Experts blamed fewer marriages in recent years due to the fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic…
It’s 2025. Can we please stop using Covid as a catch-all excuse?
I’ll have you know I intend to keep using Covid as an excuse for bad decisions well into 2040
Same here! This morning’s hangover, as just one example, 100% attributable to Covid! Definitely not the decision to have highballs #5-8 last night.
one finger on the monkey’s paw curls
Millennials are ruining the marriage industry!
nothing about the idea of having children appeals to me in the slightest
Everyone has their opinions and circumstances, but anecdotally my time with children has been some of the happiest.
it’s a good thing some people like kids because otherwise im not sure what happens
I love my kids and my life with them. People who pridefully claim they don’t want children is similar to people being prideful of not eating pizza.
No one gives a shit about your preferences.
your preferences about my preferences can suck my balls
Some body get this guy a Netflix special. This joke is so good.
thanks
I love my kids and my life with them
No one gives a shit about your preferences.
That’s exactly what I’m saying
Not even the initial sexy time?
Making children :) Having children :(
Me neither 😆 and now my son is 5 y old
We discovered him about 4 month after creation…
People now realise that kids are a lot of hard work and fucking expensive…and that yearly skiing holidays are fun.
They seem to be electing a lot of nationalist anti-immigration cucks. Maybe they should try to fix the problem instead of endlessly complaining about it.
“It’s so expensive to have children in Japan that birthrate is further declining.”
I swear to God these people couldn’t connect the dots with a GPS.
Surely if they just instill good Christian moral values like forced birth, racism, and tribal isolationism all their problems will be solved.
I mean, Japan is one of the more isolationist countries on earth. And racism is a massive issue. Christianity isn’t a major factor, but traditional views on the roles of women and the set up of the household are a major challenge.
If you didn’t notice, those aren’t Christian values. They are christo-fascist values.
Ah yeah I assumed you meant the extreme interpretations of Christian values.
The problems over there are the same problems Americans are starting to rekon with. That’s why you see Vance and his ilk push for this fetishized version of the American dream where every MAGA male gets their own concubine. It’s fantasy and has the exact wrong chilling effect. As it’s trying to answer the same racist question, “more of us less of them.” While what they need is a healthy population which they refuse to recognize requires a diverse composition with plenty of resources.
At least in the US those are basically the same thing
You associate how every you like but I wouldn’t just hand evangelicals the title they so desperately desire.
The other groups largely voted with evangelicals to make our country a fascist nation about 60 40. They don’t deserve as a group to be considered distinct
They don’t deserve to be associated with jesus, what’s your point?
you know…I’ve been saying this in passing for the last decade and I’m starting to believe it.
the rich continue to rape the planet, spurning global warming on at an alarming rate. it’s almost like they don’t care about it–or rather they want it to happen.
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
They don’t care about it getting worse. because global warming is their answer to every goal they have.
Climate change will:
- destabilize world governments
- drastically reduce world population
- displace millions, forcing them to migrate to safe zones
- allow them to capitalize on an opportunity to become “gods”
once half if not more of the planets population has died, the planet might start to regulate itself, though it will never be the same again.
I believe they are trying to take over the world and enslave humanity for their own benefit. climate change is just one of the many attacks they are throwing at the world right now.
They don’t care about it getting worse. because global warming is their answer to every goal they have.
It’s the classic “we don’t care if the valley floods, we live on the hill” mentality. They think that if/when the world devolves into chaos that they’ll be safe because they’re well off.
precisely, they want the valley to flood because the fields will be fertile and there will be less mouths to feed while they hold all the power.
Except climate change is a flood that won’t go away for 10,000 years. There is no ‘after’ for the rich to benefit from.
Elysium but in New Zealand
The problem with conspiracy theories is that they’re trying to assign a single point of blame to a complete systemic failure. The feeling is that if we can simply find out who is doing this and boil it down to one person or one group we can then simply attack that group and solve all our problems. That’s exactly the ox that fascism has yolked on its ride to power in every single generation.
Very well put.
I think it’s very natural to just want a threat to be known and made tangible.
Things are so insanely complicated, that fixing systemic issues feels insurmountable. It makes one’s head spin and feel rather helpless because it requires either power en masse or concentrated power in the right hands. Especially when there’s bad guys that defend and praise the broken system, but their elimination still wouldn’t fix it.
But man, if there was just some mustache-twirling mastermind in a lair somewhere sending out emails to all the other bad guys, and we took him out to save the world…Hooray! Much simpler! That would be a much more preferable scenario. A cinematic face-off against Skeletor / Palpatine / Rupert Murdoch / whatever, rather than trying to undo the corrupting influence of masses of oppressed people all thinking “But this broken system benefited me so it can’t be that bad bro.”
