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As discussed on this or the other thread, I can't remember, our (and most) economies are based on endless growth. As our birth rate is below the replacement level there is no alternative but to have mass immigration. Without it the economy would collapse, we'd go into a protracted recession and have endless deflation.

Think that's theoretical? Have a look at what's happened to Japan over the last 30 years.

So yeah, curb immigration but you better have a good back up plan because there's a HUGE shitstorm coming when developing countries, that provide the vast majority of migrants, reach economic parity and their birth rates decline as they have in the western world.

I'm looking forward to hearing from the first serious economist to propose a circular, self-sustaining, neutral growth economy model.
Good post which I agree with.

It may be awkward to debate migration, but I think avoiding the topic is worse. And yes, some people can get a little prickly and start throwing all these clever barbs if they don't agree with an opposite viewpoint, but all they're doing is feeding the tinderbox of prejudice against migration......

And because having legitimate concerns about mass-migration attracts, often unfairly, accusations of racism or economic naivety, sometimes people who have a valid viewpoint will just shy away from expressing it.

I think that it's a worthwhile debate to have, just as long as it's done thoughtfully and civilly.
 
Colbert fired.

A sad day for Muz as his primary news source is now off the air.
 
Good post which I agree with.

It may be awkward to debate migration, but I think avoiding the topic is worse. And yes, some people can get a little prickly and start throwing all these clever barbs if they don't agree with an opposite viewpoint, but all they're doing is feeding the tinderbox of prejudice against migration......

And because having legitimate concerns about mass-migration attracts, often unfairly, accusations of racism or economic naivety, sometimes people who have a valid viewpoint will just shy away from expressing it.

I think that it's a worthwhile debate to have, just as long as it's done thoughtfully and civilly.
Nah. Lets just label them as RWNJs or cookers.

/thread.
 
Those who argue mass immigration is required because the birth rate is falling...may ask themselves, why is the birth rate falling?

Maybe the policy of mass immigration, inflation and net zero policies have increased the cost of living so much that people cant afford to have children either financially or have the time to rear children. That's not even getting into the weeds of social policies.
 
Those who argue mass immigration is required because the birth rate is falling...may ask themselves, why is the birth rate falling?

Maybe the policy of mass immigration, inflation and net zero policies have increased the cost of living so much that people cant afford to have children either financially or have the time to rear children. That's not even getting into the weeds of social policies.

Correct.

Your solution?
 

Until recently, Georgia, a former Soviet republic, had been a darling of Europe on a fast track to EU membership.

Now it has passed a raft of draconian laws, pulled out of EU talks and started jailing dissenters.

Zurab believes he knows exactly what is behind the abrupt volte-face.

"It's Russia," he says. "It's Russia's playbook."
 
Those who argue mass immigration is required because the birth rate is falling...may ask themselves, why is the birth rate falling?

Maybe the policy of mass immigration, inflation and net zero policies have increased the cost of living so much that people cant afford to have children either financially or have the time to rear children. That's not even getting into the weeds of social policies.
Cost if living issues are definitely a factor in the birth rate falling but it's probably one of many.

Like most Western countries the 'young urban middle class' has increased exponentially in Australia over the last few decades....

Perhaps more focused on career advancement, personal experiences, and enjoying the amenities of inner city life. They may value financial independence and flexibility, potentially prioritising travel, hobbies, personal development, or political activism over parenthood. This demographic often faces high costs of living in urban areas, which can influence decisions about family size and even starting a family....

Who wants to be at home changing farken nappies when you could be sinking $30 Black Manhattan's at the latest hipster bar??
 
Cost if living issues are definitely a factor in the birth rate falling but it's probably one of many.

Like most Western countries the 'young urban middle class' has increased exponentially in Australia over the last few decades....

Perhaps more focused on career advancement, personal experiences, and enjoying the amenities of inner city life. They may value financial independence and flexibility, potentially prioritising travel, hobbies, personal development, or political activism over parenthood. This demographic often faces high costs of living in urban areas, which can influence decisions about family size and even starting a family....

Who wants to be at home changing farken nappies when you could be sinking $30 Black Manhattan's at the latest hipster bar??
yep thats about it - more about living the life instead of settling down early and having a fam.
Thats what reducing the westerners birth rates more than anything else imo.
 
