Project Autocracy

[gehringer_2]

8 minutes ago, oblong said:

The pandemic accelerated a bit the boomer retirements in my opinion. Many thru either no choice of their own or thru realization during the shutdown that they actually didn’t need to do all of that. 
 

there is a flip side. I know of several boomer aged folks in the white collar world who would have retired but work from home changed their mind. They can stay at their house on the lake now with no 75 minute drive in.  

The above is a good point. 

For sure there are white collar places where retirements have always tended to come later. e.g, my FIL was a CPA who kept a hand in part time doing corporate tax work right up to the year he passed. OTOH, most of my immediate circle have been engineers, tech area workers, teachers etc, and other than a little consulting we have all bailed. I was about the last person in my circle to hang it up.

Edited December 22, 2024 by gehringer_2

[mtutiger]

1 hour ago, gehringer_2 said:

yes - but that is an inevitability at some point before we are all standing shoulder to shoulder in our 1 ft sq allotment of the planet, so whether we learn to deal with a leveling or decreasing population today to in 10 or 30 yrs it's something every country is going to have to learn to handle. More workers have been retiring in Japan than joining the workforce for some time and they have figured out how to cope. The already undesirable pressure  of current populations is something the species collectively already has a strong instinctive understanding of  which is why in almost every nation where people have a choice, fertility is declining. A set of economic theory assumptions (we must have more laborers!) that fly in the face of what every 1st world population is choosing for itself is a priori a failed one.

Obviously - the issue is that, again, the policy we appear poised to pursue seems likely to exacerbate the problems.

Maybe I haven't been clear enough, but this is the point I'm driving at. The direction we are heading in immigration wise will make things worse on that front IMO

Edited December 22, 2024 by mtutiger

[mtutiger]

1 hour ago, gehringer_2 said:

I think are already past the worst of if. US fertility rate peaked in 1957 and those folks are already past the most typical retirement age. We are actually starting to enter the boomer die off, which will start reducing a huge aged services load/drag from the economy. The first post WWII babies will be turning 80 in a year.

Boomers are mostly still alive, still buying houses, still shopping in stores and ordering goods on Amazon. They will soon get older and require more in home and in patient care, which will demand more people to provide those jobs and services. At least until the huge age services drag comes.

If the answer is to further restrict immigration, throw out hands up in the air and say "it is what it is", we need to be honest that answer may come with higher costs and a reduction in quality of services across many industries and fields.

[gehringer_2]

10 minutes ago, mtutiger said:

If the answer is to further restrict immigration, throw out hands up in the air and say "it is what it is", we need to be honest that answer may come with higher costs and a reduction in quality of services across many industries and fields.

LOL - I would put it exactly the other way, to me throwing your hands in the air is just importing more low wage workers into the economy instead of letting the economy restructure itself properly to an equilibrium population distribution.

But it's not a black and white choice. If we have a rationalized immigration system, many people who come in will initially pick up slack in services like nursing, health care etc. I just don't like the trap logic that there is some kind of imperative to immigrate your way out of eventual population decline. That's exactly the recipe for social upheaval because you basically are justifying the position of 'replacement theory' immigration opponents.

Edited December 22, 2024 by gehringer_2

[Tiger337]

On 12/21/2024 at 12:03 PM, gehringer_2 said:

Merkel made the same mistake that American immigration progressives make, which is believing that because allowing refugees to emigrate is a moral thing to do, it is a politically/socially possible thing to do, and it simply is not. A leader may be laudable for their moral principles but they can't govern successfully by assuming their populations share their beliefs or are willing to accept the inevitable social costs of acting on those beliefs or by assuming the emigres that come will be the perfect assimilators they might be. 

Abother example of how politics and morals do not mix well.  It's a reality, but also part of the reason I dislike politics.  

[mtutiger]

41 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

I just don't like the trap logic that there is some kind of imperative to immigrate your way out of eventual population decline. That's exactly the recipe for social upheaval because you basically are justifying the position of 'replacement theory' immigration opponents.

I get it... Ultimately that isn't what I'm arguing for what its worth, it's not about bigger picture issues of population decline. It's more that we have a shortage of labor for a number of jobs, and we ought to promote policies that help fill said positions. 

And yes, some of that involves fixing the existing system, bringing order and, yes, allowing for more legal pathways for immigration. It isn't about morals or macro population decline issues for me

Edited December 22, 2024 by mtutiger

[romad1]

4 hours ago, oblong said:

I also wonder if birth rates have anything to do with it. My kids are early 20s and it seems like there just weren’t as many kids around as when I was growing up. The economy took a hit in the 2000’s so did people stop having as many kids?  And throw in people having kids later in life than we remember.  

Watching registration numbers for the league I manage, there are a couple demographic blips I've got my eye on.  My daughter was in the wave right around the 2008 crash and I've got t-ballers who will be joining who were born next year who were born in the Covid year.   I gather that we hit a new low this past year.   And those weirdos want to get rid of IVF. 

[romad1]

Yeah, so Elon's funding all the RW crazies. 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/12/22/labour-moves-to-ban-musk-donation-with-new-law/

 

[romad1]

Steve Herman @w7voa@journa.host

CBS News - Former Rep. Matt Gaetz, who briefly stood to become President-elect Trump's nominee to be attorney general, was found by congressional ethics investigators to have paid numerous women — including a 17-year-old girl — for sex, and to have purchased and used illegal drugs, including from his Capitol Hill office, according to a final draft of a comprehensive investigative report. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/matt-gaetz-et

[chasfh]

On 12/22/2024 at 12:36 PM, gehringer_2 said:

LOL - I would put it exactly the other way, to me throwing your hands in the air is just importing more low wage workers into the economy instead of letting the economy restructure itself properly to an equilibrium population distribution.