It’s not that there don’t care as much as they don’t believe it will affect them personally. They believe they their wealth will protect them.
I think plenty of them also think it’s far enough in the future that it won’t affect them (spoiler alert: it’s not)
We’re already slaves. They are just making it more obvious.
It was the government doing window guidance that caused their mess, how do you blame the people who made successful companies that gave Japan its first world living standard?
I blame the people for ignoring their responsibility towards humanity. just because you achieved success does not mean you get to stifle the progress of the world.
as the quote goes, “A rising tide lifts all ships.” when one person installs a levy and only allows their friends access, progress ends and the town(world) will die.
success is not greed, and these people are greed.
I’m not sure how true this statement is. I go to Japan every year and the child care infrastructure there is incredible.
The healthcare is icredible - you can literally summon healthcare assistant if youe kid is sick at any point for free to your home
Then there’s incredible public transporatiob system, parks, everything is equipped with child support and even culture heavily respects kids so they can do most things independently.
I think they mean expensive time and desire wise and Japanese still work incredible hours many of which seem to actually negatively impact productivity. People don’t feel like such investment is worth it and tbh that could easily shift around with cultural changes but Japan is very allergic to those.
This is an interesting point. So apparently the problems of having that terrible working culture are solved for (ish) to promote procreation, but it’s not helping. Gee, I wonder if possibly creating a society of miserable people and making it easier for them to create more people they presume will be miserable doesn’t work because they just don’t want to do that.
But what about housing? If you live in a shoebox with no hope of getting a larger place, it’s unlikely that you’re gonna have kids.
Housing is pretty good in Japan outside of Tokyo, especially if you don’t mind a bit of a train ride
pretty much the same in korea, i think korea is slightly worst off, china is beginning to see its effects too, they already trying to change that by “encouraging more sex”, but they arnt solving the underlying issue, which is the one-child policy that devastated the female to male ratio and HCOL. and they also have harsh work ethic.
My first two kids were born in Japan, and they were actually pretty cheap. The local city gives you some money (a few thousand) when your child is born, and day care was good and super cheap, like $10 per day because it was subsidized.
It really wasn’t very expensive.
That an average situation? perhaps you were financially better off than the rest
I was better off, but this was an average government subsidized day care, a neighborhood Hoikuen (保育園). Everything else was just normal stuff. In fact, we didn’t qualify for the few thousand from the city office because we were ex-pats. Medical is free for Japanese. So where are the costs?
Well it does get a lot more expensive when almost everybody wants to live in the same tiny square of the country Tokyo’s population will decline in 2035 according to some estimates
With Japan, they only have so much inhabitable land anyway. It’s a mountainous island where all viable land is already pretty much taken.
where all viable land is already pretty much taken.
Very much untrue, the actual issue with living away from one of the major cities is the same thing the US is dealing with: capitalism and a highway system (HSR there) encouraging suburban sprawl and the death of the small town. No need to visit 5 different shops in your small town if you’re going to pass a Donqi on your train ride into work. Then people eventually just move away from the smaller towns entirely to be closer to where the work and businesses are, and the cycle deepens
Although yeah, Japan is about 2/3 as big as California so it’s not as big as people think on top of that
Management issues… I know what can help… Introduce Agile.
In the context of Capitalism, sure, Japan is in trouble.
But then again, any system that demands infinite growth within a finite system has a biological parallel… in cancer. Yes, capitalism is economic cancer.
Japan has a bright future in front of it, if it can successfully pioneer an effective degrowth system that prioritizes the lives of people over Paraiste-Class profits.
Outside of capitalism it is hard to function below replacement level because the young people have to take care of the elderly
Young people would have time to take care of the elderly if they weren’t forced to work 60+ hour weeks consistently
Kind of adjacent when the person is tying infinite economic growth with population “degrowth”
Oh no, having to spend time with my family oh nooo /s
If rent weren’t so damn high and you didn’t have such a squeeze on every moment of your life to make as much money too survive, spending time and supporting each other efficiently maybe wouldn’t be a problem.
Values are defined by our parents? Is it a caste system? Is extended family more or less efficient? What is the goal: sustainability, B R E E D I N G, vacations, wealth compared to others, power over others, power over ourselves? Etc…
No they don’t. They just have to adopt a culture of euthanasia. I don’t say that to be cruel or indifferent. I assume state assisted programs are in a lot of countries’ futures assuming they can stomach it. It’s not something I’m advocating for. I just think the rich are cold enough to push it to try to fix the problem.
