#demographic collapse

[folly-of-alexandria]

What does it say that in nearly every case where its stated that a country is in danger of under-going a "demographic collapse"/Low Fertility Rates I can almost universally identify 2/3 commonalities among them that is driving it that a lot of those nations always avoid talking about?

[yokelfelonking]

We look on with horror - and rightly so - at the Canadian medical system's callous disregard for human life by basically offering euthanasia as an answer for everything.

The thing I don't think a lot of people realize is that, due to the upcoming demographic collapse, pretty soon this is probably going to be worldwide, and that this is almost inevitable.

The entire first world has an aging population without the birth numbers to replace it. That means that, in the not-too-distant future, there are going to be a lot more old people with failing health than there's going to be qualified caretakers for them.

I mean, that's already the case now. I had a job working in a nursing home / physical rehab facility for about six months (which was all I cared to do there), and it was me and two CNAs to 35 patients. And that's standard. There's plenty of places where the staffing ratios are even worse.

And the care in some of these places is atrocious. You'll hear horror stories about the state they find some people in in nursing homes, with no one having come to check on them for days as they lay helpless in bed, in their own piss and shit, bedsores down to the bone.

And that's with "professional" "medical" "care". Families aren't necessarily better; it's a lot harder to take care of a helpless adult than it is an infant, and despite attempts by family to take care of them, folks still wind up with bedsores and infections and all sorts of problems that do them in.

And if you've got no one then you're really fucked; or maybe less so, depending on how you look at it, because you might die quicker alone.

And it's not just nursing homes. People in need of more acute care are going to have less and less necessary time and attention spent on them as there's more and more of them and fewer and fewer people to care for them. Right now ICUs typically have a 1-to-1 or 1-to-2 ratio of nurses to patients. What happens when it becomes 1-to-6? What happens when the person in the ICU who needs to be tended to for 15 - 20 minutes of every hour is being looked after by someone who's got to split their time between 6 other patients? That person can't spend a third of an hour of individual care on six people at once; it's not physically possible.

"So just hire more help!" You understand that hiring doctors and nurses and other skilled medical staff isn't like hiring more people to stock the shelves at Target or work the register at Burger King, right? You need people with education and training and the ability to actually pass that education and training and the mindset that goes along with caring for people. And the more acute the care, the sharper that person has to be.

And my point is, even if it was that way, there's still going to be more old people in need of care than there's going to be people to care for them.

What's the staffing ratio going to be for nursing homes in 2050? One nurse to 80 patients? One to 100? Acute care units with one nurse to 20 patients - patients who are laid up in bed and can't get up and can't go to the bathroom and can't clean themselves and can't get their own food or water? Are we going to have ICUs with 1 nurse to 10 patients? At that point those won't be care facilities, they'll be warehouses for the dying.

And this is where euthanasia will be given as an answer. "We can't care for all of these people, who are simply dying slow deaths. The best we can do is make it quick and painless."

And it is a slippery slope. We can see it happening in Canada right now, how more and more people are being offered assisted suicide as the answer for what would be otherwise difficult or inconvenient medical issues.

My prediction is that by the year 2050 euthanasia will be a standard medical "treatment" for the elderly and anyone with chronic conditions.

And I legit don't have a good answer about that.

[sweettntmag]

Birth rates in Trinidad and Tobago: Why declining fertility threatens pensions, growth and retirement security

Birth rates in Trinidad and Tobago have fallen sharply over the past five decades, creating a structural demographic shift that threatens economic growth, the sustainability of public pensions, and the financial security of future retirees. The country’s crude birth rate declined from about 29 births per 1,000 people in the early 1980s to roughly 10.7 by 2023, with projections suggesting further…

Birth rates in Trinidad and Tobago: Why declining fertility threatens pensions, growth and retirement security

[sweettntmag]

Why Elon Musk says population collapse is a bigger threat than global warming

Population collapse has moved from an abstract demographic concern to a central warning voiced by some of the world’s most influential thinkers. Elon Musk has repeatedly argued that falling birth rates pose a more serious long-term threat to civilisation than climate change. His reasoning is not rooted in ideology or nostalgia, but in arithmetic, technology, and social behaviour. At the heart of…

Why Elon Musk says population collapse is a bigger threat than global warming

[roofhorse]

i've been playing on the same save of tropico 5 for so long that the country is now experiencing the demographic collapse that heavily industrialised nations go through and El Presidente is reaching biblical levels of longevity

[veganfrancisbacon]

Have you considered that maybe the real reason for declining birth rates is that all the human souls that need to be born are currently in circulation and don't need to be reincarnated yet? Calm down about demographic shifts, 8 billion is more than we've had here at once. Leave the soul pool alone for a while and let it recharge.

[wisemansthoughts]

Day 84 of telling people to Have More Babies, The Pending Doomsday of Retirement!!

Day 84 of telling people to Have More Babies, The Pending Doomsday of Retirement!!

The Developed world and even some parts of the Developing world are facing the largest ever demographic change in history. The combination of increasing life expectancies due to improvements of hygiene and in our diets, coupled with the issue of low fertility rates (approximately the total number of children born to each woman) being way below the 2.1 needed just to replace the population, such…

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[wisemansthoughts]

Day 79 of telling people to Have More Babies, The Pending Doomsday of Retirement!!

Day 79 of telling people to Have More Babies, The Pending Doomsday of Retirement!!

The Developed world and even some parts of the Developing world are facing the largest ever demographic change in history. The combination of increasing life expectancies due to improvements of hygiene and in our diets, coupled with the issue of low fertility rates (approximately the total number of children born to each woman) being way below the 2.1 needed just to replace the population, such…

View On WordPress