And those anxious and xenophobic motherfuckers gonna live for sooo much longer than their parents. They easily gonna leech from my salary for the next two decades while I will certainly not get a dime from the generations after me. That generation lived of the wealth of the generations before them AND after them.
Just go and make more kids bro
Fuck u slave! Keep cucking so better people can live large
Fuck u slave! Keep cucking so better people can live large
And everyone is afraid of immigration. It's bizarre.
and investing in the young
Fuck you I got mine
We are afraid of immigration because there is so few housing that bringing people will just add to the pressure and make rents even more ridiculously expensive . Also, in my country (Portugal), these workers accept working for less and live in miserable conditions (overcrowded homes, tents outside of Lisbon, etc), making it worse for everyone else, causing an exodus of qualified people and a flood of “tourism workers” because salaries just not increase when there are people accepting to work for less.
Meanwhile our public services are collapsing left and right because qualified people just leave and there are so many new people trying to access public healthcare etc.
This is not the black and white immigration is good/bad you are making it out to be .
I'm from Portugal also and it's not immigration that is driving high rent prices. That's a disingenuous position. Golden visas and Airbnb have contributed MUCH more to this as well as the liberalization of rents coupled with low new housing projects.
The workers that accept low salaries are mostly seasonal workers and they don't compete with locals for decent housing and if you were honest you would mention that most of the time you have plenty of them living in the same space. Again, not occupying a lot of the housing destined for locals. I don't see locals eager to go live in Odemira in the houses occupied by seasonal workers or in Martim Moniz in degraded housing.
Same here and totally agree with you.
I've actually worked in Finance and spent 20 years abroad before coming back to Portugal and it was obvious already when I arrived 4 years ago, that government measures were rigging the housing market to be ever higher: Golden Visa in exchange for €500k "realestate investment", tax discounts for retirees from the rest of Europe to come live in Portugal, Digital Nomad visas, such a bullshit regulatory regime for AirBnB businesses that (eventually, after 10 years) the highest court finally ruled that unlike what the "regulation" said, you can't just convert appartments to AirBnB businesses as you feel like and have to follow the same rules as ALL OTHER BUSINESSES, and, last but not least, a complete total refusal to regulate speculative investment in Portuguese realestate by foreign investors (something as simple as a minimum 6-month residence in Portugal requirement similar to many other countries would've made a huge difference and still be compatible wth EU rules as it doesn't discriminate between portuguese and other EU citizens).
And this was just their Demand side manipulation.
On the Supply side, housing construction was down to 1/3 of what it was in the 80s and there is pretty much no public housing construction in the country of Europe with the lowest percentage of public housing.
Meanwhile we get loud "we've created 100 student accomodation rooms in this old government building we didn't use" announcements as if they're so amazing when the local unis take in 50 thousand students per year for what are typically 3 year courses so 100 new rooms once every 10 years or so is doesn't even touch the problem of student accomodation (itself a subset of the wider housing problem).
(Note that most top level politicians from the 2 parties that alternate in Government have declared income as "real-estate investor").
Portugal is were it is in housing because the Portuguese are mainly dumb and greedy votting for greedy, incompetent snake-oil salesmen.
That said, the "immigration problem" in Portugal has to do with how the country mainly takes in people with far less average levels of Education than the locals, and hence not capable of working in the kind of higher value added jobs as the locals (especially the young). This is why almost everybody working as Uber and food delivery drivers are from Brasil or the Indian Subcontinent - unlike most other countries in Europe, Portugal has very little in the way of selectivity in who can come (especially from Brasil, whose citizens are the largest immigrant community in Portugal) plus it can't really attract the more well educated as richer countries can, so you mainly get a whole different kind of brasilians in Portugal than you get in, for example, Britain were I also lived.
You can't really get your Economy to climb up the value added ladder (and hence pay higher salaries) if you're pushing the locals to have fewer children or, even worse, to leave the country as soon as they finish their degrees, by pumping up house prices to increase your personal rewards from the side-business that you have as "realestate investor" alongside your politician day-job, whilst "making up for it" by importing people with a way lower level of education than those children would end up having and those degree-holding young adults leaving because houses are too expensive already have.
Also from Portugal and did you really just say that the problem with immigration is that they get exploited and then everyone ELSE suffers?
I mean i think you see what’s wrong with that.
Also without immigrants Portugal would be completely fucked because all the young people are leaving the country for better jobs in Europe. Someone needs to pick up the slack otherwise it’s just old people and a couple of children.
Also Portugal has a ton of houses. We are above average in houses per capita iirc. We have a problem with salaries and an over dependence on tourism.
He's just someone trying to provide a false narrative to justify his racism.
Portugal has massive house price inflation problems in the places were the jobs are: all it takes is to look at the house price to incomes ratio in Portugal now and compare it with the historical average (last I checked it was 5x its historical average).
Sure, there are actually empty villages in the deep inland countryside were the only work is "subsistence farming" or "forrestry", for the simple reason that even being a cashier at a supermarket pays better so nobody is going to move there to do that work.
Looking at housing as "all houses everywhere have the same utility value" to be able to come up with that "there is no housing problem in Portugal" bollocks is beyond ridiculous.
That said, blaming immigrants is pure, unadulterated far-right nutter fantasism: the idea that the people with the least power in the country (who can't even vote) are to blame for this is logic-defying, to say the least.
Imagine claiming your issue isn't with immigrants then immediately listing all the reasons immigrants are to blame for the actions of the capitalists that exploit them, and you, and the government that allows it.. 🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️
This is not the black and white immigration is good/bad you are making it out to be .
no, it's just you who is wilfully ignorant. And afraid. Because of your wilful ignorance.
Imagine not addressing any of the points, and instead just accusing someone of being wilfully ignorant.
How ignorant
Just to be clear, you’re arguing that if capitalism didn’t exist in Europe, we would be building twice as many buildings per year? This is the dumbest take I’ve read today, and I accidentally landed on r/Politics this morning.
Dunno about twice as much but the problem isn’t housing (Portugal has a shit ton of houses). The problem is affordable housing and yes capitalism is very much to blame here.
Not in a “free market = bad” that I’m very much for in many situations but simply because it’s not profitable to build affordable housing. A vast percentage of the housing built in Portugal is for upper middle class, so everyone below that (which in Portugal is a shit ton of people) you are fucked. And even if you lived in a decent house prices have skyrocketed so much that you get kicked out if they can do that.
Capitalism by design is very much against public housing and you don’t even need to imagine how the situation would be if you had that. You can just look at Vienna and see how they are doing in that regard (spoiler: pretty fucking well compared to the rest of Europe/world).
I'm not against immigration but it's no solution. You're in Europe. You're trying to replace a workforce that has free education, in a place with high quality education infrastructure, therefore most of them have bachelors and probably at least one or more masters degrees, with essentially illiterate (and i mean this with all due respect) people from a completely different culture who are not prepared to do anything remotely useful for at least 10 years, probably more.
I've literally had migrant refugees from Lebanon, Somalia, Eritrea, Morocco and such as flatmates in Brussels. Some of them are my close friends. They are not remotely prepared to take over 90% of European jobs. You either need social skills, labor skills, language skills or technical skills which they simply do not have. If i was in their shoes, it would take me decades to catch up to how Europeans work.
The migrants come here for what ? Uber eats ? How are they supposed to support themselves ? With government integration money we don't have available ? But say we figure it out and they live and then they will have kids one day. Those kids will behave exactly like the local population. They will go to University, they will be highly qualified, they will be socially adapted to the place, culture and language and, they will also not have kids, just like the locals. So which problem did these migrants solve then ?
So the issue here isn't that we lack people in Europe. It's that our economic doctrine is deficient. We need to change the doctrine, not the people. Immigration will not solve this problem, it will perpetuate it. Young people not having kids is an economic issue that will still happen whether you have a European young person there or a Iraqi young person there. You can't simply transplant a young couple from a country with very high birth rates in a totally different part of the world, subjected to an entirely different set of circumstances and expect them to be the same in Europe. That's not how this works.
with essentially illiterate (and i mean this with all due respect) people from a completely different culture who are not prepared to do anything remotely useful for at least 10 years, probably more.
You're talking shit. Immigrants make up 20% of the NHS in the UK, and loads also work in the care sector, those are vital jobs and you have to be literate. Most immigrants I've met speak better English than the local toe rags.
Those kids will behave exactly like the local population. They will go to University, they will be highly qualified, they will be socially adapted to the place, culture and language and, they will also not have kids, just like the local. So which problem did these migrants solve then ?
The lack of young workers?
You are deliberately talking over them. They’re clearly not claiming that all migrants are illiterate or uneducated or ill-prepared for work in Europe. They’re arguing that many are, and those migrants exacerbate our problems. They certainly don’t solve them.
Define many. What percentage are illiterate?
It depends on the nation. The UN collects data. Afghanistan is 62.7% illiterate, for example. Further, Almost all refugees to Denmark have zero Danish language reading and writing skills. They must learn all of these. Slightly more (but shockingly few) have any English reading and writing skills.
Surely it isn't surprising to you that refugees have limited European language skills?
a person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster.
Emigrating is a choice. Fleeing because you helped translate is not.
