere close to overwhelming hospitals, as it did in 2021 when covid wards were filled with unvaccinated people struggling to breathe and last winter when the highly transmissible omicron variant ignited a massive wave of illness.
The seven-day average of hospital patients testing positive for coronavirus has declined to 39,000 as of Friday, after peaking at 47,000 around Jan. 10. Covid-19 patients are occupying 5 percent of hospital beds, compared with 21 percent at this point last year, according to CDC data.
Weekly emergency room visits for all three viruses combined peaked in early December — with no post-holiday resurgence, according to a new CDC dashboard. For senior citizens, covid and flu emergency room visits peaked in late December.
“It’s possible the decline might have been even greater without the mingling in the holidays,” said Barbara Mahon, a CDC official who oversees the response to coronavirus and other respiratory viruses. “Things don’t look as bad as they did a few weeks or a few months ago, but we are still very much in the throes of winter.”
Experts caution the country could see additional increases in flu, which sometimes has two peaks, and another RSV season in spring. The highly transmissible and immune-evading XBB.1.5 subvariant of coronavirus that accounts for half of all new U.S. infections and has been dominant in the Northeast could spread elsewhere.
Despite the declines, it’s still a busy winter for hospitals contending with a new unpredictable rhythm of infectious diseases. The viral onslaughts have taken a toll on an exhausted health care workforce and compromised their ability to care for patients with non-respiratory emergencies, hospital executives say.
Headed into the third anniversary of coronavirus reaching the United States, many hospitals are resigned to it never going away.
“We have almost three full years of going nonstop, of surges, peaks, downward slopes, getting to a valley,” said Cathy Bennett, president and chief executive of the New Jersey Hospital Association. “It’s rinse, wash, repeat.”
Comparisons to the devastation of the first two pandemic winters can mask the ongoing toll on the elderly and severely immunocompromised. Covid deaths are rising and averaging about 670 a day, well short of the 3,300 a day peak in mid–January 2021.
The United States is better equipped now than earlier in the pandemic to weather coronavirus surges because most people have some degree of immunity, and early treatment keeps the most vulnerable people from becoming seriously ill.
“As awful as omicron was, it left in its wake a tremendous amount of immunity,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown University School of Public Health.
Even though the omicron subvariants that are now circulating cause concern because of their ability to evade antibodies, the immune systems of those who have been vaccinated or previously infected are still effective at keeping the cases mild, especially if they have recently received booster shots, doctors say.
At the Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, covid cases peaked the first week of January, with 170 patients testing positive compared with 1,338 the same time last year. Doctors there believe covid is still rampant in the community, but not as many people need hospital care.
Even after XBB.1.5 quickly became the dominant coronavirus strain in Massachusetts in December, the temporary rise in patients testing positive at the state’s largest hospital system was modest and did not surpass the last winter wave. The Mass General Brigham system, headquartered in Boston, now averages about 400 patients a day testing positive for coronavirus, compared to about 2,100 patients a day at this time last year.
Nearly three quarters of patients admitted with covid in the most recent peak were “secondary” diagnoses, meaning the patient tested positive while admitted for other causes. While such cases still create complications for hospitals to isolate the patient and prevent spread, they do not drain as many clinical resources, doctors say.
“This is all good news overall,” said Erica Shenoy, the system’s medical director of infection control. “One question we all have is, ‘Where is this going? Will we settle into a typical respiratory season where things will settle out?’”
Flu is notoriously unpredictable in the public health field, but experts monitoring its trajectory say it appears to be in line with previous flu seasons and has started to decline early because it started early. The share of outpatient visits with respiratory illness has fallen below baseline levels in parts of the country, including the Upper Midwest, Great Plains and south central United States, the CDC said Friday.
“Now the question is: Are we going to have a typical spring or a late season influenza B surge?” said Scott Hensley, a microbiologist who tracks flu viruses at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. He urges people who have not received flu shots to do so because Americans have less immunity, given the low numbers of influenza B cases in recent years.
