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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27726 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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One nuclear family, no employees, and the kids move to the city when they grow up.

What that means of course is that an incredibly empty part of the country is steadily becoming even emptier. For example this region of South Australia, more than double the size of Italy, with just 2573 people, and losing about 3% of their population each year.

Edit: Last year this property larger than Palestine sold for $34 million, or about $21 million in US dollars.

It looks like that big area of SA is about 8000 people if you add back the two enclaves which are small towns with independent municipalities. Still scary. The most remote place I have been is a tossup between the drive to the Grand Canyon North Rim and the drive through the Scottish Highlands from Fort William to Skye Bridge. In both cases you go about 30 miles between settlements, and the settlements have populations in the low three figures.

Are the jobs that the missing people used to do (presumably, mostly running sheep stations) being automated away so that the agricultural productivity of the Outback is holding up, or are they just not being done any more?

Mostly the former. Agriculture has steadily gotten more and more capital intensive and less and less labour intensive in all kinds of ways. It used to be you had to muster cattle on horseback, then people started doing it by helicopter, now people are starting to do it with drones.

There is also an effect from increasing environmental regulations and aboriginal native title stuff making either certain areas or certain management practices not viable, but the technology factor dominates. Production keeps going up overall.

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