https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/world...nking.html

Quote:Fewer babies’ cries. More abandoned homes. Toward the middle of this century, as deaths start to exceed births, changes will come that are hard to fathom.

All over the world, countries are confronting population stagnation and a fertility bust, a dizzying reversal unmatched in recorded history that will make first-birthday parties a rarer sight than funerals, and empty homes a common eyesore.
Maternity wards are already shutting down in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea can’t find enough students, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of properties have been razed, with the land turned into parks.
Like an avalanche, the demographic forces — pushing toward more deaths than births — seem to be expanding and accelerating. Though some countries continue to see their populations grow, especially in Africa, fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere else. Demographers now predict that by the latter half of the century or possibly earlier, the global population will enter a sustained decline for the first time.
A planet with fewer people could ease pressure on resources, slow the destructive impact of climate change and reduce household burdens for women. But the census announcements this month from China and the United States, which showed the slowest rates of population growth in decades for both countries, also point to hard-to-fathom adjustments.

The strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers and more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organized — around the notion that a surplus of young people will drive economies and help pay for the old. It may also require a reconceptualization of family and nation. Imagine entire regions where everyone is 70 or older. Imagine governments laying out huge bonuses for immigrants and mothers with lots of children. Imagine a gig economy filled with grandparents and Super Bowl ads promoting procreation.


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Siblings in Seoul, South Korea. The country’s fertility rate is the lowest in the developed world.Credit...Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters
“A paradigm shift is necessary,” said Frank Swiaczny, a German demographer who was the chief of population trends and analysis for the United Nations until last year. “Countries need to learn to live with and adapt to decline.”
The ramifications and responses have already begun to appear, especially in East Asia and Europe. From Hungary to China, from Sweden to Japan, governments are struggling to balance the demands of a swelling older cohort with the needs of young people whose most intimate decisions about childbearing are being shaped by factors both positive (more work opportunities for women) and negative (persistent gender inequality and high living costs).
The 20th century presented a very different challenge. The global population saw its greatest increase in known history, from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000, as life spans lengthened and infant mortality declined. In some countries — representing about a third of the world’s people — those growth dynamics are still in play. By the end of the century, Nigeria could surpass China in population; across sub-Saharan Africa, families are still having four or five children.

But nearly everywhere else, the era of high fertility is ending. As women have gained more access to education and contraception, and as the anxieties associated with having children continue to intensify, more parents are delaying pregnancy and fewer babies are being born. Even in countries long associated with rapid growth, such as India and Mexico, birthrates are falling toward, or are already below, the replacement rate of 2.1 children per family.


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A center for elderly people in Washington, D.C. U.S. population growth has slowed to its lowest rate in decades.Credit...Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times
The change may take decades, but once it starts, decline (just like growth) spirals exponentially. With fewer births, fewer girls grow up to have children, and if they have smaller families than their parents did — which is happening in dozens of countries — the drop starts to look like a rock thrown off a cliff.
“It becomes a cyclical mechanism,” said Stuart Gietel Basten, an expert on Asian demographics and a professor of social science and public policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “It’s demographic momentum.”
Some countries, like the United States, Australia and Canada, where birthrates hover between 1.5 and 2, have blunted the impact with immigrants. But in Eastern Europe, migration out of the region has compounded depopulation, and in large parts of Asia, the “demographic time bomb” that first became a subject of debate a few decades ago has finally gone off.
South Korea’s fertility rate dropped to a record low of 0.92 in 2019 — less than one child per woman, the lowest rate in the developed world. Every month for the past 59 months, the total number of babies born in the country has dropped to a record depth.


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Families in sub-Saharan Africa are often still having four or five children. By the end of the century, Nigeria could surpass China in population.Credit...Luis Tato/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
That declining birthrate, coupled with a rapid industrialization that has pushed people from rural towns to big cities, has created what can feel like a two-tiered society. While major metropolises like Seoul continue to grow, putting intense pressure on infrastructure and housing, in regional towns it’s easy to find schools shut and abandoned, their playgrounds overgrown with weeds, because there are not enough children.

