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miriam_eOur rapidly aging population has repercussions nobody I've met seems to think about. When the baby-boomers get old there will not be enough young people to look after them. It won't be a matter of families taking care of their own or of nursing homes taking people in. There simply won't be enough carers. We desperately need robots. But more than that, we need androids. This is more important than oil or making war or almost anything else you can imagine. But if you think it's bad for us in the west, imagine the problem to come in China, where under-breeding in an attempt to curb the population explosion has totally altered the age structure of the more than one billion people there.
Only one place will have more young than old -- Africa. AIDS has ripped through the adult population there while the West stood by and hardly lifted a finger in help. In fact the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank consistently worsened the problem by purposefully running down social support systems and forcing idealogically driven privatisation measures so that countries lost what little they already had. They -- we -- turned a tragedy into an incomprehensibly massive disaster.
Now with their youthful population of orphans and our aging population they don't need to do anything to hurt us. In fact that would be the best and most effective way to cripple the West -- to do to us what we have done to them for so long: to ignore us when we begin to plead for help. I almost hope they do. We certainly have it coming.
Of course the people of Africa could break with human tradition, forgive us our evil ways, and partner with the aging countries for mutual benefit and the good of all.
At least I hope they resist the urge to revenge. If they ever raise a hand against us it will be all that is needed by a bunch of crotchety, angry, old white men to go in, destroy everything and take what they want -- a new generation of black slaves. Of course they would be underpaid wage-slaves and it would look completely legal, but they'd still be slaves.
Yeah. I woke up this morning full of fears.
Don't mind me. Go back to work and ignore it.
But in the back of your mind just hope we get robots and androids very soon.
Only one place will have more young than old -- Africa. AIDS has ripped through the adult population there while the West stood by and hardly lifted a finger in help. In fact the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank consistently worsened the problem by purposefully running down social support systems and forcing idealogically driven privatisation measures so that countries lost what little they already had. They -- we -- turned a tragedy into an incomprehensibly massive disaster.
Now with their youthful population of orphans and our aging population they don't need to do anything to hurt us. In fact that would be the best and most effective way to cripple the West -- to do to us what we have done to them for so long: to ignore us when we begin to plead for help. I almost hope they do. We certainly have it coming.
Of course the people of Africa could break with human tradition, forgive us our evil ways, and partner with the aging countries for mutual benefit and the good of all.
At least I hope they resist the urge to revenge. If they ever raise a hand against us it will be all that is needed by a bunch of crotchety, angry, old white men to go in, destroy everything and take what they want -- a new generation of black slaves. Of course they would be underpaid wage-slaves and it would look completely legal, but they'd still be slaves.
Yeah. I woke up this morning full of fears.
Don't mind me. Go back to work and ignore it.
But in the back of your mind just hope we get robots and androids very soon.