It’s important for public health experts and the media to be transparent but not alarmist in their messaging and reporting, said David Rubin, a pediatrician who tracks national respiratory virus trends as director of PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. The public fixation on a “tripledemic” was always something of a misnomer, he said, because viruses typically don’t surge simultaneously, but ebb and flow as they compete for hosts.
“It can become like crying wolf,” he said, “and if there really is another public health emergency like a novel pandemic, will people listen?”
Jacqueline Dupree and Dan Keating contributed to this report.
Visibility of stars at night is DECLINING by 10% per year thanks to light pollution, study warns
Stargazing could soon become a thing of the past: Visibility of stars in the night sky is DECLINING by 10% per year thanks to light pollution, study warns
- Researchers evaluated 51,351 star observations seen between 2011 and 2022
- The night sky has increased in brightness from artificial light by 7 to 10% per year
- This is equivalent to a doubling of the night sky’s brightness in less than 8 years
There’s something quite awe-inspiring in looking at the night sky and seeing distant stars twinkling back at you.
From the glowing arc of the Milky Way to dozens of intricate constellations, the human eye should be able to see several thousand stars on a clear, dark night.
But in bad news for stargazers the spectacular sight is ‘vanishing’ due to increasing levels of light pollution, according to a new study.
Observations of the night sky over the past 12 years reveal the change in visibility is equivalent to a 9.6 per cent increase in sky brightness per year.
Observations of the night sky over the past 12 years reveal the change in visibility is equivalent to a 9.6 per cent increase in sky brightness per year
To put this in perspective, the authors say a child born in an area where 250 stars were visible would likely see fewer than 100 stars in the same location 18 years later.
Researchers evaluated 51,351 citizen scientist observations of stars seen with the naked eye between 2011 and 2022.
To determine the brightness of the night sky, they asked participants across the world to compare star maps to what they could see with their own eyes.
According to the findings, the night sky has increased in brightness from artificial light by roughly 7 to 10 per cent per year.
This is the equivalent to a doubling of the night sky’s brightness in less than eight years, they said.
Astronaut photographs of parts of Calgary show examples of how lighting changed from 2010-2021: New lighting has been installed and many streetlights have been converted from orange high pressure sodium to white LED
And it is much greater than the data provided by satellites, which suggest the night sky has increased in brightness by roughly 2 per cent per year.
When the researchers specifically looked at Europe, they found an increase in brightness of 6.5 per cent per year.
The research, published in the journal Science, was carried out by teams from the German Research Centre for Geosciences and the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the US.
Connie Walker, from NSF, said: ‘The increase in skyglow over the past decade underscores the importance of redoubling our efforts and developing new strategies to protect dark skies.’
Commenting on the study David Rothery, Professor of Planetary Geosciences at The Open University, said local councils should take action to help reduce light pollution in the UK.
‘Light pollution is a serious issue, not just for those of us who like to be able to see the stars, but for wildlife too,’ he said.
‘It is also a waste of electricity – and money – and therefore makes climate change targets harder to achieve.
‘Local councils could take action here. They should revoke permissions for illuminated name and logo signs on industrial units that are currently turned on throughout the night.
‘They should require industrial and domestic security lights to have screens that direct the light downwards onto the owner’s property only, rather than wasting half of it across the neighbourhood.
‘Perhaps with the cost of electricity currently so high, people will wise up and begin save money by illuminating only what they need.’
LIGHT POLLUTION IS ARTIFICIAL LIGHT THAT IS EXCESSIVE, OBTRUSIVE AND WASTEFUL
Light pollution, also known as photopollution, is the presence of anthropogenic light in the night environment.
Artificial light that’s excessive, obtrusive and ultimately wasteful is called light pollution, and it directly influences how bright our night skies appear.
With more than nine million streetlamps and 27 million offices, factories, warehouses and homes in the UK, the quantity of light we cast into the sky is vast.