But it's not a black and white choice. If we have a rationalized immigration system, many people who come in will initially pick up slack in services like nursing, health care etc. I just don't like the trap logic that there is some kind of imperative to immigrate your way out of eventual population decline. That's exactly the recipe for social upheaval because you basically are justifying the position of 'replacement theory' immigration opponents.

There is a desire among right wingers to increase the white birthrate substantially, not only to overcome the population decline that will come with expelling practically all immigrants of color (and, bonus, their American citizen children), but also to attack women's advances in education and employment, doing all they can to force women to stay home and pump out three, four, five, or more babies—just like when America was "great".

I know many people here think the confabulating right wing elites we see tweeting fire and brimstone all the time are stupid and ignorant and couldn't plan or strategize their way out of a paper bag, but I do believe they understand that by degrading the educational system, they can create a system in which far, far fewer students move on to college, and far, far more high school graduates (and, just as importantly, dropouts) can make up for the loss of immigrants populating the manual labor jobs.

A less-educated workforce is a more blue collar workforce, and the more less-educated people the right wing elites can engineer, the better they can fill those lowest-paying of jobs with American citizens.

Couple that with killing off unions for good and repealing labor and minimum wage laws, and we can get back to a country in which something like 88% of the men, women, and children who make up the labor force are manual, industrial, agricultural, domestic, or otherwise unskilled, and the remaining 12%—the educated professional and business class, which the right wing elite brainiacs assume will include themselves—can live very, very well off their backs.

You know—Make America Great Again.

It'll take time, maybe a couple or three decades, to see the fruit of their efforts, but if they can drive Democrats and other liberals entirely out of the body politic, as they will also seek to do by any means possible, they stand a good chance of achieving this version of the American Dream, at least in part.

 

Edited December 23, 2024 by chasfh

[CMRivdogs]

it seems the Mump or is it Dolon Christmas shopping list today consists of both Greenland and Panama. 

https://politicalwire.com/2024/12/22/trump-says-he-wants-to-buy-greenland/

If I'm good do i get a choice of the place I'm imprisoned?

[chasfh]

15 hours ago, CMRivdogs said:

it seems the Mump or is it Dolon Christmas shopping list today consists of both Greenland and Panama. 

https://politicalwire.com/2024/12/22/trump-says-he-wants-to-buy-greenland/

If I'm good do i get a choice of the place I'm imprisoned?

Yes, and your choice will be Greenland. At least officially.

[oblong]

Trump wants a signature acquisition. Like the Louisiana Purchase or Manhattan. 

[Tigermojo]

[romad1]

I really enjoyed visiting Panama with my daughter's class in spring 2023.  Place has a lot of charm to it for having dealt with all it had.   The canal was low due to the drought.  We had one trip up country to visit a native village of people who had crossed the Darien Isthmus.  It was a little slow going because the powered canoes had to be pushed off low water spots in the river quite frequently.   

The tour guide was very interesting for me because he had experienced first hand the PRC government's "charm offensive" for people like him.   The PRC tries to create ambassadors who work in the tourism industry who can also serve as their friendly local agents.   Tour guide was also interesting because he had to explain to the group of American middle schoolers that the United States and Panama had a complicated history without trying to sound too aggrieved or sugar-coating it.  He did a good job of balancing that.  

The US facilities in Panama that used to support US Southern Command were turned into a college campus and they all basically looked like US military facilities. 

Comparing notes with a couple of US Navy friends who had transited the canal a lot they remember a much different Panama back in the day.  I told them about the tropical forest urban park we hiked in Panama City and they told me that used to be a den of iniquity where people would get ladies of the evening but for much less time than the evening.  Back in the distant US Southcom days you could also purchase drugs all over the place.   Again we are there with middle schoolers so it was more than fine when we went. 

 

[mtutiger]

1 hour ago, oblong said:

Trump wants a signature acquisition. Like the Louisiana Purchase or Manhattan. 

Amazing how the "America First" guy is now projecting an image of imperial conquest.

[CMRivdogs]

He's running out of domestic golf courses to bury the bodies.

[romad1]

Another part of the PRC thing with Panama.. the number of Chinese as a minority population was notable.  It’s the crossroads of global trade so not surprising but still. 

[CMRivdogs]

This truly would be a Christmas miracle 

https://bsky.app/profile/joncooper-us.bsky.social/post/3le5myzebvc2v

love how Denmark isn’t taking any **** from Donald Trump. 🇩🇰 🤣

 

 

 

 

[LaceyLou]

I don't hate the idea

[chasfh]

Also, bonus: Danish is the European language that is the closest to English and thus easiest for English-speakers to learn.

[Tigermojo]

If Denmark buys the US, Canada will become the 51st State.

[chasfh]

7 minutes ago, Tigermojo said:

If Denmark buys the US, Canada will gladly become the 51st State.

Gladly.

Also, I was mistaken—it’s Dutch that is closest, not Danish. So sell us to the Netherlands instead.

[romad1]

1 hour ago, chasfh said:

Also, bonus: Danish is the European language that is the closest to English and thus easiest for English-speakers to learn.

Frisian is the specific language.  It is spoken along the northern coast of Netherlands and Germany by a few folk still.  One of those protected languages like Cornish or Breton.   I know this because my mother's side had Frisian roots.  

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Frisian

[CMRivdogs]

Since Trump has already sold the country to Musk for a handful of magic beans....