The Solomor Epidemy

In Denmark, one in 10 babies conceived with donor sperm is born to a woman without a partner. It is called a solomor (from Solo Amor). Denmark has the highest number of births by assisted fertility treatment in the world, and 10% solomor is just the start of a powerful trend.  The reason may be social (unwillingness to become a father) and/or biological. The sperm quality among young Danish men is low, with a quarter barely able to impregnate his partner (from Rigshospitalet the National Hospital of Denmark).  

In the USA, AID results in about 100,000 babies per year — 2% of all births. The rate is higher in Japan (5 percent) and Denmark (10 percent).

Denmark is trying to solve the problem through unprecedented State support to anyone willing to make a baby. That system is feasible while the population is homogeneous as Denmark. May be I am wrong, because France is diverse and the State provides much social assistance, although diversity in Europe is a relatively recent development that is still undigested and not reflected in the laws and the social arrangements. 

The general unwillingness of young males to marry and form families is not of today. In Solon's Greece it was necessary to force by law everyone to marry. In Sparta, unmarried men were interrogated frequently by the police and punished and imposed shaming inabilities. In Augustus's Rome, the Emperor himself publicly harangued and shamed the reluctant.  Even today, in most countries, married men pay less tax. 

Hungerstein - The Hunger Stone of the River Elbe

Medieval inscription on a stone bordering the river Elbe in Germany. "When you see me, cry". It is called the Hunger Stone. It means that the river flow is low and there is draught and failed crops. In Central Europe, the stone can be seen today. 

Thucydides' Trap Nonsense

Ischinger (A German Senior Strategist in Der Spiegel): China, of course, represents a significant future challenge. The question for us must be: What contribution must we make to ensure that China's rise does not result in military conflict? That is the global political challenge. The ancient Greek historian Thucydides once said that war is unavoidable when an established power is challenged by a new power. In his era, it was Sparta and Athens. The challenge for us is to avoid stumbling into that trap.

It happens that I had studied the Peloponnesian War for years and Thucydides never mentioned a trap. He studied the causes of the war and said that the conservative, provincial Laconians, whose food was provided by Messenian subjects and their safety was based on an orderly system of alliances, were afraid of the disordered, mob-ruled, crazy, destabilizing, revolutionary city of Athens. One day the Athenian demos decided - against all advice - sail and attack the island of Sicily, peopled by Greek colonists. The crazy expedition failed and almost no one returned home. The Spartans feared that the Athenians, fueled by revolutionary ideas, would infect the Messenians and other subject peoples, and decided to impose order in Hellas.

It reminds me of revolutionary France, full of effervescence and energy, establishing Jacobin clubs in England. Ultimately republican France attacked its neighbors and caused mighty disturbance in the established order of Europe. No Thucydides trap at all, simple preventive self defense against a nation with feverish ideas and expansionist tendencies.

In the case of China XXI Century, no ideology, just commercial expansion, perfectly assimilable by the community of nations. 

No Air in Kever Benjamin City

End of summer 2018 and approaching the High Holidays, and here in Kever Benjamin City we have no air to breath, night temperature of 35 centigrade, the food is spoiled, daughter feeling unwell, me feeling unwell with the leg still aching. Yesterday we did our weekly visit to the supermarket, and then all day in the bed.

Left the pic of the Iranian atom bomb, 10 kilotons, small enough to fit in the head of a missile. It is clearly nineteen fifty technology, the bronze explosive primers are to provoke the simultaneous implosion to compress the plutonium nucleus. To create a homogeneous and efficient implosion, the primers must explode in certain order (and not simultaneously as I imagined), presumably in the order of the numbers.  Finely timing the primers to create an uniform implosion inside the steel ball cartridge, it is necessary to have some electronic timer. But the main obstacle to build one seems to be to accumulate enough plutonium, which cannot be purchased in the black market. The Iranians tried to refine some using thousands of centrifuges, but were discovered.

For the record: I am depressed. 11AM and still did not start to work.

Population

Liu Cixin in his monumental trilogy writes about the next thousand years of wars with the Trisolars (the graph illustrates the Three Bodies Problem) and end of the universe (collapse in the optimist scenery or eternal expansion in the worst of the cases). The oeuvre is full of quantitative calculations and marginally it presumes a steadily falling Earth population. In that context, it is natural and uneventful.  

177,000 babies were born in Israel between April 2017 and April 2018.  Israel has the highest birth rate in the developed world, with an average of 3.11 children per woman.  The distant runner-up is Mexico, with only 2.2 children per woman.  The average fertility rate for countries like France, the U.S., Britain, Spain, and the Netherlands is less than two children per woman.  The birth rates for Jewish and Arab Israeli women were identical (3.13 children per woman) for the first time in history during 2015. About thirty thousand new immigrants arrived, most from the former Soviet Union, France and the USA. 

The calculated correlation between economic performance and population growth is 0.7 which is huge. Economic performance is related to national IQ.  The Jews in Israel are the exception to that law. 

Have a Tolerable Jewish New Year !

(Since former "Happy Year" wishes did not work, this year decided to be modest)

Ofwat pressuring British water companies

Britain is possibly the only country that privatized its water supply monopoly and did not nationalize them back - yet. The regulator applies pressure to make the companies more efficient, employing the bureaucrat best-loved weapon: demanding more and more reports. As part of Ofwat’s 2019 price review, water companies have been required to outline a detailed business plan, detailing how they will charge customers between 2020 and 2025. In February, the environment minister, Michael Gove, warned water companies over their “concerning” behaviour.

Eight of 18 water firms fail to meet targets on tackling leaks

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Thames Water, which supplies more than 15 million people across the south-east, said it will spend £11.7bn on upgrades, including £2.1bn to reduce leaks. The company, which was ordered in June to pay a total of £120m to compensate customers over leakage failures, has asked to keep bills flat until 2025.

I think the British system is problematic. The Israeli method to combat our Mekorot monopoly is to allow private water enterprises to outcompete the old monster. Seems to me better. Only that Mekorot keeps losing hundreds of million dollars in failed projects.