Something a little sad about this loss of youth from our cultures. Instead of seeing new trends and radical fashions everything seems just as it was 20 years ago except the young are more reticent. A critical mass of boisterous youth is needed for the production of new culture, and I suspect that in ageing societies we fell below that threshold about 2 decades ago.
Literally impossible given the size of the internet. It's not like there are groups out there funded to control discourse or introduce/censor topics for their own nefarious (relative and inconsequential in the scope of history) goals.
They have nothing to gain at all from such distraction, thats what Netflix is for. Society has never been freer in terms of personal expression! Your comment is actually ludicrous and ridiculous. The focus on more important issues, as is apparent in the open forum, will only naturally arise.
There is no fear of doing essentially nothing, repeating the same pointless discourse... for what may now seem like in perpetuity, and all the while never progressing, with 'frivolous discourse' and trivial ego-protecting topics (let's be honest, we are all free-thinking individuals here), for another year. And perhaps the year after as well.
This is an interesting observation, it might not even be possible for the vast majority of users, by definition, to be outliers enough to move the needle appreciably.
i.e. readers will only care to remember the most notable/unique/etc... fraction of comments.
And everything else will just meld together into one big mental blob.
Maybe that is why there's been a flight to smaller online communities?, even 'Joe Average' has realistic prospects of writing something memorable if there's only a few hundred folks to compare against.
I know that many people are afraid of this demographic shift, but while I think this will certainly require societal adaptations, I think this is overall a extremely good thing.
Over-population would be a much more difficult problem to manage, I am not sure about the optimal human population for this planet, but I am fairly certain that a stable population is much better than a quickly growing one.
Quick decline can also be an issue at some point, but in my opinion there is a tight relationship between population density and the housing market, the latter acting as a bottleneck, and if I am right the whole thing should be self-correcting.
The next generations will have more space than they need for themselves, that will naturally lower the barrier to have multiple Childs.
> Over-population would be a much more difficult problem to manage, I am not sure about the optimal human population for this planet, but I am fairly certain that a stable population is much better than a quickly growing one.
The environment isn't affected by "over-population" it's affected by environmental destruction and carbon emissions.
A lot of the developed countries where the populations are stabilizing or decreasing are already causing disproportionate environmental destruction and carbon emissions, especially if you factor in the effects in other countries caused by producing products that people in the developed countries are consuming.
> Quick decline can also be an issue at some point, but in my opinion there is a tight relationship between population density and the housing market, the latter acting as a bottleneck, and if I am right the whole thing should be self-correcting.
It may be counterintuitive, but having people concentrated in denser urban areas actually reduces the environmental impact overall. If the housing market leads to more people moving out of cities, that will actually increase the environmental damage.
Only of you ignore CO2 and other environmentally damaging emissions that stem from needing to feed and push millions more people out of poverty into the middle class where they also start to consume and travel and produce emissions.
So yes, the planet can theoretically sustain billions more people but only if you look at planetary free square footage per capita, but at the cost of either them living in absolute poverty, or insane environmental damage and climate change which will also create poverty from the issues climate change will cause to agriculture and food prices, so we're back to millions living or dying in poverty.
Canada and Australia are huge countries but the livable parts are quite small. You can't have infinite growth on a planet of finite resources.
It's a function of technology and what damage to natural ecosystems could be tolerated, but with current demonstrated crop yields the world could support 150 billion people. At the limit imposed by direct thermal pollution, the world could support 1 trillion people (but it would be more like living in a space station than on a planet.)
Sorry, but that is unreasonable theory vs practice.. "by my metrics the world could support 150 billion people" but we don't even manage to put 8 altogether at reasonable living standards while we dump the world into a climate catastrophe?
Why assume some tech that doesn't exist or couldn't be deployed at that scale? Even those crop yields are not sustainable long term.
It's a reasonable thought exercise to ask what the ultimate limits are if technology is allowed to vary. That's no more unreasonable than asking what the limit is if technology is completely frozen. The actual answer will be between the two.
Lithuania isn't overpopulated. Japan sort-of is, most inhabitable territory is already built over. Egypt is definitely overpopulated, with 100 million people packed into inhabitable territory the size of Florida. Etc. etc.
Edit: to the downvoters, can you provide counterarguments? I would say that a good measure of overpopulation is that the country in question cannot possibly feed all of its population even if it tried very hard, and is inevitably dependent on imports.
So what defines the limit,.and what is it?
