oh we can and do have the people power, no one wants to pay what it actually costs now to do them. It's not a lack of people, its a lack of money going to the right places, especially on the maintenance aspects. Ai ain't gonna fix that part, the one hope you do mention is robotics for augementing human strength for care of the eldery but again, money isn't going to the right places, its just filling up the accounts of the already rich and just staying there now.

as an example the landlord of the place i'm at right now spends hundreds a month of a leaking faucet but won't spend anything to fix it or update the shower that its happening in, they take in over $8000/month on 3 units they illegally split it into that they bought in 2003 for $362,000 and is now valued at $1.3 million, yet it still has lead pipes and leaking faucets. There is lots of money for upkeep on every project, the gov and ownership class doesn't want to pay it until forced to.

It’s called extraction capitalism

Just suck every last dollar of value out of every asset.

Broken down, debt encumbered assets will be someone else’s problem, especially since bankruptcy can’t reach in to the pockets of the owners only the corps and LLCs that have stood as the facade for extraction

"hundreds of dollars a month of a leaking faucet"

exaggerate much ?

It's hard to take (even valid) criticism seriously if couched in hyperbolic speech like that.

And yes, the landlords have probably no incentive to repair. They probably rent out as is as long as they can, then evict everyone and rebuild/remodel.

Maybe you could sue.

So, some math:

$362K invested in 2003 would now be $1.25M, so this landlord would have been a lot better putting the money into an index fund. When you consider the amount of real estate taxes, insurance, and maintenance, which probably today runs at about $35K a year, if you account for a measly 1% per year for maintenance, this was not a good investment, though some of the relative loss is made up in the form of tax breaks.

If the landlord did not buy this place, that would leave you or anyone else unable to live in this place unless you purchased it yourself and then became a landlord to others, essentially at a loss relative to putting your money in an index fund.

$100K a year rent for this place barely covers the interest you would earn on $1.3M, plus taxes, maintenance and insurance, so there is no positive cash flow here.

The solution is to pay the landord what it actually costs to properly maintain the units, which means raising your rent.

Yes, no one wants to pay people what they "should" be payed, just like no one wants to pay rent in the amount that needs to be paid to allow the place to be maintained properly.

At some point, a balance is found, and things are given up to achieve that balance.

Do you have an actual figure in mind when you write "With the transition to clean energy"? The reality is much much more bleak, you're looking at a very small chunk of total energy consumption that's using renewable, coal has only been going up and up the past years, and how sustainable the new renewables (non hydro) will be in a world not propped-up by cheap fossil fuels remains to be tested. I was hoping Bloomberg would call a spade a spade and acknowledge a guess of the real humans-carrying capacity of spaceship earth once it stops running on fumes... My guess: one tenth of our current peak.

There are reasons to be hopeful : https://patrickcollison.com/solar

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/our-climate-change-debates-are...

We will replace most fossil fuels with solar. Will it be in time? Maybe not, but it’s not hopeless.

Our planet was 20 degrees warmer overall that last time the CO2 levels were over 420ppm. And the level of rise over the recent past is totally unprecedented. Climate zones are moving tens of miles per decade north, far faster than forests can adapt. Things are going to get very crazy and the hunan population won't just decline gradually.

Noahpinion's self-admitted optimism bias towards solar and batteries is unhelpful hopium.

Look into Tony Seba work. The transition is on an expodential path, most prediction are simple linear. Solar + wind + batteries are going to displace almost everything in the next 10 years.

Nuclear power is the most significant opportunity for clean energy. If we implement it fully, as e.g. France has, I don’t see a reason we can’t achieve abundant clean energy.

Interesting that France's nuclear failure is still brought as argument for the opposite?

You're going to have to be more specific as to what you call a failure... Closing the Fessenheim plant even though it was in perfect condition, safe, and very useful, just for base politician reasons... is this maybe what you mean? If you count the MWh/€, the excellent safety records, it's hard to see the failure. Maybe the slow production of an EPR reactor, the giving up on efforts towards 4th-gen reactors?

They might be referring to the fact that France had to import electrical power from Germany last year (which was made with coal and natural gas), because the rivers they used to cool their reactors didn't carry enough water anymore due to a drought.

I am sorry you are not very well informed. The reason France had to import was an extreme abundance of caution: one corrosion case on a safety circuit, not even the main circuit, leading to complete stop and overhaul of all plants having the same design. There are plenty of chemical plants with less paranoia...

Ah, ok, if it that's simple.. only that one tiny bit, not half a dozen reactors showing fatigue and early cracks in primary containment vessels where we can just lower the margins on paper and be safe again.. :)

Look, that's what I got:

https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featuredealing-with-cra...