That definition of a refugee is perfectly compatible with the definition of a an immigrant. As per the definition, all refugees are immigrants. Not all immigrants are refugees.
Aren't western countries have strict education requirements before they would even consider permanent residency applications? Or are you talking about refugees, which imo shouldn't be counted as a way to replenish aging workforce because the governments let them in for humanitarian reason?
The large volume of applications of economic refugees made it so since 2015 the the education requirements are essentially waived. There are no wars in Morocco, for instance, but i personally know of refugees that hid their nationality to enter as war refugees. This is very common.
most of them have bachelors
Only 30% of people in Europe have bachelors degrees, about the same as the u.s. Thats higher than in developing countries, say India at 8%, but a majority of people in both countries don't have degrees.
It's a common misconception by those with tertiary education in the first world that everyone else has tertiary education because they only talk to people in their social class with tertiary education.
You're showing me an average with the entire population of Turkey and the Balcans. Look better at your data, please. Now consider where the majority of migrants are going and are being expected. It is not a genuine source of comparison. It's closer to 40%. Besides, like i also mentioned, it's not just higher education.
The original post was about Europe, that's the European average. Even the E.U. average is 30% and that doesn't include turkey and some of the Balkans. Also the point still stands even for the best example of Luxembourg at 46%, it's still less than half. Most people in Europe do not have a bachelors.
So what I hear you're saying is that education is the solution.
We could educate immigrants, which will take some time.
We could also educate the Europeans so they don't take the jobs that requires shorter educations.
Either way we will need the immigrants to solve the current demand.
The problem is that the same thing was tried in the 1970s and it didn't turn out well when the demand for low skill workers decreased again.
We already know that the demand will drop again in 20-30 years, so we should already now focus on educating the immigrants, so they can function in society after the low skill jobs are gone.
Another thing is that it's not like we can stop immigration. The climate changes will result in massive immigration whether we "allow" it or not.
They're not going to sit and die outside imaginary lines on the ground.
IMO, the only realistic option is to accept and start educating immigrants.
I'm not saying they can't be or shouldn't beintegrated. What I'm saying is that their existence will not affect the demographic crisis in any meaningful way. They won't have kids, just as the locals. I've seen it happen. If we're saving people, we're saving people, but let's not pretend it's because of the population crisis, because that is irrelevant to the problem
Have you noticed what governments all over Europe have done to Adult Education in the last couple of decades???!
Indeed, the genuine, strategically well thought, policy on immigration for all involved would be to bring people over, educate them and integrate them.
The thing is, the immigration policies we have are mainly to bring over people to exploit them to the max without investing in them at all - they're about growing the local underclass to lower the employment costs of food delivery apps, restauration, garbage collection and similar, not about shared prosperity for both the locals and those that were invited in and should have been treated as guests rather than thrown (along with their children: see the baundeliers in France) into a life of poverty because they're starting far below the locals in the opportunities ladder due to their lower formal education level and difficulties with local language.
Meanwhile you have muppets on the make-believe-Leftwing-Rightwing political theatre both approaching the whole subject of immigration in a highly reductionist way as some kind of Identity War, all the while the people with most of the money rub their hands in glee whilst they cash in on the misery of locals and guests alike.
Yes I know and it's about to repeat.
And yes it's driven by the political puppets of the industry.
You can tell because it's the same liberal centre parties who used to flirt with the right wing to gain votes, who are now suddenly calling for guest workers, without any support from their own voters.
They don't care what happens to these people in the future. They just want to flood the employment market with cheap labour because their friends wants that.
More immigration is inevitable, but it shouldn't be like this.
Those kids will behave exactly like the local population.
Guess you haven't been to the UK
Putting the side the whole moral aspect of it, the only way to make importing less well educated people function in most European countries would be a huge investment in Adult Dducation, and we're in the late-neoliberal political period were governments (some more, some less) have been busy cutting taxes and hence public expenses, and typically Adult Education is one of the first to have been cut.
The very people who have set up open door immigration policies claiming that we need them because of the aging of the population refuse to invest in those who they made our guests to become fully productive and integrated citizens and instead are happy to for them to live in or near poverty working low-value and highly insecure jobs such as food delivery driver for some exploitative "Startup" that doesn't even pay taxes.
This shit isn't at all being done for the reasons we are told it's being done.
essentially illiterate (and i mean this with all due respect) people from a completely different culture who are not prepared to do anything remotely useful for at least 10 years, probably more.
saying with all due respect doesn't make your bullshit racist essay any less racist, racist.
How is this racist? If I move to, say, Azerbaijan, I'm just as lost as them. I know fuck all about the language, can't even read the alphabet they have and don't know shit about the culture. And we share skincolours.
I have a PhD, but I'm basically useless in Azerbaijan for anything but menial labour, explained slowly with lots of gestures.
Culture isn't nearly that important, and learning the language, or just speaking English, is a minor obstacle all things considered. If you move somewhere, you will get a language teacher.
What the hell are you talking about? Culture is hugely important, if you move somewhere that fundamentally has issue with you... might might be outright killed.
Countries don't all necessarily speak English. I'm visiting Mexico right now... it's actually quite hard at times to find English speakers. The police I've interacted with here... no English. Border crossing... very limited English. Acting like English is something special is very short sighted.
Assuming that all immigrants or refugees will just have access to language tutoring is absurd. That's typically an expensive cost. One that many people simply cannot afford.
Well, then maybe it's different In the Americas, I don't know, but you mentioned an European country.
I live in Europe, been around various places in Europe. I'm an immigrant myself. It's not nearly as bad as you might think.
And yes, obviously racism and xenophobia is a problem, but integrating into the culture won't fix that.
Careful now. Calling racists racist is impolite and very frowned upon.
If you won’t even acknowledge that some people need help to learn to read, does that mean you want to eliminate literacy support for refugees? Isn’t that far more racist than just accepting reality? I believe this is what we call horseshoe politics at work. The tendency for the loudest “anti-racists” in the room to be the absolute worst racists.
Not when you consider that so many are rather old and afraid of change (something which correlates with age).
Many comments below (->above?) about housing. But it seems to me, the problem in much of Europe is that many old people hang on to large half-empty family houses, so over 65s are occupying a lot more space than under 15s (although the latter have more energy, need space to play ...). It's a pity they blame immigrants for this.
For me it's more a cherry on a cake. We already have a housing problem for a couple years. Most young starters can't afford to purchase/rent a house, so that look for cheaper options. Those cheaper options are given away to immigrants because of emergency housing laws. This in turn causes less houses for the population that can't afford new houses. It's not just a problem of immigration (not even that much) it's a problem that existing empty houses go way over the affordable price and on top of that the immigrants get the houses for free.
So yeah focus all that and I can see why people blame immigration, but it's absolutely not the only cause. I would prefer it more if the government limits the prices of housing, but this causes investment in housing to drop as well. It's a dirty vicious greedy circle that points to immigrants as the easy target.
I should also add that some immigrants don't accept other temporary options and want a bigger house for free, whilst the population pays 150-200%. That also causes friction.
If you look into the issues caused by (mass) immigration or related to that then it makes much more sense imo.
The old folks had a good time. Younger generation can't afford sht.
And now they've spent all their money just in time to rely on social security from the young ones. Try and screw us from every angle. Most selfish and greedy generation that existed.
Yeah... That's not where the money went. Some of it, sure. But some very few people have hoarded a lot more than it seems people realise.
Why not both?
"Some of it, sure"
Fair enough.
If you look at the weath distribution numbers it's quite a big "some" (not per person compared with those few people that hoarded lots of weath, but because it's still quite a difference between generations and there are A LOT of old people, so it adds up), mainly because it's old people who outright own the houses were they live which are worth a lot of money per current day house prices.
Because it was those very same (now old) people who voted for the very house inflation that's shafting the young and made them relativelly much wealthier than the young generations, they deserve a lot (so, a very large "some") of the blame.
Nothing that any other generation would have done different. This is not about age, it's about the system. Younger people will complain about you too
Scary though they will be making the rules for a long time to come yet
That was my first thought: They can and do vote, and now they're a populational majority as well as a statistical one at the ballot box. That can no longer be combatted by encouraging younger generations to vote.
If only society was designed around looking after people instead of infinite competition, maybe this wouldn't be so much of a problem
We have the technology
And abundant resources. But our approach to things like this will not change as long as money is king.
2023 is the hottest year ever in record. Everything suggests that it won't hold that record for long. Why would I bring children to this world to suffer the hell that 2050 will be?
Because at least you are thinking about such problems (unlike too many). I thought similarly back in 1998, many records broken since, we're still here, now glad my children are too and getting educated, to help society get through this. By the way the original post is from Ireland which may not get so much warmer (depends thermohaline circulation...) - maybe stormier, although much (not all) of europe will still be nice to live in 2050, adaptation may include many people relocating.
And will you still feel the same in 20 years time when your children are starving or fighting in wars for fresh water?
I sincerely doubt most people will be starving. Global population should peak about 25% higher than now, agriculture and diets will change and move - adapt, but it won't be equitable. So I do expect my kids may need to fight - in a non-violent way - for a better distribution of water and other resources.
Life is a movie to sheltered internet dweebs like them lol.
