* “On conditional approval for human drugs.” This will almost certainly be too late for me, but it would be a real step forward—as Alex writes: “Dare I say it, but could the FDA be lumbering in the right direction?” I hope so. I’ve been encouraging it to lumber in that direction. Particularly in oncology drugs, not making the process for people with fatal diagnoses to try even long-shot drugs easy is madness. It should be criminal. If I’m going to die anyway, why not try something unusual? The drug I’m on now, petosemtamab, should’ve been approved for recurrent / metastatic squamous cell carcinoma at least ten months ago, if not longer. Give us the right to try! I’m almost certainly going to die of squamous cell carcinoma anyway; might as well find out if any of the drugs coming out of labs work. Drugs to treat fatal diseases are not like drugs to treat some dubious ailments like high cholesterol, or ailments like depression in which it’s hard to say if any of the drugs available really work.

* “Irene Bosch developed a quick, inexpensive COVID-19 test in early 2020. The Harvard-trained scientist already had a factory set up. But she was stymied by an FDA process experts say made no sense.” The FDA is killing more people than it’s helping / “protecting,” a theme you’ll also see in the link above. And the collective response to this is to shrug, and go back to pointless culture wars.

* “The California Forever project is a great idea.” We need new cities. I suspect we’re not going to get a new frontier until we can build O’Neill Habitats, which probably won’t be for a long time.

* “Making every researcher seek grants is a broken model.” True, and an important point for effective accelerationism.

* The Dan Wang 2023 letter. Excellent. Too many sections to quote, but:

The disappointment I feel mostly concerns food. You can find pretty good food in America at fairly high prices, but you will never be able to find mindblowing food at the cost of a few dollars — which is the default in Asia. Americans who have never been to Asia will never appreciate how one never needs to cook, because right outside will be a mom-and-pop shop that is preparing a meal that is one order of magnitude tastier and cheaper than one could make at home.

Maybe one day cooking at home will be as peculiar or rare growing all of one’s food at home. Gains from trade and specialization are real!

I think the U.S. is too heavily invested in parking lots to generate sufficient proximity to restaurants to in turn generate the possibility of mindblowing food at relatively low prices.

* The culture of Boeing, and what happens when engineers aren’t in charge. Facebook/Meta seems to work well in part because it’s kept the MBAs out.

* “A vote for Trump is a vote for chaos.” Obvious, and yet here we are.

* Scientists at Strand Therapeutics Will Test a Cancer-Hunting mRNA Treatment. This is great. Unfortunately for me, their first clinical-trial drug appears to be a tumoral-injection drug, which would work for the tumors in my neck but is probably not ideal for the tumors in my lungs. Their pipeline page lists STX-003 as a systemic interleukin-12 (“IL-12”) therapy that is in preclinical development, and the indication is for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), since sticking needles into the lungs is not ideal. There’s already an IL-2 therapy called SAR444245, being tested as “THOR-707,” but the last wave of IL-2 trials didn’t seem to go well. Biology is hard. This sort of failure is also why I’m leery of many phase 1a trials.

* “Will China squander its moment in the sun?”

* Massive lithium deposits found in the U.S. Whatever you read about lithium shortages is likely BS. The biggest problem in the U.S. is NEPA, the National Environmental Protection Act, which, despite its name, often does net harm to the environment—like many putative environmentalists.

* “Why do people post on [bad platform] instead of [good platform]?” By Dan Luu, and a topic I’ve also wondered about. The information density of text is still so much greater than video, and the production costs so much lower, that I find the shift to video dumb. But I find a lot of common behaviors and choices dumb. Maybe I am the dumb one.

* Funding for “revolutionary” science, outside of the typical foundation and grant-making apparatuses.

* The Housing Famine, and how we should build a lot more housing.

* The need to build a more resilient navy—which is another way of saying: “The need to build more stuff, faster.”

* “How cancer hijacks the nervous system to grow and spread.” One of the high-risk features of my cancer was “perineural invasion”—that is, the cancer had invaded nerves in my tongue.