Imo as long as world overshoot day is not beyond December we definitely are.. there are other knobs and factors one could touch to shift that (e.g. our current living standards), but who wants to cut in there? Everything else is just theory, or waiting for some assumed tech to save us..
Is it possible to feed more people? Yes, clearly, but mostly with highly processed junk food.
At the current population it would simply not be possible to feed everyone with a healthy diet. From my point of view, we've been past overpopulation for decades.
>but in my opinion there is a tight relationship between population density and the housing market
there are entire towns in Japan with empty houses, the problem is globalization which resulted in jobs being centralized in a handful of cities in developed nations and everything else getting outsourced. Governments embracing and encouraging remote work to help spread people out would be a better solution to housing problems
Poorer countries tend to get richer over time. And their diaspora prefers to settle in richer countries. If all populations don't level off then over-population becomes an increasing problem.
Easily exploitable resources are also finite. We are consuming non-renewables and haven't even built a renewable pipeline for the renewable sources, like solar panel or wind turbine construction.
Ultimately, population is the driving factor. Technology always propagate and diffuse on the whole planet, it is only a matter of time. Take China, look at the trends over time. We're lucky their population is not growing as fast at it was.
When someone enters illegally through the Southern border, ICE issues them a court date and basically zero show up. Most simply overstay. That's an 'undefended' border. If the border is not undefended, who is showing up in New York, Chicago, etc?
Such immigrants would still face other headwinds, such as being deported if arrested or caught, being unable to work most jobs, denied access to many social services, etc. ICE orders against them can also close doors in the future. Border guards found to have immigrated illegally as unknowing children have been stripped of their jobs and faced deportation.
While not an iron curtain of 5m+ cement walls and machine guns, that's hardly what I'd call undefended. Also, being a nation of (almost exclusively recent) immigrants I find this 'replacement' retoric hypocritical and ironic.
I have not used 'replacement' rhetoric. So stop it.
> that's hardly what I'd call undefended
Sounds undefended to me. At the point where you're saying "You can't do this within America" you've already conceded the point that they've ... entered America, which is the definition of immigration.
ICE may not, but the federal government has every right to regulate immigration, including defending a border to make sure people don't arrive without papers to begin with.
Seriously... I often shrug when people ask me to pay more for public schools / child programs to encourage births. The claim is often that 'You're investing in our future'. Except... we're not. The data are pretty clear. A lot of the important jobs are being done by people not raised here. The same people will often brag that immigrants pay more taxes than native-born Americans (not sure if it's true, but it's an argument I hear). Thus, unless my taxes are going to pay for public education / child welfare in another country (like India, Mexico, Guatemala, etc), is it really an investment in our future? A good portion of 'our future' will be people coming from countries where we've actually forced other people to be taxed to prepare these kids. Is that really right? We need to have a solid discussion of what we're actually doing here, but no one seems to want to do it.
Being specific. Working in tech (as I'm sure many here do), most of my colleagues are foreign born. That's fine, but basically, my parent's tax dollars did not go to their education. Someone else's did. That means we did not 'invest in our future'. Americans are not taking these jobs / are unable to do them at the rate I'd expect given our expenditure (having been in the hiring manager position, I'd say more are 'Unable to do them' then unwilling).
I'm not anti-immigration (far from it... I'm the child of immigrants myself). I'm just wondering what the point of all the child welfare programs and such is if, at the end of the day, we're expecting children and adults raised in third-world conditions to take on the most important jobs in 'our future'. It's pretty clear to me that the immigration system is exploitative. My parents and family spent thousands of dollars, thousands of hours, etc to become productive members of this country. A similarly situated American was well taken care of their whole life and many are now benefiting from the taxes my parents and aunts and uncles paid. It seems to me that if our grand strategy is to subsidize American welfare by the mass importation of migrants, we should be paying the migrants to 'invest in our future'.
> I often shrug when people ask me to pay more for public schools / child programs to encourage births. The claim is often that 'You're investing in our future'. Except... we're not. The data are pretty clear. A lot of the important jobs are being done by people not raised here.
You should make this same argument in front of the millions of faces doing the "unimportant jobs" and their children, see then if people would still have the patience to work on your car or even sell you one in the first place
This is an argument to improve our education and social safety nets so that our citizens develop into the people who do the most important jobs in our country, not an argument to keep immigrants out.
