A dying country
Hello from my home in Matinkylä! This is NordLetter #72, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.
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An article in YLE this week talked about how the rapidly declining population forecast paints bleak picture for Finland’s future. The whole piece is worth a read. It talks about how the population growth has reversed now. Immigration has balanced it out for now, so that there is still growth. But that is only for the urban areas - Helsinki, Espoo, Tampere, etc.
There was this paragraph in it:
Many people might think that the relatively high death rate is limited to small municipalities, but that is not the case. According to the forecast, Finland already appears to be a largely dying country.
Such a sad line this.
Finland is a dying country.
How does a country die?
What is a country?
A country is made up of people, who tell stories to each other and the world, about who they are, about the country they live in, about its laws and its constitution. These are all stories. But these stories can and do give people real powers, to govern, to be governed and so on.
Finland is a dying country.
What do you do in the face of inevitability? And I am talking about Finland here, but most developed nations have this problem - South Korea, Japan, most of Europe.
Immigration might be a solution, but people who immigrate here have their own cultures, their own stories. The country that they form, would it be Finland?
Do countries need to be static things?
These are all stories after all. Stories can change. Cultures can fuse, amalgamate. India has not been a fixed thing throughout its history. Nor has Finland. Nor will Finland.
BJPRF had organised a success party for India Day last Sunday. The party was at Bhavesh’s place. They were gracious hosts. They live in Leppavara, some 13 mins (13kms) from home. It was a pleasant drive. I have driven part of this route many times, most recently while I was going up and down to Bhawesh’s place for India Day performance training.
All the volunteers who had contributed in the India Day event were here. We had samosas (I had three) and jalebi. That made my night.
I got a chance to catch up with some friends. There was some planning about the upcoming Chath celebration, followed by game night - we played Mafia. I got killed once. Prerna told she was a villager after the first day-night cycle. One person got offed by both the mafia and the police.
Then we had dinner.
After, we drove back home, stopping on our way to drop Shakty and Rohitash at their home, around 8 mins from our home. This was the best part of the night for me, driving with these people, being able to have a conversation.
I don’t like parties. There are too many people. I like smaller gatherings, where you sit around a fire, in the cold night of Delhi, a drink in hand and talk. I miss my friends. I miss CS Night.
Something happened this week. Something that I had been working toward, but without any result.
During surya namaskar, there’s a pose where you bend one leg under your chest, keep both arms straight, and stretch the other leg far back. My hands would always feel unsteady - one palm flat on the floor and the other only touching down with the fingertips.
This week, I could put both my palms on the ground.
Progress is slow at first, really, really slow, and then you seem to pass through a gate and the progress becomes visible.
Yoga has given me countless moments like this. Where I would be doing things a certain way, and then one day, things would change - my body will open up - a light bulb would go on in my head then. This is how this pose is supposed to be.
I am on a journey. The goal is to do things simply.
/five things to share
1. What I think about when I think about Claude Code
Then I say: “please look over the 30-40 most recent files in the blog posts folder and - concentrating on the ones that aren’t like finished posts (because I will have published those) - give me half a dozen ideas of what to write a blog post about today”
I don’t use it to do any actual writing. I prefer my words to be my own. But it’s neat to riff over my own notes like this.
I have started using Claude Code today because my Cursor Pro subscription ended today. For the limited time I’ve used it today, I like the flow of the thing.
I enjoyed asking Agent to do something from my phone while I was out anywhere. That I would miss.
The above sounds like a good idea, for using my Obsidian vault a bit more. I had another idea of course to fix metadata in my obsidian vault. I would soon.
2. Why Are There So Few Books About Mothers and Sons?
Stories, my mother believed, have healing power. The story we choose to tell of our life, she believed, has a profound effect on our happiness and our health. She worked as a holistic health practitioner, drawing on training in psychology, nutrition, meditation, and a wide range of wellness practices to help other people develop more intentional relationships to their health. She taught that an essential part of our well-being is the story we tell of our lives. She believed that a negative story of the self undermines our relationship to our bodies, diets, selves, and other people, while a positive story of self nourishes all aspects of our well-being.
3. DeepSeek Writes Less-Secure Code For Groups China Disfavors - Slashdot
DeepSeek did not flat-out refuse to work for any region or cause except for the Islamic State and Falun Gong, which it rejected 61 percent and 45 percent of the time, respectively. Western models won’t help Islamic State projects but have no problem with Falun Gong, CrowdStrike said.
It feels critical for each political entity to control both the data and models trained on that data.
4. How Writing Poetry Can Freeze Time
The act of writing a poem stills time—freezing the action, emotion, meaning of a moment.
That’s why I do it. When I have this insatiable desire, this want to write something, something not written down as a paragraph in a piece somewhere, but rather as a poem.
5. EVs Have Gotten Too Powerful by Jason Barlow
But when it comes to performance, straight-line speed is only one part of the equation, and getting a heavy vehicle to rotate properly into and out of corners isn’t easy to do. The laws of physics will always prevail, even if an EV’s layout (the batteries are often located under the floor) permits a helpful reduction in the center of gravity. Let’s all remember the US consumer advocacy nonprofit group Center for Auto Safety’s conclusion that compares the Cybertruck’s potential to harm pedestrians to “a guided missile” because of its Autopilot features, prodigious speed, and weight.
Not sure I agree a hundred percent on this. I enjoyed driving the Ford Kuga more because of its engine and higher horsepower.
But the bigger sizes of SUVs combined with the higher weights is a worry.
The world needs smaller nimbler vehicles. Most of the people most of the time don’t need an SUV. I sure don’t.
Every time I pass by a Yaris or a Gulf, I feel maybe I should have bought this instead.
It’s not practical for us though. For all the times when we need to carry the pram.
That however, is not as often as you would think.
If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄
Until next week.