If you’re nodding at the concept of overpopulation that’s not really a “problem” as we’re expected to top out around 15 billion as the rest of the world develops and then replacement rate is expected around 12 bil as things level back out from an earlier peak iirc.
It’s not fewer people that’s the problem, but fewer people too fast. A society needs labor to provide the goods and services people need. If the share of people who do labor (working age) to people who don’t (children and the elderly) becomes too lopsided, the burden on those who work becomes unsustainable. (The Boomers had the opposite: they had a smaller older generation and didn’t have many children, so during their prime years the working age population was much larger than dependants on both ends of the age pyramid. That’s part of the reason why they were so prosperous.)
Going by total fertility rate (children per woman):
2.1 is enough for replacement. No problems.
1.8 means every generation is 10 % smaller than the previous. We can deal with that.
1.5 means every generation is 25 % smaller than the previous. This starts to cause problems.
1.0 means generation size halves every generation. This is not sustainable.
If the share of people who do labor (working age) to people who don’t (children and the elderly) becomes too lopsided, the burden on those who work becomes unsustainable.
Except that raising children requires more time and resources than caring for elderly. So having less children frees up more resources to care for the elderly. Into the next generation there are now less people which require even less resources which means you need fewer workers to produce those resources.
History provides evidence for this. After every major war there were economic booms. This is despite wars killing off the able bodied workers leaving only the sick and elderly.
The only people who suffer from a lower population are the ownership class. They live by skimming a little of the productivity off of every worker.
Need citation for this. War is a net negative every time. War destroys resources and kills people. This leads to a labor shortage. It also destroys property so it leads to housing crisis and famine.
Except that raising children requires more time and resources than caring for elderly. So having less children frees up more resources to care for the elderly. Into the next generation there are now less people which require even less resources which means you need fewer workers to produce those resources.
That is a death spiral. You can consider the labor involved with caring for the elderly a sort of tax on labor. It’s a net drain but required and is directly related to previous generations of labor. The labor involved with raising children is similar but is closer to an investment. The more labor done for raising children, the more labor there will be next generation. Even though the labor for children is higher than the labor for the elderly, it results in a net positive.
If you have vastly fewer children in the following generation, you end up with a higher percentage of elderly labor compared to the labor pool. If the labor for children goes down enough to more than make up for it, you don’t have a per capita labor deficit. BUT you do have less total labor.
Now we get into the real issue: maintaining society. It isn’t just about the labor to care for each other. But technology, infrastructure, food, etc all need a certain amount of labor. And most of these tasks are scalable so it requires less labor per capita as population increases. If you shrink your labor pool too quickly, you won’t be able to sustain your infrastructure causing a collapse.
Napoleonic Wars, WW1, WW2. Not even including the US, Russia, China and Japan all had explosive growth after WW2.
War is a net negative every time.
If a sudden drop in working age labor causes a death spiral, then Russia would have had a death spiral after WW2. Instead they had a boom and put a man in space before the US.
The labor involved with raising children is similar but is closer to an investment.
It’s not an investment because at the end of a child’s growth, you now have a consumer who requires more resources. When an elderly dies, that frees up resources for everyone.
The Black Plague is a accepted factor for the Renaissance. Labor became more valuable. The death of so many workers allowed the surviving workers wages to increase and they got more independence. It wasn’t a death spiral.
BUT you do have less total labor.
Total less labor isn’t a problem when you don’t need more labor.
If you shrink your labor pool too quickly, you won’t be able to sustain your infrastructure causing a collapse.
WW2 was a far quicker and far more severe labor pool shrinkage for many countries in the world. There was no collapse.
You realize working people produce more resources than they consume, right?
The excess capital goes into “investments” like real estate, gold and even stocks. This raises the prices of those items for everyone. That’s why we have a younger generation that can’t afford housing like 50 years ago.
Except that raising children requires more time and resources than caring for elderly.
Source on this? Doesn’t sound right at all. According to my findings after a quick search, LTC (long-term care) takes a significantly higher fraction of OECD countries GDP than e.g. childcare+early education.
It is a pyramid scheme. We have an economic system based on continuous growth. When it doesn’t grow, it’s a huge panic, such as during the pandemic or 2008 economic crisis. Now the number of workers and consumers, the base of the whole system, is starting to shrink and nothing much van be done without changing the essence of the system.
