Japan adopts a 4 day workweek and other baby demographic crisis around the world

Japan adopts a 4 day workweek and other baby demographic crisis around the world

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In response to Japan’s increasing demographic crisis, Tokyo has introduced a four-day workweek for government employees to improve work-life balance and address the country’s declining birth rate, taking effect from April 2025.

In a country of 124 million, only 686,061 babies were born in 2024. That number is shockingly low, but even worse, it’s a decline of 5.7% from the year before and makes the 16th straight year of birthrate decline. 2024 had the lowest birth rate since records were started in 1899. Experts are citing Japan’s notoriously work-life unfriendly corporate culture, strongly ingrained family role expectations, and rise of younger generations less interested in marriage and having children.

The marriage and birth rates in Japan has dropped so low that economists are warning of a breakdown of the country’s economy as well as social welfare system – calling in to question whether so few young people could care for so many old ones. Japan’s population of 124 million is projected to fall to 87 million by 2070, and have a shocking 40% of the population over 65.

Other countries are also treating declining birth rate as a crisis and making work-week changes to encourage families, marriage, and having children. Notably in European and Asian countries such as Belgium, Germany, Iceland, Denmark, and South Korea.

South Korea

South Korea is particularly interesting because it went from a birthrate of 1.24 in 2015, to the lowest birth rate in the world at 0.72 in 2023. Shocking government officials and being declared a national crisis. Healthcare, social security systems and economic stagnation are real dangers in low birth rate countries.

And in South Korea, it has gotten so bad it is now a country in which dog strollers outpace the sales of baby strollers.

By passing many reforms to encourage marriage and having children, they have managed to finally turn the tide slightly with 14.9% jump in marriages in 2024. This, government officials hope, will signal more children for an aging and shrinking national population that was shrinking by 120,000 more deaths than births last year. Even with these changes, South Korea’s population, which hit a peak of 51.83 million in 2020, is expected to shrink to 36.22 million by 2072.

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Protect yourself from Skynet

Protect yourself from Skynet

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Drone warfare is very real as the conflict in Ukraine has shown the world. Cheap, re-purposed drone airplanes deliver bombs behind enemy lines and small copters are being used to deliver decisive and deadly grenades to entrenched positions. Hoog created this distopian instructional video that imagines how bad things could get and how to protect yourself from packs of rogue robots.

While this version is tongue-in-cheek, the reality is that swarms of cheap drones can absolutely overwhelm and kill larger, well-equipped enemy forces.

Real anti-drone weapons are already being developed

Photorealism for a Photography Simulator

Photorealism for a Photography Simulator

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Don’t like hiking but want to get lots of instagram-ready shot to impress everyone? Want to try practicing your photography skills without hours of walking or waiting for lighting conditions?

Matt Newell used Unreal Engine 5 to create a photography-themed game in which you walk trails and then take photos – getting to experiment with all the different camera settings. It’s turned into a sleeper hit – all from a guy that said during an interview for the Unreal Engine blog, he admits he learned Unreal Engine from scratch by using resources from the UE website and engaging with the development community. To create his effects, he utilized UE5 distance fields, contact shadows, and virtual textures. He also utilized free Quixel’s megascans.

You can read how he used each of the techniques in his interview on the UE blog.

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Chernobyl containment dome hit by drone attack

Chernobyl containment dome hit by drone attack

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Chernobyl’s destruction isn’t over. Besides being radioactive for 1000’s of years, now we deal with Russia crashing explosive drones into it. Can we all agree no matter how bad the war is going, nobody wants this kind of idiocy? B1M does great coverage of high profile buildings – and has a good article on this as well.

At 2am on 14 February 2025, a Russian drone struck the north-west corner of the Chernobyl containment roof. The explosion ripped through the outer containment and inner insulation layers, destroying insulation and exposing membranes to flame.

As the fire spread inside the roof’s cavity, firefighters faced conditions for which no manual had prepared them. Temperatures outside plunged to -16C. Water froze before it could seep down to smouldering insulation. For 17 days, hoses ran continuously, until finally, on 7 March, the blaze was declared out.

Sea warfare in the era of drones

Sea warfare in the era of drones

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If you can’t beat them – join them. There’s no question that the entire world’s military strategists are looking at the rampant use of drone warfare in the Ukraine to see how modern battles will be fought.

While casual observers see the switch to low cost drones as a eyebrow raising development – military experts realize it’s a radical re-thinking of a modern battlefield. One in which the large, powerful fighting tools of the past are quickly becoming nothing more than expensive, defenseless targets.

Just like we’re seeing in the Ukraine, instead of wanting a force of slow-moving tanks or a fleet of big fighting and support vessels, you can do a lot more with a ton of unmanned attack drones. It’s the difference between 3 big guys in a bar against 1000 little guys. The tactics of a small, expendable swarm can often overwhelm even the best defended capital ship by sheer numbers. We’re already seeing swarm technology being used to blanket an area. Ukrainian forces have driven a truck full of 117 drones, let them loose, and took out a up to 40 high-end Russian bombers before anyone could react.

Experts have pointed out it would be very easy to develop a system of 100’s of drones that would swarm a building or event with facial detection systems and assassinate key targets – completely autonomously and impervious to even radio jammers. All with off-the shelf parts for a fraction of the cost of normal military equipment. With hundreds of kill bots incoming all at once, it would be hard for any defensive service to protect their key assets from every single one.

The navy is taking note too – with smaller, modular fighting units.

The wish list is now simple: Rear Adm. William Daly, head of the Navy’s surface warfare division, wants to amass a large number of small, modular unmanned boats that can be quickly equip with payloads that fit in common containers and are designed to confuse and swarm the enemy.

The admiral rightly says the new hybrid fleet does not need to include large and/or exquisite un-crewed platforms. He is very clearly saying the old multi-million/billion dollar efforts are a thing of the past. The focus instead is on building lots of these craft very quickly and cheaply.

This isn’t academic, we saw the launch of a Mobile Ship Target (MST) here in Portland this year. It’s designed to mimic the electronic, shape, and other properties/signatures of just about any ship so the Navy can practice using various experimental munitions against it.

It’s a fascinating development – and a somewhat frightening new reality of the kind of drone warfare world we’re entering.

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