Climate change is real as fuck. And unless the people replying are already in hugely disadvantaged 3rd world countries coupled with hazardous terrain susceptible to ocean rise and/or jet stream change, they'll be fine.
Life will always feel like a struggle no matter how utopian our society. It's the natural mode of life to instinctually fight for survival. If there's nothing to fight, our brains literally imagine stuff for us. Hello GAD, Panic Disorder, etc.
If your in a developed nation with a decent military then you will be among the last to feel the pain of environmental collapse. Most of the world is what we would consider hellish right now, yet people still find a way to laugh and love. Watch these poor souls recycling electronics in Africa. Watch bald and bankrupt in bengladesh. Most people alive today live like this and it doesn't stop them from living life. We all adapt to our conditions, its all relative to our individual experience and what we consider "normal" in our lives. Your condition potentially getting worse shouldn't stop you from having kids, as your condition probably has a long way to go to get down to where most of the population is at currently. Whether you enjoy the ride, fight the collapse, or hail the apocalypse, someones gotta be around to keep this party going. If their born into late stage environmental collapse with nations fighting over the last scraps of arable land and drinkable water, well then that becomes their "normal" and theyll still find something to laugh about and someone to love. But at the end of the day it is your choice and you should do as you see best.
Most of the world is what we would consider hellish right now, yet people still find a way to laugh and love. Watch these poor souls recycling electronics in Africa. Watch bald and bankrupt in bengladesh. Most people alive today live like this and it doesn't stop them from living life.
You really threw bald people in there as the miserable, wretched of the earth.
Humans are what are causing the mess, and you want to add more of them?
The earth does not care much about climate change, nor about humans. Nature will bounce back eventually. It always did.
Bringing kids into this world, who are educated and adapted will help humanity, not the earth.
only if their parents care enough to make sure they are educated and smart. we don't need more stupid people.
Good point. I guess the problem is that with humans it's always quantity over quality.
The "problem" being that the more educated people are, the fewer children they have and that's a correlation that actually holds pretty well.
The whole "people should have more children and make sure they are educated and smart" is self-contradictory: it's either more kids lower-education or fewer kids higher-education.
It's magical thinking to expect that the people capable of "making sure they're educated and smart" will have many children.
Humans and our cultural diversity are part of biodiversity which makes life beautiful, it's about balance. A longterm goal should be to save more space for other species, but we need educated young people to keep knowledge and tackle the legacy of the mess (among much else) left by their ancestors.
You do it. You're not gonna fuck a solution out. Why is it always "let the kids fix it"?
because it will take multiple generations to fix?
And that's why conservatives get elected. And since more and more young vote for right-wing parties we're in for a real shitshow.
Yeah. To be honest most liberal and social democrat governments are playing right into the hands of the right wing too.
Too afraid to crack down on the far right, but still too conservative to commit to large public spending on housing and sustainable infrastructure. Or in Germany's case, nuclear energy.
I have hope for those organzing outside of electoralism, those organzing within it in the West are in for another rude wake up call soon. They keep ignoring them.
Westerners are not more tolerant or intolerant then any other people on earth, we generally just have higher standards of living as a result of economic and military hegemony. As that continues to decline for more and more previously " wealthy " people the fascist radiclization will get worse in the West.
We need new ways of living and bold ideas. The far right nor neoliberals can offer that to people. Liberals will tolerate dissidents but they will never take meaningful action on the issiues of class, the military industrial complex or encomcis for the most part. It needs to change from the outside in.
Or in Germany's case, nuclear energy.
You know that not even the former operators of the German nuclear power plants are in favour of going back to nuclear? Even if we decide NOW to invest in nuclear power again on a grand scale - which makes no sense at all economically - it won't help the energy transition, because planning and construction takes decades and is irrational in terms of costs. However, I agree with you that it was a strategic mistake on the part of the former Merkel government not to shut down coal-fired power plants first but to shut nuclear - but this does not change the current path dependencies of the German energy sector at all!
For decades German politicians have used the excuse that it takes many years to build nuclear. If they had started decades ago, Germany would have a dozen plants now and have no energy woes. Instead we now see a huge proportion of Germany’s energy generated by coal and lignite. Get off the anti-science train and join us in the 21st century. Nuclear is safe, plentiful, and green.
This doesn’t mean they shouldn’t invest in other forms of energy too. Energy grids require diversification, and concurrent leaders have been asleep at the wheel.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a fundamental opponent of nuclear power, but I would like to point out that at this point in time I think we can achieve our goal of an emission-free energy sector faster and more cost-efficiently if we focus our political, regulatory and economic efforts entirely on the development and scale up of renewable energy and storage technologies - not to mention the fact that the supply chain for uranium (Russia, Niger, China, Kazakhstan, etc) and the security of supply with sufficient cooling water are by no means secure at present and in times of worsening climate change...
Apart from that, nuclear power plants cannot be shut down fast enough and are therefore not realy compatible with an energy mix that is largely based on renewables...
Germany's strategy of going all-in on LNG has been a colossal failure, and I do not believe going all-in on any other energy sources is wise. Diversification of energy grids is almost always the best strategy, as it mitigates risks which are as yet unforeseen. Let's build wind and solar, but let's also build nuclear. Worst case scenario Germany has lots of clean energy.
not to mention the fact that the supply chain for uranium (Russia, Niger, China, Kazakhstan, etc) and the security of supply with sufficient cooling water are by no means secure at present and in times of worsening climate change…
Canada and Australia are #2 and #4 producers of uranium. Uranium mining is extremely distributed, and we have no strategic risk of losing access.
Germany has no climate model which predicts desert-like conditions. Even if there were, Germany has a large coastline, and could desalinate sea water for cooling.
Apart from that, nuclear power plants cannot be shut down fast enough and are therefore not realy compatible with an energy mix that is largely based on renewables…
We do not shut down nuclear plants. They are not quick-fire generation. They stay in operation indefinitely, and provide stable power during periods of low sun and wind. They make an excellent complement to renewable grids which are subject to high volatility.
Would you like me to list the 300 reasons a fully renewable grid in Germany is currently impossible?
Germany's strategy of going all-in on LNG has been a colossal failure, and I do not believe going all-in on any other energy sources is wise. Diversification of energy grids is almost always the best strategy, as it mitigates risks which are as yet unforeseen. Let's build wind and solar, but let's also build nuclear. Worst case scenario Germany has lots of clean energy.
There is nothing wrong with diversification, but it is always a question of how much bang for the buck you get in the end - especially against the background of the politically explosive debate about electricity prices. The real costs of nuclear power (including risk insurance, etc.) are immense and one must honestly ask oneself what amount of renewable energy one can get on the grid with the same investment in a realistic time. Given that Flamanville, Olkiluoto and Hinkley Point will be / already are all massively over budget, I assume that with the expansion of the trans-European grids (HVDCs) and seasonal storage of green hydrogen, methane, etc. we will probably achieve this goal better and cheaper...
Canada and Australia are #2 and #4 producers of uranium. Uranium mining is extremely distributed, and we have no strategic risk of losing access.
OK, point taken - assuming that their deposits are sufficient for the uranium demand of the whole western world for the next 50-100 years (?), supply may be regarded as secured.
We do not shut down nuclear plants. They are not quick-fire generation. They stay in operation indefinitely, and provide stable power during periods of low sun and wind. They make an excellent complement to renewable grids which are subject to high volatility.
Correct, that is exactly the problem: Without an unconditional feed-in guarantee (i.e. even at times when the nuclear power plants could operate economically on the common European electricity market), no operator would agree to produce nuclear energy. This, in turn, ensures that any power plants that cannot be shut down quickly enough (especially nuclear and coal-fired) have the effect that wind farms, in particular, often have to be taken off the grid. Since this is also connected with compensation payments to the wind power operators, these are external costs of nuclear power which we all (private households and industry) have to pay via our electricity price...
Just prepare properly.
Take 5 minutes of your day to excersie a small speech about how you never knew anything, nobody knew anything in fact and we were just following orders. If we all feign ignorance we can pretend like this happened under our watch.
And it's this exact problem that will get solved with the immigration from climate change. Europe is going to get more African migrants fleeing climate change.
Yes, this seems inevitable, and given Europe's relative historical contribution to climate change, I think we have a moral obligation to welcome some, as (to some extent) their right, not charity. An issue, however, is that immigrants tend to gather in crowded hot cities near sea-level, just the places we should plan to slowly depopulate, while it's rarer to see African faces in sparsely populated upland rural areas, where there are more empty houses and older people needing services. Research about climate migration focused mainly on where people will move from, not enough about where it would make most sense for them to move to.
A massive investment in adult education would probably help a lot in making up for the Economic problems of importing tons of people without the level of formal education necessary for the higher value added jobs most europeans can do (50% of the population being Uber and food delivery drivers doesn't quite work economically), but the very same people who brought us a massive house price bubble to reward rent-seekers to the max (in turn feeding a fall in birth rates because young people can't afford a family), a race to the bottom on taxing wealth and 4 decades of falling real terms funding for any public services other than the ones mainly used by old people, are hardly going to invest in adult education.
"Immigrants should be forcedguided into places that us superior white people, who are above what I deem menial work, are neededborn-in-country people struggle to live in."
So - think - you really prefer to keep immigrants in overheating floodable crowded cities - ghettoes ?