While some light escapes into space, the rest is scattered by molecules in the atmosphere making it difficult to see the stars against the night sky. What you see instead is ‘Skyglow’.
The increasing number of people living on earth and the corresponding increase in inappropriate and unshielded outdoor lighting has resulted in light pollution—a brightening night sky that has obliterated the stars for much of the world’s population.
Most people must travel far from home, away from the glow of artificial lighting, to experience the awe-inspiring expanse of the Milky Way as our ancestors once knew it.
Light pollution is excessive and inappropriate artificial light. While some light escapes into space, the rest is scattered by molecules in the atmosphere making it difficult to see the stars against the night sky. What you see instead is ‘Skyglow’
The negative effects of the loss of this inspirational natural resource might seem intangible.
But a growing body of evidence links the brightening night sky directly to measurable negative impacts on human health and immune function, on adverse behavioural changes in insect and animal populations, and on a decrease of both ambient quality and safety in our nighttime environment.
Astronomers were among the first to record the negative impacts of wasted lighting on scientific research, but for all of us, the adverse economic and environmental impacts of wasted energy are apparent in everything from the monthly electric bill to global warming.
The countries where population is declining
China’s population fell for the first time in over six decades, according to figures published on Tuesday.
But it is not the only one.
Many countries — especially in Europe and Asia — will see their populations decline in the coming decades, if forecasts for 2100 published by the UN last July prove true. In others, population is already declining.
Populations already in decline
Eight countries with more than 10 million inhabitants have seen their populations decline over the past decade. Most are European.
Alongside Ukraine, whose population has plummeted due to the Russian invasion, the number of people in Italy, Portugal, Poland, Romania and Greece is on the wane.
There are many reasons behind these falls, some unique to each country, but they all share low fertility rates, meaning women are having fewer babies on average than before.
Fertility rates of between 1.2 to 1.6 children per woman are recorded in these southern and eastern European countries, according to the World Bank. A fertility rate of more than 2 is needed to keep a population stable.
Added to this phenomenon is a huge migratory exodus in Poland, Romania and Greece, with more people leaving to go and live abroad than stay at home.
Outside Europe, Japan is also seeing its ageing population decline. This is largely due to a low fertility rate of 1.3 children per woman and low immigration.
Japan lost more than 3 million people between 2011 and 2021.
The same goes for the Middle East. In Syria, the population has been devastated by more than a decade of grinding war, with millions of refugees fleeing to neighbouring countries and beyond.
Approximately 606,000 men, women and children have been killed in the fighting, estimates the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).
Those that will decline tomorrow
China — currently the world’s most populous country — has fretted for years about the effect of its ageing population on the economy and society, but population was not expected to go into decline for almost a decade.
Tuesday’s revelation that there are now fewer people in China is predicted to turn into a lasting trend, impacting population for years to come.
China is forecast to lose almost half of its people by 2100, plunging from more than 1.4 billion to 771 million inhabitants.
Russia, Germany, South Korea and Spain are all set to join this downward movement, with their populations beginning to decline by 2030.
Europe’s population as a whole would begin to decline as early as this decade.
But there are some exceptions.
While European, American and Asian populations should all have begun to decline by 2100, the number of people in Africa will continue to soar.
The African continent will increase from 1.4 to 3.9 billion inhabitants by 2100. Some 38% of the world’s population would then live in Africa, compared to around 18% today.
Elon Musk’s Finances Complicated by Declining Wealth, Twitter Pressures
Elon Musk
‘s immense wealth and borrowing power are now being tested as the
Tesla Inc.
TSLA -1.76%
shares that have fueled his fortune have sharply declined while he rushes to stabilize his massive personal investment in Twitter Inc.
The auto maker’s share value has nosedived 18% this week alone and more than 60% since he announced his plan to buy Twitter.
His ability to use his shares at Tesla to raise money, by selling or borrowing against them, has been complicated by their rapid downdraft in recent months.