Of course those that became rich and powerful because of the system don’t want to change the system that keeps them rich and powerful. But without change the system might not survive.
KMT presidential candidate Hou Yu-ih said on Saturday that a vote for the DPP was equivalent to “sending everyone out to the battlefield” because supporting Taiwan independence would touch off a war.
What’s happening in Taiwan? Why did a presidential candidate said something like this? In another country, a presidential candidate telling people to not supporting their own country’s sovereignty would be a political suicide.
Because things aren’t black and white and reality is all sorts of shades of gray. Most Taiwanese don’t care one way or the other, they just want to live in peace. You constantly see this in the polls and the votes. If the Taiwanese people’s priority was independence, then the vote wouldn’t be so split. This is the reason the DPP hasn’t declared independence, it’s simply not what most Taiwanese people want.
Surprisingly, most Taiwanese are interested in their own well being. This is why the KMT won so many seats last election. This is why Tsai is stepping down. When they threaten Taiwanese people’s well being, shockingly the Taiwanese vote against them. Again, they neither want independence nor submission to China.
Thus, we see the votes EXACTLY AS WE WOULD EXPECT CONSIDERING THE SITUATION. They keep splitting the parties so neither side can make a declaration one way or the other.
As an outside observer, I ask one simple question. Why is it so hard for you to realize that what I said is the truth and not what western media parrots. Why do you believe the black and white issues that your propaganda keeps claiming even in the face of irrefutable evidence.
As an outside observer, I ask one simple question. Why is it so hard for you to realize that what I said is the truth and not what western media parrots. Why do you believe the black and white issues that your propaganda keeps claiming even in the face of irrefutable evidence.
Hmm, did you reply to the wrong comment? Anyway, I’m not aware of current political situation in Taiwan and was really surprised by that presidential candidate’s statement. Are you telling me that this is considered a normal statement for political opposition on Taiwan?
Yes, it is. It’s been like this for decades now. So the fact that it’s surprising and used in a way to shock western audiences tells you a lot does it not?
*Edit: Mind you, I’m not for Taiwan being absorbed into China nor am I strong on Taiwan’s independence. I just want to point out the way western propaganda works to manipulate people.
*Edit 2: Essentially, if the KMT has been talking like that for decades and the Taiwanese still vote for them in large enough numbers to win them most of the seats last election, what does that tell you about the Taiwanese people’s desire for independence? How does the media report on that? Why are these two pieces of information so conflicting.
I’m not parent poster, but I didn’t read that at all. International propaganda works, and has the potential to destroy democracy in America (and lots of other countries, too.)
They’re implying that the people who live there can’t make a decision for themselves, in other words a white guy overseas with zero stake in the matters thinks they know more about the reality than the people who actually live there, which is a very disrespectful prospective.
The racism comes from the long history of white people doing this to peoples who choose for themselves in ways that they don’t agree with. It’s never that they chose for themselves but always that someone else (usually malicious) came in and made the decision for them.
What is your source for this ? Recent polls show reunification support is still <2%, with about 6% open to reunification eventually but not now.
In 2018, before the crackdown in HK, the reunification support was 3%, with 13% open to it eventually - the events in HK have definitely significantly eroded support for reunification in Taiwan.
I have family in Taiwan and literally don’t know a single Taiwanese person that wants reunification with the PRC.
Fantastic news! so many people are so afraid of the word “nuclear”, and don’t understand how large of a volume the ocean is. the lethal dose of Fentanyl is like the size of a grain of rice. Put all of the known legal and illegal volume of fentanyl into the ocean and it would be undetectable.
Yeah, poor people are fucked… As much as I want to hope, it will be the poorest who will pay the greatest price. It has always been true for almost every major crisis in the world…
Everyone's fucked. We'll see mass migrations and mass deaths among poor people. and then the civilised world as we know it would end because it is sustsined by the labour provided by poor people.
There'll be no one to do the lowly paid but extremely important jobs. Will the wealthy grow & pick their own crops? rear and slaugter their own meat? fish fr their lobsters? or clear up garbage? or operate the sewage treatment plant?