* Canadian healthcare: “She said she didn’t even see an oncologist with BC Cancer until two-and-a-half months later but at that point, she had already received treatment somewhere else.” I’m aware that there are also U.S. healthcare horror stories. I’ve also learned, the hard way, that for serious matters it’s almost always worth backchecking, as best one can, whatever one is told. That’s been our experience with the clinical trial process, for example, and backchecking doctors is much of the reason I’m 1. still alive at all today and 2. not on (palliative) chemotherapy right now.

* “Don’t Let the FDA Regulate Lab Tests!”

* “Israel’s Impossible Dilemma: The IDF can hand Hamas either a Pyrrhic victory or a real one.”

* Low oil prices hurt Saudi Arabia, and presumably Russia, as well as some other autocratic countries. Good.

* U.S. math scores plunge. Recently I posted How Gabriel Mays is (re)learning math as an adult; it seems that there is more information and ability to learn than ever, but most people prefer short-form video and such.

* “Bari Weiss’s Surging News Startup, the FP, Lures Readers Miffed at Media Coverage of Israel” (wsj, $) One can see why: much of the legacy media’s coverage has ranged from “biased” to “abysmal.” See also “There Is No Right to Bully and Harass: Progressives who once argued that free speech is violence now claim that violence is free speech.”

* “People are realizing that the Arsenal of Democracy is gone.” The U.S. isn’t building enough in nearly all domains, and if China invades Taiwan, it’ll be too late to improve.

* “Most people don’t realize how much progress we’ve made on climate change.” We should be doing more, yes, but a sense of helpless doom is bad. Climeworks, for example, has a subscription product that lets individuals pay $28 to remove about 20 kg monthly. That’s not a tremendous amount but it’s not zero, either. Matt Yglesias has a paywalled post about how most people don’t actually care about climate, however, and he seems to be right.

* Search engine optimization (SEO), AI-generated text, and the death of the commons.

* “Inside Foxconn’s struggle to make iPhones in India.” More humane and surprising than expected.

* Coffee obsessives on making better coffee (video).

* Guy takes Ayahuasca to fix a vestibular balance problem associated with his left ear. YMMV. IMO we still know practically nothing about the brain or consciousness.

* Escalation Theory: Compliance, Violence, and Overachievement In Society. Interesting, and perhaps overstated in places. Reminds me of reading The Last Psychiatrist. I’m subscribing to the RSS feed.

* “Status diffusion as a check on elite competition.” The title is about South Korea but the article’s most interesting material concerns how elites form and compete. It’s surprisingly congruent with the “Escalation Theory” article.

* “What Conversation Can Do for Us.” (NY’er, $)

* “How to be More Agentic.”

* “Bad stuff going down at the American Sociological Association,” which is trying to avoid open access to government-funded research. Crazy!

* All the Carcinogens We Cannot See (NY’er, $). By Siddhartha Mukherjee, impressive, and possibly germane to my own cancer situation, although in ways not obvious right now.

* “Book Stores Refuse To Host An Event For Rob K. Henderson’s Book.” If you’re wondering why a lot of bookstores now suck, read this article. Bess and I went to Changing Hands bookstore in Tempe, Arizona, maybe a year and a half or two years ago, and most of the books there were terrible: like the most inane woke syllabuses from the worst college classes had been turned into novels and nonfiction. If you are wondering why Substack often seems far more vital than books right now, this is a good choice, much like that one interview with Alex Perez.

The key word in the preceding sentence is “right now.” Good trends rarely last forever and the same is true of bad ones.

* ‘This Has Been Going on for Years.’ Inside Boeing’s Manufacturing Mess. (wsj, $) The sad story of Boeing being taken over by McDonnell Douglas, MBAs, and finance people, at the expense of engineers and engineering. Fundamentally the real world matters.

* “Smothered & Suppressed Gazan Voices & Perspectives.” Some material on Twitter punctures much of what one reads in the legacy media.

* How Gabriel Mays is (re)learning math as an adult. Consistent with Barbara Oakley’s essay “How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math,” which I used to assign to students. You can be more agentic when it comes to math and many other topics!

* “What Happened to the US Machine Tool Industry?” Depressing, important.

* “Ultraviolet light can kill almost all the viruses in a room. Why isn’t it everywhere?”