Is cancer really cancer if the rest of the body can adapt and grow faster than it? You describe capitalism as a finite system and then heavily imply that we’re near the outer boundary of that system or that all current and future resources are almost depleted.
The fact that our planet’s resources are finite is a matter of physics. Capitalism may come up with some innovation or another that adds more lifespan to it, the way that digital spaces and the financial industry have done, or it may have another global war that creates room for a new period of traditional growth at the cost of countless lives, but it will inevitably hit an insurmountable wall.
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Japans GDP has been almost flat since the mid 90s, they are not following the west’s “”“infinite”“” growth. Not that I’m saying capitalism isn’t part of the problem, it absolutely is, just saying it isn’t the entire story.
Taiwanese family living in Taiwan and frequent Japan prior to having kids and after having kids.
Most people are quick to point out the gruesome work culture, but honestly, that is just a small part of the total issue.
1- Japanese people culturally hate outsiders. So their immigration system is setup to almost never give a foreigner citizenship.
2- Japanese people culturally have a mindset that if you pop one out, it’s you and only you that share that burden. That means that if you’re on a train and struggling with a crying toddler that is tired of standing, nobody and I mean nobody will let you have their seat. Half the patrons will turn up their volume on their headset and the other half with mean mug/glare at you for annoying them. You wanna know the worst part. This mindset transcends to the kid’s grandparents. That’s right. The grandparents will not lift a finger to help you.
Edit: I also want to add that the burden is not even on the father, outside of the finances. The father does not need to help with any baby duties. I have met many Japanese men that has kids that has never even changed a diaper. Why the fuck would a Japanese woman want to have kids?
3- The government is not making it easy to help the families. Do you have a sleeping kid in a stroller? Well, you better hold the kid if you’re using mass transit. Elevators are an afterthought. So once you get off a train, you either have to walk an extreme distance to get to an elevator or in some instances there isn’t even an elevator at all. In some rare occasion there is a designated elevator for strollers and wheel chair access, it’s jammed packed with people who is able-bodied and can take the escalator, all of which won’t exit the elevator to let people with wheel chairs or strollers in.
I went to Osaka Universal studios and ask to rent a stroller. The guy didn’t speak English at all. We eventually used my phone to translate and he asked me my kids age. I said 5. He said, is today his birthday? I said no. He turned 5 a few weeks ago. He then poceeds to deny me from renting a stroller. I reasoned with him telling him my kid is having major jet lag and needs a place to sleep right now. He told me to just go back to the hotel to sleep because he wasn’t going to rent a stroller to me.
I love Japan and the Japanese people, but honestly they all hate kids.
Isn’t Tokyo to be one of the most affordable major, developed cities in the world? The article suggests that Japanese homes are exceptionally expensive.
I still don’t understand the obsession. Not everything has to be a ponzi scheme where line go up. Things can shrink, it’s ok. Not everything lasts forever. At some point you can abandon areas and let them decay.
Not everything has to be a ponzi scheme where line go up.
Yeah sure my personal cup of coffee is not a ponzi scheme AFAIK.
But global capitalism? Definitely a ponzi scheme 100%. Literally destroying the planet to prop it up.
Isn’t there a protection where there may not be any new Japanese births by 2050? That they’ll essentially cease to be (pure Japanese)?
I fully agree, but also, the whole concept of a pension plan only works if the next generation pays it forwards. Meaning this generation is paying for the current retired group, and no one will pay for them.
You make the mistake of assuming that pension plans have to be paid by the next generation. Why not use a wealth tax instead?
Theres a difference between going down, falling down and crashing down
Agree so much with this perspective. I’ll never forget idly watching some financial section on the news with the newscaster, ashen faced, reporting that growth in some industry had slowed, as though someone had died.
Then I thought about it… So wait, it’s still profitable, and that profit is even still increasing, but the rate of increase is slowing!?
People are still going to work, product is being made, profits still reaped, but the greedy ambitions of those at the top aren’t being completely fulfilled!??
Well bless my bleeding heart… What a crock of shit.
This is just like a stock crashing because the quarterly profits did not exceed the very high growth expectations more than a lot, they only exceeded a little.
The biggest issue that no one ever wants to talk about is …
… it’s isn’t about the QUANTITY of life
… it’s about the QUALITY of life.
If people are able to have a comfortable, stable and prosperous life, with plenty of their own free time to enjoy without worrying about losing everything then they’ll make time and an effort to have a family and children.