By the way, I am myself an immigrant, I now live in a village, and do struggle. I also studied climate science and demography and technology trends, so I think about the longer term - places people struggled to live in the past, and the future, are not the same. We should use our knowledge to help those who move gain a better life than otherwise.
It's a problem that can solve itself with time, no need for population replacement because muh economy.
It's not passing such a milestone that's an issue, so much as how fast we pass it - i.e. a population decline is sustainable if gradual. My concern is that our models of economics and governance derive from previous centuries when population was rapidly growing, which helped provide social mobility and influence for younger generations. So we need to adjust economics and governance to compensate, to avoid stagnation and gerontocracy.
and how do we do that
Well some small steps could include - taxes shifting from income to wealth, land and luxury use of resources, lowering barriers to voting for younger people (e.g. the requirement for stable residence disenfranchises people who move about), return to free education, a lower voting age and upper age-limit for politicians... Yet gerontocracy is a problem even in youth-skewed continents like Africa. So to be honest I don't know, maybe some people here on Lemmy have more revolutionary ideas...?
Well, realistically this is a situation we can fuck our way out of
Having sex is easy. Being able to balance childcare and afford raising children is a feat that grows ever more difficult by the day
Agreed. I was just being silly. You're right, though.
Geez, feels like just this year that over 64 year olds outnumbered under 14 year olds.
My immediate response is that this is clearly good news - a gradual reduction in population is a good thing. We just need to work on managing the societal practicalities properly
Reductions in population will happen after the climate change issues go unresolved when they needed to be, and resource scarcity forces an economic global crisis never seen in modern history. It won’t be gradual. Every pop model predicts going from 10B to 1B in less than 100 years post vertex. Or at least it seems if we stay on the track we are on.
Kurzgesagt videos are usually excellent, but in this case the case for population reduction benefits to the environment are simply dismissed with ‘it will take too long for global population to fall’. This is a weirdly trite line in an otherwise nuanced video, ignoring the fact that populations don’t have to decline to improve things - a simple levelling off is beneficial. Moreover, it ignores that most reductions are taking place in countries with the highest per capita carbon emissions
Moreover, it ignores that most reductions are taking place in countries with the highest per capita carbon emissions
Yes but those are also the countries with stagnating or decreasing emissions per capita, while the ones with rising emissions are also increasing in population. These compounding factors can cancel each other out when looking at net emissions.
Let's say right now we have 10 people from the u.s. emitting 10 tonnes of co2 and 10 people from the developing work emitting 1 tonne of co2, for a total of 110 tonnes of co2.
Now let's say in 50 years we now have 8 people in the u.s. emitting 8 tonnes of co2 and 12 people in the developing world emitting 5 tonnes of co2 for a total of 124 tonnes of co2.
This isn't to let western countries and their lifestyles off the hook, or that developing countries don't have a right to increase their standard of living like the west did, just saying populations stagnating or decreasing won't necessarily help climate change.
But the future population predictions for Africa, are also being slashed.
Sort of. They are saying that the rate at which it is levelling off is inconsequential for the environmental effect. However, the rate is enough to have economic impacts already. It's not that they don't acknowledge it, they are just saying we can see the economic damage long before well see the environmental benefits.
Just a reminder that unsustainable world population growth is bad. Fewer people is good for everyone and our planet.
And this is why the retirement ages have to be raised in many countries.
People live longer and fewer young to take care of the old (and the economy in general)
Yea and by the time I get to retirement age it will be pushed so far back that only a handful of people will live long enough to retire anyway. Just work until you die /s
I doubt that will happen.
But raising the retirement age is needed in an ageing population where people just live healthier and longer than ever.
Otherwise an ever increasing amount of people will be retired and the amount of people that can contribute to the economy and well everything really will decrease.
The same problem would arise if the amount of children suddenly started increasing rapidly, fortunately that would likely solve it self after a while since they would eventually work too. We need a balance of workers and non workers otherwise society would collapse.
The only way I can see that being sustainable is if we could automate to the degree that the amount of human workers could be less every year. But that's not possible yet (if ever).
And no I obviously don't want the retirement age to increase, I hope to also retire some day. But I see no choice.
But the article said that while people live longer their healthy years don't increase that much. And that is going to be a problem
Europe has proven we can't fix this by importing millions of unskilled people with radically different values. The social unrest is proving catastrophic. Rightwing parties are gaining traction in almost every European country. The EU is on track to accept more than a million applications this year alone, and most of them have large families which will be granted reunification. Data shows most of them will never work a day in their lives. Our social systems will collapse within a decade at this rate. We'll be lucky if the EU itself survives this.
Instead, we really need to alleviate the issues resulting in young people not having kids. The usual argument is, "it's too expensive." While true, data shows that income isn't a barrier to fertility. In fact, higher income results in lower fertility, with some exceptions at the very top end of the income spectrum.
As a German, I call bullshit. Every asylum seeker I've met either had a job/went to school or was denied a job because the application didn't go through yet. I'm sure there are people out there who don't want to work, but please show me the data which shows that "most of them will never work a day in their lives". Your comment sounds EXACTLY like the rhetorics of the same right-wing you pretend to condemn.
The figures show improvement over time, of course, as German language skills are picked up and general integration occurs, but as that last source puts it: "...the integration process remains fragile, and in its early stages. Much work remains ahead for both Syrian refugees and the German authorities."
As a German, I call bullshit.
As a Dane, I call bullshit. Show me the stats. Here are ours. Syrian migrants have an employment rate of under 20%. Somali immigrants are under 30%. As you can tell by the same link, their crime rate is astronomical.
As someone from a country where the AfD gains increasing popularity on an almost daily basis, calling "bullshit" rings completely hollow. You clearly have no idea how bad things have become for your average countryman.
Yes it doesn't work if you make it impossible or very hard for it to work. I'm obviously not perfectly sure but for the amount of refugees we have both in Germany and likely Denmark, especially now with Ukraine we spend way to little money on the process of integration, if there's not enough (language) schools, shitty temporary housing and unhelpful and uncooperative Ausländerbehörden, we shouldn't turn to blaming the people who come here for the problems we in the "West" largely created.
Blaming and viliviying Somali and Syrian migrants just gets us increasingly deeper into this rabbit hole, until at the end of the day you have fundamentalist or ethnic riots, or firing squads at the outside borders. Both is completely unworkable, incredibly more expensive and frankly inhumane.
The conservatives that think human rights are a good thing should get their head out of fantasy land, the crusty socdems should ask themselves how they let this shit happen, and yeah the afd isn't gonna fix it but closing the borders as they demand is the most stupid non solution ever, just letting the thing heat up there on the outskirts until it blows up in all of our faces. Which it will continue to as long as no one takes it seriously enough to actually make a good solution. But relying on the publics generosity and frankly Kafkaesque government regulation and support isn't gonna get you well integrated migrants in a generation, it takes 3 maybe 5 in that case. Which is what we've been doing.
We don't have enough houses and schools for everyone as is. If you're saying we need even more, no one is arguing with you. We're arguing that, given reality, adding more unskilled and illiterate migrants makes all of our problems much worse.
You argue that protecting the border is impossible, and I couldn't disagree more. Countries have been successfully protecting their borders for millennia. If you're arguing that Germany just happens to be the most incompetent country in all of history, I strongly disagree. This is only a matter of political will. It's only a matter of time until AfD is elected, because successive governments have refused to protect the border. When they're in power, they'll reduce the refugee quota to zero and expel everyone who illegally immigrated. Then they'll restrict migration from countries from which migrants are overrepresented in crime and unemployment. People will cheer.
Germany (and most Western countries) have a few short years to make realistic concessions to their people before AfD and other far right parties take charge entirely. Decide if you want compromise, or the worst possible outcome. Those are your only choices right now.
In this same reality it's also still more expensive, logistically difficult and just again inhumane. If the afd is getting close to taking charge entirely, I'll take my bike to France to learn how to make the polices job a living hell. Just resigning to stupid outdated thinking doesn't seem particularly appealing to me.
Sure some might cheer when they start to push that hard against immigration. Others will riot and burn the streets even worse than they do already. Because for example we believe having such a thing as universal human rights is a good idea.
Because completely counter to whatever you think about defending borders countries have for literal time immemorial tried and failed to gain advantage or prevent each other from doing so by military force. It's been catastrophic every single time. Or are the Greeks Romans, Chinese kingdoms, Nazis, Soviets, still here with us today, did they have a graceful and good end to their reign.
The choice you present is false both options will inevitably end in the decline of the West, one just might be faster than the other. But there is in theory at least better alternatives, they just require Europeans to stop being US lapdogs. And letting go of the thousands of years old doctrine of military and economic domination, that creates most of its own problems to begin with.
I'm in the UK and the handful of asylum seekers I've met who are unemployed, have significant trauma and or disability and shouldn't be working as they are barely coping as it is.
If we can support citizens with these conditions on unemployment, it's nothing but racism to deny this support to people here under asylum.
And unless some kind of supernatural magic occurs that stops capitalism, climate collapse, resource depletion, and all the genocidal authoritarianist politics humans seem to be so naturally predisposed to, birthrates should continue to fall. Adding to our numbers is nothing short of insanity at this point.