* “The Republican Party is Doomed?” The keys to the argument: “Increasing age and education polarization means that Republicans are rapidly losing the capacity to run public institutions at all levels other than electoral, and this trend cannot realistically reverse within a generation” and “even when Republicans win electoral power, they lack the human capital at all levels of governance to accomplish what they really want with it.” Not sure this is accurate—the Federalist Society has a lot of members—but it’s plausible.

* “Cancer Is Striking More Young People, and Doctors Are Alarmed and Baffled: Researchers are trying to figure out what is making more young adults sick, and how to identify those at high risk.” I’m one of them, which makes this of particular interest to me. I notice especially this: “But doctors said obesity and lifestyle can’t fully account for the plight of the people arriving at their clinics. ‘A lot of the young patients are very healthy,’ said Dr. Y. Nancy You, a colorectal cancer surgeon at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.” I fit the “very healthy” category and yet that didn’t help me. Bess saw this and observed that some research fingers microplastics as a possible culprit, but, as the article notes, there’s at least some evidence for almost everything under the sun.

* China’s demographic challenges.

* Hardly anyone makes money from writing books.

* Impressive test scores among NYC charter schools. Interesting that this sort of thing doens’t appear in most venues.

* Chipotle’s Steve Ells, the Fast-Food Obsessive Who’s Still Trying to Solve Lunch. I hope he does, though will Kernel work outside of parts of NYC, LA, and adjacent places?

* Denmark is not magically exempt from trade-offs.

* “The flight of the Weird Nerd from academia.” Sad, plausible-seeming.

* “Thousands of Students Seek $7,000 Payments Under Arizona Voucher Law: In nation’s largest voucher program, Arizona to pay more than $200 million for private-school and home-schooled children.” (wsj, $) I’m surprised by these developments.

* Impulse Labs’ battery-powered induction stove. If I owned a housing unit, I’d have pre-ordered this stove, which looks incredible. We’ve not seen substantial improvements in kitchen appliances in decades, but induction stoves are so much better than legacy electric or gas stoves. I have a standalone induction stove called a Breville|PolyScience Control Freak. The name is not the best but the device is amazing. It, an Instant Pot, and a rice cooker have largely replaced the gas stove in my apartment.

* “Patrick McKenzie on Navigating Complex Systems.” Most Conversations with Tyler are excellent, and I particularly admire this one.

* “A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest and the revitalization of the Salton Sea.” Humans face choices between scarcity and abundance, and we should choose abundance.

* “The two cultures of mathematics and biology.” Detailed, impressive.

* “Impact on the Internet is a direct function of what you have done recently: a YouTuber is as popular as their latest video, a tweeter as their latest joke, or an influencer as their latest video. In the case of Rufo what mattered was whether he brought evidence for his claims or not; obsessing about the messenger is to miss the point that he might as well be the New Yorker dog.” I think this is a little overstated—lots of people will read older, evergreen writing—but it’s directionally correct.

* Why legal immigration is nearly impossible. We should make it a lot more possible.

* “The Billionaires Spending a Fortune to Lure Scientists Away From Universities.” Seems wise to me, for the obvious reasons. If the weird nerd doesn’t fit into academia, maybe he’ll fit with private research institutes and startups.

* More on Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) and multiple-sclerosis. There is a vaccine candidate that works in mice, but that means it’s a long way from being potentially available in humans.

* Farmers should have to pay market prices for water. Seems obvious, and yet here we are.

* The rise of the sectarian university, and the risks that increasingly brazen political side-taking is doing long-term damage. Josh Barro’s “Universities Are Not on the Level: Academics should think more about what their industry has done to lose the trust of Americans” covers related ground, and it doesn’t immediately go in the predictable directions. Instead, it initially focuses more on the Goodhart’s Law issue—when a measure becomes a target, it ceases being a good measure. The “measure” of academia is publications and citations. They’ve been gamified so thoroughly that they’re often pretty bad measures, and they encourage dishonesty among researchers, or, often, “researchers.”

* America doesn’t know tofu. One of vegetarianism’s challenges is that a lot of vegetarian cooking is poorly done.

* “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” Brutal reading, and a surprising venue for this. See, however, from 2014, “An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth: A former AP correspondent explains how and why reporters get Israel so wrong, and why it matters.” Except it is the most important story on Earth, particularly relative to China?

* “China’s Xi goes full Stalin with purge.” Maybe.

