Interesting Links for 15-07-2020

[andrewducker]

Eating Lunch At Your Desk Again? Study Examines Why Workers Don't Always Take Breaks

(tags:psychology work food working_hours )

Feeling Anxious About Wearing A Mask? Here Are 5 Ways To Overcome It

(tags:anxiety pandemic )

China Poised to Pull Plans for U.K. Nuclear Plants and HS2 over Huawei 5G ban

(tags:China UK nuclearpower hs2 technology trade )

I Hate Condoms, And I Hate Masks.

(tags:responsibility pandemic )

Yes, balancing work and parenting is impossible. Here's the data.

(tags:work children parenting pandemic )

UK has second-highest COVID-19 health worker deaths in the world

(tags:UK epicfail death healthcare pandemic OhForFucksSake )

The Lost Art of Growing Blueberries With Fire

(tags:food farming fire )

Fertility is continuing to drop. which is a good thing, but will mean a big change to society

(tags:fertility thefuture society GoodNews )

Me and my neurodivergent brain: A short play I appear to be writing while I should be cleaning the kitchen. (fascinating and funny)

(tags:brain ViaDrCross )

Comments

[rmc28]

I've never thought it's possible to work while caring for children. We are just-about coping because the children are old enough to be fairly self-sufficient, we are deliberately lowering our standards on what education we want them to get done in these Current Circumstances, and our respective employers are understanding and flexible with the time and location we work.

(I still was only working part-time until work gave me one of a very small number of laptops they'd got hold of - now I *just about* put in a full-time work week, by starting early and finishing late, and working around the kids doing their school work. Spouse gets in a full work week by ... leaving most of the active childcare to me.)

[andrewducker]

Yeah, both Jane's work and mine are very understanding that we're only working half time. We swap back and forth every hour or so (depending on meetings) and Jane takes a bigger hit around nap times.

[mtbc]

Would be nice if China pulled out if the shakeup means we actually get some decent modern reactor designs instead!

[momentsmusicaux]

'Being a grownup is largely defined by your ability to do things that you don’t want to do.'

That is so very well put.

[zz]

a skill i've never entirely learned, and then deliberately destroyed over years as an "i only want to do things that make me feel better now" response to feeling ever more miserable and hopeless as my mental health deteriorated.

(also, it's easy to go "this isn't important/worthwhile enough to bother with" when your daily assumption is that you're going to kill yourself "tomorrow"...)

[zz]

i used to eat lunch at my desk because sitting in the staffroom would involve other people watching me eat, sitting in a less comfortable chair, and not having the internet. and i was too social phobic to go out to eat on my own.

Lunch, fertility, parenting etc

[anna_wing]

I used to eat lunch at my desk because it was my only time to shut the door of my office and read the papers in peace (personalised news makes one's world smaller).

Could fears of falling fertility cancel out the fears of rising automation? If more of the "Dirty, Dangerous, Demeaning" jobs traditionally done by poor foreigners or uneducated locals could be done by robots, that would be a good thing for countries facing falling populations. And by the time species survival becomes an actual issue, hopefully Lois McMaster Bujold's uterine replicators will be as standard a technology as childhood vaccines.

The Ceausescus' natalist policies in Romania in the 1980s didn't turn out well for either the children or for Romania.Treat women better and have respectable childcare options for people other than the rich, so that they can continue to work and have lives, and they may be a bit more willing to marry and have children. Plus, educated mothers generally have fewer but better educated, healthier, longer-lived children.

Parenting styles around the world have different behavioural parameters for the child, depending on circumstances.

Re: Lunch, fertility, parenting etc

[andrewducker]

Yeah, hopefully automation will help a lot.

Re: Lunch, fertility, parenting etc

[danieldwilliam]

I think automation is coming for a range of jobs not just the dirty,dangerous or demeaning. It's probably easier to automate aspects of law and accountancy than it is to automate cleaning a toilet.

But, back of the envelope thinking here. If the population of a country halves then it needs to double productivity in order to have the same GDP*. Which implies that one job in two needs to be automated or otherwise removed.** That doesn't seem impossible.

I expect we'll also see different migration patterns to those we see now. As developing countries actually develop the economic pressures and imbalances will be different with less impetus to move from eg Africa to eg the EU for a richer safer life.

*Does having the same GDP matter? Depends on your debt levels, the fixed costs of running your country and the proportion of workers to non-workers.

**Removal of a job by e.g. using AI-supported exo-skeletons to help the infirm go about their day to day life instead of requiring a care assistant or by automating the end to end supply chain management proces at a super-market so that your online order for strawberries directly triggers the strawberry picking robot.

Re: Lunch, fertility, parenting etc

[anna_wing]

It's probably easier to automate aspects of law and accountancy than it is to automate cleaning a toilet.

Toto has you covered...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI1ikD-5lKc

[danieldwilliam]

I feel very relaxed about China pulling out of building nuclear reactors in England. I see no downside in that.