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.

Day 400 of telling people to Have More Babies, The Pending Doomsday of Retirement!

Day 400 of telling people to Have More Babies, The Pending Doomsday of Retirement!

Photo by shutter_speed on Pexels.com The Problem 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…

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A week ago, South Korea asked illegal Uzbekistani immigrants to leave the country or face deportation.

For context, South Korea has some of the strictest immigration laws in the developed world. SK’s immigration rates are rock-bottom compared to most Western countries.

Something that wouldn’t be a problem if SK’s fertility rates weren’t also rock-bottom.

Experts have repeatedly warned homogenous nations like South Korea of a potential demographic collapse if measures aren’t taken to reverse the rapid population decline. However, with an ongoing cost of living crisis, South Koreans are understandably hesitant to settle down and start families.

SK is in a dire state, and relaxing immigration laws to encourage legal migration could help. Alternatively, SK could institute policies that encourage the existing populace to have more children, i.e. Child Benefits, subsidised Childcare services, married allowances, etc. Policies that target cost of living, like rent assistance, mortgage tax relief, and regressive tax reductions are also essential.

Unfortunately, these programs are expensive, and SK’s debt-to-GDP ratio has increased dramatically since the pandemic. In a time when the South Korean government is incentivised to cut spending and raise taxes, policies that help stimulate local population growth just aren’t viable.

TL;DR: kicking out illegals does nothing to address South Korea’s actual problem - a rapidly ageing population.

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.

^^^ Hmm, I wonder why. 🤔 Couldn't resist the temptation to turn a good article into a meme.

The actual article from DailyKos:

The Washington Post is very worried that American women don't want to marry Trump supporters

If that means a shrinking population in red states then I'm all for it!

This photo from Alabama in the previous decade doesn't depict a Trump rally. But it would be surprising if the guys here were not fully on board with The Donald.

Is it any wonder why there are so many Republican incels?

whiskey i fear we've created a monster. i keep getting notes for this post HELP

YEAH ME TOO. GOOD LORD. MAC WE'VE CREATED A MONSTER. WHAT HAVE WE DONE

honestly the saddest part about like americans with how we are so desensitized to violence is that everyone like 30 years old or younger didnt even get a choice really in the matter

instead of saying "you look sour/pissed/unhappy" my coworkers and I are now saying "you look like you drive a jeep"

The amazing thing is how relatively cheap land+favorable geography meant that it took the US way longer to experience birthrate collapse despite as much lib propaganda as the rest of the west, argentina tier(in different ways) bad economic policy since 1981, and parenting norms especially in middle class/"white" america that's down there with south korea/abbo penile subincision cults in abusiveness.

yknow it’s more than a little sad that every artists ‘hand-wringing panicking’ about what ai would do to the industry and how it would replace a lot of the already slim meat-and-potatoes jobs we rely on to survive were overwhelmingly proven true months after the technology really became widespread. It’s sad that convention space is being taken up by enormous booths full of cheap ai prints soaking up the limited space and money available at cons, it’s sad that competitions are getting flooded with ai generated pieces, it’s sad that i’ve seen a lot of ‘man. i’m just gonna go work at target, i can’t compete with this.’ from ppl who have been working in the industry for YEARS.

But it’s INFURIATING to see supposedly leftist game devs and indie ttrpg makers on here try and astroturf a PR campaign for ai to make using it for their projects more socially acceptable, and in order to do this paint artists as pearl clutching hysterics. As if anyone would blink on here if factory workers threw a brick through a window when they were being replaced by automation, but because art is never respected or treated like actual labor our industry collapsing is just kind of a big joke.

Like I saw someone compare the gay sex cats to Duchamp LIKE NO!!!! THEYRE NOT!!! The people who would get pissed off at Duchamp’s fountain are a very specific demographic!!!! Namely fascists!!! Like the implication of a statement like that is actually absurd. who is the fascist in this analogy, 25 year old nonbinary artists?? If you don’t want to pay artists to do your backgrounds for your indie game like just SAY it. (edit: additional context bc this got out of hand but I’ve looked at the blog of the person who said this and i’m walking back the salt I expressed here. It’s a nuanced take that wasn’t expressed super clearly in the post that went viral and he’s elaborated on it a lot in a way that makes me feel this was an unfair interpretation of his words. My bad)

Day 541 of telling people to Have More Babies, The Pending Doomsday of Retirement!