* Anaïs Nin was early to polyamory. Some dumb mood affiliation in the essay but not bad.

* “Beijing Is on a Wartime Footing: Biden needs to rebuild America’s ‘arsenal of democracy’ or risk being unprepared.” (wsj, $). See also Austin Vernon on revitalizing U.S. shipbuilding. A lot of people understand the problems the U.S. has—but can we solve them?

* “Towards a ‘shallower’ future: Adversity isn’t worth the price of adversity.” I prefer a lot less (bad) adversity, and I’ve had plenty of adversity as of late.

* “If We Made Shoes Like We Make Housing, People Would Go Barefoot.” Abundance is good and scarcity bad.

* “Elon Musk is not understood.” To a degree this is another “the media is dumb” article.

* “Are young people actually ‘progressive?’” (nymag, possibly $) Maybe not.

* “Why math professor Alexander Barvinok opposes diversity statements.”

• “It Sure Looks Like Phones Are Making Students Dumber: Test scores have been falling for years—even before the pandemic.” Consistent with my anecdotal impressions, and what I wrote back in 2008. Some connectivity is good but, as with many things, more is not necessarily better and may be worse.
• Bess on “How the light gets in: a solstice at the border of life and death: The fire in each of us, on the shortest day of the year.”
• Is This the End of Recycling? Americans are consuming more and more stuff. Now that other countries won’t take our papers and plastics, they’re ending up in the trash.” Recycling things like paper and plastics has long been a waste of energy and, worse, time. I think a lot of people like doing it because it’s easy, but it’s also irrelevant to actual environmentalism. What matters? Combatting NIMBYism, transport choices, that sort of thing.
• Could the May 7 hearings mark a turning point for universities? It’s possible, sure. I’d love to see some change in the humanities and, realistically, social studies, but I don’t expect to see big changes. Not only professors but admins are now too acculturated into the social justice left (SJL) / woke / CRT / whatever-you-call-it worldview to change. I don’t exactly approve of legislative efforts to defund humanities programs, but I understand them. Universities were supposed to be devoted to disinterested free inquiry; if many of them, and many humanities departments, are explicitly devoted to being the ideological enemies of the legislators, and to producing “students” who are ideological enemies, why give them money? Aren’t the humanities supposed to help people see things from someone else’s point of view?
• Math team. On intrinsic interest, real learning, college admissions, and other topics.
• Building Apollo. Wow.
• Letting the CCP control TikTok is insane, and we should stop it.
• “New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to Reject Ban on Noncompete Agreements.” That’s bad news, and, if you’ve wondered whether democrats are as a group uniformly pro-worker and pro-innovation, you have another piece of the answer.
• What Sam Altman wishes someone had told him.
• Why don’t Democrats want to win?
• “The pharma industry from Paul Janssen to today: why drugs got harder to develop and what we can do about it.” I have a longer essay about clinical trials coming up, too.
• “We Were Once Masters of the Air: It’s High Time to Restore US Air Power.” Part of the ongoing problem with complacency and bureaucracy taking precedence over speed and effectiveness.
• “Things software developers should learn about learning.” Except it’s not just about software developers; it’s really about anyone who wants to learn and grow.
• How script doctor Scott Frank found his voice. Useful for anyone interested in storytelling, narrative, leadership, growth, or learning.
• Thinking about a long war with China.

* Bess on “Remembering things that haven’t happened yet: How will I know what I need to hear in a future I can’t anticipate? Who will I be, and what will she want?”

* The need to liberalize not just housing construction but also commercial real estate construction. We’re all paying the price of construction restrictions.

* Tyler Cowen on the university presidents debacle. They’ve helped further lower the status of higher ed and continue to make higher ed look like it’s most interested in ideological indoctrination, not truth seeking. Perhaps we’ll see some course correction, although I’ve been saying that for a decade. In 2014 I wrote “Why I don’t donate to Clark University [my alma mater], and thoughts on the future of college,” which now seems soft and tepid by comparison to what’s been seen in the last five years.

* Related to the above: Why math professor Alexander Barvinok objects to “diversity” statements. Note: “the routine affirmation of one’s beliefs as a precondition of making a living constitutes compelled speech and corrupts everyone who participates in the performance.” And, see further: “The Moral Decline of Elite Universities: Too much of academia cares little for universal human dignity, leaves no space for forgiveness, and exhibits no interest in shared progress.”

