As the U.S. fantasizes, the world builds high speed rail

Re:As the U.S. fantasizes, the world builds high speed rail by delhanty on Saturday July 01, 2017 @11:20PM (#14680688)

There's more to it than just available capital though.

A still-shrinking working-age population will have to look after a still-expanding retired population.

IIRC (no reference), Japanese pensioners on aggregate have lots of savings. However, they will surely be competing with one another for services rendered by the shrinking labor pool, so one would expect the costs of those services to rise, negating the effect of having lots of savings.

I live in Japan now and, unsurprisingly, the retirement home business appears to be booming, especially in and around Tokyo. But even if there are lots of retirement homes, they will have to be staffed. By robots perhaps?

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Re:As the U.S. fantasizes, the world builds high speed rail by GFischer on Sunday July 02, 2017 @10:59AM (#14682756)

Hopefully they'll relax immigration requirements? Maybe from Southeast Asia and the Phillipines? They're very used to working in the hospitality industry, a lot of cruise staff are Filipinos for example.

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Re:As the U.S. fantasizes, the world builds high speed rail by neltnerb on Sunday July 02, 2017 @02:55AM (#14681252)

Yeah, I agree. Robots for sure. If the cost of developing an AI that can do this is less than the cost of hiring scarce labor... in 2050? Sounds almost obvious now that you say it.

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