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Number of Births in Japan To Hit Record Low in 2017 (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The number of births in Japan this year has fallen to is lowest since records began more than a century ago with about 941,000 new babies, the health ministry said on Friday, proof if any were needed that it faces an ageing and shrinking population. The number of births will be about 4 percent lower than last year and the lowest since the government started compiling data in 1899, the ministry said.
Proof that slashdot editors are not robots, otherwise they wouldn't make such silly mistakes.
Why is overpopulation a laudable thing? The Japanese home islands are already highly populated -- no need to increase the population. Stabilizing at early-1900s levels would be much more sustainable.
Stop it, your kids are confused. Never going to knock up their GFs/wives that way.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Now the rest of the world needs to follow suit.
bbirths = bitcon births?
For these countries, they will have to rely on immigration which some of them are already doing.
I guess that in about 50 years, these countries' demographic makeup in terms of race will be very different.
There's like 38 million people in Tokyo. That is freaking insane. Anyway the "old person problem" will take care of itself with natural deaths.
The biggest reasons why this is a real issue are:
1) This rate is not stabilizing anything - it's well below replacement rate, which means population is shrinking.
2) Short term a shrinking population means fewer workers to pay into government funds to help the elderly,
3) Fewer elderly with children mean more reliance on the state in old age.
4) Fewer people mean shops have fewer customers, demand for housing drops, construction starts waning, economy goes down.
5) Long term, what happens when a country cannot sustain a population? Eventually it becomes a totally different nation as others will eventually take it over. I guess if you don't care about the preservation of Japanese culture that's not a problem.
If they were going to a sustainable level that would be one thing, but like I said what is happening is not sustainable without some really bad consequences.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Maybe the Japanese should take a page from the Merkel Doctrine and accept immigrants from Syria and countries that Trump actively persecutes? It would solve the paucity of numbers, and add an vibrant immigrant culture.
I see no mention of Sex Robots or Bitcoin.
TRY AGAIN WHORE MODS.
Bitcoin down 1/3rd its value... no story there!
It's completely useless knowing the number of births without a population size. 950k births could be awesome or terrible. Also completely useless knowing the percentage drop and not knowing what it was last year.
How about posting the per capita birth rate? Or how that equates to births per household or couple? Or compare it to US or mexico?
The only solution (((they))) have is to increase immigration.
in Japanese pron?
Sigh, you can't help but feel (a little) sorry for the Japanese people. They have such amazing and interesting qualities, among them courtesy, care/attention to detail, social cohesion, respect for government/authority, reverence of technical ability.
On the other hand, it produces really weird side effects like social repression, workplace stress, conformity in a bad way, racism / xenophobia, and relevant to this point... high cost of living.
If they don't start letting immigrants help them, and in a big way, this amazing culture will really die out. I mean, their countryside is basically emptying out.
I commend the Japanese for understanding and taking action on the realization that this planet needs fewer people. Thank you, guys.
We may only hope that other nations (India and China) and continents (Africa and Americas) follow.
You'd probably be interested in this TED talk on population growth and inevitable starvation. And AGW will only make things worse.
How's your average high school kid going to compete with a giant sword wielding super ninja.. lol.
Considering the advances in contraception and reproductive rights.
Add to that:
1. Japanese women putting career ahead of family, until their mid-30's
2. Japanese women who reach their mid-30's and decide dating isn't worth it.
3. Japanese men not living up to their women's standards (most men in Japan don't look like a member of the band Arashi) or women just prefer the single life.
4. Men, a far cry from the badasses they were just a generation or two ago, prefer to live at home with their parents, sleep with a dakimakura, watch AV videos, and jerk off.
The biggest problem of our planet, and the source of most our problems, is overpopulation.
Pollution, Starvation/Hunger, lack of resources, meat factories, the growing anonymization leading to dehumanization and giving psychopaths (basically all corporate and political leaders and a big chunk of western population and culture) a selective advantage, and even the "singularity", are all results of it. Plus all their secondary effects.
I said a long time ago, that the "singularity" is bullshit, since pretty much all processes are self-limiting.
Wars, it can be argued, are also a case of natural self-limitation / divergation.
This here is definitely a factor of self-limitation.
And it is also known, that the level of actual prosperity, safety and wealth anti-correlates with the amount of children being born.
Of course in Japan, their obsession with working (themselves to death) and having no life outside the company, aka end-stage capitalism in a shame culture, is probably the main driving factor behind it.