We appear to agree about the situation as it is. However you are arguing you wish to make it worse. I, and most Europeans, do not.
Because supporting people makes things worse? Wtf has to be wrong with you to consider providing basic resources to struggling people, a bad thing?
Because supporting people makes things worse?
No. Reducing the capacity of already strained social services makes them worse. WTF is wrong with you that you want to remove social services from struggling people??
And those anxious and xenophobic motherfuckers gonna live for sooo much longer than their parents. They easily gonna leech from my salary for the next two decades while I will certainly not get a dime from the generations after me. That generation lived of the wealth of the generations before them AND after them.
Just go and make more kids bro
Fuck u slave! Keep cucking so better people can live large
Fuck u slave! Keep cucking so better people can live large
And everyone is afraid of immigration. It's bizarre.
and investing in the young
Fuck you I got mine
We are afraid of immigration because there is so few housing that bringing people will just add to the pressure and make rents even more ridiculously expensive . Also, in my country (Portugal), these workers accept working for less and live in miserable conditions (overcrowded homes, tents outside of Lisbon, etc), making it worse for everyone else, causing an exodus of qualified people and a flood of “tourism workers” because salaries just not increase when there are people accepting to work for less.
Meanwhile our public services are collapsing left and right because qualified people just leave and there are so many new people trying to access public healthcare etc.
This is not the black and white immigration is good/bad you are making it out to be .
I'm from Portugal also and it's not immigration that is driving high rent prices. That's a disingenuous position. Golden visas and Airbnb have contributed MUCH more to this as well as the liberalization of rents coupled with low new housing projects.
The workers that accept low salaries are mostly seasonal workers and they don't compete with locals for decent housing and if you were honest you would mention that most of the time you have plenty of them living in the same space. Again, not occupying a lot of the housing destined for locals. I don't see locals eager to go live in Odemira in the houses occupied by seasonal workers or in Martim Moniz in degraded housing.
Same here and totally agree with you.
I've actually worked in Finance and spent 20 years abroad before coming back to Portugal and it was obvious already when I arrived 4 years ago, that government measures were rigging the housing market to be ever higher: Golden Visa in exchange for €500k "realestate investment", tax discounts for retirees from the rest of Europe to come live in Portugal, Digital Nomad visas, such a bullshit regulatory regime for AirBnB businesses that (eventually, after 10 years) the highest court finally ruled that unlike what the "regulation" said, you can't just convert appartments to AirBnB businesses as you feel like and have to follow the same rules as ALL OTHER BUSINESSES, and, last but not least, a complete total refusal to regulate speculative investment in Portuguese realestate by foreign investors (something as simple as a minimum 6-month residence in Portugal requirement similar to many other countries would've made a huge difference and still be compatible wth EU rules as it doesn't discriminate between portuguese and other EU citizens).
And this was just their Demand side manipulation.
On the Supply side, housing construction was down to 1/3 of what it was in the 80s and there is pretty much no public housing construction in the country of Europe with the lowest percentage of public housing.
Meanwhile we get loud "we've created 100 student accomodation rooms in this old government building we didn't use" announcements as if they're so amazing when the local unis take in 50 thousand students per year for what are typically 3 year courses so 100 new rooms once every 10 years or so is doesn't even touch the problem of student accomodation (itself a subset of the wider housing problem).
(Note that most top level politicians from the 2 parties that alternate in Government have declared income as "real-estate investor").
Portugal is were it is in housing because the Portuguese are mainly dumb and greedy votting for greedy, incompetent snake-oil salesmen.
That said, the "immigration problem" in Portugal has to do with how the country mainly takes in people with far less average levels of Education than the locals, and hence not capable of working in the kind of higher value added jobs as the locals (especially the young). This is why almost everybody working as Uber and food delivery drivers are from Brasil or the Indian Subcontinent - unlike most other countries in Europe, Portugal has very little in the way of selectivity in who can come (especially from Brasil, whose citizens are the largest immigrant community in Portugal) plus it can't really attract the more well educated as richer countries can, so you mainly get a whole different kind of brasilians in Portugal than you get in, for example, Britain were I also lived.
You can't really get your Economy to climb up the value added ladder (and hence pay higher salaries) if you're pushing the locals to have fewer children or, even worse, to leave the country as soon as they finish their degrees, by pumping up house prices to increase your personal rewards from the side-business that you have as "realestate investor" alongside your politician day-job, whilst "making up for it" by importing people with a way lower level of education than those children would end up having and those degree-holding young adults leaving because houses are too expensive already have.
Also from Portugal and did you really just say that the problem with immigration is that they get exploited and then everyone ELSE suffers?
I mean i think you see what’s wrong with that.
Also without immigrants Portugal would be completely fucked because all the young people are leaving the country for better jobs in Europe. Someone needs to pick up the slack otherwise it’s just old people and a couple of children.
Also Portugal has a ton of houses. We are above average in houses per capita iirc. We have a problem with salaries and an over dependence on tourism.
He's just someone trying to provide a false narrative to justify his racism.
Portugal has massive house price inflation problems in the places were the jobs are: all it takes is to look at the house price to incomes ratio in Portugal now and compare it with the historical average (last I checked it was 5x its historical average).
Sure, there are actually empty villages in the deep inland countryside were the only work is "subsistence farming" or "forrestry", for the simple reason that even being a cashier at a supermarket pays better so nobody is going to move there to do that work.
Looking at housing as "all houses everywhere have the same utility value" to be able to come up with that "there is no housing problem in Portugal" bollocks is beyond ridiculous.
That said, blaming immigrants is pure, unadulterated far-right nutter fantasism: the idea that the people with the least power in the country (who can't even vote) are to blame for this is logic-defying, to say the least.
Imagine claiming your issue isn't with immigrants then immediately listing all the reasons immigrants are to blame for the actions of the capitalists that exploit them, and you, and the government that allows it.. 🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️
no, it's just you who is wilfully ignorant. And afraid. Because of your wilful ignorance.
Imagine not addressing any of the points, and instead just accusing someone of being wilfully ignorant.
How ignorant
Just to be clear, you’re arguing that if capitalism didn’t exist in Europe, we would be building twice as many buildings per year? This is the dumbest take I’ve read today, and I accidentally landed on r/Politics this morning.
Dunno about twice as much but the problem isn’t housing (Portugal has a shit ton of houses). The problem is affordable housing and yes capitalism is very much to blame here.
Not in a “free market = bad” that I’m very much for in many situations but simply because it’s not profitable to build affordable housing. A vast percentage of the housing built in Portugal is for upper middle class, so everyone below that (which in Portugal is a shit ton of people) you are fucked. And even if you lived in a decent house prices have skyrocketed so much that you get kicked out if they can do that.
Capitalism by design is very much against public housing and you don’t even need to imagine how the situation would be if you had that. You can just look at Vienna and see how they are doing in that regard (spoiler: pretty fucking well compared to the rest of Europe/world).
I'm not against immigration but it's no solution. You're in Europe. You're trying to replace a workforce that has free education, in a place with high quality education infrastructure, therefore most of them have bachelors and probably at least one or more masters degrees, with essentially illiterate (and i mean this with all due respect) people from a completely different culture who are not prepared to do anything remotely useful for at least 10 years, probably more.
I've literally had migrant refugees from Lebanon, Somalia, Eritrea, Morocco and such as flatmates in Brussels. Some of them are my close friends. They are not remotely prepared to take over 90% of European jobs. You either need social skills, labor skills, language skills or technical skills which they simply do not have. If i was in their shoes, it would take me decades to catch up to how Europeans work.
The migrants come here for what ? Uber eats ? How are they supposed to support themselves ? With government integration money we don't have available ? But say we figure it out and they live and then they will have kids one day. Those kids will behave exactly like the local population. They will go to University, they will be highly qualified, they will be socially adapted to the place, culture and language and, they will also not have kids, just like the locals. So which problem did these migrants solve then ?
So the issue here isn't that we lack people in Europe. It's that our economic doctrine is deficient. We need to change the doctrine, not the people. Immigration will not solve this problem, it will perpetuate it. Young people not having kids is an economic issue that will still happen whether you have a European young person there or a Iraqi young person there. You can't simply transplant a young couple from a country with very high birth rates in a totally different part of the world, subjected to an entirely different set of circumstances and expect them to be the same in Europe. That's not how this works.
You're talking shit. Immigrants make up 20% of the NHS in the UK, and loads also work in the care sector, those are vital jobs and you have to be literate. Most immigrants I've met speak better English than the local toe rags.
The lack of young workers?
You are deliberately talking over them. They’re clearly not claiming that all migrants are illiterate or uneducated or ill-prepared for work in Europe. They’re arguing that many are, and those migrants exacerbate our problems. They certainly don’t solve them.
Define many. What percentage are illiterate?
It depends on the nation. The UN collects data. Afghanistan is 62.7% illiterate, for example. Further, Almost all refugees to Denmark have zero Danish language reading and writing skills. They must learn all of these. Slightly more (but shockingly few) have any English reading and writing skills.
Surely it isn't surprising to you that refugees have limited European language skills?
Refugees != immigrants
Refugees are indeed immigrants.
refugee /ˌrɛfjʊˈdʒiː/ noun
Emigrating is a choice. Fleeing because you helped translate is not.