Day 541 of telling people to Have More Babies, The Pending Doomsday of Retirement!

Photo by shutter_speed on Pexels.com The Problem 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…

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Today is Erev Yom Ha'Shoah (Eve of Holocaust Memorial Day) in Israel. It will be observed by Jews outside of Israel, too.

The Hebrew date was chosen to honor the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It's also a week before Erev Yom Ha'Zikaron Le'Chalalei Ma'archot Yisrael (Eve of Israel's Memorial Day for its Fallen Soldiers and Terror Victims), which is itself observed a day before Yom Ha'Atzmaut Le'Yisrael (Israel's Independence Day). A lot of people have remarked on the connection between the three dates. On Yom Ha'Atzmaut, we celebrate our independence, which allows us to determine our own fate, and defend ourselves without being dependent on anyone else, right after we remember the price in human life that we have paid and continue to pay for this independence, and a week before we mourn the price we've had to pay for not getting to have self defence during the Holocaust. NEVER FORGET that in one Nazi shooting pit alone (out of almost two thousand) during just 2 days (Erev Yom Kippur and Yom Kippur 1941), more Jewish men, women and kids were slaughtered than in the 77 years since Israel's Independence War was started by the Arabs. This unbreakable connection between the living and the dead, between our joy and our grief, is often addressed with the Hebrew phrase, במותם ציוו לנו את החיים, "With their death, they ordered us to live."

On this Erev Yom Ha'Shoah, I'd like to share with you some data, published on Thursday by Israel's Central Bureau for Statistics (source in Hebrew).

The number of Jews worldwide is 15.7 million, still lower than it was in 1939, before the Holocaust, 85 years ago (that is what a genocide looks like demographically).

7.1 million Jews live in Israel (45% of world Jewry) 6.3 million Jews live in the US (40% of world Jewry)

Here's the data for the top 9 Jewish communities in the world:

There are about 133,000 Holocaust survivors currently living in Israel. Most (80%) live in big cities in central Israel. Around 1,500 are still evacuated from their homes in northern and southern Israel due to the war (back in January, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, there was a report about 1,894 survivors who also became internal refugees due to the war. Source in Hebrew). One Holocaust survivor, 86 years old Shlomo Mansour, is still held hostage in Gaza. He survived the Farhud in Iraq.

I haven't seen any official number for how many survivors had been slaughtered as a part of Hamas' massacre, despite everyone here being aware that Holocaust survivors had been murdered on Oct 7, such as 91 years old Moshe Ridler. Maybe, as we're still discovering that some people thought to have been kidnapped during the massacre, were actually killed on that day, no one wants to give a "final" number while Shlomo has not yet been returned alive.

Out of all Israeli Holocaust survivors, 61.1% were born in Europe (35.8% in the countries of the former Soviet Union, 10.8% in Romania, 4.9% in Poland, 2.9% in Bulgaria, 1.5% in Germany and Austria, 1.3% in Hungary, 4.2% in the rest of Europe), 36.6% were born in Asia or Africa (16.5% in Morocco, 10.9% in Iraq, 4% in Tunisia, 2.6% in Libya, 2.1% in Algeria, 0.5% in other Asian and African countries) and 2.3% were born elsewhere.

Out of all Holocaust survivors in Israel, 6.2% managed to make it here before the establishment of the state, despite the British Mandate's immigration policy against it (up until May 13, 1948). 30.5% made it to Israel during its very first years (May 14, 1948 until 1951), another 29.8% arrived in the following decades (1952-1989), and 33.5% made Aliyah once the Soviet Union collapsed, and Jewish immigration to the west (which included Israel) was no longer prohibited by the Soviet regimes (1990 on).

The second biggest community of survivors in the world is in the US, the third biggest (but second biggest relative to the size of the population) is in Australia. I heard from many Holocaust survivors who chose to immigrate there that they wanted to get "as physically far away from Europe as possible."

