And from some of the accounts I have read they still got the soldiers on execution duty blind drunk and filtered out the sociopaths then moved them to the camps.
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Yeah, but I think you miss his point.
Japan’s economy has been in the doldrums for like 25 years because they don’t have a replacement fertility rate, super-restrictive immigration policy and a capitalist economic model, which demands a large and available labor force. And the Japanese are not happy about that situation. China has the same looming problem, with ten times the population and not the same level of industrial development.
It may also be that their fertility rate is only ‘voluntary’ in that people want to have more children but find that they are in a situation that they cannot afford them so then choose not to. That is just semantics.
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Does that really seem realistic to you?
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The demographics are already there, so we can’t really argue with the fundamental numbers. “A generation of aging parents who outnumber their children” is pretty much objective fact. At best we can postulate that having a society in which retirees outnumber workers will somehow work itself out without serious human suffering and/or economic collapse.
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So, you used the same system as the official Chinese numbers.
This worry about there being too few working age people to provide goods and services for older people ignores the relative lack of unemployed young people. The thing to watch is the employment population ratio, not the ratio of 65+ versus 18-65.
The problem really seems to be that China has not been developing an excuse to provide resources for older people. The traditional mechanism is to force women to do unpaid work, raising children and taking care of the aged. In many nations, the idea is that providing resources for one’s old age is your lookout, not a societal problem. If you don’t have a female child you can coerce or enough money saved, you are SOL.
In the US and other developed countries, the government deals with this private sector failure by taxing working people and using that money to provide goods and services for older people. There’s usually some kind of time shift of resources involved to make the bookkeeping look capitalist, but it all comes down to reliance on political stability.
China needs to start implementing a welfare state. For a supposed Marxist country, their leadership seems to have ignored the lessons Karl Marx taught over a century ago. Once a nation starts moving away from the traditional agricultural peasant pattern, it has to rely on some kind of socialist redistribution system. China could just ignore this, but the alternative would be 2.6 billion people living there in 2085, but that has its own problems.
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@KingGhidorah - Why yes, global warming is directly related to the overpopulation of the world. As is global pollution, from plastic particles being found in all animals now to ground water being poisoned. If you haven’t heard about these things, I wonder where you’ve been.
If there were only 500 million humans, the industrial revolution would have a completely manageable impact on the climate and the environment. Most of the predictions of what would happen in an over populated world have either already happened or are in the process of happening.
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How would YOU suggest we get to that number?
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How will nature get us to that number?
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I mean, I guess it’s not biggie if 6 and a half billion people die, amirite? /s
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I always tell people that they have it in their power to reduce the surplus population by one, at any time. They act all weird after that. Just trying to help. Sheesh.
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And even then they had to automate the process and make it as quick as possible, and en masse because of the psychological effects when the execution staff recognised that they were dealing with people (we can do things to a faceless crowd while at a distance that we can’t do one-on-one or close enough to hear the screaming).
NB: that is not to say have sympathy for the Nazis. The fact that they coldly figured out how to by-pass our natural psychological barriers so that the genocide could run smoothly tells you all that you need to know about them. And what you need to do to anyone who espouses their philosophy.
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It’s certainly true that’s a part of the problem that retirees in China are facing, and it’s a little nuts that a supposedly socialist country doesn’t have more of a social security system for their people but even a well-designed and fairly implemented system can only do so much when the ratio of retirees to workers gets too far out of whack. And that’s the case even if the retirees and government planed ahead and saved a lot of money for their retirements. All the money in the world can’t make up for a lack of workers unless you’re using it to import foreign labor, and it’s not clear there’s enough foreign labor available at any price to take care of the elderly in a country as huge as China.
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From:
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That’s what smoking is for.
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Maybe we ought to begin building an economy that doesn’t depend on an ever-growing population of customers/consumers/marks for capitalists/entrepreneurs/profiteers to exploit.
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Of course it is…but…
If you’re saying global warming is a demographic prediction that came true, well I don’t agree. Global warming is something we found in hindsight. We looked back and saw what was happening to the temperature, and from there it’s kind of obvious that things are going to continue along that general trajectory.
In any case, I guess I’m referring to predictions that are demographics only. Normally it’s a concern about ratios of certain types of people, old or young, this generation or another, that by their very existence is supposed to create a big problem because reasons.
I don’t know, wouldn’t it be a lot fairer to have our salaries and the developing world’s salaries meet in the middle, say perhaps around $10K? That would only drop our salaries by about 75%.
Now if the leadership in the developed world could successfully transition our economy to a new equitable model while keeping us happy that would be a great thing for us and the world.
Places that don’t have Katrinas now have something called “forest fire season.”
For months. Every single year.
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You don’t need to do the killing, actually. The crux of the “solution” is have grand kids or else.
The killing can always happen “elsewhere”