Historically, Mr. Musk has been a cash-poor billionaire, depending upon so-called margin loans—borrowing backed up by his shares—for his personal expenses and business investments while holding on to his Tesla shares and benefiting from their rising value.
But Tesla’s market value has fallen by about $700 billion this year, sinking his personal wealth along the way. The decline in Tesla’s valuation comes after years of growth that has allowed him to easily borrow money without having to cash out his shares.
Shares in Tesla have fallen around 65% in 2022, dinged, in part, by the higher interest-rate environment. Another issue relates to the reason he may need cash: Twitter. Tesla investors have been concerned that Mr. Musk’s attention is divided following his October takeover of the social-media company.
Late last year, just as Tesla’s stock price peaked, he began selling Tesla shares, totaling more than $39 billion including $3.5 billion last week. What his liquidity is like is unknown after what he said would be a more than $11 billion tax bill for 2021 and putting up roughly $25 billion in cash as part of buying Twitter.
Mr. Musk’s current Tesla holdings, not including exercisable options, total 424 million shares worth about $52 billion at Friday’s closing price of $123.15 a share.
Simply put, if he could tap all of those shares as collateral under Tesla’s rules, he would be allowed to borrow about $13 billion. That is only a bit more than he planned to borrow in April as part of the original Twitter deal using just 40% of his shares as collateral, underscoring how his borrowing power has shrunk with the collapse of the car company’s share price. He later scrapped those proposed margin loans to fund the deal amid investor concerns over the risk.
A Tesla launch in Bangkok earlier this month.
Photo:
Vachira Vachira/Zuma Press
Mr. Musk and Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Tesla shares aren’t his only asset or only avenue to raise money. He also holds shares in Space Exploration and Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, and has ownership in startups such as the Boring Co. His level of personal indebtedness isn’t clear.
Mr. Musk is facing questions about whether Tesla, where he is also chief executive, is ready for a recession as he separately tries to stem losses at Twitter, cutting thousands of workers from his newly acquired social-media platform. Late Tuesday, he said drastic spending cuts at Twitter were required as the company was on track to bleed billions of dollars. His team had been seeking additional investment dollars for Twitter.
“We have an emergency fire drill on our hands,” Mr. Musk said during a public talk on Twitter Spaces. After taking those drastic efforts, he said, Twitter could break even next year.
While Twitter has rarely been profitable in the past decade, its finances were made more challenging by the debt Mr. Musk took on to fund his acquisition and by a decline in spending by advertisers worried about the erratic changes occurring under his leadership. Analysts estimate the debt expenses alone have added more than $1 billion in cost annually to a company that last year generated $5 billion in sales, mostly from ads.
Mr. Musk has been here before—mired in debt and burning cash as the global economy teeters—and emerged successfully.
Those successes and investor enthusiasm for his ventures made him rank as the world’s richest person for a time. The drop in Tesla’s value this year sent Mr. Musk’s ranking as the world’s richest man to No. 2 behind
Bernard Arnault,
the chairman and chief executive of luxury conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. Mr. Musk’s fortune fell to an estimated $140 billion as of Thursday from a high of $340 billion a little more than a year ago, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
If he needs cash, Mr. Musk could always sell more Tesla shares, as he did recently. But, in the past, Mr. Musk, Tesla’s largest individual shareholder, has been reluctant to sell. At Tesla, Mr. Musk lacks the kind of dual class of stock ownership that gives founders at
Meta Platforms Inc.
or
Alphabet Inc.
controlling power. Instead, Mr. Musk’s large stake in Tesla, in the past, has effectively given him veto power over shareholder proposals thanks to the company’s supermajority vote requirement.
On Thursday, Mr. Musk said he sold some stock to make sure he had “powder dry…for a worst-case scenario” and said that he was done selling until probably 2025, though he’s made similar statements like that this year only to sell more.