That definition of a refugee is perfectly compatible with the definition of a an immigrant. As per the definition, all refugees are immigrants. Not all immigrants are refugees.
Aren't western countries have strict education requirements before they would even consider permanent residency applications? Or are you talking about refugees, which imo shouldn't be counted as a way to replenish aging workforce because the governments let them in for humanitarian reason?
The large volume of applications of economic refugees made it so since 2015 the the education requirements are essentially waived. There are no wars in Morocco, for instance, but i personally know of refugees that hid their nationality to enter as war refugees. This is very common.
Only 30% of people in Europe have bachelors degrees, about the same as the u.s. Thats higher than in developing countries, say India at 8%, but a majority of people in both countries don't have degrees.
It's a common misconception by those with tertiary education in the first world that everyone else has tertiary education because they only talk to people in their social class with tertiary education.
You're showing me an average with the entire population of Turkey and the Balcans. Look better at your data, please. Now consider where the majority of migrants are going and are being expected. It is not a genuine source of comparison. It's closer to 40%. Besides, like i also mentioned, it's not just higher education.
The original post was about Europe, that's the European average. Even the E.U. average is 30% and that doesn't include turkey and some of the Balkans. Also the point still stands even for the best example of Luxembourg at 46%, it's still less than half. Most people in Europe do not have a bachelors.
So what I hear you're saying is that education is the solution.
We could educate immigrants, which will take some time. We could also educate the Europeans so they don't take the jobs that requires shorter educations. Either way we will need the immigrants to solve the current demand.
The problem is that the same thing was tried in the 1970s and it didn't turn out well when the demand for low skill workers decreased again. We already know that the demand will drop again in 20-30 years, so we should already now focus on educating the immigrants, so they can function in society after the low skill jobs are gone.
Another thing is that it's not like we can stop immigration. The climate changes will result in massive immigration whether we "allow" it or not. They're not going to sit and die outside imaginary lines on the ground.
IMO, the only realistic option is to accept and start educating immigrants.
I'm not saying they can't be or shouldn't beintegrated. What I'm saying is that their existence will not affect the demographic crisis in any meaningful way. They won't have kids, just as the locals. I've seen it happen. If we're saving people, we're saving people, but let's not pretend it's because of the population crisis, because that is irrelevant to the problem
Have you noticed what governments all over Europe have done to Adult Education in the last couple of decades???!
Indeed, the genuine, strategically well thought, policy on immigration for all involved would be to bring people over, educate them and integrate them.
The thing is, the immigration policies we have are mainly to bring over people to exploit them to the max without investing in them at all - they're about growing the local underclass to lower the employment costs of food delivery apps, restauration, garbage collection and similar, not about shared prosperity for both the locals and those that were invited in and should have been treated as guests rather than thrown (along with their children: see the baundeliers in France) into a life of poverty because they're starting far below the locals in the opportunities ladder due to their lower formal education level and difficulties with local language.
Meanwhile you have muppets on the make-believe-Leftwing-Rightwing political theatre both approaching the whole subject of immigration in a highly reductionist way as some kind of Identity War, all the while the people with most of the money rub their hands in glee whilst they cash in on the misery of locals and guests alike.
Yes I know and it's about to repeat. And yes it's driven by the political puppets of the industry.
You can tell because it's the same liberal centre parties who used to flirt with the right wing to gain votes, who are now suddenly calling for guest workers, without any support from their own voters. They don't care what happens to these people in the future. They just want to flood the employment market with cheap labour because their friends wants that.
More immigration is inevitable, but it shouldn't be like this.
Guess you haven't been to the UK
Putting the side the whole moral aspect of it, the only way to make importing less well educated people function in most European countries would be a huge investment in Adult Dducation, and we're in the late-neoliberal political period were governments (some more, some less) have been busy cutting taxes and hence public expenses, and typically Adult Education is one of the first to have been cut.
The very people who have set up open door immigration policies claiming that we need them because of the aging of the population refuse to invest in those who they made our guests to become fully productive and integrated citizens and instead are happy to for them to live in or near poverty working low-value and highly insecure jobs such as food delivery driver for some exploitative "Startup" that doesn't even pay taxes.
This shit isn't at all being done for the reasons we are told it's being done.
saying with all due respect doesn't make your bullshit racist essay any less racist, racist.
How is this racist? If I move to, say, Azerbaijan, I'm just as lost as them. I know fuck all about the language, can't even read the alphabet they have and don't know shit about the culture. And we share skincolours.
I have a PhD, but I'm basically useless in Azerbaijan for anything but menial labour, explained slowly with lots of gestures.
Culture isn't nearly that important, and learning the language, or just speaking English, is a minor obstacle all things considered. If you move somewhere, you will get a language teacher.
What the hell are you talking about? Culture is hugely important, if you move somewhere that fundamentally has issue with you... might might be outright killed.
Countries don't all necessarily speak English. I'm visiting Mexico right now... it's actually quite hard at times to find English speakers. The police I've interacted with here... no English. Border crossing... very limited English. Acting like English is something special is very short sighted.
Assuming that all immigrants or refugees will just have access to language tutoring is absurd. That's typically an expensive cost. One that many people simply cannot afford.
Well, then maybe it's different In the Americas, I don't know, but you mentioned an European country.
I live in Europe, been around various places in Europe. I'm an immigrant myself. It's not nearly as bad as you might think.
And yes, obviously racism and xenophobia is a problem, but integrating into the culture won't fix that.
Careful now. Calling racists racist is impolite and very frowned upon.
If you won’t even acknowledge that some people need help to learn to read, does that mean you want to eliminate literacy support for refugees? Isn’t that far more racist than just accepting reality? I believe this is what we call horseshoe politics at work. The tendency for the loudest “anti-racists” in the room to be the absolute worst racists.
I'm sorry you feel that way.
Not when you consider that so many are rather old and afraid of change (something which correlates with age).
Many comments below (->above?) about housing. But it seems to me, the problem in much of Europe is that many old people hang on to large half-empty family houses, so over 65s are occupying a lot more space than under 15s (although the latter have more energy, need space to play ...). It's a pity they blame immigrants for this.
For me it's more a cherry on a cake. We already have a housing problem for a couple years. Most young starters can't afford to purchase/rent a house, so that look for cheaper options. Those cheaper options are given away to immigrants because of emergency housing laws. This in turn causes less houses for the population that can't afford new houses. It's not just a problem of immigration (not even that much) it's a problem that existing empty houses go way over the affordable price and on top of that the immigrants get the houses for free.
So yeah focus all that and I can see why people blame immigration, but it's absolutely not the only cause. I would prefer it more if the government limits the prices of housing, but this causes investment in housing to drop as well. It's a dirty vicious greedy circle that points to immigrants as the easy target.
I should also add that some immigrants don't accept other temporary options and want a bigger house for free, whilst the population pays 150-200%. That also causes friction.
If you look into the issues caused by (mass) immigration or related to that then it makes much more sense imo.
The old folks had a good time. Younger generation can't afford sht.
And now they've spent all their money just in time to rely on social security from the young ones. Try and screw us from every angle. Most selfish and greedy generation that existed.
Yeah... That's not where the money went. Some of it, sure. But some very few people have hoarded a lot more than it seems people realise.
Why not both?
Fair enough.
If you look at the weath distribution numbers it's quite a big "some" (not per person compared with those few people that hoarded lots of weath, but because it's still quite a difference between generations and there are A LOT of old people, so it adds up), mainly because it's old people who outright own the houses were they live which are worth a lot of money per current day house prices.
Because it was those very same (now old) people who voted for the very house inflation that's shafting the young and made them relativelly much wealthier than the young generations, they deserve a lot (so, a very large "some") of the blame.
Nothing that any other generation would have done different. This is not about age, it's about the system. Younger people will complain about you too
Scary though they will be making the rules for a long time to come yet
That was my first thought: They can and do vote, and now they're a populational majority as well as a statistical one at the ballot box. That can no longer be combatted by encouraging younger generations to vote.
If only society was designed around looking after people instead of infinite competition, maybe this wouldn't be so much of a problem
We have the technology
And abundant resources. But our approach to things like this will not change as long as money is king.
2023 is the hottest year ever in record. Everything suggests that it won't hold that record for long. Why would I bring children to this world to suffer the hell that 2050 will be?
Because at least you are thinking about such problems (unlike too many). I thought similarly back in 1998, many records broken since, we're still here, now glad my children are too and getting educated, to help society get through this. By the way the original post is from Ireland which may not get so much warmer (depends thermohaline circulation...) - maybe stormier, although much (not all) of europe will still be nice to live in 2050, adaptation may include many people relocating.
And will you still feel the same in 20 years time when your children are starving or fighting in wars for fresh water?
I sincerely doubt most people will be starving. Global population should peak about 25% higher than now, agriculture and diets will change and move - adapt, but it won't be equitable. So I do expect my kids may need to fight - in a non-violent way - for a better distribution of water and other resources.
Life is a movie to sheltered internet dweebs like them lol.
