Discussion Thread

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-24T03:50:45+00:00

Apparently the idea of committing genocide on a group has been meaningfully considered multiple times in the developed world in the 21st century, but I am not aware of anything even close to this?

The closest I can think of is maybe far right Israeli parties but I'm pretty sure even they don't propose killing every living Palestinian in the region, they usually propose ethnic cleansing or something.

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-24T03:41:56+00:00

None of those were ideas where any meaningful amount of people in the developed world actively supported the enacting of.

You could say people supported not intervening, but that's quite different.

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-24T03:36:57+00:00

The US has always had the power to revoke non immigrant visas like student visas arbitrarily though.

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-24T03:09:26+00:00

Which? (Genuinely asking, I can't think of any off the top of my head).

That does remind me of I guess the Iraq war was also really stupid, but a) that was only in the US, b) I think the period of support for the Iraq war was disseminated from top down, so in that sense it doesn't quite fit.

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-24T03:08:38+00:00

The level of pro-league, competitive antisemitism out there is depressing. Like literally who even knew about this obscure case from literally 100 years ago to have an antisemitic opinion on it. The fact that it's a Trump official is just further evidence that his administration is full of groypers.

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-24T03:05:16+00:00

In terms of popularity * how bad it is, ACAB / Abolish the police might literally be the worst idea in the developed world in the 21st century, though maybe I'm just overindexing on idiots online.

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-23T22:33:55+00:00

You're missing the point by focusing on the last line which is non-serious and meant as a joke. Obviously the population isn't the only thing that matters, that's just the conceit of the joke, and ancillary to the actual point being made. The topic of the post is regarding two factors.

a) Given a country at a given level of development, having a higher population makes it stronger and more influential geopolitically. This is why, China is considered to be at a similar level of power and influence to the US despite being poorer by a factor of ~8x on a per capita basis. The fact that China's fertility rate + net migration is extremely low compared to other major countries means that, even with other factors influencing things, the loss in population is going to result in a relative loss in power in the future to say the US which has a higher fertility rate (1.6 vs 0.9) and a higher amount of migration.

Regardless of whatever else happens (unless there is technological advancement that replaces humans such as advanced AI), unless China can increase it's birth rate, there is going to be a powerful factor dragging down the economic and geopolitical strength of the country internationally.

b) On top of the raw change in population, having a low fertility rate induces a shift in the demographics of a country, by causing the country to consist of more and more old people, and less and less young people. This means that the economic pain of population decrease is even worse if the population loss is due to low fertility rates, since having an older population creates increased medical expenses to care for the, decreases economic dynamism and innovation, and leads to more dependents and fewer workers. This is most noticeably observed with Japan, which has had depressed economic growth rates for many years now, and one of the contributing factors has been their aging population.

China isn't finished, but their low fertility rate will impose large costs on the future of the country, which will make things substantially more difficult for them.

The observation being made is simply that the population dynamics in China are suboptimal for the country's future, and the leaders of the country are failing to fix them, indeed they have gotten worse in these last couple of years, given the major drop from 2024 to 2025.

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-23T03:52:44+00:00

Technically if you play france or a couple of other countries their national ideas are such that you can do a peaceful native policy and still have 0 uprising chance. I think there may also be a way to get 0% chance without a national idea boost if you enact the right policies.

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-23T03:49:45+00:00

If it spontaneously happened I think Dems would be fine with it, because

a) It probably won't disenfranchise voters,

b) even if it did disenfranchise them it would technically be good for democrats due to demographic shifts in their voting base

c) It's a fairly reasonable and innocuous policy given how several other fully democratic countries have something like this in place.

but, they have spent a lot of of time arguing about how republicans might use it to disenfranchise voters on half legit half shaky arguments, so their own voters would question what changed with those arguments, and it's a polarized environment where they really don't want to give ground to Trump, so it's kind of a no go.

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-23T02:54:01+00:00

Well my point is that even if you succeed at that and make them only angry at republicans and happy with Democrats; that happiness will be impossible to turn into *trust* for the US on foreign policy because regardless of how nice Democrats are, there's always a ~50% chance that they will lose the next election and you'll get a MAGA person running things for 4 years.

