Russian President Vladimir Putin is urging Russians to have more children.
"Large families must become the norm," Putin said in a speech Tuesday.
Russian birth rates are falling amid war in Ukraine and a deepening economic crisis.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is urging women to have as many as eight children as the number of dead Russian soldiers continues to rise in his war with Ukraine, worsening the country’s population crisis.
Addressing the World Russian People’s Council in Moscow on Tuesday, Putin said the country must return to a time when large families were the norm.
“Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, had seven, eight, or even more children,” Putin said.
Ok I will come to Russia “mother”land, have a sex change and pop out some Ruskie babies, at least 3 by next week. Line up boys!!
If this is true, this has to be the ultimate way of not really dealing with the population crisis upon us. Not saying any government is doing a great job here as they are all beating around the bush and not addressing root causes, but this one from Putin has to be the most delusional of them all.
There is no population crisis, unless you mean there are too many people. Most of the work we do is entirely unnecessary and only exists to help billionaires become trillionaires. At least that’s the case in countries that don’t need meat to throw in front of bullets.
Necessary jobs are mostly farming, mining, manufacturing, and customer service. The first two have already been automated to need only a tiny percentage of the workforce they once require. Manufacturing is mostly there as well, and is getting closer all the time. Customer service still employs a lot of humans, but even those jobs are being replaced or augmented with physical or logical bots.
Necessary jobs are mostly farming, mining, manufacturing, and customer service.
And elder care, which is set to be a real growth industry
That’s fair, but even in that there is a whole lot that automation can do to address the ratio of elderly to caregivers. Japan is ahead of the curve on population decline, and they are not exactly fond of immigrants. That has been a huge driver behind the development of technologies for elder care.
That and healthcare are counted as services iirc, which can contribute to some confusion when you look at 70% ish of the economy being made up of that. But most jobs being created now are like the top commenter said, minimum wage service jobs that don’t meet the needs of employees and aren’t great for customers, either
The crisis is that without enough babies, there will not be enough young people to support the older people. It is why places like Canada have such high immigration as it offsets the lack of births from Canadian citizens. Now, it is a crisis from a planet health perspective. No. It is the best thing that could happen right now as we really could use less people and their associated carbon emissions, but it will still impact the economy hard especially since it is becoming a steep birth rate decline in so many countries. Feels like a free fall right now and to address is going to take as much change as it will take to fix the climate emergency. Might even have some of the same solutions.
Lucky we have automation and AI making everyone jobless, will be plenty of people and machines to look after the older generations
That is a real crisis on the horizon as the evidence so far is that there is no support for those who get displaced. I am counting down the days till my career is replaced. I am Imagineering a VR Theme Park and am certain that in the years to come you will be able to ask AI to make you one via a prompt and it will customize it to your tastes. When that happens I need to find a new career. Unsure what but I am hopeful that new careers will open up that we cannot foresee today. That or we will all be in a hellscape of which I have positioned myself to weather.
I think if we don’t change the system then we’re going to have a world of hurt for pretty much everyone, if we do change the system into something that facilitate an existence where people can survive periods without work or with minimal work then it could become a golden age.
A lot of the big problems with that comes from legacy obsessions which persist even when technical solutions have displaced the need or reason behind them. Building sites are already nothing like they used to be, the cost of construction has fallen dramatically especially in labour time but house prices rise because they’re not tied to construction cost but availability, which is often kept purposely low so rich people who run government can have big numbers in their balance s sheets. At some point this stress point will fracture.
Subtle automation already makes things like surveying and designing incredibly easy, we’re not far from the point where ai assisted architecture tools are as easy to use as the Sims and will produce plans which can be automatically passed or rejected for the technical side of planning. Not only will more visible forms of automation like concrete shuttering and pouring become more widely adopted this again reducing the time and cost of construction but they’ll have sensor driven analysis which can be uploaded to local authorities for instant inspection and verification. Likewise for cable routing, pipework, insulation, plastering, brickwork, roofing, decorating…
When a house can be demolished and rebuilt in weeks for the cost of machine rental and materials then the housing crisis will fade away, especially when industrial areas shrink due to efficiency of automation, office space gets repurposed, and transport infrastructure gains efficiency - areas like where I live in the UK with absurd property prices are almost certainly going to see automated construction tools take a lot of industry and transport underground - shooting cargo down small underground networks could replace a huge amount of road and rail usage which would be a huge positive for people and free up space for housing.
I got off track but what I’m getting at is we can use these things to solve major problems in our society, but we need to make sure people can lose their job and go through peeiods of adjustment without it ruining their life.
I agree, but as you pointed out, we already have many tools to solve most of our global issues, but instead we carry on like we like in a scarcity world. I am concerned about the AI disruption as I am not seeing evidence of us really caring for those impacted let alone the millions impacted daily by how the global economy is run. We can fix so many things, but don’t. Heck, even getting rid of day light savings is a cause too far it seems despite overwhelming support.
That is depressingly true, though I do think there’s hope. I’m in a lot of open source dev and design communities, they’re flourishing and growing steadily because they’re able to build on all the prior developments. Every day people are writing code to improve design tools, and writing code to improve programming languages and development environments so that it’s easier to make better design tools … and the better the design tools get the easier it is to make better designs on them, easier to build on prior open source designs and improve or customise them.
I already use AI coding tools in my open source project, they’re awkward and not always useful but for certain tasks they can save hours - for example I got it to divide a circle into an arbitrary amount of sections and return the quadrant coordinates, I could have worked it out and coded it myself but not doing things like that allows me to make much more progress. The easier it gets to code the more time I’ll be focused on making it do useful things which will result in a far better product.