Glad to see Comac planes being used at production scale. Hopefully they are safe and push Boeing to do better, but based on recent US actions I bet they will ban Comac to prevent competition.
Uh, so how’s that “limit warming to 1.5°C” target coming along?
Global average temperatures from January to September were 1.4 C higher than 1850-1900, almost breaching the 1.5 C warming goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement, C3S reported.
That threshold is seen as essential to avoid the most catastrophic consequences of climate change.
Don’t worry, humanity is reaping massive profits. Well, actually, a tiny little group is reaping the benefits before dying and leaving all future generations with a burning hellscape, but THINK OF ALL THE MONEY THEY ARE MAKING NOW!
Hopefully one day we will see articles about Taiwan cooperating with another country that don’t just automatically include something about China’s reaction.
Pretty sure I saw this referred to as Flesh Eating Bacteria a couple of days ago. I’m sure “tissue-damaging” is just as effective a warning moniker to keep people alert.
That’s correct. A majority of the increase is due to strep throat cases; there’s also an increase in streptococcal toxic shock syndrome from the bacteria going systemic. There is not a significantly increased amount of necrotizing fasciitis that I’m aware of. It’s been going on for a few months now.
Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children.
The article opens by saying something totally different than the above summary. The point is that it’s difficult to replace a lot of these chemicals, not that there isn’t any substitute.
Coffee is going to become increasingly rare in the coming years. It won't go away completely, but the places that can actually grow it will shift, and a coffee tree takes years of cultivation before it becomes productive. 3-5 years to get your first beans, and then another couple years for full production from that tree.
And as the climate shifts and environments collapse, you'll have to either grow in a greenhouse, which greatly limits supply, or you'll need to be planting new trees in colder areas in the hopes that you'll have a productive run as the Earth warms.
The Norwegian salmon industry has cut fish meal and oil to around 30% of feed, down from 90% in the 1990s. Further reductions have remained elusive, though, as farmed salmon still need omega-3 fats and acids mainly found in marine life.
Hmm. So omega-3 fatty acids are the bound on other food sources?
Microalgae are unicellular species containing eukaryotes and prokaryotes (Wen and Chen, 2003). The smallest microalgae are only a few microns, while the larger ones can reach a hundred microns and are widely distributed in the ocean and freshwater (Ryckebosch et al., 2012). As the only creature that can de novo synthesize omega-3 fatty acids efficiently in nature, historically, humans have commercially used microalgae for a long time as food, fodder, and a chemical of high value.
Sounds like it’s generated by algae. Farm omega-3 fatty acids too? Maybe genetically-engineer to try to increase yields?
Moreover, the development of sequencing, genetic engineering and bioinformatics technology has significantly contributed to the synthesis of omega-3 PUFA. It has provided essential information for optimizing the enzyme system for algae to synthesize high-value oil (Yang F et al., 2019; Degraeve-Guilbault et al., 2021). The synthetic pathways of PUFAs in algae are relatively well-understood, and many desaturases and elongases in algae or other species have been identified. Additionally, the enzymes present in algae have also provided crucial information for the synthesis pathways of omega-3 PUFA in other species, such as fungi and plants (Rezanka et al., 2017). Compared to the fermentation mode and genetic engineering of yeast and other microorganisms, the tools available for algae still need to be developed (Xue et al., 2013; Xie et al., 2015; Khera and Srivastava, 2022).
Advances in genetic engineering technology are essential for the synthetic biology of algae. However, many algae can only undergo genetic modification, such as RNAi, which cannot be stably inherited (Kugler et al., 2019). Alternatively, high-producing strains can be screened using blind mutagenesis. Nevertheless, if significant breakthroughs occur, many efficient photosynthetic chassis cells could provide a vital platform for the production of PUFA, carotenoids, and other substances. Algae, with their ability to use light energy and cheap carbon sources to produce PUFA, hold great potential for the future. With its high photosynthetic efficiency, algae can be used as chassis cells to transform into a cell factory that can synthesize omega-3 PUFA using solar energy and cheap carbon sources. Thus, genetic engineering technology to transform microbial fermentation for PUFA production is currently an important means to achieve commercialization.
japantimes.co.jp
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