DrQuickbeam

Praise the sun!

Lebanon is a beautiful country and Beirut is a fun city, but man their government bungled things for so long that everything is falling apart and all the money is leaving the country.

Is this Winamp for Finns or a financial amplification device?

All of the Yakuza games are basically, collections of well made mini games that turn each beat-em-up campaign into a hundred hours of fun. But among those, the Cabaret Club and Pocket Circuit RC race-car games from Yakuza 0 and Yakuza Kiwami, are probably my favs.

Coconut Monkey thinks: this very, very good idea!

Having continuous population growth leads to continuous economic growth. But…

1. You can also achieve that by squeezing more economic productivity out of fewer people, by continuously improving education, diversity of thought, legally protecting creativity, fostering small businesses through seed money and tax incentives, and lots of other stuff.

2. We have already been scaling the amount of productivity that comes out of a population since the invention of the steam engine and the factory line. Digital automation, AI and robotics are expected to keep that trend going for a long time.

3. Not to mention, that it’s easier now to operate productively in areas of less dense population. Previously small towns would die, but with clever infrastructure that supports broadband everywhere, public transportation, self-driving vehicles, drone delivery, additive manufacturing (3d printing), virtual presence through XR, and so on, you can operate a rural population like a big productive city, and get the benefits of both.

4. And at the end of the day, if your economy doesn’t grow, it just means that wealth in the country doesn’t grow.You can maintain that indefinitely. Or if an economy shrinks, society doesn’t come collapsing down until everyone gets poor enough that bribery and corruption overcome lawfulness. But if the society was already wealthy, that will take a long time, and you can mitigate it by doing things like spreading out concentrations of wealth among the population (taxing the rich), increasing immigration, and adopting socioeconomic sustainability planning approaches.

Not necessarily. Also this is already happening in many countries, and they don’t collapse into ruin. They just stagnate for a few generations.

It doesn’t necessarily reduce population density though, because often what happens is that young people leave small towns and villages that have fewer opportunities and move to the big city, causing those little towns to die. That’s usually bad for maintaining cultural and linguistic diversity across a country’s landscape, but good for biodiversity, because as people go, the environment recovers.

Also as population declines, land and resources tend to consolidate more and more into the hands of fewer oligarchs. But the oligarchs all own us already anyway, so NBD.

Final Fantasy 6, Chrono Trigger or Earthbound. So many feels my little brain didn’t have words for.