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Comment by grabcocque | Hacker News Reader

Japan's population is expected to collapse over the next few deacades, and that population will be increasingly past retirement age.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2014/03/japans-demogra...

So you're gonna need to give serious thought to where you're planning to get employees from.

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> So you're gonna need to give serious thought to where you're planning to get employees from.

As well as the tax burden for supporting the aging portion of the population (similar to considerations of basing a company in Florida, Maine, Vermont, Pennsylvania, or other high-percentage elderly population US state).

That won't happen in Florida. Florida is very right-wing and low-tax. Any older people unable to support themselves there will be left out in the cold (by the state government at least).

Maybe Japan will become more open to people from other countries living in Japan; I'm probably moving there soon and if you have contracts with Japanese businesses you can self sponsor a visa. Seems fairly progressive to me.

That's the price of freedom. Banning birth control and abortions would probably keep the population growing or at least stagnant.

Or you could start a robotics or elder-care business...

You'd probably want to combine them and run an elder-care business staffed by robots to get around the labor supply problem.

Or still yet, a robot-care business staffed by ever more populous and longer living Japanese. Because Japan!

Or just cut out the care part and start robotically enhancing Japanese seniors.

Or making robots act as Japanese seniors. The sky is the limit.

There's some evidence that much of the reason the Japanese are so "long lived" is just pension fraud by surviving relatives: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/world/asia/15japan.html

Hahahaha. Awesome. I'd never heard of that, but based upon observations of the same elsewhere I'd lend it credence. I certainly didn't see loads of super old people in Japan on my (month long) trip, even in places they might traditionally be found (high ranking Buddhist monasteries) but perhaps that was just the places I was hanging out (rural north of Kansai, Kansai).

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