Jack Ma and Elon Musk are worried about population collapse

[hanselthecaretaker]

Yeah. [https://qz.com/1697884/jack-ma-and-elon-musk-are-worried-about-a-population-collapse/amp/]

The standout comment would seem to be this from Ma,

Ma, meanwhile, this year encouraged his thousands of employees to have more sex and more kids. He offered the advice not long after defending the intense ?996? work hours Chinese tech companies like his are notorious for?9am to 9pm, six days a week.

So, have the uber rich simply and completely lost touch with reality and what peasant people deal with on a day-to-day basis while they conjure deep thoughts in their gated kingdoms of exclusion and denial?

News flash for all the Ma?s And Musk?s: the reason all these uber populated countries are having less kids is due to the exact opposite of what they?re thinking, right down to the defense of soul crushing work weeks that ?underachievers? trying to raise functional families without access to full time nanny services and the best of everything have, you know, a bit rougher time with. Maybe they need to experience driving in rush hour traffic or sitting on a hot, sweaty subway rubbing shoulders with god knows who for a few days on their way home to make dinner or pick their kids up from daycare on time vs being whisked around by their personal driver or hell, just taking the heli to and fro. They don?t seem to comprehend how heavy the everyday stuff can hit when you have to actually get down in the dirt with it.

I may not have it nearly that bad, but I?m also not going to sit here oblivious to the fact that millions of people do. I?m also not by any means saying the rich are just kicking back all day while their underlings toil and struggle, but maybe just that making most people?s weekly wage in a matter of minutes or even seconds is at the very least incentivizing, probably even addicting. Especially if you realize that it is truly an elite and exclusive position to be in given our current economic structure.

But yeah, perhaps AI will solve everything. It would have to at the rate humanity is going. The road to hell...

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

"We need more of you peasants paying taxes for the military to protect our assets, so that we don't have to."

Thanks but no thanks, guys. I see the world you want to give us, and why would I want to have children just to damn them to that?

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

News flash for all the Ma?s And Musk?s: the reason all these uber populated countries are having less kids is due to the exact opposite of what they?re thinking, right down to the defense of soul crushing work weeks that ?underachievers? trying to raise functional families without access to full time nanny services and the best of everything have, you know, a bit rougher time with. Maybe they need to experience driving in rush hour traffic or sitting on a hot, sweaty subway rubbing shoulders with god knows who for a few days on their way home to make dinner or pick their kids up from daycare on time vs being whisked around by their personal driver or hell, just taking the heli to and fro. They don?t seem to comprehend how heavy the everyday stuff can hit when you have to actually get down in the dirt with it.

He also said that people should work 12h a week. 4 hour work day 3 days a week, to be more specific.

 

[Marik2]

The birth rate is really only low in Japan.

 

[Trunkage]

The birth rate is really only low in Japan.

Some ex-Eastern bloc countries are depopulating rapidly too.

 

[Anti-American Eagle]

I'd be fine with measures to boost population... as long as that doesn't mean to replace the population and we're also controlling population growth to prevent it from exploding. Worldwide. Needs to be done worldwide.

 

[Trunkage]

I'd be fine with measures to boost population... as long as that doesn't mean to replace the population and we're also controlling population growth to prevent it from exploding. Worldwide. Needs to be done worldwide.

Now, when you say replaced....

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

The birth rate is really only low in Japan.

I remember reading about the 4-2-1 problem in China.
Couple A: A1, A2 make baby A3
Couple B: B1, B2 make baby B3
A3 and B3 get married and become Couple C
Couple C: C1 and C2 make baby C3.

C3 is now an adult, and in the Chinese culture the adults take care of the elders, and they're a long-lived culture. So C3 has to care for C1, C2, A1, A2, B1 and B2, all while trying to find D1/D2 to have their family.
Apparently its a huge economic problem for them.

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

This is why we need socialism.

 

[McElroy]

The existence of a bunch of super-rich doesn't necessarily mean squalor for everybody else.

China had the one child policy and if few children are born now, population could start declining worryingly fast. The issue isn't small here either but the scale of it is.

 

[Dalisclock]

The world has close to 8 billion people right now. We're not exactly in danger of going extinct from lack of babies in the near future. If anything, we need to be having fewer kids for a while to stabilize out at a lower level(like 5 billion or something) to help with resource delpletion and pollution creation.

If you need more workers, I hear there are plenty who want to move to where the work is, but apparently that involves the dreaded I word which seems to terrify the shit out of certain people(because it always does). Or, you know, just replace them with robots like they've been doing anyway.

While I don't know Jack Ma, Elon Musk has come across as a while as a bit of an idiot about a lot of things. Props to helping commercial spaceflight, reusuable boosters and electric cars along, but a lot of what he opines about seems to come straight out of his ass rather then from any sort of knowledge of understanding(such as his belief in simulation theory). And his massive Starship looks like a debacle waiting to happen.

