We can either automate production or import workers.

Currently we're automating as fast as possible. Meanwhile people are flooding across the border. Perhaps migrants realize that once ChatGPT is robotized, automation will spread to dominate the economy: there will be less need for labor (immigrant or other).

BTW assuming "oligarchs" control the economy is not a useful concept.

I dunno. No one has brought up the question of whether hippo meat is tasty or not. If it were tasty then Louisianans would cook 'em up and eat 'em!

Anyone tried a hippo burger? How much meat on a hippo? How much fat? Is the fat tasty? Is hippo leather useful?

What is LWN?

Have a professor friend who says the same: oral exams are coming back to his classes. If you don't pass the oral, you don't pass the class.

Huge parts of Spain have always been deserts:

https://fascinatingspain.com/place-to-visit/the-best-of/the-...

The problem of Spain is intense anthropogenic land (mis-)use including deforestation and mining, which led to the desertification especially in the south in the first place; this has been happening since pre-historic times. So, no, there shouldn't be deserts in Spain right now, and they are for the most part not natural. Read further here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00346... (free version available via google search on ResearchGate)

Exactly. Los Monegros was until 1766 Europes largest oak (encina) forest. It had been a communal forest. The forest was privatized and cut to cultivate cereal.

Does Spain have any reforestation efforts planned for areas experiencing anthropogenic desertification?

Without the will to jail arsonists first is a waste of money.

Huh, it makes me wonder how the Black Forest in Germany was preserved.

It mostly wasn’t. What you see now is a tiny remnant.

The linked article is about deforestation by humans and is irrelevant to the fact that huge parts of Spain have long been deserts.

Deforestation is the only major relevant factor that led to the formation of any desert in Spain, and this started a "long" time ago, and is purely and simply controlled by humans. For example, the famous Tabernas desert is the result of deforestation, followed by intensive erosion.

This is unsurprising. It was claimed that the algorithms developed by Cambridge Analytica and FaceBook during the Brexit campaign and the American 2016 election were able to predict behavior better than could friends or spouse:

https://www.amazon.com/Mindf-Cambridge-Analytica-Break-Ameri...

Uh, we don't have the "spice" so we don't have "mentats"?