While population decline I see as a major issue, the more pressing issue is that our social services will collapse. Other comments have said that social services are basically a Ponzi scheme, where the younger generation subsidizes the older generation. It's not hard to believe but then the next questions is: what are we going to do about it?
Eventually the age bell curve is going to start trending up for the older folks and were are going to have vastly more people taking out of the system than folks putting into the system.
Part of the social security system is built as a Ponzi, but we often forget that kids and teens are also economically inactive, having less of them means more money for the old.
I agree with Tucker Carlson from what he said on all in podcast about Japan.
Yes the population decline is alarming but does slowing growth really matter when you have a strong culture?
I don’t believe the solution to their problem is importing random people who share nothing in common with their culture.
The Japanese should be able to maintain their culture and I am sure they will bounce back. They owe it to nobody to radically change their culture to appease some number crunchers.
And I say this as an immigrant to US. I’ve been to Japan and it’s just quite amazing.
A population that consists of more retired elders than workers is a problem. There are no automated retirement homes and more medical workers are needed as well.
> Yes the population decline is alarming but does slowing growth really matter when you have a strong culture?
Wtf is "strong culture"? I guarantee your answer would be different than Tucker Carlson's because he never intended it to be defined. It's just a fake term he made up because, in the heads of his mindless listeners, it invokes the idea that some cultures are superior, but deliberately with no criteria to define it.
First, Japan's entire history is a story of radically changing their culture. Adaptation and cultural syncretism is the norm, not the exception.
Also, the vast majority of immigrants to Japan will always be from other Asian countries. It seems like a stretch to assume none of their neighbors (from whom Japan adapted much of their own culture) share anything in common with them.
But of course, this isn't about Japan. It never is. This argument is always an orientalist proxy for Western xenophobia and racial prejudice. A polite way to say "I don't like the brown people in my country who speak a different language and worship strange gods, wouldn't it be nice if we could be more like the noble Japanese, who are willing to fall on their katanas and go extinct rather than suffer the impurity of foreign blood?"
I live in a very dense area of the US midwest (still single family homes, but shotgun style houses) and I see a lot more young people and parents! I think it’s the density and walkability. I’m told Japan is really good at both of those things.
The solution to Japan's problem is mass import of highly educated, non radical people who are a net positive contribution to Japanese society. India, China, S Korea are good candidates.
All 3 countries have a birthrate below replacement. Highly educated, non radical people are those not having babies to begin with.
At some point society will either reckon with its values and value raising children more highly, or generations of highly educated non radical people will keep wiping themselves from the gene pool until things balance themselves out.
It's hard to imagine two cultures less compatible. Indians would have a very rough time in Japan -- imagine being effectively ostracized and forever unable to integrate into society (and not only yourself, but also your descendants!) -- and the average Japanese won't last 10 minutes in India without having a nervous breakdown on account of unsanitary conditions, lack of personal space, interpersonal aggression, etc.
I’m not an expert by any means, but aren’t they too concerned with cultural purity to ever really consider this? I feel like they would have already started down this path if they weren’t.
I can’t imagine a worse candidate than Indians lmao. They are polar opposites of Japan. No manners, no sense of personal space, the country is dirty beyond understanding, etc.
When people are free to decide how many children they want, this amounts to 0, 1 or 2 typically. Which averages out to about 1.5-1.8 in most developed nations, which is significantly below replacement rate. Japan is an extreme case.
People often blame the cost of living. Whilst it doesn't help, it's not the root cause. The root cause is straightforward: people simply do not WANT more children.
Those that want children, will often have 2. There's very little reason to have 3, 4, 5 or more once you have 2. Two children already dominate your life so there's little incentive to just let the number grow arbitrarily. And having more than 2 children has very real consequences. For your home, your car, your schedule, your sanity. Even most millionaires will not have a huge amount of children.
Bottom line: most people still want children and will have 2. Which is not enough to cover the replacement rate. No policy, monetary or otherwise, will significantly move the needle.
Japan's issue is the above universal behavior combined with additional local constraints. As also seen in South Korea and China, the "work yourself to death culture whilst also financially supporting your ageing parents" means your culture as a whole ultimately goes extinct. It makes family formation near-impossible.
Instead of working more we should work less if we're interested in continued existence. The world won't move in that direction though it's "all hands on board" to deal with the current ageing society.
Mass immigration doesn't solve this. It's a brain drain for those countries, but also consider that a giant population of young people will turn into a giant population of old people, requiring even more young people. Which won't happen because also in developing countries the birth rate is in decline.