But the results are good. Even rent prices should come down or not rise as much as a result.
Doesn't OpenBSD seem like the answer to anything these days?
Just trollin'.
The destruction of traditional European culture is bad enough, but that's actually one of the least significant problems with their plan.
The real problem is that these new arrivals are a net loss to European economies, in that they consume far more value than they will ever produce.
Just having more participants doesn't mean that an economy will be strong. The strength, and subsequent growth, of the economy only comes when the participants are productive and efficient. Ideally they're also increasing their productivity and efficiency on an ongoing basis.
Europe is being flooded with some of the least-educated, least-skilled, least-capable, and least-productive people on Earth. Even the ones that supposedly have some kind of "training" end up being far below even the lowest European standards.
Since they aren't even capable of functioning, never mind actually producing anything of value, within modern European economies, they end up leeching off of social programs. This creates an additional burden on the already over-taxed economic participants who actually manage to be productive!
It gets worse when these foreigners, and often their children, end up engaging in crime. Aside from the social costs, now the governments have to put even more resources toward policing these unskilled, uneducated, unproductive burdens on the economy.
To give an analogy, Europe was in a position of having to fill a water bucket using a garden hose, except the bucket had two holes in the bottom that let out more water than was coming in. But instead of doing the sensible thing and adding more productive input, in the form of two new garden hoses, they chose to leave the one hose in place, and instead drilled five more large holes in the bottom of the bucket, causing even more water to leak out. Worse, each of these new drill holes compromises the integrity of the bucket's structure, causing the drill holes to get larger over time, causing yet more water to leak out. Meanwhile, the only productive input is completely overwhelmed, and eventually any water entering the bucket immediately is drained away.
Europe's already seeing a significant decrease in its standard of living. It will only get worse. At this point there may be no salvaging Europe. It will become a third-world hellhole much like the terrible places in Africa and the Middle East where these unskilled, uneducated, unproductive arrivals came from.
I may be 57, but I will personally impregnate as many Japanese women as I possibly can. For free!
You seem to prefer a more! more! more! people attitude. Why? Why do you want to continually increase people on this planet? What is with this need for us to continually breed like a virus?
Don't you know?
Population must rise constantly exponentially at >7%. Because the economy must rise exponentially, or preferably exponentially exponentially. So the numbeer on some bank sheets can rise. So the sexual organs of their owners can rise/wet.
That number represents, how much you have to slave away to be worth keeping alive.
And stagnation, aka stabity, is basically already recession. My thesaurus says so too.
Even tough it is the natural state of any permanently existing thing and any suviving life. In nature everything is in a set of finely balance cycles.
The only things that are not, are exposions and pathogens. Both of the deadly case.
Seven billion humans. The smart populations are shrinking as they weed out those among them who are unable to cope. Quality over quantity is going to win out in the future. We could have had eugenics, but instead we will have a vast lumpenproletariat ruled over by cynical and merciless overlords. Good work, democracy!
Alternative Right.
First, the obligatory Matrix clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5foZIKuEWQ
Then something more informative from 2015:
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/nov/24/addicted-to-growth-six-ways-to-wean-off-prosperous-economy-robots-climate-change-finance
The Japanese might be the first to figure out sustainability, but it'll be too late since the rest of us monkey-breeders will destroy the rest of the planet and take down the enlightened Japanese along with us.
Self-driving blockchains will make typos obsolete!
Europe's already seeing a significant decrease in its standard of living. It will only get worse. At this point there may be no salvaging Europe. It will become a third-world hellhole much like the terrible places in Africa and the Middle East where these unskilled, uneducated, unproductive arrivals came from.
Governments are more interested in the "next generation," not today's immigrants. Canada has been successful to a degree. I am sure this is what they (the governments), are looking at.
European countries can help themselves by putting measures in place that discourage "white flight" .
And better still, they should discourage powerful countries (read the USA) from fomenting chaos in distant lands.
Remember that the Syrian refugees are in Europe because some powerful country decided that it was better to bomb a leader they did not support. The refugees then fled into the "welcoming hands" of some German leader.
and work them less. This isn't because they don't want kids. Multiple studies and surveys have shown that. They can't afford to have kids and only work 12/day, 6 days/week. Since they don't have the Christian hang ups about using birth control that Americans have the birth rate keeps going down. Meanwhile their prime minister is coming up with all sorts of crazy schemes to try and get people to keep up their crazy pace of work and still squeeze out 3-4 kids.
