These fears over population collapse are the weirdest form of mass hysteria I’ve ever seen.
Not an expert on this at all but I feel like it’s less of “the human race is going to die out” vs the owner class needs cheap labor and bodies for war to continue infinite growth.
My running theory is in the United States, Republican’s obsession with abortion is tied to the fact they need poor and broken families to pump out kids for future cheap labor and the prison industrial complex to make a nation function moving forward. That and the gray sunami of a upside down pyramid with not enough young to take care of the older generations (I think Japan and China are experiencing this currently).
Well in Russia it’s about replacing all the kids and men dying in Ukraine. The Russian losses are staggering and Russia is basically throwing their people into a meat grinder.
If only a fraction of a percent are coming home “after the war” Russia is in big big trouble regardless of population growth or shrinkage due to other causes.
In the USA I’d agree it’s about cheap labor. They don’t want to let the Mexicans in too so gotta keep those white babies flowing.
Russia was facing demographic collapse before it invaded Ukraine. The war has only worsened its outlook.
Russia has like 500 million people, they could send 499 million to their deaths and they would be fiiiiiine.
Most of their economy is oil and gas extraction which doesn’t require a very large labor force. They can just outsource exploration to Europeans corporations anyway.
No, their population peaked in 94 at about 150M. They definitely have a serious population/demographic crisis. Arguably it’s one of the reasons Putin decided now was the moment to escalate in Ukraine, before it’s too late. Also why they’re taking Ukrainian children.
Are you a hammer? Because I think you just nailed it.
Politicians have straight up said it’s a reason they are against abortion…
The data follows: https://www.epi.org/publication/economics-of-abortion-bans/
Politicians have straight up said it’s a reason they are against abortion…
But we agree it’s only safe abortions they’re blocking, right?
In germany the sheinking population or rather the aging population is causint serious issues for the pension system. The current working population is paying the pensions for the current pensioners. So what happens is fewer and fewer people pay for more and more people, leading to my generation not being able to get state pension, instead needing to get private plans
Yeah that’s the real issue. Instead of fixing that they just try to make more people lol so lazy. There are no real leaders anymore
A bit embarrassing to admit this but the first time I was in Germany I was mildly shocked by the number of non-ethnic Germans I saw speaking German. Yes I am aware that immigration has increased there.
The US has an easy way out of the demographic trap through immigration. Countries like China and Japan don’t have that because no one wants to immigrate to China and Japan basically doesn’t allow it at all.
That requires long term planning that I doubt they are capable of or willing to engage in. It takes a minimum of 16 years to go from conception to worker in the developed world. In practice over 20 if you want them to be able to make real money for you.
Who plans for 16 years ahead? No one. The horizon is way too long. No one is going to lobby a politician today for an investment that might pay off that far in the future. You could get about 7% return on an index fund this year alone and instead you want to try for the slim possibility that you can pay a worker less in 16 freaken years? Companies usually won’t go beyond even a 5 year investment, 8 if they are a utility. This would be an investment that is literally over twice as risky as a nuclear power plant.
It isn’t an existential problem, but it’s still a very big problem, not just for the upper class, but for everyone.
No, it’s not, you’re a gullible tool.
It’s a problem for everyone because the societal changes that would adjust for a population decline and inverted population pyramid aren’t favored by the upper class.
We’d need to invest in doctors and nursing staff properly, something a ton of places are struggling with. We’d need to make the job more appealing by both increasing pay substantially and improving conditions. We need to get rid of student debt overall, but definitely for medical professionals that care for the elderly.
We also need to decrease inequality and use redistributed wealth to fund the retirements of younger generations, but that’s more complicated and the more uphill battle.
Not from the perspective of someone whose only strength in the war in Ukraine is the number of people.
Most of the time, yes. When you’re throwing a large portion of your population into a blender, it makes more sense.
Population collapse for the human race isn’t so much a problem, we’ll weather through it as a species. For an economy, population decline is very not good though. You need working age people to support the young and old, as well as everything else your taxes go to.
The issue is that demographic collapse can and almost certainly will have devastating economic consequences for the countries facing it.
Removed by mod
After my Russian wife was browsing the internal news yesterday to see what level of information is provided over there she mentioned that their solution in the abortion debate is to have everyone give birth, and just give up the kids to be raised by the state if you don’t want them.
Also there seems to be a proposal to exclude women from higher education unless they’ve given birth.
Wow, that’s wild. This will likely lead to women claiming/diagnosed to be infertile needing to have sex with the principal to enter higher schools.
Also there seems to be a proposal to exclude women from higher education unless they’ve given birth.
Being forced to give birth to a child is very effectively excluding you from higher education(at least if you take care of it).
my Russian wife was browsing the internal news yesterday to see what level of information is provided over there
How do you do that? Or is your wife one of those “Russian brides” that you pay but they never actually come to you?
