6 ms·

This is likely the worst issue humanity will be facing over the next 50 years, even more than climate change. An increasingly old demographic will sabatoge the

This is likely the worst issue humanity will be facing over the next 50 years, even more than climate change. An increasingly old demographic will sabatoge the future of humanity as they drain enormous resources and abuse democratic processes to reroute resources to their preservation of life over young people and familes. Young people and families will choke to death under the strain of elders who demand unlimited services, money, support while outvoting them, staying in jobs and houses and giving little to nothing back to society. Innovation will grind to a halt, families will continue to shrink, work hours will get longer and longer as taxes get higher and higher to pay for and increasingly super old leadership and voting base. Society will begin to lose hope to solve problems like going into space or fixing climate change as increasingly the elderly population will obsess over themselves and continued life. It is one of the hardest moral problems we will face in our era.

MrBuddyCasino 6mo ago
I don’t know why people downvoted this because it is obviously correct. In a democracy you have to buy the votes of the largest constituency with other people’s money, which in this case is the boomers votes with the younger generations money. This will continue until nothing is left. This already happened with the triple pension lock in GB, mathematically ensuring the bankruptcy of the state.
- lenerdenator 6mo ago
  It's happening in the US, too. I know of a senior couple where the husband recently retired after forty years of working in a professional field. They live in a house worth over $750k that is paid off. They have three new or late-model vehicles. Both the husband and wife could, if necessary, work for an income. They also collect Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance checks after enrolling for them. The common name for this is Social Security. Why the hell are they able to collect on that? They have the ability to work and assets that could readily be made liquid to fund living expenses.
  - nixon_why69 6mo ago
    SS has to pay everyone to be viable. If you make it more complicated the politics turn into a nightmare.
    - adrianN 6mo ago
      Social security is already a redistribution scheme, it already is more complicated.
  - WalterBright 6mo ago
    > Why the hell are they able to collect on that? People in the higher income brackets get far less back on SS than they paid in.
    - catgary 6mo ago
      Yeah, because they aren’t in need of a social safety net.
    - Terr_ 6mo ago
      I think it's important to emphasize that much of the in/out money asymmetry in SS is not rich versus poor ... but old versus dead. Which, incidentally, is good and proper! OASDI is an insurance policy to cover an (alive) person faced with starvation or living in a ditch. That's a very different set of tradeoffs from an investment account that can pass to children who don't need it. Like all insurance, it depends on a portion of people who pay in and then don't need it, even if sometimes that's because they've, er, passed beyond all material needs.
    - lenerdenator 6mo ago
      They shouldn't get any. This is a fund for widows, orphans, and those who are simply unable to earn any sort of money to fund their survival. They're none of the above.
      - WalterBright 6mo ago
- opo 6mo ago
  >...I don’t know why people downvoted this because it is obviously correct. In a democracy you have to buy the votes of the largest constituency with other people’s money, In the last few decades both political parties in the USA have tried to outdo each other in reckless over-spending, but for the first couple hundred years that wasn't the case. Something changed.
  - croon 6mo ago
    There wasn't a speculative economy based on increasingly distant balance sheets. The stock market was initially created to crowdfund big investments. It's still that in theory, but in practice it's something very different now. In a similar manner to bastardizing the stock market, the national budget is run in any way that is short term beneficial and long term nebulous.
  - MrBuddyCasino 6mo ago