If all our wealthy overlords ever want to do is squeeze every penny out of us all the time, then people will be less likely to want to have children.
.
It also strongly correlates to women’s rights and access to education. The more educated women are, the less likely they are to have a lot of kids.
https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/health/female-education-and-childbearing-closer-look-data
It’s why you see a renewed attack on women in some developed countries, especially in the US.
Which is the plot to Idiocracy and why the movie is no longer a fantasy and it is now a prophecy.
I love that movie, except for the premise which is actually based on eugenics.
You mean eugenics, but it shouldn’t be an ideological position, reality in this case is that intelligence is actually very inheritable, around three quarters is a summary of decades of research.
Yea sorry, I accidentally anglicized.
Skimming over the link, I can see that a clear explanation is still lacking and that environmental theory is showing results.
Believing it is mostly genetic reinforces the claims of the class who has access to better education to maintain those accesses and resources.
I wouldn’t say that it’s entirely eugenics. Most of the point they were making is environmental factors like having uneducated parents that don’t enrich the child’s life or being too poor for education because the parents were too poor because they had 10 kids. It’s where we are headed because they are trying to actively destroy our education system and force people into unwanted births.
First, the comparison and core of the intro is about reproduction. Second, welcome to the Internet, where not everyone is from the USA.
But the movie was based in USA
It’s either developed countries or the US, you can’t have both
Here’s what happened in America.
In the 1960s the “Women’s Lib” movement started. They got a lot of press coverage because it was a good stroy, but didn’t actually change things a lot.
In 1973 the Oil Embargo hit and suddenly one job wasn’t enough for the family to survive. Lots of wives had to go out and look for work to keep paying the bills.
The Right has been lying that women getting jobs is what destroyed the one income family.
Tying the mortgage repayment rate to the median salary of a single individual would go some way towards fixing things then, but that would mean putting price caps on houses which would devalue the currency and also need anti-cartel laws (eg. Laws mandating a maximum amount of homes one can own, as cartels might see artificially low prices as an opportunity to buy up more houses).
Artificially constraining parts of banking and all of residential real estate is likely to have other unforeseen effects on the economy, but may still be worth it.
Another alternative is starting a state bank in which citizens can be part of a rent-to-own mortgage, with minimum but achievable life time repayments. If they don’t meet those minimum payments, the house is sold and the profit from the sale is portioned out between the state bank and the mortgage payer in proportion to how much % they paid off.
That’s a win win, as theyre probably getting a big cash payment when struggling, and the state bank then gets to relist the home.
How do you put price caps on houses? They vary so much in price depending on location. A shack in San Francisco costs the same as a mansion in the middle of nowhere.
No this kind of centralized approach is doomed to fail. We’re much better off with Georgism with a land value tax and the total repeal of zoning laws. People should be able to build what they want, where they want, and the land value tax captures the increases in property values as a result. When a neighbourhood becomes too expensive to afford for single family households it gets converted into apartments.
All of our housing problems come from meddlesome local politicians, their NIMBY supporters, awful zoning laws and easements, and a terrible property tax system which disincentivizes development. A very simple land value tax system along with the total removal of local politicians’ power over housing development solves all of these issues.
People should be able to build what they want, where they want
I’ll be sure to build a toxic waste dump right beside your house.
Sure, if you can pass the environmental requirements. And of course if any of the toxic waste leaks onto my property I’m gonna sue you for everything you’ve got.
It’s not city hall zoning laws stopping you from building toxic waste dumps. When I said people should be able to build what they want, I was talking about mixed density housing and mixed use / light commercial.
There are some good people here on Lemmy but my god are there an awful lot of obtuse, blockheaded teenagers! Get a clue!
You think the gubberment is the problem, think we can know when house prices are too much for families to afford, but can’t possibly know the same to figure out appropriate price caps, think we can’t have centralized federal laws, that “people should be able to build what they want, where they want when they want”… and that developers should be given family homes when they become too expensive so they can “replace them with apartments”.
Look bud, we’ve seen these pro-Capialist libertarian “free” market solution already. Lots of what you’ve said has gotten America where it is today: to an unlivable oligarchy.
People want something different. I’m fine with Georgism, but the rest of what you’ve written is clearly thinly veiled Libertarian and Free Market economics.
You’re just reproducing the ideology that benefits people like Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk - putting the wealthy in power.
I’d prefer a highly regulated, legally transparent, auditable, government system in power. Not people rich enough to build apartment blocks whenever and where ever they want.
Your ideas are incorrect and we’re seeing that in realtime.