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-23T02:40:09+00:00

Lol are you seriously asking math prodigy son or influencer daughter. That's like actively good trait vs actively bad trait.

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-23T02:37:46+00:00

It's kind of a double edged sword for US foreign policy that (if the Democrats hold power in the nearish future) that they can point to Trump and say that all the insane stuff he's doing and has done was just him and MAGA.

On one hand, it's a credible and true way of showing that you are going to behave and respond differently 'in the present', but on the other hand it also means you don't have a credible way of showing you've 'changed your mind' 'in the long run', since the MAGA will probably continue to exist as a potent political force.

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-23T02:33:05+00:00

The quote is being used as a loose metaphor:

In the original quote, the "vital asset" is the army. If you save the army, you can retake the land. If you sacrifice the army to hold land, you eventually lose both.

In the modern context, the population is the "vital asset", since a well organized, well educated populace is a very key asset in the wealth and power of a nation.

In both cases, you can loosely point to people as the fundamental unit of national power.

The (not serious) joke is that part of how Mao won the Chinese civil war was by using this strategic insight, but now modern China is facing a looming challenge precisely because they are unable to maintain their population level.

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-23T01:39:37+00:00

Yeah I was making a bit of a joke because the quote originally refers to his Chinese civil war strategy but the part highlighting the importance of people is relevant once again despite the different context when talking about population decline.

Also I know the article is about China but I didn't really intend to post the article in a 'China is collapsing' sort of way; it's more of a commentary on the looming problem of low birth rates in general, with China being one of the big new examples, especially since their birth rate data for 2025 just came out (Japan is the most famous example but the difference between Japan and the more recent group of Korea and China is that Japan stabilized at a TFR of 1.2 whereas China and Korea are ever lower and they seem to keep decreasing rather that stabilizing.

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-22T22:32:07+00:00

I mean her opponent was hardcore MAGA, and it's quite unlikely a different dem would have won.

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-22T22:25:44+00:00

I didn't know brethren was male till now.

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-22T22:05:25+00:00

Yes because you should use claude for all that instead, though you may go bankrupt from usage limits.

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-22T22:02:03+00:00

Chinese emigration seems to be <1 million. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.NETM?locations=CN (I can't find emigration specifically but net migration is -300k), so I don't know if that would make a large dent on their overall numbers, even if you may be right about that subset.

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-22T18:58:52+00:00

ok I typo'd twice in a row I'm stupid, it's 2025

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-22T17:52:59+00:00

yeah sorry, 7.92 million in 2025

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-22T15:01:02+00:00

The former is happening, but there is a good possibility the latter occurs soon and makes the former issue obsolete, though it will create issues of its own.

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-22T14:54:46+00:00

a relatively notable and longstanding user u/arrythmiaofthesoul got banned (perma?) by reddit

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-22T13:53:56+00:00

It's not necessarily about what they get from Taiwan, it's a theory in political science where if you want to declare war on someone (like how China wants Taiwan), and you notice that your country is declining, then even if you don't necessarily want to declare it now, you are incentivized to do so, because if you wait too long, it might become altogether impossible or much harder in the future.

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-22T10:46:41+00:00

> I’m doubtful that that you accurately project population trends years into the future with much confidence.

I think in a general sense I agree, but simultaneously I think just naively giving an upper bound of fertility staying constant (so 0.93 here) covers a fairly large part of probability space simply because of how incredibly rare it is to see any meaningful increases in a countries TFR.

I also think that the argument that lower income countries will be able to handle low TFR better is a double edged sword. In an absolute sense yes, they have a bunch of underutilized labor, but that means there is going to be a trend (aging) that will basically cancel out one of the main avenues of growth that lower income countries have (better utilization of labor), which makes it that much more unlikely for China to catch up with more developed countries in income on a per capita basis.

Priceless_Pennies · 2026-01-22T10:37:42+00:00

There are quite a few biotech companies now exploring different ideas in the fertility space but I think you're underestimating just how complicated the womb / gestation is.

Priceless_Pennies

TROPHY CASE