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Comment by thatguy0900 | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of interesting to think about, obviously a mandated girlfriend won't happen but Musk has already said people arnt having enough kids and if we keep deporting everyone and denying new entries we'll have a population crises, I wouldn't be surprised if Republicans start pushing for a big tax on the child free/single or something

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I'm curious what your viewpoint is here. Is human extinction a bad thing? And if not, do you care if it's your own descendants thriving, versus the descendants of an immigrant?

My viewpoint is that a population collapse is very bad for society, can already see it beginning to happen in places like South Korea. I don't see how I could possibly retire with any comfort if Noone is having kids and we also don't accept immigrants. Human extinction is a bad thing to happen for the people alive when it's happening, philosophically in the grand scheme of things I think life would go on. I don't plan on having descendants at all and I am against the current mass deportations, especially the way it is currently being carried out.

The retirement problem isn't solvable the way it is presented right now because in most countries it requires 2-5 working people per retiree to work properly, which implies infinite growth, it has to die at some point, the earliest will be the easiest to handle

Why does that require growth? If a population is at replacement level and keeps a uniform population pyramid, things are stable as long as the retirement age is set at the last 15% of life-expectancy or so (to account for labor force non-participation).

Replacement level isn't enough to sustain the lifestyle we had since then end of ww2, that's why the quality of service in most European countries are going down while taxes, retirement age, &c. are going up

It does have to be solved but shocking the system as hard as you can in one generation is probably not the way to do it. At this point we're basically saying that we hope robotics takes care of it because if not all the old people can just starve on the street. It would also be better if the people doing the changes actually had a comprehensible plan beyond just doing it and seeing what happens. You can't cut public health spending (but leave the current system where births cost years of salary) and kick out all the immigrants and cut social security in one generation

Starving on the street (or really, starving in their homes) might be more humane than the current long term care industrial complex. Just sayin'.

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