It's a longish read....

Ukraine is Putin’s test bed for ‘total war’ on the West
The Kremlin’s idea of conflict is changing. Nato leaders must grasp that Russia will use anything from mass drone warfare to child abduction, bots, algorithms and blackmail to bring down its foes, writes Bob Seely

It’s late autumn 2024, and I’m sitting in the basement of an abandoned farm just off the front line in eastern Ukraine. To my left is call sign Koleso, or Wheel. The 21-year-old Ukrainian soldier is piloting his Vampire drone on to the night’s target, a Russian trench a few miles away.

The Vampire strikes fear into Russian soldiers — they’ve nicknamed it Baba Yaga after a folklore witch who flies in a barrel at night, frying and devouring the young. It’s not a bad description.

As his drone nears, Koleso’s eyes flick between his screens. To the left is Ukraine’s battlefield-targeting software, Kropiva (Nettle), which charts its course. To the right is the video feed from the drone’s thermal imagery camera. Its green crosshairs sit over grainy grey images of woods and fields. The camera picks up the trunks and thick branches of the birch woods but not the late autumnal leaves, so the images give the impression of deep midwinter.

Koleso adjusts the drone’s position slightly and then releases. We watch the bomb, a TM-62 anti-tank mine, green and flat and about the size of half a dozen large dining plates, fall clumsily 60 metres or so to the earth. A white and grey-tinted explosion envelops the centre of the screen as the trench section is incinerated. Khartiia Brigade has just added another couple of unlucky Russians to Moscow’s dead and seriously injured, which this summer may have hit a staggering one million.

For frontline soldiers, the tactics and tools of Russian warfare are clear. But talk to others in this conflict and the answers are different. As well as being the conflict that has introduced mass drone warfare to the world — and is rewriting the rules of conflict as a result — it is also a war of algorithms and bots peddling disinformation. This is a form of conflict that includes assassinations, blackmail and bribery, where the Russian state abducts children as a tactic of conflict, and where special forces, spies and organised crime work together to stage coups. Welcome to Vladimir Putin’s new total war.

Last summer I lost my parliamentary seat in the general election. I was heartbroken — I loved my vocation and my constituency, the Isle of Wight — but I didn’t want to dwell on the defeat, so I set about writing a book, The New Total War, to tell the story of Russia’s new way of war and why it is likely to be a template for future conflicts.

I also wanted to tell the story of the war in Ukraine through Ukrainian voices. This is a nation saved by its volunteers. As a reservist who spent a decade on fulltime service myself, I empathised with the experiences of Ukraine’s volunteer army. I was curious about the call signs — you don’t get to choose, you are given them by your colleagues — but also by what these volunteers did before the invasion.

I met call sign Rosemary, a chef whose favourite dish is steak with rosemary and whose expertise is in shooting down the Iranian Shahed drones aimed at his home city of Odesa. He has a dozen kills to his name.

There was Achilles, the Kyiv councillor who was given the call sign because his friend was the Ukrainian distributor of the Hollywood movie Troy. Achilles has his own drone unit, one of the best in Ukraine.

And there was Panoushka, a widowed sniper who was little bigger than her rifle. Panoushka (best translated as Miss, perhaps little lady) was a Latin teacher before the war but now, twice a week, she walks out to the front lines to kill Russians. Despite her remarkably high-risk role, her greatest challenge in this war was to bury her fiancé, a man who was also her commanding officer, killed in a freak missile strike in Odesa. “For that moment I had to be a warrior, not just a woman who had lost the love of her life, but also a soldier who had lost my brother-in-arms,” she said.

Alongside the physical war is the conflict in the psychological and virtual worlds. Putin’s Russia has created an integrated and innovative form of conflict based on using the full spectrum of state tools — the “unification of everything” in the words of one Ukrainian intelligence officer — in the service of aggressive state power. It reflects the idea that, according to the head of Russia’s armed forces, the “very rules of war” have changed and that non-military forms of conflict — corrupting and corroding a society from within, or manipulating societal frictions as Russia has with mass migration into Europe — can weaken an adversary. Perhaps it can even defeat the enemy before battle, echoing the great Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu, who said the greatest victories were those achieved before the fight.

