Interesting Links for 08-04-2025

[andrewducker]

1. North of Scotland electricity network to have £450m upgrade

(tags:electricity scotland )

2. Online fashion sales generated 941 million plastic bags in the UK alone last year - 2.6 million bags every day.

(tags:plastic uk postage )

3. 20 years of Git. Still weird, still wonderful.

(tags:versioncontrol history computers )

4. South Korea is doomed

(tags:population Korea thefuture doom video )

5. First baby born in UK to woman with transplanted womb

(tags:childbirth organdonor uk )

Comments

1

[danieldwilliam]

Good, that should allow people living in northern Scotland to make better use of the renewable energy there. It's pretty expensive heating homes off the gas-grid in Scotland - any little helps.

Re: 1

[andrewducker]

Yes.

I'm really hoping that the zonal pricing changes go ahead too. Gives people a stake in encourage electricity generation near them.

[nancylebov]

I doubt that whole major ethnicities will disappear because of low birth rates. Jews chug along at 20 million.

On the other hand, I don't know what *will* happen.

[bens_dad]

But they live in amongst other people.
South Korean culture may continue else where, but what will happen to the (old) people where South Korea is now ?
IIUC, the former East Germany has the same problem.

One possibility is to encourage immigration.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely. We need decent levels of immigration. It's a shame that people are so against it.

[bens_dad]

IIUC C21 UK immigration has been significant*, though I don't know how much is around students and could thus go away quickly.
But it happened without me noticing and with politicians saying they were stopping it, so there was no discussion about who or where would be best.

* https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/uk-population/ suggests over 15% population growth since 2000. Well over half of that appears to be migration. We are however a smaller percentage of the world population (but perhaps not of world resource consumption).

[andrewducker]

Good point. The immigration will keep things functional, so long as we build enough infrastructure.

[channelpenguin]

I think, at going on 54, I'm probably more part of the problem here as an immigrant to E Germany, rather than part of the solution.

Definitely in the countryside, it's lots and lots of old people. Depressing amounts of whom are ALSO anti-immigrant. The former communists seem bizarrely attracted to the new far right...

At least we are getting lots of Ukranians. Who don't attract the same racist bullshit. I'm lucky, I don't LOOK especially "foreign" but those who do can get a lot of shit. My and 2 Russian ex-colleagues did ponder our luck. In one big renewable energy solar installations company I worked for, I remarked that company-wide ALL the "workers" were immigrants, while ALL the management were German. Being white and speaking good German I might have had a bit of a chance. Maybe not too...

[nancylebov]

I'm just looking at the question of whether ethnicities will survive. I think they pretty much will.

I think a great many old people, possibly including me, will die of neglect.

Will falling reproductive rates worldwide, immigration is not the solution! Maybe in the short run, but not in general. The countries which supply immigrants will also have a shortage of young people.

The only possible solutions I can see are technological and biological. Robots, but also lesser things like exoskeletons. Or finding out how to slow or reverse aging, and hopefully making it cheap.

[andrewducker]

Global fertility is at 2.3 - so we should be okay overall for a while, so long as we allow immigration from the areas above 2.1 to the areas below it.

Technological solutions are a lovely idea, but I'm not sure that robots or reversing aging are actually feasible.

[nancylebov]

I didn't realize global fertility was still that high.

I'm pretty sure slowing aging to an extent is feasible. There are families where people are in good health until their nineties, and they're being studied.

The really good news is that it isn't their basic genes being special, it's that they have very good protective genes. Perhaps it can be bottled.

[andrewducker]

I'm sure it's feasible.

I'm not sure it's feasible in the next 50 years.

[bens_dad]

I guess I was thinking that birth rates would increase again once population density decreases. Not good for (older?) people alive today, but if we return to a stable birth rate the population "pyramid" will only temporarily be out of shape and there is only a transitional problem (for approx one lifetime).

I need to think some more whether this makes any sense.

It also provokes me to think about C21 colonialism.

[nancylebov]

It's a hard call. I believe population might go up because the only people breeding are the ones with a really strong drive to have children. This can apply on both the individual and cultural level. Oh, and it's a drive to have both girl and boy children.

As for your theory, I'm not sure how much crowding/real shortages are the current issue. My impression is that the cost of housing, education, and medical care are limiting the number of children people have, and good social safety nets don't seem to solve it.

[andrewducker]

Cost of housing, cost of childcare, cost to women's careers.

I don't know if you fixed those if it would fix the problems.

I don't know of anywhere that's reversed it. Highest European countries are France (1.8), Ireland (1.8), and Denmark (1.7). But I don't know if there are lessons that can be learned from them.

[movingfinger]

4. The patriarchy will do anything to perpetuate itself except housework

[andrewducker]

Yup!

[channelpenguin]

*splutter* indeed!

[greenwoodside]

4. Reading some of the comments from South Koreans below the video are the saddest part. It sounds like the experience of growing up and living in SK are like a blown up version of the things I disliked about growing up in the UK. But put on steroids and raised to the power ten. Exam culture, institutionalisation, competition, plus these days housing costs and the diffusion of LinkedIn values.

Back when I was doing TEFL, the advice was all 'don't go to Seoul and teach in a hagwon (cramming school), even if the pay is decent, because it's too depressing. You don't want to be party to what they're doing to children'. No wonder when the hagwon children reach adulthood, they don't want kids themselves.

[andrewducker]

Yup, all of that.

Immigration

[agoodwinsmith]

Interesting factoid.

Canada relies on immigration to grow its population, and we need a constant supply, year after year, because once the immigrant families' children absorb the culture of Canada, they, too, reduce their number of children per woman to the (low) Canadian average. Their rent/mortgages are as high; their transportation costs are as high; their aspirations towards vacations and cottage having are as dearly held.

It may not be the first generation born in Canada, but by the fourth at the latest, it's done.

I found this information in Stats Canada about fifteen years ago when I was researching a presentation.

Re: Immigration

[andrewducker]

That doesn't surprise me at all. Immigration it is!