(I’m just joking… I hope… I am actually curious how to read internal Russian news. I have a couple VPS in Moscow.)
I am actually curious how to read internal Russian news.
Internet?
Internal
There is news for internal consumption, and news for a global audience. Both is available via internet nowadays - there’s pretty much no local newspaper without internet presence nowadays.
lso there seems to be a proposal to exclude women from higher education unless they’ve given birth.
Would they not be required for the skilled workforce?
I’m pretty sure that’s the current step. Free range, but still.
JFC all the guy said is that people convicted of minor charges should be released, and if they’re released they’ll have babies because they’re, y’know, not in prison.
How much of a hard on does Lemmy have for keeping prison populations high?
Rape will become a patriotic duty
Pretty sure it’s already considered one if you’re in the Russian army in Ukraine.
A member of the Russian State Duma has proposed releasing women convicted of minor charges from prisons so they can conceive
Did anyone even read the article?
Of course not!
Considering that domestic abuse is legalized in Russia it already is
Shithole country
Did you mean Russia, because the Republicans in the US seem to be marching to the very same tune?
They have the same boss.
Let’s play Russian Bot or Brainwashed Citizen
Mode: Lemmy (10/10 Difficulty)
Is this a troll comment? Republicans literally have a history of attacking womens bodily autonomy. This isn’t a secret.
Sure, the dictator who windowfalls or poloniumteas anyone that says something he doesn’t like is the same as the party of people who have the worldview that allowing abortion at the doctor is the same as allowing adults to be murdered in the street.
Not.
Some day you’ll realize people are brainwashed. Not just other people either, but me, you, your mom, my mom, everyone is to some extent. American Tea Party Republicans have been told their entire lives that abortion and birth control is morally equivalent to shooting someone in the street. Yay for Baby Jeebus. And you believe that terminating a growing series of cells that would turn into a human isn’t murder. They think you’re evil for that. You don’t think you’re evil, and they don’t think they’re evil, you simply share opposing worldviews. That’s why having multiple cultures in a melting pot can be such a clusterfuck… I suppose they call it a melting pot for a reason, and not like, a cohesive utopia.
Thankfully states like California are stepping up and helping women in states like TX, and we still have federal law on our side. But you can’t have it both ways – you can’t want state laws for things like marijuana and federal laws for things like abortion.
Local, state, and federal laws exist for a reason. Trust me, the last thing you want is to grant ‘the good guys’ currently in power writing federal law over free and open abortion access. Because then the next ‘bad guys’ will come in and yank that right out. Like they did.
Separation of church, state, and even more importantly, the branches of government.
But comparing 200+ different people in power all with differing views on a plethora of ideas to a dictator who brutally and publicly murders anyone who speaks out against him, and lets murders and rapists out of prison (but not his political opponents) as long as they’ll be body bags for a failing war he can’t admit he lost?
Think more. Read more history and less current news and memes. Please. Your older self will thank you for it.
There is SO MUCH astroturfing going on today on the internet to sway ideas and ideologies of entire groups of people, even entire political parties and generations. If you asked 1,000 people on he street to sit down and decide what articles/memes/posts were bots, and what was legitimate and organic, I think you’d have a higher detection number rolling dice. https://gvwire.com/2023/11/14/spamouflage-chinas-massive-online-disinformation-campaign-targets-americans/
^ That’s just the one that’s beneficial for the West to post about right now. Surely there won’t be similar English articles about Eglin this week.
edit: I accidentally a words
Actually came in here to comment that GOP Disneyland (AKA Russia) is apparently going straight down the tubes.
Lol invade Ukraine after promising not to. Getting entire generations of sperm makers killed in illegal war. Force female prisoners to be baby factories. Ladies and gentlemen: the bad guys.
A member of the Russian State Duma has proposed releasing women convicted of minor charges from prisons so they can conceive
Literally nobody here has read the article and it shows
People who haven’t read the article aside: I do not believe the Russian State member has women’s best interest in mind with this proposal.
I’m not making any claim as to the rationality of the Russian State member. The Duma has some crazies, just like Congress does. They don’t speak for the entire country, though.
I’ll agree to that partially. Unless the proposal actually passes it’s just the shitty legislating of another shitty government official.
I just wanted to point out the Russian States’ history with women’s rights; because it’s not like these people gain power in a vacuum.
If article authors wanted people to understand the truth, they wouldn’t title articles misleadingly.
In journalism the writers don’t write the heds. That’s an editor’s job. It goes back to the days of print journalism when only the editor would know how many column-inches they would have for a given story on any given page. It’s still industry standard for digital publishing as well.