I wanted to explain this form of warfare because too few people, including our diplomats and soldiers, politicians and journalists, understand it, and if our western leaders don’t understand what they are up against, our nations are imperilled.

Russia’s new total war is the integration of the two Russian ways of war of the 20th century, one of which we have not even recognised yet as a means of war. The first is “traditional” or “conventional” war. That’s the war of popular imagination, the one we see in films and books: of armies and tanks, planes and warships. So far so obvious. Yet the Soviet Union had a second way of war in the last century, too — subversive, politicised conflict; the conflict of spies, blackmail and assassinations, of propaganda and disinformation, fake organisations, political “fronts” and paramilitary groups, and of politicians and opinion-formers knowingly or unknowingly manipulated by their adversaries. It could also include economic power, energy supplies, language and religion.

This second way, known euphemistically as active measures, has not necessarily been seen as a method of war in its own right. I believe it should be. It has history, doctrine and a century of practice.

In Russian, the word for war is voina, while the revolutionary, subversive form of conflict has often been referred to as “struggle”, bor’ba. Russia’s new way of war is the integration of military war and political conflict into a seamless whole within military doctrine. For us to grasp this, we need to reassess our concept of war. We may regard child stealing, assassinations or economic war as bad things that happen in and around a conflict, but we don’t consider them part of the core tactics. But conflict, in the Russian leadership’s mind, has a much wider definition and a broader range of tools.

Indeed, for Putin and his regime, being in a state of conflict is as much a state of mind as a series of actions. Since the first decade of this century, they have seen themselves in a state of conflict with Ukraine and the West, and have acted with increasing hostility to both.

Understanding Russian doctrine, we see that the Ukraine war has had three clear phases and started not in 2022, nor in the initial Russian invasion of 2014, but in 2005. At every step, Putin has tried to regain control of Ukraine’s strategic direction. When he failed, he escalated the conflict.

The first phase, which lasted from the socalled Orange Revolution street protests of 2004-05 through to the collapse of the pro- Russian government in early 2014, saw the Kremlin use economic, political, religious and informational tools: funding political parties run by its agents of influence, intense espionage, the corruption of police, security agencies and the armed forces, and the use of influential businessmen to buy up parts of the Ukrainian economy. Putin nearly succeeded — proof of the power of these weapons. He only failed after tens of thousands took to the streets to help overthrow the breathtakingly corrupt president Viktor Yanukovych.

Putin then escalated to the second stage of the conflict in early 2014. Russian secret agencies “curated” a string of violent uprisings in eastern Ukraine and organised the annexation of Crimea.

Crimea was a brilliant success, the uprisings in the east less so, although two, in the counties of Donetsk and Luhansk, partially succeeded. Yet still Ukraine would not fold. So 2022’s large-scale invasion marked the third phase. Contrary to accepted wisdom, it was not a “fighting” invasion, but a show of force in which spies, special forces and organised crime worked with a Ukrainian pro-Russian fifth column to attempt a coup d’état while the Ukrainian army was pinned down in the east of the country.

Ukraine innovates, Russia steals

Since then the war has ebbed and flowed. Following the initial disaster, the Russian army has regrouped.

We overestimated Russia in 2022 but we underestimate them now. Since the winter of 2002, they have engaged in a three-pronged strategy seeking to wear down Ukraine. It can be succinctly explained as: hold the line, break the link and make life hell.

Russia is holding its line by building up very significant frontline defences. From there, it has made grinding progress through relentless attrition. Second, Putin is working to damage the relationship between Ukraine and its western backers. This includes political warfare, including information campaigns and the manipulation of western politicians. Third, they are making life hell for Ukrainian civilians and chipping away at their will to resist by bombing cities as well as destroying the electricity supply.

On the battlefield, war is being reimagined using land, air and sea drones aligned with machine learning. For air drones, we are talking thousands of small quadcopters, first-person view drones (FPVs), effectively flying mortars and grenades that can watch and chase you. There are also bomber drones and single-use FPVs, also known as kamikaze drones or “loitering munitions”. In Kherson, where Russian pilots use the Ukrainian civilian population for target practice — “human safari” is the dystopian term — drones loiter on the tops of buildings or in gardens until the pilot decides to strike, killing civilians at random.

