Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
In any case, the "huge spike in violent crime and terror attacks in Europe" has to be interpreted as meaning that Europe is beginning to get almost as violent as the United States, but actually not getting there, it's still less violent by about a factor of four.
> Do you have any idea of the huge spike in violent crime and terror attacks in Europe which were non existent before 2015 ?
I lived through the IRA years. It seems to have been better in recent years. Nobody has tried to murder immediate family members in this decade or the last.
A pretty graph on Wikipedia supports that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In the list of incidents we can see in recent years, islamic terrorists were the perpetrators of most of the attacks, they have not been perpetrating nearly as many attacks as home grown separatist organizations in Europe in the 70s and 80s.
You type bullshit, don't check your facts and you should be ashamed.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
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?
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.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.