A very dark conclusion you could make is that people get too old.
For any living species the population is self-regulated by the ecosystem.
We're no different.
We've been able to change our ecosystem with technology and thus greatly expand our population. But there are limits, always. And we're lucky that this self-regulation is still operating (I think that the housing market is acting as the signal for us) otherwise we would have to endure an ecosystem collapse at some point.
Demographic collapse in advanced nations is an existential threat to our civilization, if not our species. As much as climate change.
We need to remove as many impediments as we can to child birth and rearing - for example changing how we work so that children are compatible with productive and fulfilling careers (and indeed lives as a whole).
Where does this come from? We're currently in a 100+ year long population explosion that is wreaking havoc on the planet.
Even if models predict the population growth will slow down and may turn to a decline after peaking 50 years from now, it feels quite rash to over-extrapolate and panic now about a potential eventual decline from the 15 billion peak to a genetic population bottleneck (1000-ish). The population would have to halve ~25 times which would take ~1000 years if it declined at a similar speed as it's been growing now.
Exponential growth works just as well in reverse - the point is that our current social structures seem incompatible with even replacement levels of child birth.
And that is before we consider the effects of the second order transition (i.e. going from a growing population to a shrinking population). That in itself wrecks things like pension provision.
> the point is that our current social structures seem incompatible with even replacement levels of child birth.
This means our current social structures need to change. We can’t have exponential growth forever. It’s literally not possible on a planet with finite resources.
> And that is before we consider the effects of the second order transition (i.e. going from a growing population to a shrinking population). That in itself wrecks things like pension provision.
Pension provisioning will suck yes. But it’s not an “existential threat to our civilization, if not our species. As much as climate change.” You are drastically overstating the drawbacks to population decline, as evidenced by your immediate moving of the goalposts when probed.
Um I meant the transition effects are also a problem, not that they are a bigger problem - my wording was a bit slack there. Yes probably we could overcome those issues, but with no clear reason for birth rates to increase as population falls (and quite a few reasons for the reverse - e.g. greater proportion of elderly requiring care that would otherwise be given to infants), our population and civilization would simply evaporate.
Our current social structure was built on wrong assumptions, this is what need to be fixed.
This is probably not as difficult as it seems. We talk a lot about the proportion of active / inactive, but we often forget that most population under 20 is inactive and also supported by the active population.
Look at how easily supply chains collapsed due to lockdowns, complex systems are hard to sustain and the focus on efficiency above all else has resulted in reduced redundancy. With less people around it will be hard to even maintain things, let alone improve them
It's not just the raw numbers, it's the ratio between old and young that is absolutely essential which you're not including.
Say we're below replacement rate and the first "halving" has occurred. The replacement rate now no longer is 2.1 (as it currently is), it would be perhaps 3-4. Which won't happen, so then it becomes 5. Which won't happen so then it becomes 6. And so on.
Once the serious decline sets in, it cannot be stopped.
>We need to remove as many impediments as we can to child birth and rearing - for example changing how we work so that children are compatible with productive and fulfilling careers
Most European countries already support this but their birth rates are as bad or worse than Japan when excluding migrants. The only groups reproducing above replacement level are traditional Christians and Muslims, groups with an ideology that is proven by 2000+ year Lindy effect.
I don't think we'd feel comfortable adopting a solution that is predicated on the subjugation of women, Lindy effect or no. We should find another way.
realistically the solution is going to be artificial wombs, which are already being tested in Japan and the US. They'll get them in the door initially for women who can't have kids naturally or homosexual couples, but eventually it will be normalized or governments will just create as many test tube kids as needed
only other alternative is a massive propaganda campaign to raise the social value of being a mother to how it used to be, where motherhood was socially seen as being far higher status than having a job for women. That's the current problem, years of women being told that "freedom" and having a job is way better than having kids. It's really not a money/stability issue, because the poorest people in Western countries have the most kids
However in many ways freedom and having a job is better than having kids, we can't really propagandize that away. What we need to do is make child birth compatible with freedom and having a job. For example free child care provision, social expectation on fathers to take a greater role in child care, less wealth inequality so that working provides more free time.
Artificial wombs are straight out of Huxley's 'Brave New World' - scary how prescient that work is.
While women are absolutely disproportionally affected by a couple having children, in general raising a family needs to be made such that it isn’t so disruptive to… well, basically everything. In today’s economy once a couple has even one kid, many sacrifices must be made by both parents, even for the relatively privileged in the working middle class.