Since 2022, drone production in both countries has soared. Ukrainians innovate on a small scale while the Russians steal the ideas and mass produce through their military-industrial complex. Already, the more sophisticated Ukrainian military units, such as Khartiia Brigade, are experimenting with assaults controlled by humans but led primarily by land and air drones. Next year, should the war continue, we will witness more significant steps towards autonomous drone warfare. The rise of the machines is upon us.

Yet alongside Russia’s sophisticated theory of war and drone use is the extraordinary willingness to send conscripts into the attritional, medieval slaughter. The grisly term is “meat assaults” along the “meat grinder” frontline. These attacks began with Russians being driven at the point of a gun to assault Ukrainian positions. They have since evolved into repetitive, small-scale section attacks.

At first, Ukrainians units believed they were successfully repulsing these meat assaults, assuming that the 50 per cent casualty rates would prohibit their use. Slowly, it dawned that casualties were not an issue for Russian officers. One Ukrainian commander experienced the tactics for the first time in the battle for Bakhmut. He described, repetitively and rhythmically, how waves of Russian penal colony troops came at the Ukrainians’ positions: “They move.

We kill three, two make it. Next, again five or six men.

They move. We kill three, two make it. They reinforce, and move to the next stage, until they get to six. They try to advance. They move. We kill three, two make it.”

If successful, Russian troops would move to the next position. Failure would mean a new wave of Russian Comment “soldiers” would start the process again, because senior Russian commanders, with their rigid tactics, predictability and refusal to delegate decisions to officers on the ground, would order the same assaults on the same positions via the same routes.

“ Drones loiter on the tops of buildings or in gardens until the pilot decides to strike, killing Ukrainian civilians at random

Despite the slaughter, Putin shows no signs of wanting to halt the war, nor does he need to. Despite a casualty rate of 30,000 a month, he has been able to recruit. Despite the economic cost, Russia is not yet running out of money. Despite losing divisions’ worth of tanks and personnel carriers, they have been able to replenish. Perhaps the blood sacrifice of a million humans is Putin’s way of reshaping Russia in his image.

We are dangerously complacent

We may look at the war as an unmitigated disaster for Russia, but Putin sees it very differently. The war has allowed him to accrue more power over the Russian state than any dictator since Stalin, and more unchecked power than any man on the planet. He has three major goals: to reshape Russian society into one deeply hostile to the West; to destroy an independent Ukraine; and to break Nato. The war has enabled Putin to achieve the first goal, he is working on the second and will at some point attempt the third.

And what of our reaction? For many, Ukraine still seems a faraway place about which we know little, yet our military leaders are now saying we may be in conflict with Russia within five years. A miscalculation in the Baltic Sea, a downed passenger jet thanks to Russia’s GPS jamming or a land grab by Putin in one of the Baltic republics could see it happen earlier.

Errors of judgment in times of tension create world wars, while our enemies plan according to our weaknesses and their timelines. Lest we forget, Putin declared in late 2024 that “a serious, irreconcilable struggle is unfolding for the formation of a new [world order]”.

UK defence intelligence has claimed it will take Putin a decade to rebuild his army. This is dangerously complacent. Putin is using war to make his army and nation war-ready. The Russian army that finishes this war will be battle-hardened and brutalised. It will have a crude effectiveness. Russia’s will also be one of only two armies on earth capable of ground drone warfare — the other being Ukraine. It will be a generation ahead of the few Nato battalions it faces in the Baltic republics.

If Putin thinks Nato’s Article 5, the pledge of joint defence, is losing credibility, he will be tempted to mount an incursion into ethnic Russian areas of Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia, using a range of espionage, paramilitary, terrorist and ultimately military tactics, and offer the nations of Nato a blunt choice: give me back “Russian lands” or risk war, possibly nuclear. On the first morning of any outbreak of conventional war, Nato’s modest forces would be faced by thousands of drones to which they might have no response. Our window for preparation may be a lot shorter than we think — and the risks much greater. Do Donald Trump, Keir Starmer and their fellow Nato leaders understand this? Let us hope so.
 
Such an in depth answer.

Clap, clap, clap.

When expectations are so low it's easy to be not disappointed.
I don't have time to entertain you champ. I have work to do over here.

Regardless, my advice is still valid.
 
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