For a few years now, there's been this project in Israel, called Maalim Zikaron, מעלים זיכרון (uploading memory. Here's the project's site in Hebrew. In English it's called Sharing Memories, and here's the English version of the site) where Israeli celebs are asked to meet up with a Holocaust survivor (it's done in Hebrew), and share the survivor's story and the meeting on their social media on Erev Yom Ha'Shoah (which is today). Each year, there's also one non-Israeli Jewish celeb asked to participate (in English. This time around it's Michael Rapaport, he's meeting Aliza, an 81 years old survivor from the Netherlands, who was hidden along with 9 other Jewish babies for two years. He uploaded a preview of his meeting with her here, where he asked her what it means to her to be a Jew, and from what I understand, he will upload more today to the same IG account). This year, there will be an emphasis on Holocaust survivors who also survived Oct 7 (with 6 of the 20 participating survivors having survived Hamas as well). Here's a small bit from an interview with one such survivor, 90 years old Daniel Luz from kibbutz Be'eri:

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

there is something profoundly depressing about the russo-ukraine war. here are two dying countries (demographic pyramids for both look awful, both have TFR <= 1.5) just grinding their last together and. for what?

average age in both armies is over 30. (ukraine's is over 40). ukraine is not even thinking about conscripting people under the age of 25. the median age of the people russia did conscript was 35 (for reference: in ww2 the average age of the american solider was 22-24). this is an old man's war - neither can afford to send their young, they're too precious, and even then, there aren't many of them left.

ukraine has a gdp per capita of around 5k. russia of 12k. it's likely neither of their countries will see their economies grow substantially after this, if at all. both remain highly corrupt. ukraines infrastructure has been shattered.

we've had 2 years of war now. 2 years. 100000 people have died. in the last year the front has barely moved. the war is expected to last at least another year. russia sells wheat to north korea for artillery shells while we try to scrape together political support for the latest equipment of the 1990s to send to ukraine.

even if ukraine wins, so what? its best and brightest will leave as soon as they can, presumably the rest will be stuck doing reconstruction work and defending the now heavily militarized border in case of another invasion as the country slowly dies due to emmigration and fertility collapse.

even if russia wins, so what? its best and brightest will leave as soon as they can, presumably the rest will be stuck building occupation governments and selling natural resources to china while its country slowly dies due to economic sanction and alcoholism.

if the war ended tomorrow, maybe we'd all come to our senses about how senseless it was - two dying nations throwing the remnants of the former soviet army into battle with each other, an orgy of senseless violence, the final hurrah before slowly fading into an endless stream of pension payments and economic dependency, neither side given enough ability to do anything.

just old men dying, dying, dying, until the guns go silent.

🖱️🖥️ COLLAPSED NETWORK ⚙️🔌

design i did for a collab that finally dropped today! figured this'll hit the target demographic on this account. quite proud of this lil thing.

you can check it out on TH here!

IT'S THAT TIME AGAIN: WE MIGHT BE GETTING A GENERAL ELECTION 👀🍿

Alright, folks! The UK government is in open collapse and a general election seems inevitable, if not right now then very, very soon! As we know, the right always comes out to vote, so we need to come out as well if we're going to get rid of the Tories and finally move on from fighting to survive to actually having enough breathing room to fix shit. Labour aren't perfect, but we don't have the luxury of a perfect solution when things are as bad as they are, so let's go to work.

Here's what you need to know.

📜 Register to vote if you aren't already registered. Do that here.

💌 Apply for a postal vote if you have any doubt whatsoever that you'll be able to make it to a polling place on the day. Previous GEs have seen the Tories set dates that make voting unduly difficult for demographics they don't like, e.g., students. A postal vote will get your ballot paper to you weeks ahead of the election and you can vote from anywhere in plenty of time.

You can apply for a postal vote here. You don't need a reason.

✅ See who came closest to beating the Tories (or who beat them by the biggest margin) in your constituency at the last GE and vote for them. You can look that up here. In urban areas, this is most likely to be Labour, but in more rural areas it might be the Lib Dems or even the Greens. The point is to take as many seats from the Tories as possible and thereby remove them from power.

It's been a long 12 years. Let's get these cunts gone.