“I’m somewhat paranoid having gone through two really intense recessions,” Mr. Musk said.
While he had used margin loans before, the idea of borrowing billions off the backs of Tesla shares to help Twitter carries risks.
Tesla’s board of directors has limited his borrowing power to essentially 25 cents on every dollar of share value, according to regulatory filings. As the shares fall in value, he must comply with the 25% limit. The risk to Tesla shareholders, as the company describes in its regulatory filings, is that he may have to unload a lot of shares at once to generate cash. He has never disclosed at what price he would need to pony up more collateral.
In recent days, Mr. Musk has swatted down the idea of margin loans altogether. In a tweet, Mr. Musk cautioned that such a move was unwise in this market. “When there are macroeconomic risks, it is generally wise to avoid using margin loans on any company, as stocks may move in ways that are decoupled from their long-term potential,” he wrote on Dec. 8.
As of the most recent public filing, Mr. Musk had pledged as collateral more than half of his Tesla holdings, excluding options he could exercise.
Pledging doesn’t necessarily indicate that actual borrowing against those shares has occurred, the filing said.
Write to Tim Higgins at tim.higgins@wsj.com
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Support for School Vaccine Mandates Is Declining, Survey Shows
A growing share of parents say they oppose routine childhood vaccines as a prerequisite for school attendance—a setback for public-health advocates.
In a new survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 28 percent of adults said that parents should have the choice not to vaccinate their school-age children, even if it creates health risks for others. In 2019, 16 percent of adults held that view.
The latest survey—called the KFF COVID-10 Vaccine Monitor, found that, compared with in 2019, fewer adults believe that healthy children should have to get the MMR vaccine (which protects against measles, mumps, and rubella) in order to attend public school. Seventy-one percent of adults now are in favor of the MMR vaccine requirement, down from 82 percent in 2019, as reported in a Pew Research Center survey.
The changes in attitude are drawn largely along political party lines. KFF reported that 44 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents now say “parents should be able to decide not to vaccinate their children”—an increase among this demographic from 20 percent in 2019. Currently, just 11 percent of Democratic-leaning adults agree with that statement, a proportion that has remained relatively unchanged since 2019, according to the data.
School nurses say vaccine mandates are critical
Linda Mendonca, the president of the National Association of School Nurses, said the results aren’t surprising given the battles over COVID vaccines in the past two years.
“It’s not terribly shocking with what we’ve been through during the pandemic and how people responded to the COVID vaccine,” she said.
Nonetheless, getting children vaccinated is critical to protecting people from illness and death. All states require vaccinations against measles, mumps, rubella, and other childhood diseases with some limited exemptions as a condition for school attendance.
Said Mendonca: “It is the position of the NASN that [the vaccination requirement] is about public health. Reaching a high vaccination coverage of school-aged children is what we strive to do.
“We know that vaccines save lives and prevent disease,” she added. “As school nurses, we certainly do what we can to promote health among school-aged children.”
Nurses are vaccine advocates and trusted source of advice
Mendonca points to several ways that school nurses actively encourage families to vaccinate their children. An integral part of their role involves routinely monitoring and ensuring that students are in compliance with vaccine requirements, she said. Additionally, many schools host vaccine clinics that are coordinated, promoted, and staffed by school nurses. And, as trusted members of the school community, school nurses make logical partners in the fight against vaccine hesitancy among families.
“School nurses have good rapport with families. Many times there are multiple siblings that go through the school, and families get to know the school nurse,” said Mendonca, who adds that because of their positive relationships with families, nurses are likely to effectively educate families on why it’s important that they vaccinate their children against contagious—and potentially deadly—diseases.
Mendonca offers this advice to school nurses when communicating with vaccine-hesitant parents: “Meet them where they are. Instead of shoving information down their throat that maybe they don’t want to hear, try to work with them and help them understand [the importance of vaccines].”
Instead of shoving information down their throat that maybe they don’t want to hear, try to work with them and help them understand [the importance of vaccines].”