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Most adults in Japan still read manga comics. This must have something to do with the low birth rate.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Mixed race baby making program? Where is it? I'll come to Japan and bring my Nordic values with me. I'm already partially Buddhist/Christian/Atheist so I don't even have to convert to anything. I'll make babies with your women. I'll even stay at home, caring for the children while you can develop your corporate careers. Sing me up, Aiko.
That's not going well at all, either. Look at the perpetrators of some of the major recent attacks in Paris and Brussels. A number of them were descended from third-worlders who ended up in Europe. Look at the various urban districts where these people and their parents and others like them have isolated themselves to, refusing to integrate with European society in any positive way.
The reality is that unskilled, uneducated, unproductive parents will very likely, except in very unusual circumstances, produce unskilled, uneducated, and unproductive children.
That's total revisionist bullshit. The conflict in Syria started due to a civil uprising in 2011 as part of the so-called "Arab Spring" movements.
The only people to blame for the Syrian conflict are Syrians. It's idiotic to blame anyone else.
The only reason they're in Europe is because European leaders didn't do the right thing and strictly enforce the integrity of Europe's borders, preventing these third-worlders from entering Europe in the first place.
To impregnate Japanese women. That should sort them out
I'm posting anonymously because of course this will be a touchy subject, not trying to troll.
I have pondered for a while if some of our new societal norms might be causing the decrease in births. Granted some lesbian couples may choose to become impregnated artificially, but I don't know how often that is. Gay couples of course are going to adopt (generally) if they choose that they would like to have children of their own. All in all, the more people who don't fit with the traditional definition of a "couple" (man and woman) will decrease the overall likelihood of producing one of those 2.3 children that used to be the status quo.
Anyway, something to ponder. Not judging anyone on what is of course a very personal choice, just wondering what the effect is.
I blame Hentai.
Yeah, because the Arab Spring was an entirely grassroots movement organized by the Syrian people with no leadership.
Here you go. It's even from one of your officially approved propaganda outlets.
The problem comes in when "mature" cultures with a stable population base come into contact with expanding cultures. Some cultures put a big push for expanding their population because it means more people to fight, more people for their rulers to subjugate, and more backs to be broken. Contrast this to stable cultures that are less autocratic and where the "prole" actually means something.
These two culture types are immiscible. Put them together, and the culture that values popping out babies by the legions will just outpopulate and obliterate the the other culture, just due to force of numbers. The only the way the mature, static population culture can survive is by genocide, otherwise, they will just get overrun.
My wife’s friend is Japanese and told us epidural isn’t available during births. She delivered three kids all without epidural. She wanted a boy because the first two were girls. For one, she was in labor for 16 hours. Childbirth is already difficult enough and without epidural that just adds to more reasons to have fewer children.
Honest question.
A lot of people believe that the answer to all of our environmental issues is to lower the human population.
Certainly excessive human population does cause a lot of problems.
But if a population goes down, even modestly, it is treated with alarm.
I think this won't solve easily. Here's why.
> 1. Too long work hours/days, compared to other developed countries
I'm working Mon-Sat, 7:30 - 21:00 as a repairman. I repair from
computers to various electronics such as fridge. The official work hours
in this company is 8:00 - 17:30. (including 90 minutes rest.)
My company force us to come to work 30 minutes early to do meaningless
meeting(about 20 min) and cleaning up the office.
Don't be surprised - many people around me work like this. Some of them
didn't get paid from overworked hours(free service overwork).
> 2. Lack of motivation to make GF/BF
Because of 1, many of us just go home, eat, bath, and sleep, repeat.
There's no time to plan a date or something. My friend actually have a GF and living with her for 5 years in the same apartment. I asked him about marriage. He said, she's not interesting in getting married. She loves him, but she's just living with him because the house rent is cheap. (he & she split house rental cost - 50:50)
I know many other pair like this one.
> 3. "Having a child is cruel"
As a repairman, I go to client's house, fix something, and have some chat time. One of the client(female) told me; "We're married but I don't want to have a baby. This country's work environment, decreasing citizens, rising cost of "national pention", etc is horrible. I don't want to say "I'm sorry(for leaving you on this cruel country)" to my child when I get old and dying.
Thank you for reading.
