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Comment by ornornor | Hacker News Reader

We’re already heading into a certain demographics crisis. It’s not only about the pyramidal system that retirement is but also about who will be your nurse when you’re old, make your car, be your doctor, etc if there aren’t enough people anymore? Every developed country is well below replacement rate with no real plans from the powers that be to address it because it’s so far in the future that it’s the next best guy problem (30 years horizon)

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Countries are not doing anything about low replacement rates because its currently in the interest of the elite to keep them low so that they can sell the need to import lower paid foreigners instead.

Elite is interested to have their country to win the race and not other, and healthy menpower is still essential for this.

When you are far removed from everything, your logic doesn't always make sense.

The problem with local workforce is that you have less threats hanging over their heads. Ones you can threaten with deportation, separation from their children, or just shoot in the streets, are just more controllable.

Imported labour has less rights and will be more open to grovelling.

you still need local country to be attractive enough to make people come and fear of deportation, meaning locals will be Ok too.

Either:

1. These people are detached from reality.

They would never see water that can be ignited because of the contamination so don't know the scale of their actions. Or

2. They think they have enough power to make the other countries worse, pressure on the EU, bombing the middle east, that making life worse for locals is offset.

That describes aristocracy. Those have been economically and politically compromised, or were assassinated in the 1930s.

Modern elites do not belong to any particular country; this is the entire selling point of globalism. They have no stake in any country's success.

We may pride ourselves on distinctions but when you put a white guy, an African and an Indian through the grinder, the same pink slurry comes out the other end. We're all just mince to them. We aren't even ruled from within our own borders anymore.

I don't think humanity will run into any capacity problems because of that, due to how grotesquely overpopulated it currently is. As far as I see it, every country in the world should be well below replacement rate, for the long run. Setting aside some problematic side effects stemming from our current social system setups. A small fraction of the current world population would probably enable everyone to have a much higher quality of life, if organised properly. We probably don't need to worry about who builds our cars when there are close to 10 billion of us. Where we'll get our food from, on the other hand -- I think that's where the real crisis lies.

Time of the robots has come! ;-)

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