Linda Mendonca, president, National Association of School Nurses
It may be easy for the public to forget why it’s so important to continue receiving vaccines such as the MMR, which has been in regular use in the United States by children over 12 months for more than 30 years—leading to far lower prevalence of the diseases it protects against.
But, as Mendonca notes, very real and pressing reasons persist as to why school nurses and other public-health advocates continue to educate the public on its importance.
“There have been outbreaks of measles recently. It is still prevalent. We don’t see it as much, but if we stop vaccinating, we are going to see more of these diseases,” Mendonca said. “We need to maintain that level of herd immunity.”
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Omicron BA.5 is declining as emerging variants gain ground: CDC data
The U.S. faces at least seven different versions of Covid-19 omicron as the nation heads into winter when health officials are expecting another wave of viral infections.
Although the omicron BA.5 variant remains dominant in the country, it is starting to lose some ground to other versions of the virus, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published on Friday.
Omicron BA.5 has splintered into several new but related variants that include BQ.1, BQ.1.1 and BF.7. The U.K. Health Security Agency, in a report earlier this month, said these three variants are demonstrating a growth advantage over BA.5, which was the most contagious version to date.
In the U.S., omicron BA.5 makes up about 68% of all new infections, down from about 80% at the beginning of October. BQ.1, BQ.1.1 and BF.7 are now causing about 17% of new infections combined, according to the CDC data.
About 3% of new infections are attributable to BA.2.75. and BA.2.75.2, which are related to the omicron BA.2 variant that caused a bump in cases during the spring but was pushed out.
Scientists at Peking University in China found that omicron BA.2.75.2 and BQ.1.1 were the most adept at evading immunity from prior BA.5 infection and several antibody drugs. The study, published earlier in October, has not been peer reviewed.
Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House Covid response coordinator, said earlier this week that U.S. health officials are closely monitoring these variants because they are good at evading prior immunity.
“The reason we’re tracking them is because they either have a lot more immune invasiveness or they render many of our treatments ineffective,” Jha said. “Those are the two major things that get our attention.”
But Jha said the new omicron boosters that the U.S. started rolling out last month should provide better protection than the first-generation vaccines against these emerging variants. The boosters target BA.5 and the emerging variants are all omicron and most descend from BA.5.
Jha called on all eligible Americans to get the new boosters by Halloween so they will have full protection for Thanksgiving when family holiday gatherings kick into full swing.
But the scientists at Peking University said the immune evasiveness of variants like BA.2.75.2 and BQ.1.1 could mean that the BA.5 booster shots will not provide sufficiently broad protection.
It’s unclear how much more effective the boosters will prove in the real world. The Food and Drug Administration authorized the shots without direct human data, relying instead on clinical trials from a similar shot that was developed against the original version of omicron, BA.1.
Pfizer and BioNTech on Thursday published the first human data from their BA.5 shots. They triggered a significant boost to the immune system against omicron BA.5 in a lab study that looked at blood samples from adults ages 18 and older, the companies said.
Elon Musk reveals 3 existential threats he’s scared of, including a declining birthrate, religious extremism, and ‘artificial intelligence going wrong’
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Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Insider’s parent company, recently interviewed Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
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In response to the question, “what is your biggest fear?” Musk listed three existential threats.
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They included a declining birthrate, religious extremism, and “artificial intelligence going wrong.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed three “existential threats” he believes currently face humanity during a recent interview with Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Insider’s parent company, Axel Springer.
The richest man in the world said he fears religious extremism, a declining birthrate, and “artificial intelligence going wrong.” Death, however, did not make his list.
“I spent a lot of time talking about the birthrate thing,” Musk said. “That might be the single biggest threat to the future of human civilization.”
Musk has long flagged his concerns of the declining birth rate, a trend that has accelerated amid the pandemic “baby bust.” A 2021 CDC report found that the US birth rate fell by 4% from 2019 to 2020, the sharpest single-year decline in nearly 50 years and the lowest number of births since 1979.