Force male prisoners into the meat grinder and force women prisoners to give birth. Birth from who…? Such massive dystopia in Russia. What a shame.
Birth from who…?
Prison guards, I suspect.
Sounds like somethings that needs a steady stream of new convicts and flexible legislation that can be wielded to that purpose. Just like with US corporate correctional system. I think they can manage it.
That reminds me. Anyone here ever hear about the bureaucratized rape in West Virginia coal mining camps back in the day? If a man was injured and couldn’t work his wife could take “Esau scrip” which she would have to pay back with her body. Capitalism! The entire situation is a stark reminder that capitalists wil LITERALLY rape and murder you to protect their position.
Somehow that topic didn’t come up in 7th grade WV History class. Going to have to dig into that as it would make a great post.
Edit: JFC, I had no idea this happened. And I live here and have toured the Whipple Company Store (again, in 7th grade).
https://wvpublic.org/what-was-the-esau-scrip/
“We’ve had multitudes of women and tell us as little girls they remember their mothers coming to the company store and one of the things that a lot of more the lovely ladies had to do was come upstairs. Some of the young girls had the stories shared by their mothers stating that they would be escorted in the shoe room. There would be a selected guard that would be waiting for them and they would receive a brand new pair of shoes with no accountability other than to perform whatever the service the guard wished to have in lieu of pay. We had one woman in particular share with us that her mother was a young girl about 25 years old and bought her first pair of shoes here and the women’s entire life those shoes remained in the shoe box on her closet shelf never to be worn and she refused to wear another pair of shoes her entire life. She made her shoes out of cardboard, newspapers and twine.”
- Joy Lynn, owner and tour guide, Whipple Company Store
Damn. I don’t even know what to say. That’s so fucked up…
Thank you for sharing a source. I should have done that.
No. Wtf.
Yeah, they don’t teach a lot of things in school. I only know about it because of BtB. The whole episode on The Battle of Blair Mountain is nuts and shows how far the owner class will go to keep people in line.
Yeah, they don’t teach a lot of things in school
And current politicians are making it so many other important topics aren’t being taught.
I’m looking at you Florida and Texas…
BtB just did a separate story on the Hawk’s Nest disaster in West Virginia in which they killed thousands of men by knowingly giving them silicosis and covered the whole thing up.
Regardless of the economic system, people in power will rape and murder to maintain their position of authority.
No they won’t
Wonderful argument. In case you’re gonna say “I’m a capitalist” no. You’re capital.
Here’s a crazy idea to make your population grow: how about not sending your people to die in a war?
nah, prison baby factories and lower the conscription age
also, not having babies is now illegal
Prisons in russia are starting to look like revolving doors. Women get out if they choose to give birth, men if they choose to throw themselves into the meat grinder.
Ah. Coming to a ‘Murica near you soon.
Our species is totally on a brink of extinction.
No. It’d be very difficult to actually have humans go extinct. Bad things will happen, but extinction would require a Children of Men level situation.
True, but Its 100% possible for us to get knocked back into the iron age, and if that happens, there’s a very real chance we won’t be able to climb up again.
Easy to access sources of a lot of the resources needed to rebuild a modern civilization are gone, the only reason we can get to the remaining deposits is because we already have the advanced equipment to extract it. It’s entirely possible that if we get knocked back down the tech ladder, we may never climb back up again
I think that is an extremely unlikely scenario. Do you think modern technology is just going to disappear?
Dissappear? No, of course not
Fall out of repair, and be unable to be repaired effectively without tools, resources, or knowledge that are no longer accessible?
Abso-fucking-lutely
Take a deep sea oil rig. How long do you think it’ll be operational without maintenance with all that sea water? After not too long you won’t be able to repair the damage without serious industrial capabilities, and that’s assuming you even know how to fix it.
Really even as relatively little as a few decades of total chaos and disorganization would be enough to make crawling back really hard. A century and more and it really could be impossible, or at least improbable - especially given that the humanity that comes out of the other end of the crisis is the same one that got us into it. So the remaining pieces of major valuable infrastructure left will probably get wrecked as the survivors fight over them
ChatGPT:
As the fiery tendrils of the celestial catastrophe engulfed the world, humanity found itself cast back to the primordial embrace of the Stone Age. The once towering achievements of civilization crumbled into dust, leaving survivors to navigate a world stripped of its technological marvels. In this new epoch, where the remnants of mankind struggled to eke out an existence, a daring expedition was conceived in the sun-scorched lands of Argentina. A ragtag crew, armed with little more than salvaged tools and an unyielding spirit, prepared to embark on a perilous voyage across the treacherous seas to scour the mysterious ice-clad wilderness of Antarctica and the riches entombed on the base therein. Their mission: to uncover forgotten secrets, salvage survival, and reclaim a semblance of the ingenuity that once defined their species. On the timeworn deck of a makeshift sailing ship, the brave explorers cast off into the unknown, setting forth on a journey that would either revive the flame of human innovation or be swallowed by the icy abyss of a desolate world.
