Starving pensioners in Japan responsible for shoplifting crime-wave

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GrandPa & Granny Yakuza


How long til it comes to America? We are a Christian nation you know, provided you are white, Republican and have money.

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Abe’s got it back-to-front: it’s the young and fit you put into the industrial prison complex, so that their forced labour can be used to support the pension funds.

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The messed up thing is that this kind of situation is my back-up plan in the event that I can’t make ends meet as a senior. Commit crimes that’ll get me put away, where I’ll be fed, clothed and housed. What could possibly go wrong?

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Reminds me of the urban legend of the elderly man that robbed a bank for a dollar because sentencing was proportional to the amount stolen and he had no health insurance for cancer treatments.

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Not sure that you not knowing means it’s an urban legend, unless you’ve found this debunked somewhere. These two guys have suspicously similar stories 
but snopes.com doesn’t have anything to say it wasn’t so.

James Richard Verone ( http://boingboing.net/2011/06/21/sick-man-robs-bank-f.html, also http://thinkprogress.org/health/2011/06/20/249307/georgia-man-robs-for-health/ )

Timothy Dean Alsip in Oregon ( https://www.rt.com/usa/oregon-man-bank-robbery-healthcare-126/ )

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Are those wax figures in that prison photo?

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Off by an order of magnitude. „78,000 is more like $690 a month.

I wouldn’t mind retiring on $6,900 a month myself.

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I’d always considered it an urban legend because I’d seen nothing that proved it actually happened.

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Japan, like many developed states, is in the midst of a demographic crunch: the richer a state is, the better its pension system and the lower its overall fertility. This means that each generation of retirees depends on a smaller generation of workers to support its pensions.

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Only happens when you run a socialist pension ponzi. ie. Redistribute the contributions and do not invest them. ie. Pay as you go pensions have massive liabilities, no assets.

When it comes to paying out on the debts, you get back a fraction of the value paid in, and even that gets cut.

Dump that nightmare and move to capitalist based pensions if you want to be safe.

In the US, ask how much your government owes for pensions, and why is it not reported on the books.

but the capital market is also a ponzi scheme, hoping that the economy will grow

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It isn’t a ponzi scheme, it just means not everyone can be winners all the time.

I’m sure the decades of privatization and off shoring of manufacturing and employment aren’t helping matters either.

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still not reassuring for something essential as pensions

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OH wait, sorry. Thinking general market, not just pensions.

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This is a problem that the entire world is going to have to come up with a solution to. The entire world is aging and unlike the article suggests, the transition to stable or falling populations cannot be solved by asset stripping the developing world of its educated young people. We’re already seeing several countries’ health care systems suffering from the emigration of a large number of their doctors and nurses. All this is doing is kicking the problems of exponential growth further down the road.

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The point of a ponzi scheme is that one guy convinces a whole bunch of other people to invest in his/her magic product/service/bank, and when the coffers for this are filled, the person running the scheme closes the company and runs off with the invested capital.

This model applies to much within the current market: valuations fluctuate according esoteric rules, some of which are not actually rational, causing money sieves that aren’t always replaced.
Companies fold, and rarely pay all investors despite being insured.
Individuals put time and effort into jobs, for about an 8% share of their labours’ value, only to be “downsized” when employing them is no longer convenient for the company.

Ponzi schemes, bro. It’s how the invisible hand rolls.

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Japan, like many developed states, is in the midst of a demographic crunch:
the richer a state is, the better its pension system and the lower its
overall fertility. This means that each generation of retirees depends on a
smaller generation of workers to support its pension

If you have a ponzi set up. The only way the state can pay is to screw the
younger generation.

However, if you have a capitalist based system, then why does the capital
have to be invested in Japanese assets? It can be invested anywhere, such
as where there are young workers.

Turns out that the demographic problem is a problem of Ponzi pensions,
where the contributions get redistributed rather than invested.

For Renke, its easy.

Give me back my payments plus interest and capital growth, and indemnify me
against any payments into the system to support its debts. i.e. I opt out
of the socialist ponzi, and into the capitalist ‘ponzi’.

Do you really understand the socialist mess?

ie. How much does the UK state, or the US state or wherever you are owe for
pensions? Current liabilities. Start with that to see who is running the
Ponzi. If you can’t say or can’t find out, its a sure sign that Bernie
Madoff is alive and well and operating government accounts, for the same
reason.

And if what you paid isn’t enough to cover a pension because there were only menial jobs available during your working life? You just starve?

BTW, if you’re going to trolley, learn how the quote tags work in Discourse.

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