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Comment by binary132 | Hacker News Reader

The reality of elder care is that (especially) infirm old folks really need a lot of hard, difficult, unpleasant care that our economic system has made basically impossible for their children and extended families to perform, as would have probably been done in the past. This requirement isn’t going to go away. There will be no cheap, safe, efficient butt-wiping robot, and unmotivated, uninvolved third parties are going to keep doing lousy jobs and getting old folks hurt. Technology is not going to make much of a dent in this one.

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This is true for most cases. However in my family we have special circumstances: because my grandfather is a veteran, my father is paid to take care of him. It is an absolutely phenomenal experience for our family and has brought us all together. If we could enable this again for everyone that would be good for everyone in terms of mental health.

I think it would be great if states offered support to people who were willing to be caregivers to their elders and children. These are essential roles that cannot really be replaced.

This is available to anyone in Australia, although ~$500-600 a week isn't enough to support the carer and the one they care for in most personal circumstances. https://www.servicesaustralia.gov.au/carer-payment

Same in NL, I don't know about the pay though.

Minimum wage by contrast is $915 a week

Perhaps I'm missing something here. Why wouldn't an elderly care home invest in such a robot, considering this is one of the most common and time consuming tasks their orderlies need to perform on a daily basis? It seems like it would free up a lot of bandwidth to take in yet more elderly folks, which would be more profit to the care home.

> Technology is not going to make much of a dent in this one.

I'm sure people said the same thing many times before. Agriculture is probably a good example of it, even if you ignore anything before modern times. Do you think after we developed tractors that we would have went on to make automated tractors that run by GPS and can plant, weed and harvest?

Technology can, and does, solve hard problems.

This, on the other hand also younger people are getting old. Future old people might be much more tech-averse

The butt wiping robot may be called a bidet combined with air drying.

Or have a self-cleaning, self-sanitized shower van with lifts and adaptive equipment make the rounds like an ice-cream truck.

> care that our economic system has made basically impossible for their children and extended families to perform

I don't wanna take care of my parents; I blame society.

I don't wanna have kids; I blame society.

We really can't keep letting society get away with all this.

This is just a snarky way of saying “incentives drive behavior” which, of course, is actually true and when incentives yield bad outcomes we should interrogate the system that produces them.

Establish UBI and then we can blame families for not wanting to care for their elders, but until capitalism demands dual-income to sustain the nuclear family... we can't unfold that blame blanket you're proposing.

I can’t have kids; I’m single.

Not with that attitude you won't.

The reality is that right now, most people need to work full-time-plus just to get by.

My wife and I have a bunch of kids. We are also the only ones who will be meaningfully sorting out care for our parents. I am fortunate to be able to provide enough support to make it work. I also don’t feel confident that when we’re also responsible for caring for all four of our parents, there’s going to be enough of our time and energy to manage it along with my work, especially if there are more little ones or medical issues at that time. It’s important to be realistic.

And again, I’m an outlier. Most people have fewer resources to devote to it.

Even if I did want to have kids, I wouldn’t have them to take care of me in old age. What if they move to Japan? Should I have them move back to the US to take care of me?

Nah, we should build a society that can and does take care of its elderly.

If your own kids are not going to care for you, why should someone else's kids?

Because the someone else’s kids had a choice?

What if your kids pre-decease you?

I moved to Japan 13 years ago. My mother developed early-onset Alzheimer's in 2021, and I'm her only child. I relocated her to Japan. It has been immensely stressful but I know she's getting better care and this also avoided the US healthcare system completely bankrupting our family and robbing us of our chance to build multi-generational wealth.

But living in a country with an outsized elderly population/terrible demographics, I can clearly see how the problem will eventually cripple most economies without significant technological augmentation. Large multi-generational families living in very close proximity at least provides for essentially unpaid labor who can share the burdens to prevent caregiver burnout.

And I’m saying technological augmentation will not be enough to avoid that fate

A society based on individual agency and transactional dynamics is foundationally incapable of communally taking care of elderly people as they lose their faculties. Some family member or other personally-invested party has to be involved to represent the interests of the elderly person, many times even clashing with the immediate whims of the person themselves. Leaving this dynamic to third parties in the biz creates too many moral hazards to opt for the easy choices, financially drain the person, and then just walk away. The culmination of this dynamic of course being the modern nursing home, where "patients" lay around getting bed sores while management gets hypersubscribed workers to check boxes on forms that say they're being taken care of.

To be fair the transaction is supposedly something like “old person has added value all their life and now receives some return on investment” but in reality the past (along with other elements of their personhood) typically just disappears once someone loses agency, unless they have a committed and devoted advocate.

Even illness or injury are enough to dehumanize someone, since they make it harder to self-advocate and the system isn’t built to advocate for you — in fact it’s often incentivized to advocate adversarially against you!

> the transaction is supposedly something like “old person has added value all their life and now receives some return on investment”

What you're describing isn't really a transaction though? This dynamic can only exist from family and other longer term personal relationships.

I’m saying even the inhuman transactional model at least has a concept carved out for like, long-term investment and savings. Just playing Devil’s advocate really.

Just brand a bidit with a lifting mechanisms

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