Jack Belvedere

There's been a lot of press this week about Japan, since it's been a year anniversary of the tsunami. One aspect that is striking is that there's been another surge of articles about how Japan is declining, particularly in population, and its difficulty recovering (economically and politically) from the disasters.

Right now, only 2 of their nuclear plants (which previously supplied over a third of their country's power) have come back online and no one has a clue when or if the others will come back online.

Dweeb Patrick Buchanan wrote a piece printed today in which he seemed to be blaming all of Japan's population woes onto women using birth control and abortion. (Depressed about Limbaugh, Buchanan?!)

Actually, the means ARE in dispute, with multiple causative factors listed. Interestingly, this seems to be one of the primary causes:

I also got a laugh out of this quote from the same article:
Besides blaming SL , some of the other causes mentioned include high education, devotion to raising healthy children, late marriage, increased participation of women in the labor force, small living spaces, education about the problems of overpopulation, and the high costs of child education.

It gets you thinking that any of this can and probably will happen to any advanced civilization including ours. Do you think Japan will be able to recover, and how? Do you think we're all just one disaster away from the death of our own civilization? Can we learn anything from it?

Ann Otoole

Yes. SL is seriously eating Japan.

http://edge.ebaumsworld.com/picture/...6/GODZILLA.png

* edit * NSFW

eku Zhong

Japan's biggest problem is the exploitation of temporary workers..

Japan Economy | Temporary Workers

it sounds trite but it sits at the root of most of the problems, including the decreasing birthrate, late marriage among many other things.

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Paula001 Goldschein

having hit 7,000,000,000 i think we are far off "one disaster away from the death of our own civilization"

here it mostly depends on government control, funds, tax breaks and paid stay home nurturing time for mom and/or daddy..

Ariane

The tsunami and the nuclear disaster is going to take a while to recover from.

As for the population decline, there is nothing to recover from. Japan is ahead of the curve, reducing the population via attrition which is the best way to do it. The other ways are starvation, disease and bloodshed.

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eku Zhong

more people has nothing to do with the health of civilisation... more people means fewer rights for the many .. and sadly more for the privileged few.


IMHO civilisation is going full circle and heading back to feudal times of indentured servitude of the masses to serve the pampered few who sit at the top of the heap...

Ann Otoole

This condition never lasts a long time. It is why the necessary change is called revolution. It just flips everything over and the same crap starts all over with a different elite caste.

Earth needs governance. But not by earthlings.

Imnotgoing Sideways

Please don't let anyone in Doll Works see that. It's bad enough what they did with Renamon avatars... (._.)

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Zaida Gearbox

I don't have a cite to back this up. I heard it from Spawn, but he's pretty good about not spouting bullshit. He said he read somewhere that the only reason the US population is continuing to go up is because of immigration. If the immigrants went home or stopped coming our population would be going down.

Ann Otoole

Earth's population will continue to rise as long as sex feels good.

Paula001 Goldschein

i didn't say population growth means also better medical care for the mass or that it raises justice..
i don't understand why you have quoted me

eku Zhong

i quoted you before you added the government care part.

when you just said


this is one of the problems caused by editing..
that what is quoted then looks incomplete because of additions to the post.. which effectively alter the main meaning.

Twisted Pharaoh

People are working or studying and don't have time to raise children. Or they are unemployed and they don't have the money.

A country can have birth control and abortion, and have a fertility rate above 2.0, if there are the right social measures.

Karen

Just like here in the USA

Future of America
"The forecast for the next five to 10 years: more of the same, with paltry pay gains, worsening working conditions, and little job security. Right on up to the C-suite, more jobs will be freelance and temporary, and even seemingly permanent positions will be at greater risk. "When I hear people talk about temp vs. permanent jobs, I laugh," says Barry Asin, chief analyst at the Los Altos (Calif.) labor-analysis firm Staffing Industry Analysts. "The idea that any job is permanent has been well proven not to be true." As Kelly Services, CEO Carl Camden puts it: "We're all temps now."

Nibb Tardis

You mean the wrong social measures.

We should be actively working on decreasing the fertility rate. If we don't deal with overpopulation ourselves, then at some point, the laws of nature and physics are going to find a way to reestablish the equilibrium as they always do, and it won't be pretty.

Kara Spengler

Although following the typical attention span most of the news coverage has long since gone even though what they were covering did not. If you look for it you will find random pieces on it though.

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Ann Otoole

No damage reported after quake in north Japan; 50 cm tsunami warning issued - Yahoo! News

eku Zhong

Japan Meteorological Agency | Earthquake Information

thats a particularly bad area for tsunami as the sea is forced in the straits between honshu and hokkaido..

Twisted Pharaoh

You mean we need to work on reducing our ecological footprint and raising our biocapacity (like stopping cultivating tobacco and making more food), if we do there is enough resources on planet to feed more people.


http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/i...rld_footprint/

Beebo Brink

I don't want more people even if we can feed them. You may like living in a sardine can but I sure as hell don't. Sheer capacity is not a persuasive argument for population growth.

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Twisted Pharaoh

Well if people start living like americans do it's not 2 planets that we will need but 14 5 or so. Europe and Japan overconsume too to be honest.


If all the world was living like an average habitant of these countries, how many planets would we consume?

French : 2.5 planets
American: 5 planets
Brazilian: 1.3 planets
Chinese: 1,8 planets
Indian: 0,8 planets

http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth...on_our_planet/


About the sardine part there is plenty empty spaces in my country. People like living in town and have derserted the countryside.

Ann Otoole

Jack Belvedere

That's the thing. I can read about these countries undergoing a population decline and yet the majority lives and continues being born in a few places (compared to the whole). Population growth charts are staggering.

World Population Clock: 7 Billion People - Worldometers

Birth control can't be a bad thing when you look at those numbers and figure in hunger and..daaaamn, SPACE.

Now, that 39% of Japanese men who think sex is despicable. There's just no help for them!

Nibb Tardis

On paper maybe, but in reality that won't happen. We can't even agree on stuff as obvious as limiting CO2 emissions or fishing quotas.

Industrialized countries will never give up on their standard of living, there is no way you are going to make America or Europe cut down to the level of India or even Brazil. Now that China and India are getting hooked on the same capitalist way of life as we are, there's no going back.

Resources are limited, but efficiency and productivity increases are also limited by the law of diminishing returns. There is only so much margin for improvement, and the more you optimize production the more expensive it gets in another area and the more fragile the whole system gets.

Besides, what's the point of sustaining more people if everybody has to be miserable ? It's simply cheaper and so much easier to limit the population increase. It's better to have fewer people in the world, but in greater comfort and a more robust and safer ecosystem.

Morgoth

With regards the notion of fertility control, the important thing is to give people, especially women, the world over a choice as to having children or not- access to birth control and a culture that does not condemn them for using it. Also, societies which either use children as a resource for making money via their labour, or greatly prioritise having one gender rather than another will have more children (unless in a country where they practice sex selective abortion on a large scale). Progress with respect to gender equality could remove many of these problems, except for the use of children as labour, which of course is also a problem that needs tackling.