So a tech nobody from a single games company talks to an elitist newspaper about concerns that only a financial bull would care about simply because he thinks that everyone on blighty is for some reason using an iphone.

Well I'm on android and I dont care what happens to the iphone users and their game choices.

> From what I've read the average woman wants 2.6 kids

I dread to think what the 0.6 child would look like

Ah so you want extinction of races you dont like.

There is a word for people like you.

Does it taste nice? I prefer Clubs and Trios myself. Does a Zanzibar have caramel?

> Not all people believe in having so few children.

Why do you think this is anything to do with choice?

- Low sperm counts getting even lower (last time I checked us guys didnt have to chose the number of points to assign to fertility stats when we get to 18).
- No interest in sex (there are so many easier and more attractive alternatives resulting in no repercussions).
- Economic stangation literally making an accidental pregnancy a trip to the abortion clinic.
- STD's

Basically it seems more like a need to actually CHOOSE to "do it" as all the other options are a no-brainer.

> Gen Alpha (2013-2024) and Gen Beta (2025-2039) may have a real shot at home ownership when Boomers and half of Gen X are gone

You'll be waiting a long time.

> we should consider alternatives

We did. They all failed, ended up in slaughter and war crimes. Where have you been?

I dont think you quite understand what this means. Tools? Mechanics? All of that will be gone. Much of it is proprietary crap that nobody will learn to understand without breaking laws. Then you have education, with very little offspring the kids are NOT going to be sent to school or much of what we would think of as a school.

We will have an aging population with aging infrastructure that the kids have no hope of understanding or maintaining, letting much of it simply rot along with the aging and more senile knowledge holders: the old fogies that rely on young kids working earlier vs leaning to pay for pensions etc.

You will have resource rot, brain rot and knowledge rot. Whole swathes of the country will be empty, ghost towns and cities as there are just not enough people to live everywhere. Librarues, the keepers of the science you say will be inherited by the overworked kids, will be empty and abandoned all over the country. Forget the internet, who is going to keep that up? The clouds will be shutdown as companies collapse, A.I will have been pressed into replacing as many humans as possible but A.I cant swap a DDR stick nor can it flick the switch on the PSU.

You might for a while have local intranets kept up by larger communities. If they connect to each other you'll have a smaller internet. But as it is now with all the clouyds, machine learning, social media etc, all will scale way back as companies lose out due to lack of employees.

Maybe A.I robots will keep a underused internet up. Like A.I robots forever resurfacing all the roads across a country while nobody can actually drive on them for lack of oil or car parts. Rubber tyres dont grow on trees, well ok they do but who is going to harvest the rubber and vulcanise it?

Such things may happen in small communities, if they have the resources and means of power still, but most advanced knowledge and tech will simply be a mystery to them.

We are not a global civilisation.

The east and west are VERY different and even if both were affected those that survive and take over will be the tribes.

You are making a big assumption, that people are still having the same level of "bedsheet fun".

I'll think you'll find that as contraception has been avaliable for many decades its all mixed in with the fact that you dont need to get between the sheets to enjoy youself anymore.

You also have the infertility of men, which means they barely make any "little soldiers" anymore. Just today it was on the news that kids on vapes have been shown to result in even lower sperm counts, not that a 16 year old boy today has anything close to a normal count anyway.

With A.I girlfreinds, access to porn etc, most boys have no need to concern themselves with navigating the turbulent course of an actual relasionship. Likewise girls now free from being walking incubators for life now just go out and work.

They are barely meeting, barley mixing, barely sleeping together (involving intercourse that is, let alone unprotected), barely able to afford to have an "accident", barely any of them are getting married leaving single parent households everywhere which are even harder to finance.

So if contraception was the cause, who is actually using it?

Why is this a pressing issue?

This is a long awaited solution!

Oh it will eventually you'll have loads of empty houses.

You'll just be able to walk in!

It's about time the population finally levelled out.

Most males have become infertile, when looking at past definitions of male fertility almost all males today would be seen as unable to reproduce.

Women have rightly left the traditional role of incubator that cooks and cleans, thus have no need nor time to waste making a child if they can find a man capable of doing it.

Heck huge swathes of males have gone the same way as women, leaving the traditional rold of sex craved macho men adding notches to a belt to todays male, free and flighty able to work on supporting the most important person in todays lifestyle, themselves.

Work for men and women is now so unable to fund lifes traditional milestones, both now struggle to get a house, if they ever decide to bother leaving the parents house, and when they do manage to get a roof over their heads they prefer to live alone as it can be cheaper and even if they dont, the income is so low as to make getting a car, let alone having more than ONE child a point of discussion.

Then there is the general idea that all creatures manage to find a balance where they reproduce till there are too many for the natural resources to support them, so they seem to just stop. Well my geography teacher told us that humans were unique in that they HAD no limit and would simply overpopulate till we all died in our own filth much like bacteria.

I guess with the slow progress towards a plateau he was wrong. We will probably bob up and down like a yo-yo for a bit, humping like bunnies till we cant afford to, they dying back a bit..

We will have to leave the planet to grow the population again, this one is full.

What else would you use?

Browse to each site one by one like its 1997? ;)

Here in the UK many payphones have been removed much to my annoyance as I see the access of such facilities as a modern right, certainly for emergency calls.

Sure, most of the time most people even myself are reaching for the mobile phone, but I'm very much aware of the crazy state of mobile network coverage, and with the threat of 2G shutdown that will make coverage way worse.