Expectant mothers in many areas can no longer find obstetricians or postnatal care centers. Universities below the elite level, especially outside Seoul, find it increasingly hard to fill their ranks — the number of 18-year-olds in South Korea has fallen from about 900,000 in 1992 to 500,000 today. To attract students, some schools have offered scholarships and even iPhones.
To goose the birthrate, the government has handed out baby bonuses. It increased child allowances and medical subsidies for fertility treatments and pregnancy. Health officials have showered newborns with gifts of beef, baby clothes and toys. The government is also building kindergartens and day care centers by the hundreds. In Seoul, every bus and subway car has pink seats reserved for pregnant women.
But this month, Deputy Prime Minister Hong Nam-ki admitted that the government — which has spent more than $178 billion over the past 15 years encouraging women to have more babies — was not making enough progress. In many families, the shift feels cultural and permanent.


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A village school in Gangjin County, South Korea, has enrolled illiterate older people so that it can stay open as the number of children in the area has dwindled.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
“My grandparents had six children, and my parents five, because their generations believed in having multiple children,” said Kim Mi-kyung, 38, a stay-at-home parent. “I have only one child. To my and younger generations, all things considered, it just doesn’t pay to have many children.”
Thousands of miles away, in Italy, the sentiment is similar, with a different backdrop.
In Capracotta, a small town in southern Italy, a sign in red letters on an 18th-century stone building looking on to the Apennine Mountains reads “Home of School Kindergarten” — but today, the building is a nursing home.

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Good. I've said time and time again, there are just too damned many people in this world, and the entire human race is genetically dumbing down over it. Average IQ's are dropping, because people are artificially being kept alive who would have, years ago, died from stupidity and taken their genes with them, and out of the gene pool. Yeah, I'm a harsh bastard, but survival sometimes requires harsh bastards, whether survival of individual families, nations, or the entire human race.

Years ago, I had a friend named Dave. he was killed in 1993, just one month after the birth of his third and last child. He used to be fond of telling me that "in the end, the wild will win", and the older I get, the more truth in that statement I see. Nature has a way of keeping things in check. The classic example is Alaskan Lemmings and their every-seven-year suicide march, when hundreds of thousands of lemmings, answering their overpopulation call, march en masse off of cliffs and into the sea, committing mas suicide. That works, in one form or another, for all species. Deer, for example, when they get overpopulated, eat all the forage available and die of starvation in droves because they didn't keep their libidos in check.

ALL species. Humans included.

I believe that is what we are seeing in operation with declining birth rates. There are now almost 8 BILLION people on this planet. Just in my lifetime, I have seen the world population increase by over 250 percent. That is more than 2 1/2 people gobbing up space that one person used to occupy. It couldn't go on like that forever without overloading the carrying capacity of the planet. Like deer overpopulation, humans would eventually starve out for lack or resources until the population got back down to manageable levels.

Nature has a number of mechanisms to combat that problem. War is one. Starvation another. In humans, psychology seems to be ruling that roost. People are fearful of the future now, and that is translating to waiting or forgoing having kids at all. Who wants to bring kids into an uncertain world where they may not survive?

I'm as susceptible as the next guy to that sort of pressure. My grand dad had 13 kids. My dad had 5. I had one, just replacing myself in the world. My brother had none. My son has 3 so far, so things may be looking up as far as demographic shifts go. My genes will stay in the pool for at least another generation, and probably more. With any luck, the shift will entail a concurrent rise in the species IQ as the dumber specimens are allowed to die off.

Africa, despite the high birth rate mentioned in the article, is not immune to the dictates of nature. They already have a fairly high barbaric penchant for killing one another off and an inability to feed themselves, and that will only get worse as resource pressures increase in response to rising populations there. 

Just look at Rhodesia. The natives were incapable of feeding themselves, and when white farmers came in and started producing more food, the population increased due to the higher standards of living. War broke out, lots of folks were killed, and the white farmers were either killed or deported, run off of their land, so that natives could take over the farms. Then the natives stopped farming the land, for lack of ability and will. They wanted native control, but did not have the foresight to realize that control of land means nothing if you are not doing anything with it. More people died. The economy went to hell. Now they are trying to get more white farmers to come back to feed the natives, but not many are taking up that call. They know what happened last time.  

