Are we turning into a can't do society ?

[33C]

10 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

We import about half of our food, but don’t use the land we have either completely, or to maximum nutritional efficiency in terms of the crops we do grow, so I think that by a combination of “going backwards” to crops that work well in our climate/weather/soils, and a far more restricted and, crucially, seasonal diet, plus newly-devised clever stuff, we could support a lot more than half the population, maybe even all of it, so we might not be as ‘overpopulated’ as present methods/consumption-habits make it appear.

 

You’d have to get used to a lot of oats and beans, endless cabbages, hardly any meat (pigs are good for multi-layered agriculture though), lots of root-vegetable stews, restricted dairy produce, plenty of eggs. And, a lot fewer calories overall. Think Dig for Victory.

 

The other thing is fuel. We might struggle to be self-sufficient in having enough to keep warm, even after cars were banned on Day 1.

 

Is this all OT at all?

 

 

What worries me most is this charge, (no pun intended) towards everything being rechargeable. This requires a lot of energy. How is this going to be achieved? If we as a country are going carbon zero in 20 years, the whole infrastructure has to change, and quickly. Who's paying? Plus if you put all your eggs in one basket, we become vulnerable to outside influences. (Think of your teenage daughter when she has 1% on her phone and a non working charger × 65,000,000.) Storing up trouble....

[rockershovel]

I freely admit that I hate DIY and will never willingly engage in it. 

[rockershovel]

1 minute ago, 33C said:

What worries me most is this charge, (no pun intended) towards everything being rechargeable. This requires a lot of energy. How is this going to be achieved? If we as a country are going carbon zero in 20 years, the whole infrastructure has to change, and quickly. Who's paying? Plus if you put all your eggs in one basket, we become vulnerable to outside influences. (Think of your teenage daughter when she has 1% on her phone and a non working charger × 65,000,000.) Storing up trouble....

I lost all interest in Nett Zero once I realised that it was an accounting sleight-of-hand based on offloading our carbon production on others. 

[Nearholmer]

Actually, I didn’t postulate it as an emergency, which to me implies suddenness. It was more a thought experiment about self-sufficiency.

 

Nuclear power: is Britain self-sufficient in uranium? Or, many of the exotic materials needed to make a reactor and associated control gear? I know there is uranium under Cornwall, in fact there are a lot of useful things under Cornwall.

 

We do have a lot of wind and moving water in Britain though, so good use will be made of those. Think C17th, that’s the thing to do.

[colin smith]

10 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Is this all OT at all?

 

Yes it is, thankfully.

 

I'm confident the UK will not be involved in a prolonged war of defence like WW1 or WW2 within the next century, if ever. 

 

I think the 'war mentality' is an issue for people around my age (60) and older because we grew up within the shadow of WW2 when the images and cinematised events swamped the national consciousness. Our sense of what Britain was was founded on the events of the last world wars. Thus we see the future in terms of that shadow.

In reality the grievances that would support a civil war in the UK are simply not there and the nature of warfare and countries capacity to fight a prolonged conventional international war are simply not there. The world is too interconnected for any one country to go it alone. 

 

The real threat to our way western of life isn't war: it's climate change and the disruption we've seen over  Covid is nothing compared to the potential havoc climate change could do.

[Nearholmer]

5 minutes ago, 33C said:

Think of your teenage daughter when she has 1% on her phone and a non working charger × 65,000,000.) Storing up trouble....

Terrifying; truly terrifying.

[ikks]

1 hour ago, Steven B said:

How many boys who left school in the 1950-70s were taught to cook? Probably a similar number to the number of girls who did woodwork or metalwork.

I went to Henry Cavendish School in Derby when it opened in 1958, it was Co-Ed.......boys and girls, in the second year, for two terms, the girls learned the basics of woodwork, tech drawing and metalwork, "Us boys" learned housecraft, which involved cooking , sewing, ironing , cleaning and managing basic household issues, we thought it was a bloody pain at the time but hey, I lived on my own for twelve years in the late 70's/early 80's and those lessons proved invaluable. Only two issues, 1) my fudge never set and getting it home made a hell of a mess over some of my text books!! and many years later I blew up a whole fish in my first microwave, not sure I used it too much after that!!

mike

[33C]

3 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

I lost all interest in Nett Zero once I realised that it was an accounting sleight-of-hand based on offloading our carbon production on others. 

It doesn't help when I recently found out that Musk is sending 25? satellites a month into orbit for some sort of   communication platform. Chri$t on a bike.....