What source do you have?

Basically everything you can find easily by googling.. so hat, their failed maintenance outages failed, their failed (or just too expensive) planning for their future capacities (too much in time and money) and the general concept not being fit for the future on many other aspects.

In the US at least, we'll have plenty of other much more serious problems before we have to worry about infrastructure. There was a story on here just the other day about record levels of homelessness for baby boomers. Our housing market was built for growth and rents are probably not going down much any time soon. The elderly have found themselves with houses too large to care for, and they're often well into disrepair by the time it's feasible to downsize. Financial companies have been preying on this same population with predatory financial instruments like reverse mortgages. Lots of folks who were among the first to get 401ks instead of pensions are realizing they have far too little saved to maintain anything even close to their pre-retirement lifestyle.

Our society has optimized itself for profit around the historically financially well-off baby boomer generation and not their welfare or comfort. Sadly this absolutely won't be a problem that's solved for at least a generation or two. Until then it'll be very painful times for many people.

Japan is not on fire, and their GDP and population growth has been stagnant a long time. They have an aging population, but they won't live forever. Fertility rate could be trivially boosted through policy measures and we aren't seeing those, because they don't care.

> Fertility rate could be trivially boosted through policy measures and we aren't seeing those, because they don't care.

Totally false. It can be argued that they're not doing enough, but they are definitely trying.

December 14, 2022: "The Japanese government is planning to provide an additional 80,000 yen (€556, $592) to couples who have a child as Tokyo looks for ways to halt the alarming decline in the nation's birth rate."[1]

January 24, 2023: "Japan’s prime minister issued a dire warning about the country’s population crisis on Monday, saying it was “on the brink of not being able to maintain social functions” due to the falling birth rate.

...The government has launched various initiatives to address the population decline over the past few decades, including new policies to enhance child care services and improve housing facilities for families with children. Some rural towns have even begun paying couples who live there to have children."[2]

June 1, 2023: "Japan is investing around 3.5 trillion yen in a push to increase the number of children. The country's acute population problem is getting worse quicker than expected.

Parents will be entitled to a monthly allowance will of some 15,000 yen —about $107 dollars — for each child from newborn to two years old. There will then be 10,000 yen for children from the age of three and older, with the coverage expanded to include children in senior high school.

The government also plans to open up nursery school or day-care center places to children, even if their parents do not have jobs.

It will raise childcare leave benefits, starting in the fiscal year 2025, so disposable family incomes remain unchanged for up to four weeks even when both parents take leave.

The measures also include increasing paid parental leave and providing subsidies for fertility treatments. "[3]

[1]: https://www.dw.com/en/will-japans-new-plan-to-boost-birth-ra...

[2]: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/23/asia/japan-kishida-birth-rate...

[3]: https://www.dw.com/en/japan-to-channel-billions-of-dollars-i...

Fair enough, but the low hanging fruit I see is not a lack of money, but a lack of time. The expectations placed on workers, on top of raising a family, is ridiculous, but they won't budge. For all alarmist rhetoric, the government certainly isn't behaving as though it's an emergency.

To be fair those numbers are tiny. The NPV to society of a new baby is probably more like $500k. I would guess if we paid $500k for a baby it would be quite effective

The problem with that approach is a simple $500k payment does not result in a productive adult. It takes years and years of hard work and sacrifice to end up with the type of adults you want.

You will get the people you least want to be parents pumping out kids for $500k.

I don’t think this is a problem solvable with cash.

Even if instead of NPV they simply paid lost wages/opportunity cost then it would be something. In Japan there is a lot of discrimination against young women because of fear they will go on maternity leave/not stick around. As a result, women don’t get promoted/hired, and if they do get pregnant are minimally accommodated. If we want to encourage women having children we need to compensate all the negative consequences they face in the workplace, and that’s tens of thousands of dollar per year.

From what I understand the problem is discrimination in the workplace that young women, and especially mothers, suffer.

If a woman sees children as a block to her personal success then a little bit of money (and it is a little, compared to lost wages) won’t help.

Have you seen evidence that less discrimination at work leads to higher fertility?

Here's one paper about Poland; "These data reveal that discriminatory practices by employers against pregnant women and women with small children are decisive in women’s decisions to postpone or forego childbearing."

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26349356

And yet there is still widespread discrimination against immigrants. If Japan is consumed by this crisis, it will be by their own stubbornness

>discrimination against immigrants

... aka not being demographically suicidal.

Their current track is not demographically suicidal?