 

[Hawki]

The birth rate is really only low in Japan.

http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-rate/

Taiwan has the lowest. And a lot of countries are below replacement rates.

That aside, I'm far more concerned about overpopulation than underpopulation, and there's some who say that instead of peaking at 9/10 billion, the human population is set to plummet around mid-century. Which, for the environment, will be a good thing.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

More meat for the grinder, more gristle for the frontline. That's all the machine hungers. Bigger pools create more desperate fools in competition with each other for the scraps off the table of capitalist Utopia. Babies suck anyway. Adopt. Cut out the worst stage of human growth and do some bloody good at the same time. Your genes aren't that sacred.

 

[McElroy]

I hear there are plenty who want to move to where the welfare is

Fixed.

Anyway, not having children because "the globe already has plenty" is one of the worst mindsets to have. For one, people who might think like that are the ones who should be having kids in this world. Universalism is trash -- a birth in a developing country is worth a fraction of a birth here. Yes, even in carbon emissions.

 

[Dalisclock]

I hear there are plenty who want to move to where the welfare is

Fixed.

Anyway, not having children because "the globe already has plenty" is one of the worst mindsets to have. For one, people who might think like that are the ones who should be having kids in this world. Universalism is trash -- a birth in a developing country is worth a fraction of a birth here. Yes, even in carbon emissions.

Anything to back that up or is this just more brown/yellow peril BS(like it normally is)? Because it sounds like you're saying people who are born elsewhere are less human in some capacity.

And you're forgetting that immigrants contribute to the tax base NOW, not kids that won't contribute in any meaningful way for 2 decades. Or are they all just welfare mooches because reasons?

 

[Agema]

So, have the uber rich simply and completely lost touch with reality and what peasant people deal with on a day-to-day basis while they conjure deep thoughts in their gated kingdoms of exclusion and denial?

Probably. It's not their job to care what the little people think and do. And any solution to sorting out the world's problems that involves them making less profit or paying more tax is a non-starter.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

This is why we need socialism.

I guess that WOULD lead to a reduction in the population.

 

[McElroy]

I hear there are plenty who want to move to where the welfare is

Fixed.

Anyway, not having children because "the globe already has plenty" is one of the worst mindsets to have. For one, people who might think like that are the ones who should be having kids in this world. Universalism is trash -- a birth in a developing country is worth a fraction of a birth here. Yes, even in carbon emissions.

Anything to back that up or is this just more brown/yellow peril BS(like it normally is)? Because it sounds like you're saying people who are born elsewhere are less human in some capacity.

And you're forgetting that immigrants contribute to the tax base NOW, not kids that won't contribute in any meaningful way for 2 decades. Or are they all just welfare mooches because reasons?

Not less human, but human value doesn't add up while other things do. Consumption adds up, but so does quality of life. Education adds up, but it also increases cost of living. Efficiency adds up, but most profits go to capitalists and so on. Human value doesn't. A person who bases their "childfree" life on developing nations doing the reproducing does a disservice to the world.

I can think of one way immigrants from developing countries contribute to the tax base: doing low-wage jobs like elderly care, delivery work, cleaning, restaurant work, and providing services for other immigrants. On their own these jobs don't break even, but in theory the businesses who hire them enjoy better odds at staying afloat. Here in Finland we don't have these jobs for everyone and actually we don't want to create a class of working poor who end up burdening our wide welfare system anyway. Unemployed immigrants are worse in that regard, obviously. To top it off integration is tough because people tend to want to live in the few metro areas that exist which leads to specific areas drawing most immigrants. All in all immigration is an expenditure that won't pay itself back economically unless the society adapts more towards an unskilled workforce that doesn't speak the language. Human value once again doesn't add up, so that's not a plus either. Then there is the cultural effect which is more subjective, but I personally don't like the outlook of that either.

I hope my rambling is understandable.

 

[Agema]

All in all immigration is an expenditure that won't pay itself back economically...

That depends on your timescale. If you start thinking in terms of decades, it almost certainly does.

If you want your pension covered when you're an oldster, you might really appreciate that long-term view.

 

[Kwak]

This is what happens when abstract numbers rule civilisation over the actual things they're representing. To these people, if there is only a 2% instead of 5% growth in GDP, or quarterly profit, or share-market dividend - or whatever bullshit they've decided is more important than actual quality of life in our civilisation - it's literally the end of the world to them.

That's why the population must continue to grow, because every person represents a lifelong source of contribution to that little number next to the percentage sign and therefore their value can continue to rise, because that is all that matters. Despite all evidence to the contrary that more people, at this point in the balance of things, make every problem worse.

Perhaps if people were just brains to be harvested for the vast planet-wide quantum computer so the planet's processing power could increase, then it would be logical to increase the population.
But we're not, each body takes up resources and depends on other life and systems to sustain it, and those systems are failing because of the load we've put on them.