Edited January 20, 2022 by 33C
Missing letter.

[Michael Hodgson]

4 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

I freely admit that I hate DIY and will never willingly engage in it. 

My partner's son thinks DIY is an acronym for "Don't involve yourself".

[Michael Hodgson]

1 minute ago, 33C said:

It doesn't help when I recently found out that Musk is sending 25? satellites a month into orbit for some sort communication platform. Chri$t on a bike.....

Never mind.  You can save the planet by putting your used baked beans tin in the right dustbin.

[Nearholmer]

3 minutes ago, colin smith said:

In reality the grievances that would support a civil war in the UK are simply not there

Just keep your fingers crossed on that one. The USA seems to stagger perilously close to that condition sometimes, and look how their internal polarisation seems to have emerged almost from nowhere, under no discernible external pressure.

 

You are spot-on regarding climate change being the biggest threat, though.

[Reorte]

7 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Actually, I didn’t postulate it as an emergency, which to me implies suddenness. It was more a thought experiment about self-sufficiency.

 

Nuclear power: is Britain self-sufficient in uranium? Or, many of the exotic materials needed to make a reactor and associated control gear? I know there is uranium under Cornwall, in fact there are a lot of useful things under Cornwall.

 

We do have a lot of wind and moving water in Britain though, so good use will be made of those. Think C17th, that’s the thing to do.

There's wind (if you can stomach wind farms everywhere; I can't) but you need steel to build them. We've no iron mines left open, and whilst I doubt all the iron in the country has been mined is there enough for steel-making on modern scales? You probably need some exotic materials in them too, at least if you want the most effective ones.

 

One think C17th isn't is the massive scale everything is these days, and which modern economics requires to even be viable.

[Michael Hodgson]

33 minutes ago, 33C said:

90% of devices I've tinkered with have stopped working due to dirt and lots of it, from constantly being handled, and a light clean is usually all that is required, yet the default setting is panic, terror and an emergency purchase of a new model. E.g. 1 hour of time, soft toothbrush, cotton bud, furniture polish. = £600- £1000 new purchase. Trouble is it's usually the other way round.......

 

You really ought to put your layout on a proper baseboard not the carpet - it would save you a lot of maintenance!

[33C]

5 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Just keep your fingers crossed on that one. The USA seems to stagger perilously close to that condition sometimes, and look how their internal polarisation seems to have emerged almost from nowhere, under no discernible external pressure.

 

You are spot-on regarding climate change being the biggest threat, though.

If the people have nothing to do, they find something to do.......

[Dunsignalling]

2 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Just keep your fingers crossed on that one. The USA seems to stagger perilously close to that condition sometimes, and look how their internal polarisation seems to have emerged almost from nowhere, under no discernible external pressure.

 

You are spot-on regarding climate change being the biggest threat, though.

TBH, the end of the last American Civil War never really appeared much more than a long-term cease-fire to me.

 

Many of the same dividing lines still exist and are not buried deep. A resumption of hostilities wouldn't surprise me very much.

 

John

[AndrueC]

19 hours ago, hayfield said:

It seems to me many now want everything done for them. Is it they are leaving school without being taught basic life skills, which includes cooking !!!

I dunno about all that dross but I could design, implement and maintain most of the software that currently underpins your life if I had to. For a specific example if you have the misfortune to visit your GP it's highly likely they will be dictating their notes into software I help write.

 

Because I don't have to spend time cooking (unless I want to) and assembling flat-pack furniture I have more time to play golf and/or work on my model railway.

 

As for importing stuff I think that's a good thing (up to a point). Trading relationships between countries tend to deter military wars. If country A is dependant on B and B is dependant on A they are more likely to work out a way to get along together as long as neither of them is led by a complete jackass. Sadly at the moment most of the richest countries do appear to be run by complete jackasses which is a shame

 

Life's great in the 21st century(*)

 

(*)Although it would be better if the politicians could stop pratting around.

Edited January 20, 2022 by AndrueC

[AndrueC]

6 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Of course we do. But, the question is: does everyone need to attempt to be a Jack of most of them?

 

I know I’m being deliberately contrarian about all this, but I do acknowledge that there is a problem. Not so much in DIY, where my view is that it’s a very individual thing whether people want/can do most of it themselves or not, but in professional trades, especially highly skilled ones, where far too few people have been properly trained and technically educated over the years - there are huge skill shortages in all sorts of trades, and at professional level, which leave us really badly placed as a country. Midwives, high-voltage technicians, plumbers, experts in finite-element analysis, vets; the list is almost endless. We have to import people to fill those gaps, and even that we’ve made harder for ourselves.