Not only are the financial and opportunity costs huge, but so are missed experiences – with the age of retirement skyrocketing, choosing to be a parent can mean essentially trading away the remainder of one’s finite lifetime.
If birthrates are to recover, society must restructure such that we do not live to work and families within a community support each other so parents don’t have to forfeit the people they were prior to parenthood and can have lives beyond their job and kids.
So childless men should be expected to pay for free child care through taxes, but we’ll keep fathers in check by having the social expectation they take on a greater role in childcare? That system isn’t really engineered to optimize for men bonding with children, it will just inevitably result in polygamy really.
We had a system that optimized for male attachment to children and it was the societal expectation to marry and for marriage to really be til death do you part.
Assuming population growth can be infinite because our economic systems are built on the faulty assumption that it’s not only possible but necessary is something I will never understand.
Even the brightest minds don’t seem to be able to extrapolate their beliefs out to the logical conclusion that they’re describing a Ponzi scheme that will collapse eventually by definition.
Ideally we'd find a population level where we can sustainable co-exist with our habitat (and then perhaps go out and find new habitats).
However such a balance might be hard, it is difficult to see that interest in having children in advanced economies would recover as populations crash. In fact likely as there are less people around (and a greater proportion being old), child rearing becomes more expensive to the individual.
Note that economic growth is not necessarily predicated on population growth, it can also measure better use of the people we do have (hopefully in an actualization, more than an extractive, sense). People should be understood as a (in fact the most) valuable resource, not as a costly burden.
our economic system is a scam to fleece populations by shifting value attribution from moving atoms to moving money. 'brightest' minds have a vested interest to keep the system going, after all it pays their bills.
We should just find an economic system that doesn’t depend on being a generational pyramid scheme.
Arguably it’s exactly the opposite of what you say: the sustainability of life on this planet depends on human population decreasing.
There’s nothing particularly scary about having an older population curve, it just means that society has to adjust by having higher savings rates for individuals and government retirement programs.
Considering that AI is projected to eliminate 300 million jobs globally it sounds like we don’t need to all procreate like rabbits.
Indeed. Let's start by getting rid of the welfare state and bringing back the greatest incentive to child-bearing... care in old age.
I'm serious. One thing I often see is complaints that the younger generation (typically millenials) are not pulling up their end of the bargain. However, neither are their parents. Typically, one would expect to become a grandparent that cares for their grandchildren. In return, your children take care of you. This is how humans have lived for generations. Yet, today, seniorhood is treated as a second adolescence. Grandparents neglect their grandchildren while parents are forced to do it all, so to speak. It's no wonder they have no time for kids.
Human childbearing is exceptionally hard. It's why human males take part in the child-raising typically (women with committed men have more children on average and shorter spacing between pregnancies). Moreover, it's why natural selection has typically brought about kin groups that care for children. Social security is an affront to this entire arrangement. There's a balance to be struct between guaranteeing no one is destitute and not shifting expectations of the elderly to the point where living purely for themselves is actually considered acceptable.
There's no need for the crypto-fash comments about government safety nets causing the downfall of the west.
The grandparents barely being kept out of elderly poverty by Social Security aren't the same as the second-adolescence grandparents spending down their 401ks (based on wealth disparity, the former group outweighs the second group).
It's true that grandparents don't help raise grandkids anymore, but the rise of hyper-individualism in the 1950s with the death of multi-generational households is the most obvious root cause of this.
Back in the day a well off family could buy a duplex where a young family could live in one unit while the elderly parents live in the other (allowing both sides to keep their privacy), but the rise of suburbanization and the lack of sensible housing stock make this hard to pull off.
Late 1949s - 1950s = first modern payment of social security that wasn't affected by wars.
Also this is not 'fascist'. Fascists support these sorts of programs for the racially pure class. I don't support them for anyone. Fascism is not a libertarian ideology. It's a collectivist/socialist one.
> There’s nothing particularly scary about having an older population curve, it just means that society has to adjust by having higher savings rates for individuals and government retirement programs.
Savings are meaningless if the saved money can't buy the work of young, able workers. Elderly people would just waste their savings outbidding each other for the services of the few younger people left. Numbers in your bank account can't do a hip replacement and change your saline solution. People do.
Like I mentioned, automation and AI will continue to accelerate to the point where a larger percentage of the working population can be dedicated to services for the elderly.