I think you mean favouring their own ethnicity (which is fantastically narrowly defined, socially, in Japan. If one of your grandparents was Korean and the other three Japanese, you're mostly treated as Not A Real Japanese Person by Japanese who know. Which affects promotion prospects, for a start.)

"Favouring your own ethnicity" has a simpler name...

I think you're suggesting racist, but they seem to be more xenophobic.

$500 plus $100 a month is basically nothing

Many countries have tried to boost it, so far nothing seem to work.

It’s a cultural thing and once it shift it doesn’t come back easily.

You would have to convince modern woman to stay at home and have 3+ child and you need most of them to do so.

Without return to traditional values that is not going to happen.

I'd confidently venture to guess the only times throughout history this is arrested is when either a Patriarchal foreign group conquers, or when a Patriarchal ideological minority gains influence with their population increases.

There isn't a good way to boost fertility that I know of. The Nordics with very generous maternity leave and social safety net have a lower fertility rate than the USA.

I don't think fertility rate is something good or bad, I think people are very conservative (beyond its political sympathy) because change opens for uncertainty. It does not matter if it is about drugs, fertility, AI or diversity.

Keeping a populace dumb and uneducated works pretty well.

On the other side of the coin a society without children allows its members the freedom to be obese and mentally ill.

.cz has been increasing births by tweaks to public policy/spend.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CZE/czechia/fertility-...

A TLD has been increasing birth rates?!? Surprising!

By allowing more than one children? What a generous State.

Both parents have to work, if you want to increase birth rates then you can't force everyone to be a dual income family.

You'll notice that all the high birth rates are with single income family structures.

In Sweden you get 480 days of parental leave and heavily subsidized daycare. Both parents can have jobs without issues

So a year and a half. Every large family I know ( and I know very many, very large families) are single income or the mom works at the school.

He didn't even make a point, just gave us a fact about their social support programs.

Clearly paternal leave doesn't fix the core problem since it's been there, and grown, over the entire time the birth rate has fallen.

It doesn't even make sense to do it unless both parents have exceptional careers, and most people just have mundane jobs.

Not good enough. It is not for daycare and The State to raise your children while you're echoing poetically down the halls of Coincidence Inc...

Reduce taxes. All countries with high fiscal pressure have a low birth rate. Maybe the correlation is there. Someone out there might not want to look because his whole structure (bureaucracy) depends on the status quo.

> All of our infrastructure was build in constant growth. That mean that we cannot pay to maintain it

Not really. For example both the US and California run on insanely large yearly budgets and base economies. What neither have are priorities that would consider infrastructure to be critical. Not for maintenance and sure as hell not for investment. Both have plenty of legacy money sinks, and hangups, and hobby projects (some mindblowingly large), and bad habits (like road resurfacing that comes riddled with defects and needs redoing on a yearly basis - in the most boring weather). There is a lot of money. There seems to be no incentives for spending on boring solid infrastructure.

US and California have run on immigration since their respective beginnings. Budgets don’t matter if there’s no one who can do the actual work.

There are plenty of companies on the planet who know how to build solid roads. And I doubt they would refuse to bid on California road projects - including training and importing their own workforce if it came to that. They are used to building through the middle of nowhere. But yeah, it's up to California (for example) to refuse to consider such solutions.

> we can’t keep our standart of care for the elderly.

Seems obvious. If you go from 10% of your population being elderly to 50% - you either need to spend a ton more or quality is going down.

Or automation and increased productivity fill the gap, as they have always done.

I’d file that under “quality is going down”.

Are you imagining machines delivering canned food or something?

Medical advances too - drugs and procedures that didn't exist 10 or 20 years ago are commonplace along elderly populations now, a trend that will no doubt continue. Attitudes and regulations around euthanasia will inevitably change too. Personally I'm not worried my final years are going to be of significantly diminished quality of life compared to what my own parents have experienced. I might not be so sure of that if I lived in a country like South Korea or Italy, mind you.

It's not going to happen in a day. We can go from 10% to 12%.

It happened already over 30 years, and in most countries should plateau in less than 10 years.

You went from about 200 years of an industrial world where <5% of the population was elderly to - in the span of 30 years - that going up to the mid 30s to low 40s in almost all developed countries.

Japan & Italy led the charge.

> All of our infrastructure was build in constant growth.

And the demand for that infrastructure also comes from growth. It's not the landmass that needs roads and schools.

At some point the population will level off. Either it'll be by choice, or due to some resource limit. The voluntary option seems strongly preferable, as it doesn't involve vast numbers of people starving.