--
And me - I'm 20-29, and I've actively searched how to escape from this country. I want to live in other countries where I can use English(I know my writing is horrible, but I can understand what people are saying clearly), but because of 9/11 attack, many contries limit their doors. I'll appriciate if you give me some idea. I'm ready to quit my job if I found clear path to outside country.
+5 Informative
Japan has poor worker productivity https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20171221_22/ and a plummeting birthrate.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In August 1945 near 95 % of the Alpha Males and Females had been killed mostly by US forces.
What remained of the once noble population was a hull of lesbians, gays and queers.
The population today mostly made of lesbians, gays and queers is the outcome and the birthrate is the crown jewel of the bombardment.
Next destination ... Extinction. Beautiful. Perfect.
and courtship. They also can't afford places to have sex. Besides the 20 year recession Japan's wealth inequality is worth than the states.
So yeah, cookie cutter socialist solutions are _exactly_ what's needed here, at least if they actually want to solve the birth rate problem. Or I guess they could do what the States does and get religion and ban birth control. But barring that it's either socialism or Japan goes away as a country. The South has much higher rates than the North and Western states, but they've also got crazy levels of poverty to go with it.
What I'm saying is, there is no way to solve this problem that doesn't make people's lives worse except socialism. You either distribute the benefits of civilization more equitably or you shrug your shoulders and live with the social distortions that come from not doing that.
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From my post in 2009, echoing your points: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net...
[After citing some articles with statistics on low birth rates in most industrialized countries...]
Again, sick or dead young people can't pay for the health care of old people, nor can sick or dead young people be health care practitioners for old people. You would think old people could see it, but maybe it will take some leadership to help them see it?
Again, this is not to disagree with Michel's main point that people need to
focus on commonality to solve problems. The last paragraph in the first item makes a related analogy to old wars and how the youngjust want the same thing the older generation got. I'd suggest my point just above is one such point of commonality -- the young can not take good care of the old if the young are sick or dead.
That point by David Willetts was actually the quote in my mind when I wrote my previous reply, but I could not find it.
As with the comment on Ireland, that is why the industrialized globe is facing a "Peak Population" crisis, not a "Peak Oil" crisis, even though people are confusing the two, which is odd given solar is now (or soon will be) cheaper than coal. :-)
But, think about it, how many of the industrialized world's current problems are better explained by "Peak Population" rather than "Peak Oil"?
And how much has the "Peak Energy" misrepresentation of the "Peak Oil" fact by people like Catton led to smaller families and made worse the "Peak Population" crisis? Gloomsters and Doomsters are in that sense creating the terrible problems we are facing right now. In Voyage from Yesteryear, James P. Hogan talks about despair versus optimist in a culture, in part based on appreciation of the potential abundance energy in the universe.
The less peers that are around, the less peers can help each other and contribute to a free commons. Maybe there are laws of diminishing returns, but are we anywhere near them? What would Wikipedia be like with only 100 contributors instead of 100 thousand? Especially in a digital age, it is easy for a peer to add more to the free commons than they take away. What do you take away from Wikipedia by reading a page? A little electricity power perhaps, but Wikipedia shows us how to get all the power we need from the sun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
So, even in a physical sense, Wikipedia is helping peers physically power it by giving away such knowledge.
We can support quadrillions of humans in the solar system (see my previous references to Dyson, Bernal, Savage, O'Neill, and there are many others), or about a million times our current population on Earth. We essentially had the specific technological ideas in the 1970s we needed to do that, even given refinements since then. So, a focus on zero or negative population growth for the human race as a whole right now, as opposed to just limiting the population currently on Earth (which might be sensible, even though I think we could easily grow 10X on Earth), has created a "Peak Population" crisis that we didn't need to have for 1000 years when we filled up the solar system (and by then, we would have better technology and better social ideology to deal with changing demographics of moving from a triangle to a square of population by age).
Sure, let's set a population target for some carrying capacity on Earth the same way the health and fire departments limit the maximum number of people in a restaurant. But, you don't limit the human population of a city (or the solar system) the same way you limit the number of people that can safely be in a restaurant (the Earth). That is ultimately the mistake that gloomsters like Catton make -- they confuse the two, mostly IMHO from lack of imagination, but also because some profit from artificial scarcity, as well, as
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Preferably from muslim countries. A little bit of gang rape will push birthrate right up to where it should be.