CN China's population shrinks for the first time in six decades

https://archive.ph/5S7Rr

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Society/China-s-population-shrinks-for-the-first-time-in-six-decades

China's population shrinks for the first time in six decades​

Decline jeopardizes Xi's ambition to overtake U.S. as world's biggest economy

An elderly woman rides a tricycle in a village on the outskirts of Beijing. The world's most populous nation is grappling with a low birth rate. © Reuters
CK TAN, Nikkei staff writerJanuary 17, 2023 11:30 JSTUpdated on January 17, 2023 12:22 JST
SHANGHAI -- China's population shrank last year for the first time since the early 1960s, jeopardizing President Xi Jinping's ambition to overtake the U.S. as the world's biggest economy.
Data released on Tuesday by the National Bureau of Statistics showed China's population stood at 1.41175 billion in 2022. The birthrate was the lowest on record, and the death rate the highest since 1976. The natural population growth rate was a negative 0.6 per thousand, a slide from 2021's 0.34.
The population contraction confirmed the fears of officials and demographers who have raised the alarm for years as Chinese couples delay marriage. India is now expected to replace China as the world's most populous country this year.
Beijing introduced a "three-child policy" in 2020 to arrest the population decline, replacing an earlier "two-child policy" in 2016, which itself dialed back on the controversial "one-child policy" previously used to curb population growth.
The ruling Communist Party vowed at its national congress in October to introduce policies to boost birthrates and lower the cost of having babies.
Under a five-year economic plan through 2025, Beijing proposed gradually extending the retirement age to 65 for men and 60 for women, up from the current 60 and 55. It also promised to provide a better workplace environment for mothers and pregnant women.
The fall in the birthrate was the first since the Great Leap Forward famine in the late 1950s and came after the country announced a sharp increase in COVID deaths to nearly 60,000 in the five weeks through Jan. 12.
As in some other Asian countries, the uncertainty brought by the pandemic has added to young people's reluctance to get married and have children.

 

[Fata v3]

The scary part is if Xi tries to take a page from Pootin's book and try to increase the population of his rapidly dying country by attempting to annex Taiwan

If a war with a country with nothing to offer other than grain (Ukraine) has fucked up the world order so much, imagine what happens when an important link in global chip industry gets fucked

Taiwan is only 25m people, and their fertility rate has been one of the lowest in the world for decades. The last reason China would invade for population is one that has worse demographics than theirs

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

This will be happening within the next 10 years or so. We are literally at only 10x the true limits of physics at this point with silicon. Something is going to have to give; traditional transistor design as we know it with node shrinks doesn't have much room left.

Keep in mind that the "nanometers" advertised is generally fake. You have 5nm transistors with dimensions that are more like 40nm. The way I heard it explained is that it's the nanometer equivalent if you had been able to scale down the old planar transistor designs. Instead, new designs like FinFET and gate-all-around are needed, and there are at least a couple of variations on gate-all-around and a couple possible designs after that. Maybe we will never see single-atom transistors in real applications.