 

In that respect, I agree that we have become a can’t do country.

There is a serious shortage of people in IT and related trades. There's been a shortage of programmers all my life (which is why it was such a good career) and it seems to be getting worse.

[rockershovel]

One fundamental difference between the US and UK is that States still govern themselves to a considerable degree. Most States possess armed police and National Guard units - the Civil War is sometimes described as the "War Between the States" and much of the structure which made that possible, still exists. 

 

This isn't true of the UK. 

[F-UnitMad]

21 minutes ago, Dunsignalling said:

TBH, the end of the last American Civil War never really appeared much more than a long-term cease-fire to me.

 

Many of the same dividing lines still exist and are not buried deep. A resumption of hostilities wouldn't surprise me very much.

 

John

 

3 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

One fundamental difference between the US and UK is that States still govern themselves to a considerable degree. Most States possess armed police and National Guard units - the Civil War is sometimes described as the "War Between the States" and much of the structure which made that possible, still exists. 

 

This isn't true of the UK. 

Plus, of course, in the US you can buy a gun in your local Wallmart. Not so easy to arm yourself to the teeth in the UK.

Unless you're part of the criminal fraternity, of course.

[Nearholmer]

I have no idea what the scenario would be: I merely started a thought experiment in response to 33C’s contention that a nation isn’t truly a nation unless it is self sufficient.

 

As it happens, I don’t agree with the contention anyway. The old “territory and an army strong enough to defend it” definition works fine for me, because some nations, ours being one, have very lengthy histories of surviving by obtaining a significant proportion of the resources they need by trading and/or conquest.

 

Anyway: the modern form of globalisation renders most nation states irrelevant as units of organisation. Discuss. (Which is quite a leap from debating whether youngsters these days know how to wipe their own noses, which is what this thread is meant to be about).

[Hroth]

4 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

the modern form of globalisation renders most nation states irrelevant as units of organisation. Discuss.

 

Yet another can of worms.

(Not to be confused with a Diet of Worms)

[rocor]

15 minutes ago, AndrueC said:

There is a serious shortage of people in IT and related trades. There's been a shortage of programmers all my life (which is why it was such a good career) and it seems to be getting worse.

 

Programming today could be thought of as a craft profession, being analogous to the late eighteenth century weavers. A craft, Seemly secure and well paid. 

 

Then came the  mechanized looms and knitting frames.

 

 

[rocor]

32 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

I have no idea what the scenario would be: I merely started a thought experiment in response to 33C’s contention that a nation isn’t truly a nation unless it is self sufficient.

 

As it happens, I don’t agree with the contention anyway. The old “territory and an army strong enough to defend it” definition works fine for me, because some nations, ours being one, have very lengthy histories of surviving by obtaining a significant proportion of the resources they need by trading and/or conquest.

 

Anyway: the modern form of globalisation renders most nation states irrelevant as units of organisation. Discuss. (Which is quite a leap from debating whether youngsters these days know how to wipe their own noses, which is what this thread is meant to be about).

 

I would not entirely concur that globalization/anti-globalization is an issue totally divorced from what skills the nation's youth could/should be acquiring.  

[Michael Hodgson]

2 hours ago, Reorte said:

Of course the big problem is that that change would be even further from being able to feed everyone - we're overpopulated.

 

Overpopulation is easy to fix.  All we need is a pandemic.  A war could be just as effective. 

[rockershovel]

30 minutes ago, Hroth said:

 

Yet another can of worms.

(Not to be confused with a Diet of Worms)

One thing I did observe during my travels through the Former Soviet Union, between 2000-16 was the rapidity with which nation states re-emerged from the chaos. 

 

People need a workable infrastructure - currency, employment, services, public order - to go about their daily business. 

 

It's also my long experience that people tend to self-segregate based upon language and customs. 

 

The nation states of the FSU developed our of the geography and languages of the region. They change over time, but remain remarkably constant. Sargon the Great or Xerxes would recognise modern Iraq and Iran. Caesar would recognise modern Italy and France. Ramesses would recognise the geography and economic shape of modern Egypt. 

 

The English clearly recognise themselves as a nation, as demonstrated by the 2004 Referenda - an attempt to impose regional devolution. 

 

Globalism is an ideology which depends upon modern technology. The Romans and Czars alike sought to impose uniformity  and how did THAT turn out?