“I’m really worried about this birthrate thing,” Musk said. “That’s been troubling me for many years, because I just don’t see it turning around. Every year it’s worse. And I drive my friends crazy with this.”
While the fear of not enough birthing ranked high on Musk’s list, the fear of dying did not.
“I certainly would like to maintain health for a longer period of time,” he told Döpfner. “But I am not afraid of dying. I think it would come as a relief,” adding that he would like to live long enough to see SpaceX fully realized.
Several of the world’s billionaires — including Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos — are on the hunt to discover the scientific fountain of youth. Musk, however, said he has no interest in increasing the human lifespan.
“I don’t think we should try to have people live for a really long time,” he said. “That it would cause asphyxiation of society.”
Musk specifically referenced US politicians who are older than the bulk of the population, an age gap he believes has caused the government to lose touch with the average constituent.
“The truth is, most people don’t change their mind. They just die. So if they don’t die, we will be stuck with old ideas and society wouldn’t advance,” he continued.
On the flipside, Musk said his greatest hope is for humanity to created a “self-sustaining city on Mars.”
“I would be happy if humanity has a self-sustaining city on Mars because then, probable lifespan of humanity is much greater,” he explained. “I think we really just got this little candle of consciousness, like a small light in the void. And we do not want this small candle in the darkness to be put out.”
Beyond Musk’s goals for the future of humankind, his feelings around personal happiness are less clear-cut.
“For one to be fully happy, I think you have to be happy at work and happy in love. So, I suppose I’m medium happy,” he said. Earlier this month, Musk split from singer Grimes after welcoming a second child together.
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Halo Infinite’s player retention is sharply declining, but why?
What you need to know
- Halo Infinite’s player count has fallen sharply since its launch period late in 2021.
- The game has a variety of serious issues, including a lack of the content that Halo fans have come to expect, shallow customization options, a controversial microtransactions shop, poor performance on PC, a rampant cheating problem, and a severe issue with ranked matchmaking.
- Recent and upcoming fixes and adjustments have alleviated fan concerns over these problems, but many improvements are still needed.
While Halo Infinite rocketed out of the gate with rave reviews and a massive concurrent player count of 200k on Steam on its launch day, the game’s player retention has sharply declined over the course of the last two months. Despite the fact that 20 million players have played Halo Infinite in total, many of these players haven’t stuck with the game for long and have already moved on to other titles. The game is no longer in Xbox’s top five most played games list (it sits at sixth place under Roblox at the time of writing), and on Steam, it typically hovers between 10-20k concurrent players — a small fraction of what the player count looked like a couple months ago.
So, why is this happening? Why is a new Halo game with strong core gameplay mechanics and a free-to-play, no barrier to entry model struggling to retain its player base? There are a variety of reasons.
For starters, Halo Infinite is lacking a lot of the content that most players have come to expect from the franchise. There are only a handful of playlists and game modes available, and many staple Halo modes like Infection, Grifball, King of the Hill, Action Sack, Team Doubles, Team Snipers, and more are nowhere to be found. The game also only has three Big Team Battle maps, which often makes the beloved social mode feel stale after a few matches. Campaign co-op and the Forge map creation tool — both of which are considered crucial elements of the Halo experience — aren’t being added until later in 2022. Co-op is expected to launch in May 2022 at the start of Season 2, while the developers are planning to add Forge three months later when Season 3 begins.
Fans have also been vocal about their disappointment with Halo Infinite’s customization and monetization systems. Many of the game’s customization options are unacceptably shallow and restrictive, and Halo Infinite’s microtransactions shop has been heavily criticized for charging high prices and offering little value. The developers have recently made some improvements to the shop, thankfully, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.
