The US is going full Cyberpunk! After 20 years of service you are eligible for citizenship of the Corporate zone and one child permit.

> and one child permit

The way discourse has been trending lately, I suspect it will be just the opposite. Florida and Texas will probably be first to impose one-child-minimum policies, with heavy penalties for noncompliance.

Yea, I was gonna say! The current administration has this weird fixation on "babies" and encouraging people "having babies" and incentivizing "baby production" with these new savings accounts that are essentially baby bonds, and weirdly trying to denigrate childless people. Why this sudden politicization of childbearing?

Well population decline is a very real threat and with the conservative scapegoating of immigration (the only thing keeping the US growing) they need to get labor somewhere.

Plus it fits right in with their anti-woman and anti-lgbt sentiments. Good god-fearing Christians should be having children after all. But of course child poverty and healthcare is not their concern. Labor should be hungry and desperate.

I remember when the "threat" was out-of-control overpopulation. Most developed countries have finally solved that, and now the "threat" is underpopulation? It sounds like we're just justifying everything as a threat. In any well-run society that isn't a ponzi scheme that relies on ever-increasing labor, population decline is what you want, given the extreme environmental footprint of every single person. The Earth has fixed and limited resources, so the fewer people competing for them, the better.

Population decline is an economic issue not an ecological one. How do we support a larger population of non-working elderly with an ever decreasing population of workers. I don't see how without a restructuring of our economy and society which doesn't seem to be on the table.

South Korea is essentially already doomed. In 25 years over half their population will be over 65. It's workforce will be half what it is now. It simply will not be able to care for the elderly. They will work until they die in poverty.

Ideally as society advances and productivity increases the necessary ratio of workers to non-workers should decrease as well but, the gains of productivity increases have historically not translated to wealth of the populace. And even if productivity does shift to benefit the worker it has to outpace population implosion which seems impossible considering the compounding nature of the decline.

> population decline is a very real threat

A threat to what? How can it be that AI is poised to eliminate large numbers of skilled jobs but we still don't have enough humans? Both can't be true simultaneously. One of them has to be a lie.

Even if you believe AI will eliminate a significant portion of skilled labor do you honestly believe that the increased productivity will be used to support our aging population?

If the productivity isn't well-distributed, it's all the more reason to have fewer mouths to feed.

Have you pictured what that will look like in practice?

It can't be worse than too many children, not enough work. We've had that for most of our history.

Have you pictured what a society with mostly unproductive humans (relative to AI) and no income redistribution looks like? Peaceful and tranquil aren't words I'd use to describe it.

A false dichotomy. I did not suggest rampant population growth. Not that I agree with your characterization anyway.

> I did not suggest rampant population growth

Neither did I. My argument is we need a long-term population decrease to maintain a stable society if all the wild AI predictions come true. We simply can't have 25% unemployment for multiple generations without something like UBI. And even with UBI there will be lots of idle hands and unrest.

In that sense we're lucky that the AI boom and a trend toward smaller family sizes is happening roughly at the same time.

A halving of the world population is like the world as it was in 1970. Not some Dark Age devoid of prosperity. Getting to that in 2 or 3 generations, in the absence of a climate change calamity, wouldn't be the worst thing.

I don’t personally see AI as replacing a significant portion of workers any time soon, nor our government implementing UBI if it does. But should both those things come to pass then sure, the devastating effects of population decline on our economy could be mitigated to some degree.

The population doesn’t just halve. Instead the population ages dramatically.

Look to history[1][2]. In short, it’s an old tactic for increasing nationalistic sentiment, growing targeted demographics, and putting pressure on women’s rights/bodily autonomy.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_for_Births

2. https://ahistoryfactaday.org/the-nazi-lebensborn-program-a-c...

>The current administration has this weird fixation on "babies"

This is not a Trump or American thing... This is a problem in EU too.. Lack of births is a very real issue and will only get worse.

I live in Sweden where you get 480 days off work already to split between 2 parents already and has for years. Births are in record decline.

Imo we are just too comfortable and don't need kids the same way we used to.

Traditionally higher population means a bigger workforce and army. Things a country can use to become "great." The US reaped a demographic dividend from the Baby Boom and is now feeling the pain of Baby Boomers retiring and transitioning to needing elder care. The Trump Administration is overlooking how US led free trade, security alliances, and R&D funding were also important factors in the US becoming the wealthiest and most powerful country.

They're equally as likely to reintroduce the medieval policy of prima nocta.

gotta have more wagies to do the drudgery

This is limited to industry category and employee’s keep their current pay. How is this bad?

Bonus is a very significant component (often the majority) of comp that gets cut when you're under a noncompete in these kinds of jobs. Yes I understand that's a "world's smallest violin" problem at these scales.

Seriously? HN and the tech news sector have exhaustively covered the abuse and exploitation of noncompetes inside and outside of tech for the past decade. They protect employers at the expense of employees, consistently fail to provide reasonable compensation for lengthy agreements, and are regularly exploited by bad actors to harm current and former employees by making them accept lower wages and worse working conditions.

Even fifteen minutes of casual reading through old threads here should answer this question for you. The only supporters of non-competes tend to be those who do not view employees as people, but as proprietary property.

If your company information is so sensitive that losing a worker would leave you vulnerable, then the solution is to compensate that employee well enough that they don’t see the need to leave and take on that additional risk.

If only people weren't forced to sign non-compete agreements... seriously, you don't like em, don't sign em.

The freedom not to sign is not the same as the liberty to pass up an opportunity for survival. Your snippy quip just makes you sound like an ignorant fool who can’t defend their position, let alone coherently argue against others.

If I walk across the desert and find a house on an oasis and the owner offers me water on the condition that I first put a chain on my ankle that is tethered to the property, do I really have the option to say no?

Yes and to stay within your metaphor you can just go to the house next door and get water without being chained up

What if all the houses are following the “standard industry practice” of chaining anyone who asks for water? What if refusing to follow this practice means that you can’t obtain funding to build a house?

> If your company information is so sensitive that losing a worker would leave you vulnerable, then the solution is to compensate that employee well enough that they don’t see the need to leave and take on that additional risk.

Yes, this is what I think people are missing: non-competes harm the free labor market.

Labor is a resource like any other, and as such there's a market. If the labor is highly valuable that means we should value it as such, in dollars. If we're not doing that then that means something is distorting or otherwise breaking the free market.

I would never expect to buy a car for 5,000 dollars. But, for some reason, with labor, everyone's expectations of how a market works suddenly need not apply. Why is that?

The problem is if we forcibly lower wages via non-competes then that harms the labor market as a whole. Yes, companies get to save a few bucks, but in exchange the expectations are broken. This is actually self-destructive. Why? Because companies, as much as labor, relies on those expectations. Now, you can't hire better workers for more money because we've detached monetary value from the actual value of labor. Oops! You want the best of the best? You can't do that do anymore.

On the surface, non-competes appear to benefit companies, but they don't. It's an illusion, and a seductive one.

> This is limited to industry category and employee’s keep their current pay. How is this bad?

I don't know... former communist countries had restrictions precisely like this one, it was an integral part of their regulations.

Former feudal countries too, maybe a bit harsher.

The land of the serfs and category 5 hurricanes - sounds sweet.

> and employee’s keep their current pay

Oh yeah, inflation is just starting - to pay for the big bubblegum bill, in real terms that pay is going down 10%/yr, and the serfs cannot renegotiate.

their current pay is getting increasingly worthless given inflationary trends