* “We will all become boring: Loneliness, liberalism, and the traditional family.” Poorly titled but interesting, and really about how to live your life. It underemphasizes the extent to which individuals also owe good, prosocial behavior to the groups they’re a part of. Another essay could be written along similar lines that emphasizes how important that is.

* “Destigmatizing Drug Use Has Been a Profound Mistake.”

* Saying no, by Ryan Holiday. I’d highlight this: “I once heard someone say that early in our careers, we say yes to everything so at one point we can afford to say no.” The earlier you are in your career, the less known you are, the fewer the number of requests that you get, the more you should tilt towards say “yes.” I’ve also learned the hard way that, if you say yes and then can’t do the thing, or don’t want to, the sooner you correct the “yes” to a “no,” the better. Neal Stephenson’s essay “Why I Am a Bad Correspondent” is germane too. Holiday mentions that “I used to post my email address on my website, and I would respond to everyone and everything.” I still mostly do this for commenters, or commenters on Bess’s Substack, but I probably get at least an order of magnitude less inbound than he does. Different scales require different strategies. “Do things that don’t scale” is applicable.

Particularly since my cancer’s recurrence and metastases, I’ve said “no” to a lot more than I would’ve before—and some of the things I’ve said “no” to have hurt. Friends and acquaintances who are well meaning and want to see me, but whose visits mean that Bess and I won’t get the writing done we’d like to do. Journalists or “journalists” who appear not to have read whatever Bess or I have already written publicly about a subject. Focus matters. Do I want to speak to tens of thousands of people, or one or a few? How do I decide? Few inbound queries asking me for stuff start with: “I donated to your Go Fund Me, and….” And look, I’m not saying everyone can or should do that. I’ve written to and semi-coached a lot of people with head and neck cancers; few understand better than me how parlous cancer makes one’s finances. But that’s a possible strategy for standing out and appearing worth investing in—a topic I’ve hit in How to get coaching, mentoring, and attention). I’ve seen stories from VCs or startup founders who will say that one way to stand out in email or Twitter is to, instead of saying, “Can we get coffee?”, saying: “Can I buy you coffee?” It’s only a few dollars, but bringing something to the table is different than not, even if you’re bringing something minor.

* The low fertility crisis is one of opportunity costs. But I think it underestimates the role of high housing costs caused by government-imposed restrictions on new construction.

* Most professional sports have too many games and so devalue their games. The games and even playoffs don’t become societal Shelling points any more.

* “Israeli Military Reveals Tunnel It Says Hamas Built for Large-Scale Attack” (wsj, $). One of the big reasons Israel is doing what it’s doing. And indicative of the tragedy of the Gazans: money is going into terrorist tunnels instead of schools, hospitals, transit, or public works.

* “Jason Schrum, the Forgotten Man of mRNA Research (wsj, $).

* “Dwarkesh Patel interviews Andy Matuschak on Self-Teaching, Spaced Repetition, and Why Books Don’t Work.” Among other things. His thoughts on the education system stand out to me.

* Harvard, now.

* GSK gonorrhea vaccine fast tracked. A potential win for human flourishing!

* “It Sure Looks Like Phones Are Making Students Dumber.” Consistent with my experiences in teaching; back in 2008 I wrote Laptops, students, distraction: hardly a surprise.

* Battery recycling is taking off. Humans still need, collectively, a massive amount of raw, mined material (estimates vary on exactly how much) but battery production is shifting towards lithium iron phosphate (LFP) and there may even be some shifts towards sodium batteries. Those trends auger for much less dependence on Congolese cobalt. Oh, and Lithium prices have dropped 77% in the last year. Demand goes up, new sources are found, and the price drops. The price acts as an incentive. “Shortages” of commodities rarely last.

* Some more deep background on copper.

* Why the age of American progress ended. We should try for progress again. I’m particularly interested in progress, given that medical tech progress is the only way I’m likely to live.

* On Flaubert’s letters (WaPo, $).

* Is it possible for a genetically engineered bacterium to prevent tooth decay? Is it possible that the FDA will let us find out whether it’s possible?