    You can read this exact criticism of democracy in „Athenaion Politeia“, (The Old Oligarch), 5th century BCE. There is nothing new under the sun. It always worked like this. Democracy is simply an incredibly destructive form of government.
    - tsunamifury 6mo ago
      To ignore scale differences here is to negate what could have been a great comment into a miss.
      - MrBuddyCasino 6mo ago
        Scale is an important aspect. If something doesn’t work in a greek city state, it certainly won’t work in anything larger.
    - bombcar 6mo ago
      Democracy hasn’t even been good at its sole point - preventing violent revolution.
- Theodores 6mo ago
  The B-word - boomer - is what it is about. The government has always been about them, well, at least since WW2, or WW Eleven as one of the few youthful members of Congress would have it. In the UK and elsewhere in Europe we had free education for the boomers, with benefits for them in the holidays. But they hoisted the ladder up after them. Final salary pensions, boomers had that, but they deprived others of getting the same perk. The same with healthcare and everything the state does, it was all designed for boomers. The boomers once had people waving CND and Peace signs in their midst, however, after 9/11 the boomers found themselves back in their happy space of having an external enemy, the semi-fictional 'al-qaeda' mercenaries that none of them ever met. Their younger selves would not have been clamouring for war, but, after the planes hit the towers, they were just gagging to support more and more bombing, all in their name. The boomers paid for the nukes, the planes to deliver them and the entire war machine, whilst pricing their kids out of the housing market whilst chastising their own kids with 'back in our day we had nothing and had to work harder than you with your latte and iphone'. We all know the deal. The problem is not just a few geriatrics in power, which societies have had problems with ever since the first king, it is bigger than that, it is the boomers that do not care about anything other than their selfish world view, that can't be argued with because you can't 'cheek your elders'. The problem with the boomers is that many of their children honestly believe they can mimic the boomer life, where you knuckle down and pay for that mortgage like they did and where you spew toxic emissions everywhere you go, because boomers are entirely car dependent.
ButlerianJihad 6mo ago
When 250 years old you reach, look as good, you will not!
johngossman 6mo ago
If only the olds would die we could build more datacenters! More seriously, why wouldn't older, longer-lived people be more likely to address long-term problems like climate change?
- diordiderot 6mo ago
  whats wrong with datacenters?
  - gegtik 6mo ago
    nothing, didn't you read what he wrote? he's advocating to build more of them.
- tokai 6mo ago
  Why do assume that its young people that want datacenters? Its not zoomers' money being invested into Oracle.
- avidiax 6mo ago
  > More seriously, why wouldn't older, longer-lived people be more likely to address long-term problems like climate change? Why would people with a short-term future be likely to address long-term problems?
scythe 6mo ago
>This is likely the worst issue humanity will be facing over the next 50 years, even more than climate change. Tangent, I know, but the climate change horizon is very long, much longer than 50 years. For example, a common projection is that the sea level will rise by almost one meter by 2100. This is already an unpleasant forecast. But it will continue to rise: under a 2 C warming scenario, sea levels reach (median prediction) 2.7 meters above the 2000 levels in 2300, which would be catastrophic. 2300 may seem far away, but it will come. The current estimate is that we need to eliminate emissions this century and we will thereafter still need to do mitigation and removal to undo the damage, or extant coastal settlements will be destroyed. It is a very long process. See e.g.: https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1584 https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1584
- tsunamifury 6mo ago
  Do you know what the timelines are for demographic collapse? Similar and much worse, who will need the coastal cities if our trends continue. AND they have NO way have being undone AT ALL after the previous hundred years of trends set in.