Look for more African wars, prosecuted more ruthlessly, as population pressures increase. Also look for more massive migrations from Africa as Africans seek to leave there and take over new lands with new resources in their attempt to escape the overpopulation bomb of their own making.

Some of those lands they attempt to take over will be yours, and mine. Best get prepared for it, because it's coming.

In the end, the wild will win.

.

Call me weird but I am good with less people around. 

Maybe I am reading too many post-apocalypses books 

(05-26-2021, 02:19 AM)ABNARTY Wrote: Call me weird but I am good with less people around. 

Maybe I am reading too many post-apocalypses books 

I recommend the post-apocalyptic books of Franklin Horton. The "Borrowed World" series in particular, although the "Mad Mick" series is pretty damned good, too. I hear in the wind that there is about to be some sort of shake-up between those two series, and they are set in the same literary universe, a few miles apart.

Franklin is a personal friend of mine, for years now. As a matter of fact, I inspired one of his characters in "The Borrowed World" series. He has a habit of killing off his characters. Every time a new title in the series comes out, I have to rush to get it to make sure he hasn't killed off "my" character, too.

Franklin sometimes has a twist to him, and doesn't mind shocking folks upon occasion. I recall once years ago when he confided in me that he wanted to don a pair of dark sunglasses, get one of those red-tipped blind canes, and drive his car down the main street of our home town tapping the yellow line with the cane and see how long it took for the cops to stop him...

... gong to college only made him worse.

.

https://www.bitchute.com/video/iioPhEORl8QF/

(05-26-2021, 03:14 AM)Ninurta Wrote:

(05-26-2021, 02:19 AM)ABNARTY Wrote: Call me weird but I am good with less people around. 

Maybe I am reading too many post-apocalypses books 

I recommend the post-apocalyptic books of Franklin Horton. The "Borrowed World" series in particular, although the "Mad Mick" series is pretty damned good, too. I hear in the wind that there is about to be some sort of shake-up between those two series, and they are set in the same literary universe, a few miles apart.

Franklin is a personal friend of mine, for years now. As a matter of fact, I inspired one of his characters in "The Borrowed World" series. He has a habit of killing off his characters. Every time a new title in the series comes out, I have to rush to get it to make sure he hasn't killed off "my" character, too.

Franklin sometimes has a twist to him, and doesn't mind shocking folks upon occasion. I recall once years ago when he confided in me that he wanted to don a pair of dark sunglasses, get one of those red-tipped blind canes, and drive his car down the main street of our home town tapping the yellow line with the cane and see how long it took for the cops to stop him...

... gong to college only made him worse.

.

I will check out the books. Thanks.

https://japantoday.com/category/national...an-in-2020

Quote:Record low number of pregnancies reported in Japan in 2020

May 27  10:25 am JST  97 Comments
TOKYO
The number of pregnancies reported in 2020 reached a new low amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, government data showed Wednesday.
Municipalities across Japan recorded 872,227 pregnancies last year, down 4.8 percent from a year before, suggesting that the number of babies born in 2021 is likely to fall below the 800,000 line for the first time.
The data from the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare puts even more pressure on the government, which in addition to tackling a persistently low birth rate is also dealing with a rapidly aging population.
Soaring social security spending to cover pensions and medical care for the elderly weighs heavily on the world's third-largest economy's budget.
The annual number of newborns sank below 900,000 for the first time in 2019. The number is likely to further decline to below 850,000 in 2020, according to government sources.
The projected fall in births in 2021 is likely the result of the tough employment situation amid the novel coronavirus pandemic and a reluctance for women to travel to their parents' home to give birth, as is tradition in Japan.
The ministry on Wednesday released the number of pregnancies reported in November and December and added it to the total already compiled for January to October.
There were 69,804 record pregnancies in November, down 4.8 percent from the year before and 75,755 in December, down 1.8 percent.
Every month except for March posted a year-on-year decline in the number of pregnancies in 2020, with the largest fall of 17.6 percent registered in May, two months after public concern over the spread of the pandemic heightened and organizers decided to postpone the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics by one year to the summer of 2021.
The ministry said the number of pregnancies has continued to decline into 2021, with the number dropping 7.1 percent in January from the year before to 76,985.
© KYODO

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

https://www.bitchute.com/video/rfbrSiaqO4lL/