The most common profession in every state, truck driving, is probably going to be completely automated in the lifetime of the millennial.
The planet could support many more people - but not if they all drive SUVs! (sorry, being glib, but with more efficient resource utilization, the planet could support the current population to a good standard of living).
The concern is that there is no obvious natural mechanism that would reverse the decrease. Our civilization would simply evaporate.
Don’t forget that we still have to grow food, which is the most serious consumer of fresh water (see: California droughts) and a very significant part of CO2 emissions. Even basic essentials like clothing are not very environmentally friendly.
This is a very interesting point. Arguably the last century was an anomaly with constant growth afforded by scientific progress and post-war reconstruction, so it's possible we don't know what modern steady state looks like yet. I really hope it doesn't look like the pre-renaissance steady state.
Is it? We’re going to peak at 10 billion. The population seems like it could fall quite a bit before it became an existential threat. Humanity numbered in the thousands at one point I believe.
Still I generally am glad Japan is going though this process as population decline is inevitable and immigration only delays it.
Oh indeed, but the underlying problem is broadly the same - children are a lot of hassle and expense, and in advanced nations the calculus appears to be that they aren't worth it (to each individual). We must change that calculus, or our civilization will evaporate.
I don't see it, in the United States, as being that severe. The housing and economic squeeze is going to change the locations that people live and may change the ways in which people live together, but I don't expect it to become a wound so long as the corrective curve is round. I expect new laws which are likely to act as a pressure valve towards this issue.
If something cannot continue forever, then it won't. Population decrease may be inevitable and if so then handling it with less panic is smart.
I haven't checked the stats, but I believe the US population growth is supported by mass immigration? The US system works well for immigration, as it gives (or purports to give) opportunities to do well, while spending few resources looking after those that fail.
Not if you look at internal and external migration. Housing has gone up in the big cities of countries with declining demographics because the places where demographics are declining are villages and small towns because everyone is moving to the big cities with jobs and universities which see virtually unlimited demand irregardless of local demographics.
Look at Germany, Italy, Balkans, etc. all have declining demographics ranging from slight to severe yet housing in their cities has gone up from slight to severe. Like everything in real estate, it's all about the location location location, so everything is localized not extrapolated to the whole country it's why demographics can be steeply declining but prices steeply going up in cities.
Unless you want to live in desolate villages with no infrastructure or jobs, urban housing prices isn't tracking demographics.
I'm seeing moderate housing price increases at best in Germany and Italy, and that's generally going to happen because of inflation in general. I don't see the evidence that declining demographics are directly causing housing in cities there to get more expensive.
Like another reply said, it's more likely that general movement from rural to urban is what's causing that, and that if their population growth was higher, those cities would've just gotten even more expensive than they're getting now.
Japan is probably a good example for your rural to urban migration example.
Anecdotally I hear that the big cities like Tokyo are becoming more expensive (as everyone moves there) while smaller cities (<500,000 people) and rural areas are becoming cheaper, but I don't have a reference or data on hand for it.
Sure, the current market is down right now due a but due to interest rates hike and the economy being shit, but check the period from 2010 to 2022 please. It went up up up despite a stagnant population.
I fear reinforced concrete disease and sea level rise will make housing disappear at a faster rate than people for the next 100-200 years. Conventional reinforced concrete is not like traditional stone buildings that may last centuries. The rebar inside rusts on timescales about ~100 years, and many buildings built over the XX century will be in bad shape and very hard to recover by the end of this century.
So we're going raw with the antisemitic conspiracy theories now? Sure, you could have provided any example, but the others just failed to convey what's at the core of your paranoid imagination.
a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls. In egregious cases (like this one) you're certainly welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com. But for sure please flag the comment (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cflag for how to do that)
> Jews have an ancient and vicious hatred of Europeans.
I'm not going to bother with the antisemitic conspiracy theory nonsense, but this part I couldn't resist replying to.
It's very ironic for you to say this considering the origin of Ashkenazi Jews came about when a large number of Jewish men from Judea were forcibly exiled to Southern Europe by the Romans, and subsequently married pagan women from that region who converted to Judaism.
In other words, at least 50% of the average Ashkenazi Jew's ethnic makeup is Southern European (a few centuries later, some eastern european slavic was also added), and these are the people who have an ancient and vicious hatred of Europeans?
a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls. In egregious cases (like this one) you're certainly welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com. But for sure please flag the comment (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cflag for how to do that)