* “San Francisco’s old housing policy regime was a world-historical failure. What comes next?” Maybe we get more of the same? Is there a “next?”

* “Demographic Aging and Shrinking.”

* Profile of Bryne Hobart, prolific writer of The Diff, among other things.

* Most people with addiction age out of it.

* “Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma Vaccine: Current Landscape and Perspectives.” Probably not of interest to most people but of tremendous interest to me. It looks like Moderna is in the lead with mRNA cancer vaccines, followed by BioNTech, and then there are a bunch of others. Moderna and Merck just announced a Phase 3 trial of mRNA-4157 for lung cancer, but there’s no announcement of phase 1b or or 2 or even 3 of mRNA-4157 for head and neck cancers, which is what I need. MRNA-4157 dropped the risk of death in melanoma patients by at least 50% compared to Keytruda alone. That’s amazing.

* “Frozen methane under the seabed is thawing as oceans warm – and things are worse than we thought.” News that’ll likely be ignored, like all other news of this type.

* The National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) is very bad and, beyond merely being bad, it’s perverse in that it harms the environment more than helps.

* Be Wary of Imitating High-Status People Who Can Afford to Countersignal.

* Patagonia removing PFAS / “forever chemicals” from its clothes. I got a Patagonia “Nano-puffer” coat that can be stuffed into itself, yielding a tiny package good for travel, and, although I like it, I also used a seam ripper to remove the Patagonia label from the chest. I’m not a billboard for a company.

* Companies and other organizations should “Just Stop Making Official Statements About the News.” Seems obvious, but here we are. Consistent with “A simple theory of cancel culture:” “[M]ost of these online mobs are paper tigers. They have no second move. Cancellation is a ‘shock and awe’ strategy, it relies upon an initial wave of intimidation to achieve its effects.” Ignoring and blocking works surprisingly well.

* The squat is an important exercise.

* “The 20 Farming Families Who Use More Water From the Colorado River Than Some Western States.” The supposed water shortages in western states are almost entirely about agriculture and a failure to price water correctly. To a lesser degree, we’re dealing with the failure to build out desalination plants, particularly in California.

* New York City schools.

* I saw an article titled “Your Friends Don’t All Have to Be the Same Age;” no link needed, because people who are substantially older or younger are likely to know different things and see things in different ways, which is valuable and interesting.

* “The Fight for the Future of Publishing: Ideological fanatics and fear have crippled the major houses. But new book publishers [and Substack] are rising up to take the risks they won’t.” Consistent with me writing the death of literary culture, though maybe that culture will be reborn on Substack.

* Vitalik’s techno-optimism. I’m also a techno-optimist; I almost have to be, given that technology is the only path forward to me being alive for more than a year.

* “The End of History: Academic historians are destroying their own discipline.” Another one that verges on too obvious, and similar things could be said for most liberal arts and social studies disciplines.

* “Unfortunately, production efficiency isn’t going to make housing affordable.” Note:

[Two to four] unit lots have never been a particularly large part of housing growth. They probably are a sort of canary in the coalmine. A city with functional land use regulations will tend to allow them, so that they are one arrow in the quiver of potential housing development. Like VanHalen checking for brown M&Ms in the green room, a lack of ADUs probably means a lot of other things aren’t working well.

And:

From 1998 to 2022, the median home in the Compton ZIP code increased from $100,000 to $570,000. That isn’t because the cost of construction quintupled. It’s because the price of a low tier LA location quintupled. The construction costs on that house are not the reason for its value inflation

Compton!

* “How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia Is Powering the A.I. Revolution.”

* The U.S. doesn’t lose all its wars. Note: “even victories [in the past decades] tend to feel like losses, because war is almost never a good idea in this day and age.” In April I wrote: “The level of long-term, strategic thinking being displayed in Russia is, to put it mildly, not high.” Even if Russia somehow “wins” in Ukraine, whatever that might mean, the country as a whole has already lost: most of Europe is trying to accelerate the transition away from Russian oil and gas, and whoever remains of Russia’s smartest and most capable people are trying to get out. What will be left? Russia’s fertility rate per woman has ranged in the last two decades from 1.2 to 1.8; at present it’s about 1.5.

* Also, related to the immediately above, South Korea is on the road to disappearing.