https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-07-26/japan-records-steepest-population-decline-while-number-of-foreign-residents-hits-new-high.html
Japan’s total population was 125.41 million, down just over half a million people from a year earlier
I wonder if some of them feel similar to me. It just doesn‘t feel like a positive thing to put anyone into this world, which seems largely exploitative and hostile towards my economic class. All I have to look forward to is to work my whole life to pay the rent and food and all that for what? To destroy nature with everything one does or purchases, to participate in what is basically a pyramid scheme.
For those that do feel similar I can say this, some subsidies for parents won‘t make us create more children, where I am we already give a lot of our taxes for the parents here and it doesn’t change my mind to get a few hundred € a month extra, which just about offsets some of the implicit cost of children anyway. They can punish, threaten, spread panic, or reward obedience and all that in any way they like, I won‘t put anyone into a similar existence to what I experience, simple as.
So from my perspective, they‘d have to actually fix our economic situations for working class people first (much lower inequality and higher wages) and ALSO fix climate change, which I just don‘t see happening.
My theory is that there's not enough money at the lower levels - where it gives the most benefit to the most people.
If someone gave you a few thousand, chances are it would be used sometime soon - a repair, a vacation, a rainy day fund. If that stays at the lower / middle class levels, chances are it gets recirculated soon from there as well.
Otherwise it sits in a rich person's bank account, and is used by the bank to do real estate investment - which leads to newer buildings and higher commercial / residential rents.
Yes, the rich and corporations generally do things with their money - it's not just sitting in a pool like scrooge mcduck. Unfortunately, what they do with the money tends to have the effect of suppressing the lower classes
There are more than enough people on the planet and the answer to falling birth rates in the developed world isn’t more births, it’s more immigration.
Unfortunately, the xenophobes seem to be winning in most western countries, to everyone’s detriment.
Canada has massive immigration targets, but guess what? No one wants to move to the middle of nowhere where it gets down to -45C they want to live in major cities along the border, where we haven't built housing since the 70s and unless these immigrants bring money to buy hyperinflated 2M dollar houses end up living terrible lives, doing terrible jobs, further putting a strain on our crumbling healthcare system.
I'm all for immigration but we need a place for people to go. Refugees are showing up right now and we don't know where to put them, a whole whack of them that showed up were living on the streets in 40+C weather because we have no place to put them and little money to put them up somewhere
I’d like to retire early in the Canadian tundra. I’d need kinda stable internet, though. How much is a house in the Canadian outback going for?
With Starlink anything is possible, go far enough north and you might not be sharing satellites with many people.
I'm thinking Saskatchewan, my wife won't leave Toronto but the house we're in is worth 1.4M in the current market. I could get a similarly sized house in Saskatchewan for under $300,000. They have fibre available in the cities so I can keep my gigabit speeds. We could set aside some money for retirement and buy a couple snowmobiles, a couple ATVs and really enjoy living. Instead of being miserable here.
I wouldn't put too much stock in starlink. Its fine for the present but the orbits are not stable, and the equipment isn't exactly top of the line or remarkably durable.
I meant it as a joke, who knows how long before Elon nukes it for the hell of it. But Amazon's is still in the works, and the Canadian government gave a huge amount of money for a home-grown solution that's supposed to provide internet access in very remote parts of Canada
Hopefully we see some more Sat based comms being implimented soon from Canadian sources. Sasktel (crown Corp major ISP in SK) has done a decent job getting mobile network access available in rural areas. But as soon as you head anywhere north of La Ronge you're shit outta luck without satellite.
Would love to build a retirement home up near Besnard, but a fast stable internet connections kinda requirement for me haha.
Speaking very broadly here, I define conservatism as needing an out of power group to shame/ostracize. Looking at Japan, 98% of the population is ethnically Japanese. 2% is immigrants. Hell I bet most of the people reading this already know the Japanese word for outsider without me even having to say it. It's a lock that Japanese conservatives are every bit as shitty as English or American conservatives.
Nah, like most instances, it's a smaller ruling class that imposes it's culture over the local populations who they've invaded; More conversion than replacement.
Japans immigration is actually surprisingly strict no ? I feel as the population ages more and more those laws will get a little more lax.
Japan’s population declined in all of its 47 prefectures for the first time in a record drop, while its number of foreign residents hit a new high, reaching almost 3 million people, according to government data released Wednesday, highlighting the increasing role that non-Japanese people play in the shrinking and aging country.
The population of Japanese nationals fell by about 800,000 people, or 0.65%, to 122.4 million in 2022 from the previous year, falling for a 14th straight year.
After peaking in 2008, Japan’s population has since shrunk steadily due to a declining birthrate. The country saw a record low of 771,801 births last year.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has set tackling the declining births as one of his top policy goals and pledged to secure annual funding of about 3.5 trillion yen ($25.2 billion) over the next three years for a new child care package, which includes child birth and rearing allowances and increased subsidies for higher education.