Likewise the complexity and quality of stuff I see on 3d printing model sites continues to improve, printers continue to improve… We can’t be far away from ai assisted pick&place enabling complex electronics to be built into designs - there will be a cheap open source printer that can make everything except the magnets in the motors. A lot of companies are going to find the their entire product line is completing against items that can be made better and cheaper in any tech guys garage.
It wasn’t eBay that took down Tandy and Maplins it was the people with any garage space buying the same bulk orders of components but selling them without the overheads. The same will happen to Hotpoint and Logitech, people who have bootstrapped high quality fabrication labs in the garage selling things made from open source designs.
They won’t be able to stop it, they might slow it for a while but progress is as a river in that you can only hold it back so long.
The crisis is that without enough babies, there will not be enough young people to support the older people.
So you didn’t read a word I said beyond the first sentence. Got it.
I do not understand your comment as my comment was building upon yours as you went down the billion support path and I just added the old age pension path.
I say this as someone who had lots of kids - you cannot build an economy on a continuous explosion of population. That is ridiculous. There are enough people - the population of the earth has more than doubled in my lifetime. I’d much rather work till I die, than tell someone else they must reproduce. Let people who want kids have them, let people who don’t want kids not have any, it’s working out and population growth has slowed and hopefully population will decrease. That’s fine, yes many of us will be old at once, that’s not the fault of the non-reproducing people. There wouldn’t be fewer old people even if everyone had kids, it has to happen before things settle back out.
Very much agree. Besides, it is looking like we really are entering an era of significant human life extension if you believe all the longevity breakthroughs.
Don’t care, I’ll be dead.
Maybe. There is serious breakthroughs with longevity tech with aging and diseases perhaps being a thing of the past in the decades to come. Maybe.
There is no population crisis, unless you mean there are too many people.
Barring climate change or World War 3 doesn’t get us first, if things are going the way it does now, we’re expecting global population decline or it could plateau. Countries across the world is experiencing increase in standards of living so we can expect decline in birth rates too in proportion.
What makes that a bad thing?
That is a GOOD thing. So not a crisis.
This is fantastic. Humans are shit.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Addressing the World Russian People’s Council in Moscow on Tuesday, Putin said the country must return to a time when large families were the norm.
Putin’s remarks come amid decades of falling birth rates in Russia that its invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent economic fallout have only made worse.
In October, the UK’s Ministry of Defence reported that Russia has likely amassed up to 290,000 killed or wounded soldiers in the war against Ukraine.
Since coming into power 24 years ago, Putin has tried to boost Russia’s birthrate by introducing a range of government incentives for those who have children, including payouts for families who have more than one child.
But the measures have had little to no impact, with figures from Rosstat, Russia’s federal-statistics service, putting the Russian population at 146,447,424 as of January 1, lower than it was in 1999 when Putin first became president, Le Monde reported.
“Russia lacks workers,” Alexei Raksha, a demographer who previously worked at Rosstat, told AFP in February.
The original article contains 409 words, the summary contains 167 words. Saved 59%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Well I wonder whose fault this was? Probably the guy who was so bloodthirsty and crazy that he actually annexed Chernobyl of all places
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Even Putler wants to flirt with the idea of turning his empire into fucking Gilead.
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Ordinary Western and US propaganda - no matter what Putin may do, it’s a sign of his weakness. Whether he eats ice cream, smiles, fucks women, sleeps, urges the women to give birth to more children, washes his teeth or itches his left shoulder – it’s a proof that he’s weak.
In reality, he’s ever stronger and supported by the russians – thanks to none other than the West and US.
Yeah the media have a tendency to exaggerate his flaws but this isn’t a well thought out move, it’s probably a mix of that white birther thing musk is into and general desperation at the industrial and military problems he faces.
The reality is Russia is not doing well economically, Russian families can’t afford to bring up eight kids even in the poverty conditions they’re getting increasingly used to. The Russian state can’t afford even the shitty education kids get now so it’s certainly not going to cope if there was a sudden baby boom.
This isn’t a well thought out economic, social, or moral plan so what else is it beside foolish bluster and weak minded desperation?
Isn’t he just a Russian trump?
Yeah. He’s smart and strong.
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Wow. Defending Boris Jonson, Ze and Biden is akin defending Adolf Hitler. They’ve already killed over a milltion of ukranians by sending them to the russian meatgrinder. And they’ve made UA complitely dependent on their own financial aid.
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Lol. That wild tootin Pootin.
Equal to abortion banning propaganda in the west.
By what metric?
Lack of abortion access breeds poverty. Poverty breeds the human grist for our military industrial complex mill. +Tie in to for-profit prison slave labor and inability to break the economic cycle of generational poverty and feed a cheap labor economy
Similar reasons and similar propaganda.
[edit: typo on prison]
Equal in the metric of people able to be sent to the war at 18.
he really needs to skip a step and go full Krieg and just grow his cannon fodder in tubes
edit: the difference is that Krieg is competant
With what husband? Got em
Ah, so Russian women are broodmares for the state now?
“Women will birth more”
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Maybe they can open the borders to immigrants?
Those also will be thrown into the grinder.
All they get are 70 year old alcoholics to lay back and think of the empire for.
I doubt any immigrant on its right mind would move to Russia, and even if some did, no immigrants on its right mind would fight a war for RuSsIA
They already have the Day of Conception - Wikipedia - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Conception
