• BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    If growth doesn’t compensate for shrinking working population, you’ll be fucked. Somone has to work so you have your retirement.

    • MisterD@lemmy.ca
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      10 hours ago

      Why not make billionaires an illegal thing. Poof! You have money for retirement for everyone

      • pizzamann2472@feddit.org
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        9 hours ago

        Money isn’t the issue in the end, the issue is that you still need enough people in working age so that you can use the money to get the goods and services that you need as a retiree.

        If a large number of people retire without finding any young successor, services just become more and more inaccessible. Like e.g. if there are not enough doctors in your area because many of them retired, you won’t get treatment even with money, because the capacity just isn’t enough anymore to treat everybody. If a car shop closes down because the mechanic retires, you cannot get your car repaired there any longer, even with a lot of money, and so on…

        An old society means that the area decays, more and more places close down or cannot get maintained any longer. And money doesn’t help because numbers in a bank account don’t do the real work. There are already a few old regions around the globe where this can be seen

        • BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          Finally somone who gets it. It’s like economic 101 in school: Money is fundamentally worthless. It can only buy as much as the economy is able to produce

  • tooks@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    I can’t think of anything more irresponsible and selfish than procreation in the 21st century. Why would anyone want to end their own life and subject themselves to the stress of ensuring their craft human survives and becomes a relatively average coal miner.

  • FiniteBanjo@feddit.online
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    21 hours ago

    I make it my personal responsibility in life to constantly bring up the necessity of immigration as the solution to age disparity and population decline. There are working people. There are as many as you could ever need, tens of millions, perhaps hundreds. It’s never going to be an issue which can’t be solved with immigration.

    • binux@sh.itjust.works
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      15 hours ago

      I don’t see how this is a solution so much as delaying the problem for future generations to deal with. What happens when the countries the immigrants are coming from start to face the same issue (if it isn’t happening for them already?) It’s basically the population equivalent of the “one more lane bro” philosophy.

      • pingveno@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        It is absolutely happening already. Many of those countries are experiencing issues with being below replacement and a hollowing out of their workforce at the same time. For many, they have gotten old before they got rich, which will make further advancements difficult.

    • bridgeburner@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      Dude, immigration is the root cause for a whole range of problems if not done correctly. See prime example germany.

    • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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      1 day ago

      I don’t live in the US so mostly I’m thinking of who’s gonna pay for my retirement and healthcare when I’m old.

      I’m paying for the current old people’s retirement and healthcare. That’s fine, it’s the social contract we have in our nation: everyone gets taken care of and those who can work, pay a lot of tax to make it happen. If the population decline gets bad enough, there will be no one to do the same for my generation.

      Oh and they populist conservatives did a pension reform so you can take out whatever you’ve gathered in your second pillar even at age 20 if you want (at which point it’ll probably be in the hundreds of euros lol) and can’t resume payments (which were matched by the government - you pay 2, 4 or 6 percent and government pays 4% of your gross income) for 10 years. Worst deal ever for most people taking it out if they want to retire at one point. And a third of the population took it out. They now have to fully depend on the first pillar (government) pension, which isn’t based on past investments at all, it’s taken from the working population’s social taxes when you retire. So far more directly affected by the population decline. I’m betting they’ll eventually forcibly fuck it up for the rest of us to pay for the retirements of those who took it out.

      • resipsaloquitur@lemmy.cafe
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        19 hours ago

        You understand that money is a fiction, right? It’s not even numbers on a piece of paper anymore, it’s ones and zeroes.

        Fewer people means more resources per person and less damage to the earth.

        • nooneescapesthelaw@mander.xyz
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          3 hours ago

          The “resources” we rely on require (working) humans, less working humans means less resources. The population we have today won’t disappear all at once but when they age out of the workforce, a smaller population will not be able to support them

          In other words, if we are below replacement level, we will eventually have a situation where the old outnumber the young, which means that the young have to work harder to support the old

  • fizzle@quokk.au
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    1 day ago

    I hate to break it to you YuckyTom but no matter how you slice it a declining birth rate means a shittier situation for you in your retirement. Most people who think about anything other than retweets and boobs care about this.

    • ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip
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      20 hours ago

      I can assure you that our endless growth model will make things really shitty by the time I retire. In fact, it’s possible our endless growth model has already made my retirement irreperably shitty.

    • Ryanmiller70@lemmy.zip
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      18 hours ago

      Retirement is as realistic for me as finding an actual pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. I’m going to die either at my workplace or right before or after being at work.

      • fizzle@quokk.au
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        1 day ago

        Ok, imagine I said twilight years.

        You may not “retire” but inevitably there will be a period before you die where you are less productive and generally less able than you previously were.

        When you reach this period, the more people there are being productive and paying taxes the better your circumstances will be.

          • fizzle@quokk.au
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            23 hours ago

            Sure but aren’t you interested to know that you’re going to be more fucked than previously forecast?

            • pankuleczkapl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              21 hours ago

              I don’t think it matters much. My generation will have to come up with a retirement plan on its own and whether the government can cover 0, 10 or 20 percent of the basic cost of living makes almost no difference to me. I expect that I will basically have to cover everything on my own or maybe go to jail for free food.

            • isleepinahammock@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              19 hours ago

              You’re forgetting the positive declining birth rates bring to retirement - a lifetime of higher wages. In a society with few young workers, those that can work make bank.

    • asg101@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      The oligarchs haven’t figured that out quite yet. They want to starve us out of existence, but still want to pig out at the government troughs. Where is that money going to come from when all the jobs are being done by AI and robots?

      • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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        4 hours ago

        they think they can just have robot slaves or humans slaves in thier little enclaves. in almost all cases, fiction media goes, both groups end up rebelling anyways.

      • LostWon@lemmy.ca
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        1 day ago

        See that’s the neat part when it comes to tech oligarchs, specifically. They believe in TESCREAL/Transhumanism so they’re aiming to become the AI robots! YAY! /s

        • Malyca@lemmy.zip
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          16 hours ago

          So far ai seems pretty horrified by them,I don’t think they will be well received should we actually create real ai.

          • LostWon@lemmy.ca
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            15 hours ago

            By the time things reach that point, it could be too late. TESCREALists are like planetary eugenicists. You know how Thiel couldn’t answer the question about whether humanity should live in that one interview? He’s not the only one. Their fantasy of what comes next will never work, but that doesn’t mean they won’t do unfathomable harm to the globe trying to make their sick dreams come true.

  • NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone
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    1 day ago

    But there’ll be fewer workers for the oligarchs to lay off! How are they going to signal to shareholders that operating costs will be lower next quarter?