Guy I jam with in a band is a coder. He said that ChatGPT is fucking nuts. It’s getting to the point where it will be able to point out the flaws in his code and offer fixes. Only a matter of time when we can take a photo of something and our personal Jarvis will tell us: what it is. What it does. How to use it. How to fix it. Shit is wild man.
ChatGPT is mediocre in a silo. It has no context for distributed systems and will never compete with real developers. The benefit of ChatGPT is the time it will save a good developer from writing boilerplate. Nothing more, nothing less. Anyone who says otherwise is bitten by the bias bug.
I have consulted chatGPT on code for Ansible, which is garbage anyway. Then I sent it my ideas, which it spotted and suggested fixes for bugs within. Then I ran it and did 5 days of work in one.
For code I do enjoy, I’ll want to keep the experience in my brain. For ansible, I’ll let chatGPT suffer the PTSD instead. But we’re already there.
I don’t get this under estimation of humanity. If 99% of humans died, the planet became 3-5 degrees warmer, and all computers literally popped out of existence, we’d recover a ton of technology within a few centuries. We’d use a strange mish-mash of old and new tech, but people would write down a ton of information from the generations that remember the before times, and using previously learned principles, new generations would reverse engineer a ton of useful things.
Radio communications would be relatively easy to remake and will almost always exist in some form. A ton of useful developments like agricultural technologies and energy technologies would be too valuable to be lost for long. Gunpowder and firearms aren’t going anywhere. All of these bedrock technologies would never totally disappear as they’re too useful.
Even in a world constantly at war, these technologies would be essential to winning those fights. If you forget how to make guns, a group that didn’t will conquer you. If you rediscover an old technology, it could give you an upper hand. If there isn’t perpetual war, the risk of it and the benefits of trade will allow even more development and rediscovery.
The biggest reason for you underestimating humans is that you forget that most of our technology isn’t physical. A boat may decay and become inoperable within a few decades, but the engineering principles that allow for the boat to function are unlikely to decay and fall out of disuse. Engines are useful. Boats are useful. Construction of high quality versions of these things won’t happen overnight, but low quality and functional versions will get built.
People, even without writing, are exceptional at remembering useful ideas. With writing, we can store information outside of our minds and write out more complicated ideas than our working memory can handle. You think everyone is going to forget how to write mathematics? Hell no. We’ll never lose written language, and that will allow us to find knowledge that no one alive remembers. The necessity of learning unknown concepts alone will ensure people would remember how modern languages are written.
The most impressive technology humans have is language, ideas, forms. Without forms, we’d never have built the most impressive physical structures and technology we have. Every advanced building began as a blueprint, and even Stonehenge required planning and communication. If every physical technology we’ve ever made disappeared at once, we’d rebuild many of those things by writing down what we remember and sharing knowledge with eachother.
TLDR: Ideas can outlive physical technology, and we’ll never stop using useful tech in any apocalyptic situation. Only the Planet of the Apes neurological disease would stop humans permanently.
Appreciate it typing this out.
It would have to be a really wild scenario where humans get stuck permanently in the iron age again. While they are fun thought experiments, I just can’t see to many ways that humans survive but our technology and books disappear from existence.
It could. If enough smart people who make it and industrial plants are ruined, then it’s quite possible.
Plenty of people around who can build wood gas generators… and there’s going to be plenty of warlords who will happily employ them and provide resources.
See my other comment on ideas. The communication abilities and intelligence of humans would need to be crippled for us to die off. We’d never truely go back to the iron age, because we have non physical technology that’s difficult to destroy. We’re unlikely to forget how to make steel because it’s too useful, even if all steel is destroyed.
Pretty easy actually. Just watch the oxygen levels drop below 16%. Just kill the rest of the insects and trees. That’ll do us in.
This sounds much easier than creating a society where people feel happy and secure enough to have families. I wonder when 45 will add this to his campaign checklist.
Putlers Youth to a theater near you, coming soon. Fuck that guy!
Never thought that Russia would become the Republic of Gilead, but I suppose they want to excel at something.
Hey, don’t count the US out…we could get there as early as Jan 20!
The plans included funding for new mothers and not just “maternity capital” for families with two or more children, in addition to welfare benefits for low-income families and free school meals for a four-year period.
Hey regressives! You love Russia so much, why don’t we follow their example?
Please read the rest, not all measures (mentioned in the article) are that good.
I’m aware. I was being (somewhat) sardonic
☹️