Climate change is real as fuck. And unless the people replying are already in hugely disadvantaged 3rd world countries coupled with hazardous terrain susceptible to ocean rise and/or jet stream change, they'll be fine.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LxgMdjyw8uw
Life will always feel like a struggle no matter how utopian our society. It's the natural mode of life to instinctually fight for survival. If there's nothing to fight, our brains literally imagine stuff for us. Hello GAD, Panic Disorder, etc.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://m.piped.video/watch?v=LxgMdjyw8uw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
If your in a developed nation with a decent military then you will be among the last to feel the pain of environmental collapse. Most of the world is what we would consider hellish right now, yet people still find a way to laugh and love. Watch these poor souls recycling electronics in Africa. Watch bald and bankrupt in bengladesh. Most people alive today live like this and it doesn't stop them from living life. We all adapt to our conditions, its all relative to our individual experience and what we consider "normal" in our lives. Your condition potentially getting worse shouldn't stop you from having kids, as your condition probably has a long way to go to get down to where most of the population is at currently. Whether you enjoy the ride, fight the collapse, or hail the apocalypse, someones gotta be around to keep this party going. If their born into late stage environmental collapse with nations fighting over the last scraps of arable land and drinkable water, well then that becomes their "normal" and theyll still find something to laugh about and someone to love. But at the end of the day it is your choice and you should do as you see best.
https://youtu.be/JXDrIvShZKU?si=SJZi6VLNjzPgvVXD
https://youtu.be/iq_76McFVLo?si=ys1zZE6mUe5LyaWT
You really threw bald people in there as the miserable, wretched of the earth.
Lol
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because otherwise who will fix this mess?
Humans are what are causing the mess, and you want to add more of them?
The earth does not care much about climate change, nor about humans. Nature will bounce back eventually. It always did.
Bringing kids into this world, who are educated and adapted will help humanity, not the earth.
only if their parents care enough to make sure they are educated and smart. we don't need more stupid people.
Good point. I guess the problem is that with humans it's always quantity over quality.
The "problem" being that the more educated people are, the fewer children they have and that's a correlation that actually holds pretty well.
The whole "people should have more children and make sure they are educated and smart" is self-contradictory: it's either more kids lower-education or fewer kids higher-education.
It's magical thinking to expect that the people capable of "making sure they're educated and smart" will have many children.
Humans and our cultural diversity are part of biodiversity which makes life beautiful, it's about balance. A longterm goal should be to save more space for other species, but we need educated young people to keep knowledge and tackle the legacy of the mess (among much else) left by their ancestors.
You do it. You're not gonna fuck a solution out. Why is it always "let the kids fix it"?
because it will take multiple generations to fix?
And that's why conservatives get elected. And since more and more young vote for right-wing parties we're in for a real shitshow.
Yeah. To be honest most liberal and social democrat governments are playing right into the hands of the right wing too.
Too afraid to crack down on the far right, but still too conservative to commit to large public spending on housing and sustainable infrastructure. Or in Germany's case, nuclear energy.
I have hope for those organzing outside of electoralism, those organzing within it in the West are in for another rude wake up call soon. They keep ignoring them.
Westerners are not more tolerant or intolerant then any other people on earth, we generally just have higher standards of living as a result of economic and military hegemony. As that continues to decline for more and more previously " wealthy " people the fascist radiclization will get worse in the West.
We need new ways of living and bold ideas. The far right nor neoliberals can offer that to people. Liberals will tolerate dissidents but they will never take meaningful action on the issiues of class, the military industrial complex or encomcis for the most part. It needs to change from the outside in.
You know that not even the former operators of the German nuclear power plants are in favour of going back to nuclear? Even if we decide NOW to invest in nuclear power again on a grand scale - which makes no sense at all economically - it won't help the energy transition, because planning and construction takes decades and is irrational in terms of costs. However, I agree with you that it was a strategic mistake on the part of the former Merkel government not to shut down coal-fired power plants first but to shut nuclear - but this does not change the current path dependencies of the German energy sector at all!
For decades German politicians have used the excuse that it takes many years to build nuclear. If they had started decades ago, Germany would have a dozen plants now and have no energy woes. Instead we now see a huge proportion of Germany’s energy generated by coal and lignite. Get off the anti-science train and join us in the 21st century. Nuclear is safe, plentiful, and green.
This doesn’t mean they shouldn’t invest in other forms of energy too. Energy grids require diversification, and concurrent leaders have been asleep at the wheel.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a fundamental opponent of nuclear power, but I would like to point out that at this point in time I think we can achieve our goal of an emission-free energy sector faster and more cost-efficiently if we focus our political, regulatory and economic efforts entirely on the development and scale up of renewable energy and storage technologies - not to mention the fact that the supply chain for uranium (Russia, Niger, China, Kazakhstan, etc) and the security of supply with sufficient cooling water are by no means secure at present and in times of worsening climate change...
Apart from that, nuclear power plants cannot be shut down fast enough and are therefore not realy compatible with an energy mix that is largely based on renewables...
Germany's strategy of going all-in on LNG has been a colossal failure, and I do not believe going all-in on any other energy sources is wise. Diversification of energy grids is almost always the best strategy, as it mitigates risks which are as yet unforeseen. Let's build wind and solar, but let's also build nuclear. Worst case scenario Germany has lots of clean energy.
Canada and Australia are #2 and #4 producers of uranium. Uranium mining is extremely distributed, and we have no strategic risk of losing access.
Germany has no climate model which predicts desert-like conditions. Even if there were, Germany has a large coastline, and could desalinate sea water for cooling.
We do not shut down nuclear plants. They are not quick-fire generation. They stay in operation indefinitely, and provide stable power during periods of low sun and wind. They make an excellent complement to renewable grids which are subject to high volatility.
Would you like me to list the 300 reasons a fully renewable grid in Germany is currently impossible?
There is nothing wrong with diversification, but it is always a question of how much bang for the buck you get in the end - especially against the background of the politically explosive debate about electricity prices. The real costs of nuclear power (including risk insurance, etc.) are immense and one must honestly ask oneself what amount of renewable energy one can get on the grid with the same investment in a realistic time. Given that Flamanville, Olkiluoto and Hinkley Point will be / already are all massively over budget, I assume that with the expansion of the trans-European grids (HVDCs) and seasonal storage of green hydrogen, methane, etc. we will probably achieve this goal better and cheaper...
OK, point taken - assuming that their deposits are sufficient for the uranium demand of the whole western world for the next 50-100 years (?), supply may be regarded as secured.
Correct, that is exactly the problem: Without an unconditional feed-in guarantee (i.e. even at times when the nuclear power plants could operate economically on the common European electricity market), no operator would agree to produce nuclear energy. This, in turn, ensures that any power plants that cannot be shut down quickly enough (especially nuclear and coal-fired) have the effect that wind farms, in particular, often have to be taken off the grid. Since this is also connected with compensation payments to the wind power operators, these are external costs of nuclear power which we all (private households and industry) have to pay via our electricity price...
Just prepare properly.
Take 5 minutes of your day to excersie a small speech about how you never knew anything, nobody knew anything in fact and we were just following orders. If we all feign ignorance we can pretend like this happened under our watch.
And it's this exact problem that will get solved with the immigration from climate change. Europe is going to get more African migrants fleeing climate change.
Yes, this seems inevitable, and given Europe's relative historical contribution to climate change, I think we have a moral obligation to welcome some, as (to some extent) their right, not charity. An issue, however, is that immigrants tend to gather in crowded hot cities near sea-level, just the places we should plan to slowly depopulate, while it's rarer to see African faces in sparsely populated upland rural areas, where there are more empty houses and older people needing services. Research about climate migration focused mainly on where people will move from, not enough about where it would make most sense for them to move to.
A massive investment in adult education would probably help a lot in making up for the Economic problems of importing tons of people without the level of formal education necessary for the higher value added jobs most europeans can do (50% of the population being Uber and food delivery drivers doesn't quite work economically), but the very same people who brought us a massive house price bubble to reward rent-seekers to the max (in turn feeding a fall in birth rates because young people can't afford a family), a race to the bottom on taxing wealth and 4 decades of falling real terms funding for any public services other than the ones mainly used by old people, are hardly going to invest in adult education.
"Immigrants should be
forcedguided into places thatus superior white people, who are above what I deem menial work, are neededborn-in-country people struggle to live in."So - think - you really prefer to keep immigrants in overheating floodable crowded cities - ghettoes ? By the way, I am myself an immigrant, I now live in a village, and do struggle. I also studied climate science and demography and technology trends, so I think about the longer term - places people struggled to live in the past, and the future, are not the same. We should use our knowledge to help those who move gain a better life than otherwise.
It's a problem that can solve itself with time, no need for population replacement because muh economy.
It's not passing such a milestone that's an issue, so much as how fast we pass it - i.e. a population decline is sustainable if gradual. My concern is that our models of economics and governance derive from previous centuries when population was rapidly growing, which helped provide social mobility and influence for younger generations. So we need to adjust economics and governance to compensate, to avoid stagnation and gerontocracy.
and how do we do that
Well some small steps could include - taxes shifting from income to wealth, land and luxury use of resources, lowering barriers to voting for younger people (e.g. the requirement for stable residence disenfranchises people who move about), return to free education, a lower voting age and upper age-limit for politicians... Yet gerontocracy is a problem even in youth-skewed continents like Africa. So to be honest I don't know, maybe some people here on Lemmy have more revolutionary ideas...?
