Thread

1. shoobiedoo · 1789687401 · focus · HN ↗

   This article calls it a "quiet emergency" but even as a foreigner living in Japan there are alarm bells everywhere. And the government buying 150 F35's is just a slap in the face when there's a massive chunk of the population that is, very quickly, going to need extra care.

   I looked into becoming a care aid myself as I'm tired of office culture in Japan and have some experience in that field. I was shocked to see that they start at less than 10USD, and working your way up takes years, decades even.

   Continuing to kick this can down the road is going to be an absolute disaster.

   1. rightnutwingjob · 1789689669 · focus · HN ↗

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      1. PorciiVorbesc · 1789690719 · focus · HN ↗

         >Why do people think The Government™ is able to, should, or can, solve everyone’s problems?

         Where do you see them demanding the government solve $ALL their problems?

         >The Government™ probably can solve defence.

         Agree.

         >It probably can’t solve your lack of desire to do the right thing and look after your aging parents.

         Is there a lack of desire? Or a lack of resources resulting as a consequence of how the modern developed economy works, where youth need to move away from the family to get a college education and skilled jobs, and in return the government taxes you to take care of your parents and your kids so that you can focus on maximizing your skilled productivity at work? Isn't this the modern (faulty) social contract?

         Sure, I can move back with my parents to take care of them, but then I won't have a job to earn money because all the industry in that town was hollowed out and moved abroad (also thanks to government actions of maximizing shareholder value).

         Now , if the government admits it can't solve elderly care and wants us to take care of our parents on our own dime, the it should also stop taxing us for a welfare state it can't provide and just focus on what it can, like defense. IIRC Switzerland works like that.

         Unfortunately, in our modern post-industrial economy we can't all go back to tribal/village lifestyles of our ancestors where we all lived on farms in multi generational households and we all took care of each other and lived only off the land. That would sound nice in theory, but it's not feasible anymore the way nations and economies are set up to work and compete against each other, unless we can somehow agree to fight wars from now on only with bows and arrows like our ancestors, instead of AI drones and cruise missiles needing cutting edge chips and SW made by singles with phds and no kids. We built this faulty societal system and now we're forced to live by it whether we want to or not.

         1. jll29 · 1789693154 · focus · HN ↗

            The Japanese fail to produce enough children.

            The country will either have to change or it will disappear soon.

            Most European countries have the same issue, but it is less visible due to immigration, which Japan does not have.

            1. PorciiVorbesc · 1789937893 · focus · HN ↗

               >The Japanese fail to produce enough children.

               Yes, and? What will those "missing" children do in a stagnant economy except contribute to watering down already low wages and increasing pressure on housing?

               >The country will either have to change or it will disappear soon.

               Massive doomerist over-exaggeration. Japan will be fine. Not an imperialist world super-power, but the Japanese people will be OK, better than 80% of the world's population.

               >Most European countries have the same issue, but it is less visible due to immigration, which Japan does not have.

               Yes and long term European countries will be worse off than Japan, due to the ethnic and cultural replacement and racial clashes and crime caused by their immigration policies. Japanese travel to Europe on vacation a lot, saw what imigration looks like, and don't want that. They'd rather stay a stagnant/shrinking but homogenous, safe and peaceful nation, rather than have a growing population of foreigners that replaces them and causes crime.

               What Americans/westerners fail to understand is that a nation's success, stability and long term future is more than its GDP and population number that must grow to the moon at all cost just to enrich the top 10% of asset holders while everyone else fights for the scraps, but it's the people and culture that made it great to begin with, not a faceless, borderless economic zone of corporations and workers. Nations that decline economically/demographically can always rebounce back(see post-WW2), but economic zones not so much, as when they fail, the corporations and migrants that came purely for economic reason, just move to the next economic zone, like locusts, since they have no ancestral ethnic and cultural roots tying them to that land incentivizing them to stick around through thick and thin and rebuild it.

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