MrBuddyCasino 6mo ago

I don’t know why people downvoted this because it is obviously correct. In a democracy you have to buy the votes of the largest constituency with other people’s money, which in this case is the boomers votes with the younger generations money. This will continue until nothing is left. This already happened with the triple pension lock in GB, mathematically ensuring the bankruptcy of the state.

lenerdenator 6mo ago
It's happening in the US, too. I know of a senior couple where the husband recently retired after forty years of working in a professional field. They live in a house worth over $750k that is paid off. They have three new or late-model vehicles. Both the husband and wife could, if necessary, work for an income. They also collect Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance checks after enrolling for them. The common name for this is Social Security. Why the hell are they able to collect on that? They have the ability to work and assets that could readily be made liquid to fund living expenses.
- nixon_why69 6mo ago
  SS has to pay everyone to be viable. If you make it more complicated the politics turn into a nightmare.
  - adrianN 6mo ago
    Social security is already a redistribution scheme, it already is more complicated.
- WalterBright 6mo ago
  > Why the hell are they able to collect on that? People in the higher income brackets get far less back on SS than they paid in.
  - catgary 6mo ago
    Yeah, because they aren’t in need of a social safety net.
  - Terr_ 6mo ago
    I think it's important to emphasize that much of the in/out money asymmetry in SS is not rich versus poor ... but old versus dead. Which, incidentally, is good and proper! OASDI is an insurance policy to cover an (alive) person faced with starvation or living in a ditch. That's a very different set of tradeoffs from an investment account that can pass to children who don't need it. Like all insurance, it depends on a portion of people who pay in and then don't need it, even if sometimes that's because they've, er, passed beyond all material needs.
  - lenerdenator 6mo ago
    They shouldn't get any. This is a fund for widows, orphans, and those who are simply unable to earn any sort of money to fund their survival. They're none of the above.
    - WalterBright 6mo ago
opo 6mo ago
>...I don’t know why people downvoted this because it is obviously correct. In a democracy you have to buy the votes of the largest constituency with other people’s money, In the last few decades both political parties in the USA have tried to outdo each other in reckless over-spending, but for the first couple hundred years that wasn't the case. Something changed.
- croon 6mo ago
  There wasn't a speculative economy based on increasingly distant balance sheets. The stock market was initially created to crowdfund big investments. It's still that in theory, but in practice it's something very different now. In a similar manner to bastardizing the stock market, the national budget is run in any way that is short term beneficial and long term nebulous.
- MrBuddyCasino 6mo ago
  You can read this exact criticism of democracy in „Athenaion Politeia“, (The Old Oligarch), 5th century BCE. There is nothing new under the sun. It always worked like this. Democracy is simply an incredibly destructive form of government.
  - tsunamifury 6mo ago
    To ignore scale differences here is to negate what could have been a great comment into a miss.
    - MrBuddyCasino 6mo ago
      Scale is an important aspect. If something doesn’t work in a greek city state, it certainly won’t work in anything larger.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    Democracy hasn’t even been good at its sole point - preventing violent revolution.
Theodores 6mo ago
The B-word - boomer - is what it is about. The government has always been about them, well, at least since WW2, or WW Eleven as one of the few youthful members of Congress would have it. In the UK and elsewhere in Europe we had free education for the boomers, with benefits for them in the holidays. But they hoisted the ladder up after them. Final salary pensions, boomers had that, but they deprived others of getting the same perk. The same with healthcare and everything the state does, it was all designed for boomers. The boomers once had people waving CND and Peace signs in their midst, however, after 9/11 the boomers found themselves back in their happy space of having an external enemy, the semi-fictional 'al-qaeda' mercenaries that none of them ever met. Their younger selves would not have been clamouring for war, but, after the planes hit the towers, they were just gagging to support more and more bombing, all in their name. The boomers paid for the nukes, the planes to deliver them and the entire war machine, whilst pricing their kids out of the housing market whilst chastising their own kids with 'back in our day we had nothing and had to work harder than you with your latte and iphone'. We all know the deal. The problem is not just a few geriatrics in power, which societies have had problems with ever since the first king, it is bigger than that, it is the boomers that do not care about anything other than their selfish world view, that can't be argued with because you can't 'cheek your elders'. The problem with the boomers is that many of their children honestly believe they can mimic the boomer life, where you knuckle down and pay for that mortgage like they did and where you spew toxic emissions everywhere you go, because boomers are entirely car dependent.

ButlerianJihad 6mo ago

When 250 years old you reach, look as good, you will not!

johngossman 6mo ago

If only the olds would die we could build more datacenters! More seriously, why wouldn't older, longer-lived people be more likely to address long-term problems like climate change?

diordiderot 6mo ago
whats wrong with datacenters?
- gegtik 6mo ago
  nothing, didn't you read what he wrote? he's advocating to build more of them.
tokai 6mo ago
Why do assume that its young people that want datacenters? Its not zoomers' money being invested into Oracle.
avidiax 6mo ago
> More seriously, why wouldn't older, longer-lived people be more likely to address long-term problems like climate change? Why would people with a short-term future be likely to address long-term problems?

scythe 6mo ago

>This is likely the worst issue humanity will be facing over the next 50 years, even more than climate change. Tangent, I know, but the climate change horizon is very long, much longer than 50 years. For example, a common projection is that the sea level will rise by almost one meter by 2100. This is already an unpleasant forecast. But it will continue to rise: under a 2 C warming scenario, sea levels reach (median prediction) 2.7 meters above the 2000 levels in 2300, which would be catastrophic. 2300 may seem far away, but it will come. The current estimate is that we need to eliminate emissions this century and we will thereafter still need to do mitigation and removal to undo the damage, or extant coastal settlements will be destroyed. It is a very long process. See e.g.: https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1584 https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1584

tsunamifury 6mo ago
Do you know what the timelines are for demographic collapse? Similar and much worse, who will need the coastal cities if our trends continue. AND they have NO way have being undone AT ALL after the previous hundred years of trends set in.