Well, realistically this is a situation we can fuck our way out of
Having sex is easy. Being able to balance childcare and afford raising children is a feat that grows ever more difficult by the day
Agreed. I was just being silly. You're right, though.
Geez, feels like just this year that over 64 year olds outnumbered under 14 year olds.
My immediate response is that this is clearly good news - a gradual reduction in population is a good thing. We just need to work on managing the societal practicalities properly
Reductions in population will happen after the climate change issues go unresolved when they needed to be, and resource scarcity forces an economic global crisis never seen in modern history. It won’t be gradual. Every pop model predicts going from 10B to 1B in less than 100 years post vertex. Or at least it seems if we stay on the track we are on.
any references for said models?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/09/learning/whats-going-on-in-this-graph-nov-15-2023.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Bunch of models on one chart there. The dark red line is if all rates of fertility were the same as the US. The other lines are other global models.
Yes young people not being able to afford families is a good thing!
Fuck 'em, old people got to finish this circus with a bang.
I usualy write a hefty reply on why this is not good news, but InTheNutshell did it better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBudghsdByQ
Kurzgesagt videos are usually excellent, but in this case the case for population reduction benefits to the environment are simply dismissed with ‘it will take too long for global population to fall’. This is a weirdly trite line in an otherwise nuanced video, ignoring the fact that populations don’t have to decline to improve things - a simple levelling off is beneficial. Moreover, it ignores that most reductions are taking place in countries with the highest per capita carbon emissions
Yes but those are also the countries with stagnating or decreasing emissions per capita, while the ones with rising emissions are also increasing in population. These compounding factors can cancel each other out when looking at net emissions.
Let's say right now we have 10 people from the u.s. emitting 10 tonnes of co2 and 10 people from the developing work emitting 1 tonne of co2, for a total of 110 tonnes of co2.
Now let's say in 50 years we now have 8 people in the u.s. emitting 8 tonnes of co2 and 12 people in the developing world emitting 5 tonnes of co2 for a total of 124 tonnes of co2.
This isn't to let western countries and their lifestyles off the hook, or that developing countries don't have a right to increase their standard of living like the west did, just saying populations stagnating or decreasing won't necessarily help climate change.
But the future population predictions for Africa, are also being slashed.
Sort of. They are saying that the rate at which it is levelling off is inconsequential for the environmental effect. However, the rate is enough to have economic impacts already. It's not that they don't acknowledge it, they are just saying we can see the economic damage long before well see the environmental benefits.
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We're so utterly fucked...
Covid 2 electric boogaloo?
Just a reminder that unsustainable world population growth is bad. Fewer people is good for everyone and our planet.
And this is why the retirement ages have to be raised in many countries.
People live longer and fewer young to take care of the old (and the economy in general)
Yea and by the time I get to retirement age it will be pushed so far back that only a handful of people will live long enough to retire anyway. Just work until you die /s
I doubt that will happen.
But raising the retirement age is needed in an ageing population where people just live healthier and longer than ever.
Otherwise an ever increasing amount of people will be retired and the amount of people that can contribute to the economy and well everything really will decrease.
The same problem would arise if the amount of children suddenly started increasing rapidly, fortunately that would likely solve it self after a while since they would eventually work too. We need a balance of workers and non workers otherwise society would collapse.
The only way I can see that being sustainable is if we could automate to the degree that the amount of human workers could be less every year. But that's not possible yet (if ever).
And no I obviously don't want the retirement age to increase, I hope to also retire some day. But I see no choice.
But the article said that while people live longer their healthy years don't increase that much. And that is going to be a problem
Europe has proven we can't fix this by importing millions of unskilled people with radically different values. The social unrest is proving catastrophic. Rightwing parties are gaining traction in almost every European country. The EU is on track to accept more than a million applications this year alone, and most of them have large families which will be granted reunification. Data shows most of them will never work a day in their lives. Our social systems will collapse within a decade at this rate. We'll be lucky if the EU itself survives this.
Instead, we really need to alleviate the issues resulting in young people not having kids. The usual argument is, "it's too expensive." While true, data shows that income isn't a barrier to fertility. In fact, higher income results in lower fertility, with some exceptions at the very top end of the income spectrum.
As a German, I call bullshit. Every asylum seeker I've met either had a job/went to school or was denied a job because the application didn't go through yet. I'm sure there are people out there who don't want to work, but please show me the data which shows that "most of them will never work a day in their lives". Your comment sounds EXACTLY like the rhetorics of the same right-wing you pretend to condemn.
Official unemployment figures show that nearly two-thirds (65%) of Syrians who are able to work actually rely either entirely or partially on receiving public benefits.
Euractiv link to the same stat
Source from a website self-labelled as "A platform for Syrians to own their discourse
The figures show improvement over time, of course, as German language skills are picked up and general integration occurs, but as that last source puts it: "...the integration process remains fragile, and in its early stages. Much work remains ahead for both Syrian refugees and the German authorities."
As a Dane, I call bullshit. Show me the stats. Here are ours. Syrian migrants have an employment rate of under 20%. Somali immigrants are under 30%. As you can tell by the same link, their crime rate is astronomical.
As someone from a country where the AfD gains increasing popularity on an almost daily basis, calling "bullshit" rings completely hollow. You clearly have no idea how bad things have become for your average countryman.
https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/oecd-migration-beschaeftigung-100.html shrug
Yes it doesn't work if you make it impossible or very hard for it to work. I'm obviously not perfectly sure but for the amount of refugees we have both in Germany and likely Denmark, especially now with Ukraine we spend way to little money on the process of integration, if there's not enough (language) schools, shitty temporary housing and unhelpful and uncooperative Ausländerbehörden, we shouldn't turn to blaming the people who come here for the problems we in the "West" largely created.
Blaming and viliviying Somali and Syrian migrants just gets us increasingly deeper into this rabbit hole, until at the end of the day you have fundamentalist or ethnic riots, or firing squads at the outside borders. Both is completely unworkable, incredibly more expensive and frankly inhumane.
The conservatives that think human rights are a good thing should get their head out of fantasy land, the crusty socdems should ask themselves how they let this shit happen, and yeah the afd isn't gonna fix it but closing the borders as they demand is the most stupid non solution ever, just letting the thing heat up there on the outskirts until it blows up in all of our faces. Which it will continue to as long as no one takes it seriously enough to actually make a good solution. But relying on the publics generosity and frankly Kafkaesque government regulation and support isn't gonna get you well integrated migrants in a generation, it takes 3 maybe 5 in that case. Which is what we've been doing.
We don't have enough houses and schools for everyone as is. If you're saying we need even more, no one is arguing with you. We're arguing that, given reality, adding more unskilled and illiterate migrants makes all of our problems much worse.
You argue that protecting the border is impossible, and I couldn't disagree more. Countries have been successfully protecting their borders for millennia. If you're arguing that Germany just happens to be the most incompetent country in all of history, I strongly disagree. This is only a matter of political will. It's only a matter of time until AfD is elected, because successive governments have refused to protect the border. When they're in power, they'll reduce the refugee quota to zero and expel everyone who illegally immigrated. Then they'll restrict migration from countries from which migrants are overrepresented in crime and unemployment. People will cheer.
Germany (and most Western countries) have a few short years to make realistic concessions to their people before AfD and other far right parties take charge entirely. Decide if you want compromise, or the worst possible outcome. Those are your only choices right now.
In this same reality it's also still more expensive, logistically difficult and just again inhumane. If the afd is getting close to taking charge entirely, I'll take my bike to France to learn how to make the polices job a living hell. Just resigning to stupid outdated thinking doesn't seem particularly appealing to me.
Sure some might cheer when they start to push that hard against immigration. Others will riot and burn the streets even worse than they do already. Because for example we believe having such a thing as universal human rights is a good idea.
Because completely counter to whatever you think about defending borders countries have for literal time immemorial tried and failed to gain advantage or prevent each other from doing so by military force. It's been catastrophic every single time. Or are the Greeks Romans, Chinese kingdoms, Nazis, Soviets, still here with us today, did they have a graceful and good end to their reign.
The choice you present is false both options will inevitably end in the decline of the West, one just might be faster than the other. But there is in theory at least better alternatives, they just require Europeans to stop being US lapdogs. And letting go of the thousands of years old doctrine of military and economic domination, that creates most of its own problems to begin with.
I'm in the UK and the handful of asylum seekers I've met who are unemployed, have significant trauma and or disability and shouldn't be working as they are barely coping as it is.
If we can support citizens with these conditions on unemployment, it's nothing but racism to deny this support to people here under asylum.
And unless some kind of supernatural magic occurs that stops capitalism, climate collapse, resource depletion, and all the genocidal authoritarianist politics humans seem to be so naturally predisposed to, birthrates should continue to fall. Adding to our numbers is nothing short of insanity at this point.
We appear to agree about the situation as it is. However you are arguing you wish to make it worse. I, and most Europeans, do not.
Because supporting people makes things worse? Wtf has to be wrong with you to consider providing basic resources to struggling people, a bad thing?
No. Reducing the capacity of already strained social services makes them worse. WTF is wrong with you that you want to remove social services from struggling people??