Interesting Links for 17-08-2025

[andrewducker]

1. What's your answer to the UK's population implosion?

(tags:UK population immigration doom )

2. African Union urges adoption of world map showing continent's true size

(tags:africa maps )

3. People (wrongly) don't believe that building homes helps with the cost of housing.

(tags:housing economics psychology )

4. Snow White, various dwarves, and convergent evolution with butterflies

(tags:short_story evolution )

Comments

[liv]

1. Sorry to be Debbie Downer but I'm pretty sure we're going to have far, far worse problems by 2060 than an excess of pensioners compared to working age people. Like, you know, worldwide agriculture collapse, mass movement of climate refugees on a scale that will dwarf any population movement we see now, and that's assuming that the UK continues to be habitable at all which I'd give about 50:50 at this point.

Simply assuming that current trends will continue for 30+ years regardless of external factors is utterly uninformative. Racism isn't going to solve any of our current problems, obviously, but neither is mindless liberalism that ignores material reality.

[nancylebov]

1. The other solution is technological improvement so that old people don't need as much care.

I like the idea of getting the effects of those families whose members stay healthy until they're 90 or so. Last I heard, they have genes that are protective against the problems of aging, which would be easier to replicate than not having genes that cause the problems of aging.

4. Reminds me a little of "Red as Blood" by Tanith Lee. Snow White is a vampire.

[movingfinger]

1. "Tax the extremely rich" doesn't seem to have occurred to this guy

[channelpenguin]

You definitely are Debbie Downer. And almost certainly right. And we have clearly been on this road since. As long as I've been alive (I'm 54). This is why I have never understood why any of my friends had kids. I would not wish the future on anyone I love.

I cannot think about any of it without going insane. I don't watch or read or listen to news (for decades now). I might have to give up Andy's blog too at some point.

Meanwhile, I'll be in my veg garden with my cat, trying to persuade myself just to borrow the damned money to get the well working again and put in solar.

(I'm in N Germany, but nothing is much different).

[andrewducker]

I'd love that to happen, but I'm not holding my breath.

[andrewducker]

Still wouldn't deal with the lack of people available to do the actual care of the elderly.

[aldabra]

1. Nationalise everything. Including the non-owner-occupied housing stock. And the schools and hospitals and railways and utilities. Council housing used to be a source of revenue. Tax the buggers who have been extracting rents from all of this.

If you let 20-yr-olds form secure households in appropriate housing with available schools they will have children; you don't have to make anyone do anything. They're not having children now because people can't afford housing until their mid-thirties by which time it is too late.

Tax households rather than people. You've got households hoarding work and pushing up house prices. The care of the elderly used to be done much more cheaply within households when you could run a household on 35 hours/week work rather than 70 hours work. Tax work over, say, fifty hours a week at a higher rate. Your high-flying dual-earner couples can get their status from their job titles, they don't have to hoard resources too.

Stop raising the retirement age. Every time you do that you make it harder for youngsters to get jobs and have families.

Stop outsourcing work to countries that undercut us on labour conditions and environmental standards. This is what tariffs are for.

Stop running the country as if it was a business. Countries can't fire people. The population has to be fed and housed whether or not it is useful; once you accept that, the marginal cost of getting people to be useful is much lower. If you've nationalised the housing then the proportion of income that people spend on housing comes straight back to you, as a transfer payment. That halves the cost of public sector labour, compared to putting them in corporate-owned rental housing.

What is actually going to happen is that we will deploy the Navy to sink the immigrants and we will close the nursing homes because they're not profitable once the population runs out of money. The elderly without family to take them back in will die. I understand this is in Project 2025. The population (and the government) runs out of money in direct proportion to the billionaires holding it all.

3. I think people have observed forty years of commercial house-building for rent extraction and have given up. Starter homes, for example, were a brazen plan to force people to take out 30-year mortgages two or three or four times rather than once, and have trapped families with children in grossly inadequate housing that they can't afford to move out of. And shared equity starter homes are the same con on steroids.