Halo Infinite on PC also simply isn’t good enough, as many players (yours truly included) have reported a myriad of both major and minor issues with the PC version of the game. Everything from terrible framerates and severe instances of screen tearing to infinite loading screens and texture stretching bugs have made the game nigh-unplayable for many PC players, regardless of whether or not they’re using powerful hardware or updated drivers.
PC players using cheats have also run rampant throughout the game’s servers for months due to Halo Infinite’s ineffective anti-cheat, and while a fix for the issue is supposedly coming later this month, the cheating problem has gotten out of hand and hackers have already driven countless players away. The hacking epidemic affects Xbox players, too, as there’s currently no way for players to disable crossplay.
Finally, fans also recently discovered a severe issue with Halo Infinite’s ranked matchmaking. The game’s matchmaker takes your performance in social and practice modes like Big Team Battle and Bot Bootcamp into account when matching you with other players in the competitive playlist, giving you highly-skilled opponents if you got a lot of kills in these playlists. Conversely, you’ll be given less-skilled opponents if you perform poorly in these modes, which has led some players to intentionally lose social games to make ranked play easier for themselves. It’s clear that this is not a healthy matchmaking system for Halo Infinite’s competitive multiplayer, and it needs to be adjusted sooner rather than later.
Ultimately, Halo Infinite simply isn’t in an acceptable state right now, and the game is losing players at a rapid pace because of it. Halo Infinite’s excellent core mechanics give it the potential to become one of the best Xbox games as well as one of the best PC games, too. Without the content, customization options, quality performance, and anti-cheat measures that fans expect from modern shooters, though, Halo Infinite will fail to capitalize on that potential. Hopefully the developers are able to turn this ship around.
Halo is back
Halo Infinite multiplayer
Halo Infinite’s multiplayer has finally arrived, compiling its classic arena multiplayer modes, expanded 24-player Big Team Battle, and more into one free-to-play package. The core of the game is excellent, but it’s lacking most of what players have come to expect from the series and the game’s player retention has suffered as a result.
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Oh Dear
New report reveals Microsoft’s future AR strategy; HoloLens 3 is dead
Business Insider has today published a follow-up report with more details about Microsoft’s canceled HoloLens 3 augmented reality headset. The partnership with Samsung is said to include a headset with a set of screens inside, powered by a Samsung phone in your pocket.
Keeping it affordable
Review: Surface Laptop SE is the new standard for K-8 Windows PCs
Starting at just $250, Microsoft’s first foray into affordable laptops for the education market is a winner. With a gorgeous design, excellent thermals, and a fantastic typing experience, Microsoft would do right to sell this directly to consumers as well. Let’s just hope Intel can make a better CPU.
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Alaska’s first detected case of omicron variant comes as state’s COVID-19 counts are declining
Alaska’s first reported case of the omicron variant on Monday comes as the state is seeing a steady decline in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations.
The state on Monday reported one virus-related death and 422 new cases over the weekend, a significant drop in cases compared to earlier in the fall when a surge overwhelmed much of the state’s health care capacity, sickening and killing hundreds.
The city of Anchorage announced that the state’s first case of the new omicron variant had been detected on Monday. It was detected in a resident who traveled internationally last month and tested positive for the virus in Anchorage.
The newly reported death was in a Ketchikan man in his 60s. In total, 857 COVID-19 deaths among residents and 30 among nonresidents in Alaska have been reported since the pandemic arrived in the state in spring 2020.
By Monday, COVID-19 patients made up only 5.3% of the state’s hospitalized patients. In all, 63 people were in Alaska hospitals with active cases of the virus.
Those numbers don’t include some people recovering from the disease who need continued care. They represent a significant decrease from the high of more than 200 people hospitalized on average in September and October.
The portion of COVD-19 tests coming back positive was down to 3.57% by Monday based on a seven-day rolling average, also significantly below the state’s peak of 10.9% in October.
Nationally, Alaska’s seven-day case rate per 100,000 people was ranked 30th, after taking the No.1 spot with the highest case rate in the nation for several weeks earlier this fall.