We should be in a situation where people need to take in like 5 non-relative old people into their homes and provide them constant care (which they cannot do if they are at work). It’s not sustainable no matter your economic system.

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That’s an interesting point but I’m not sure if the numbers really add up. As I understand it, the number of dependents will be greater from population decline (primarily due to an aging population) than it was during the baby boom

Yeah. But people won’t change willingly. A lot of the suburbs around my city are pretty rich areas. I don’t expect those people to willingly move to the denser inner city anytime soon. More likely they’ll petition city hall to keep their subdivisions running until the city goes bankrupt from the financial burden of supporting a subdivision that does not bring in enough property taxes to support itself

Also the ratio is a lot higher in nursing homes. Yes you might have a ratio of x nurses to y old people, but you also need to consider the people indirectly contributing. Like the trades people who built the building, or the people who pay for the care through taxes or otherwise, the people working to route electricity, the pharmacists making all those medications that the old people need, etc.

Also, we need people to do jobs other than working in nursing homes. We can’t have all our workforce caring for the elderly.

Population decline is a global phenomenon. You can’t offset this loss with immigration when the countries people are coming from are also experiencing a population decline. We (in the West) are currently using immigration to offset this loss now, but when the population decline really starts hitting other parts of the globe (as it is projected to do within the next few decades) then that will no longer be a solution.

The problem with calling it a ponzi scheme is that this would apply in all contexts, even in very basic economies without money. If you have a tribe of hunter gathers and suddenly they have a sharp decrease in their birth rate, they too would have a hard time taking care of their elderly/children.

The rotting infrastructure problem is made a lot worse by urban sprawl

This is not about communism vs capitalism, its about the ratios. If there are 5 old people for every young person then how are we supposed to take care of all the old people? There’s just not enough manpower.

Even burger king is hard to get a job at these days.

I’m not the guy you’re arguing with, but it will be interesting to see if/how LLMs deal with novel Gödel sentences in a way that is more than just mimicry. I’m sure there is a way to set this up that is mathematically rigourous.

The idea is that there are some statements which are true but unprovable in a formal system. Since LLMs run on a computer they are technically a formal system of sorts. So it will be interesting to see if they can pinpoint the true yet unprovable sentences. If they can it will lead to a lot of interesting questions about how exactly they know it’s true without “proving” it in some roundabout way.

I’m not doing this issue justice. A lot has been written on this by Roger Penrose (you don’t have to agree with his stance to appreciate that he’s touching on an interesting problem, here).