Maternity wards are shuttering in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in China. Hundreds of thousands of properties in Germany have been leveled and the land turned into parks.
I came to the conclusion there were too many people, decades ago, that people are not just the source of pollution, but effectively pollution itself. But I felt helpless to do anything about it. The population of the U.S. has close to tripled in my life time, but birth rates here have definitely dropped...
The ghost cities in China (if you haven't heard) are actually a giant investment scam. Scams are so common in China that one of the few investments people trust is real estate. With much more money floating around China than a generation ago, prices of apartments for sale in real cities where people live are getting crazy. So developers build whole new cities. Folks with money to invest, rush to buy in before the prices go up, never intending to live in the new city, never even taking a look at it, not realizing the buildings of the new city may be so shabbily built that they may start falling down before the whole sham city is finished. China watchers are amazed this has gone on as long as it has. No one knows what will happen when the people realize their investments are literally turning to dust... The result of the One-Child-Policy in China is the nightmare, with more old people to support than there will be people of working age in another decade. It's worse than it sounds because, for reasons you can guess, there are too many men and too few women of child bearing age. It's now a two-child-policy but the change may have come too late... (I've seen projections that India will become the most populous country in the world this century...)
The properties in Germany? I doubt the population of Germany is collapsing. It's just a guess but I think that's about East German communist era buildings that people don't want to live in any more getting torn down and replaced with more comfortable apartment buildings more spread out with green spaces in between.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2021-05-24 02:07 pm (UTC)I came to the conclusion there were too many people, decades ago, that people are not just the source of pollution, but effectively pollution itself. But I felt helpless to do anything about it. The population of the U.S. has close to tripled in my life time, but birth rates here have definitely dropped...
The ghost cities in China (if you haven't heard) are actually a giant investment scam. Scams are so common in China that one of the few investments people trust is real estate. With much more money floating around China than a generation ago, prices of apartments for sale in real cities where people live are getting crazy. So developers build whole new cities. Folks with money to invest, rush to buy in before the prices go up, never intending to live in the new city, never even taking a look at it, not realizing the buildings of the new city may be so shabbily built that they may start falling down before the whole sham city is finished. China watchers are amazed this has gone on as long as it has. No one knows what will happen when the people realize their investments are literally turning to dust... The result of the One-Child-Policy in China is the nightmare, with more old people to support than there will be people of working age in another decade. It's worse than it sounds because, for reasons you can guess, there are too many men and too few women of child bearing age. It's now a two-child-policy but the change may have come too late... (I've seen projections that India will become the most populous country in the world this century...)
The properties in Germany? I doubt the population of Germany is collapsing. It's just a guess but I think that's about East German communist era buildings that people don't want to live in any more getting torn down and replaced with more comfortable apartment buildings more spread out with green spaces in between.