In 2025 I frequently laugh as I try to browse the web or stream a short low quality youtube video or use a radio stations app to stream their shows only to find that around my town, which is THE county town no less, of > 50,000 people, full of schools and businesses etc, that I find there are huge numbers of "not spots".

These are not just a little blip down a road where coverage is poor. No. Try whole estates! Multiple roads where indoors you can say bye bye to mobile voice and data in most rooms and outdoors you are looking at 1-2 bars at best often accompanied by strange issues where you try and make a call only for the 4G network to puke with your phone then jumping down to 3G if its still up and the call failing.

THREE of my cousins in different areas of the town have exactly this problem. One cousin lives next to the main town park (the one named after the town, not all the other ones), in a densely populated area of flats and houses. It is a stone’s throw away from the TOWN CENTRE (for the Yanks this means the area where everyone and their dog go to eat, drink, shop, socialise) youd expect this area to be a serviced area no? Well, outside her house you can usually get a signal. Inside, forget it. Lean out the window. She had a Smart meter fitted a couple years back. It obviously uses the mobile network. So, after a week of not having a signal it went into dumb mode and refused to allow any top ups leaving her and her young daughters without electricity or gas for 3 whole days before there was a change to contact the supplier.

My other cousin (they are all sisters btw) lives a few roads closer to the town centre. Literally at the bottom of the HILL where I work. On this hill is the mobile cell tower. Literally 100 METRES from my workplace, here where I work in IT, issuing phones to employees, we can barely get a signal indoors. Outdoors os ok. But go down the hill to my cousins and...

In fcat go down the hill to the SUPERMARKET and as soon as you get into the car park you lose signal. Forget calling someone while in the building as you shop to check what bread they wanted, there is NO signal.

And my third cousin again lives in an area where the same thing happens. Outside I barely manage to connect, indoors she is lucky her phone registers. When any of them don’t have working wifi it’s a bloody pain in the ass. How will they call emergency services? Even with wifi they have no wifi calling anyway so they have to hope the phone works or go outside and hope it works there.

This town has full fibre internet, has several main A roads passing through it, has a railway station with direct links to London, one of the busiest lines in the UK. In fact, on that line there (it's starting to get silly) IS ZERO SIGNAL for a large part of the route and thats NOT going through any backwaters but just the natural countryside between the TWO major towns and again into London... LONDON itself.

I can’t help but laugh in disbelief. Over and over I'm told that streaming this and mobile that is the "modern way". Told that FM radio and radio in general is defunct. But I'm left wondering how the HELL anyone can actually do this stuff.

I drove to Yorkshire a couple years ago. The only electromagnetic waves that were reliable were on the FM broadcast band.

I was in Norfolk last May, just above Gt Yarmouth, Caister to be exact. Signal? Yes. Bandwidth? HAHAHAHAHAHA noooooo. Before *am when the Caister kids etc got to school and started using the bandwidth, I could get about 300kbps on 4G with 3 bars. Enough to stream or download youtube videos at 480p within a reasonable time while having breakfast in the caravan. But, come 8am the available bandwidth plummets, to 20kbps...

And I'm told that within 10 years my TV wont work anymore as UK TV will all be streamed. So I look at the caravan’s TV and wonder, will it even work? I've been going to this place on holiday for 7 years now and it aint gotten any better...

Apparently 5G solves the problem. My brother has a 5G handset, I dont. He swears at his phones as often as I do.

I drive from my town to BRISTOL in 2021. Along A roads (main routes). For 70% of that trip I was damn lucky to get anything better than 2G Edge, till I got to Bristol that is when 4G just suddenly appeared.

I once stayed in a campsite that was literally across the road from the cell tower. I mean it, literally it was a few hundred meters away. Oh, signal strength was AMAZING! But I quickly found that there was something really wrong with this tower as ALL data was simply not working, till you drove 10 miles down the road and switched cells. That was a while ago in the days of 3G that was supposed to solve this problem.

So in the UK we have a rule. BT can’t remove a phone box from an area unless the box has a strong signal from the THREE main mobile networks: Vodaphone, O2 and 3. If just ONE network has poor coverage the box must remain and if the box has more than a certain number of calls a year it also must remain. The same rules are in place for when BT disconnect a copper landline leaving a household with a fibre line that won’t work in a power cut.

A couple of years ago Yorkshire had almost all of the electricity network ripped apart by a winter storm. Snowed in for weeks thousands of families had no power, gas, heating etc. And as I described earlier, no mobile signal. What worked was their copper landlines. The army was pulled in to distribute supplies and gas canisters, to navigate the densely hilly and valley filled landscape to knock on doors etc. Like Texas, they too learnt to buy "power stations" and I bet many have taken on a few lessons from the "crazy preppers".

Where was this advanced 2025 tech then? When people needed it most, in Yorkshire and Texas as they froze? This tech that was supposed to have obsoleted the AM stations that Texans discovered were a lifeline or the copper landlines that suddenly became one of the most important "obsolete" features of a house in power-less Yorkshire with all roads impassable, freezing temperatures and bored cold hungry kids?

Where is the reward for this American man filling the gaps, the apparently LARGE gaps out of his own pocket?

Why does he have to do it at all? Who didn’t actually use their head and check before they ripped out the phone booth just because it was going to save a bit of money on spares, maintenance and training?

Will I be saying the same thing in 2030? I bet I will.