Libertarians like you are LYING when they say centralized systems are doomed they’re too inefficienct the most obvious way to disprove that idea is to look at the world wars, what happens to industry during world wars? It gets NATIONALISED. Centralized under government power, we do this in war time because it’s highly efficient - despite the free market propaganda you’ve swallowed whole.
Where as Libertarian become traitors and mercenaries in war time. You may not realize it, but you’re arguing for the wrong team (are we the baddies? Yes, you are), the team that lets Nazi in, and if they have enough money, sits them in the position of advisors and department heads right next to the president.
We want democracy, rights, the freedom of a garanteed place to live… By putting that in the hands of people with “no price caps on building anything anywhere” you’re looking to destroy that freedom. You’re taking security from the poor and exchanging it for freedoms exclusively for the rich who can afford it, developer cartels, and corporations.
So you’re just reproducing the system we’re already in… That’s not a solution. That’s just reproducing the problem.
These people worship their god almost identically to the way religious brain-rot peasants of the dark ages did, it’s just their god is “The Markets,” thinking it bears mircales through human sacrifice and suffering, except for the Divine bloodlines of their billionaire Kings and Queens their suffering is spared because “Where would society be without
Kingsbillionaires.” They think they’re so smart and ahead of the game, they think their bank account proves it, when really they’re dumber and less significant than a medieval peasant. Centrist free-market libertarians are a horrible, gutless bunch of egotistical twerps out there.
and also need anti-cartel laws
Bring it on. Maximum 5 “homes” allowed per person, 7 for any family unit, children under 25 ineligible for ownership except as a post-death inheritance.
Anything above those limits is landlording-as-a-business, and combined with laws that make ANY business ownership of residential properly illegal, would force landlords to actually work for a living by getting day jobs.
Plus, have an extended “speculation tax” that hits any place being sold with a 100% tax on the first 2 years of owner-occupancy, with a straight-line decline to 0% in the eighth year. Any home being sold where the owner has never lived in it for a minimum of 2 years? 100% tax on the sale of the house straight out of the gate, with all proceeds going to a fund for first-time home owners. Exemptions, of course, for military deployment or death or a few other issues that cannot be leveraged for fraud.
That’s a win win, as theyre probably getting a big cash payment when struggling, and the state bank then gets to relist the home.
I like your ideas, but where do they live once they get foreclosed on by the State?
They use their profits from the house sale (which may be substantial depending on how long they’ve been there + market inflation), to rent somewhere.
That nest egg (which they’ve been paying into all this time) would give them breathing room and time to recover and get back on their feet to try again at a more stable point in thier lives.
It’s a win win because the mortgage payer gets a lump sum, and space to reassess what went wrong. The state bank gets the unpaid percentage of the home’s sale price, and then to sell the house again (under a new rent to buy mortgage arrangement).
P.S Part of how this works financially is that most of the money in an economy is created by loans issued from banks, those banks then buy Government Bonds periodically… A state bank would be another entity doing much the same thing, just with a specific purpose in mind.
Frankly, I LOVE the idea of cartel laws for ownership of residences.
The more appropriate fix would be no land ownership by people or countries that don’t reside in the US, a banishment of investment companies from purchasing houses, and a hard cap of like 5 properties for any individual or company that can be owned as rental properties.
Far too many people/corporations are being landlords as a big business.
We might even expand it to all private ownership, maybe…
Sounds like you figured it out, since the debasement of the gold standard we locked away an inelastic good behind a mountain of debt, where prices rose to whatever interest rates would allow, providing a massive first mover advantage to those born prior. Then we wonder why nobody has kids.
If housing didn’t continue to rise how many boomers would hold it as an investment instead of downsizing and buying an appreciating asset?
This is also why Bitcoin will keep going up and everyone should own at least a little, it leverages the cantillon effect as central banks get looser and looser due to aging demographics and shrinking aggregate demand.
If you want people to actually be able to have a family, you need to enable that. My understanding of Japanese society is that you have medium to no personal freedom over how you spend your time, and meeting people is difficult. It feels like they are so intent on shooting themselves in the foot, and then complaining about their foot hurting.
Even countries that try to enable it don’t renew their population, no matter the level of socio-economic equality.
The only way you’re reversing the trend is by taking rights from women and I sure hope you don’t want that.
Do you have any links to studies/articles about that?
Just stats from a bunch of countries, look at the birthrate over the past 100 years to see the trend, even in Scandinavian countries where socio-economic equality is the highest. If you look at Canada there’s quite a drop right as the pill was made available.
It might be highest in Scandinavia, but you still see that one income households are rare there.
But that’s the thing, unless you force women to not work, most will still choose to work. Divorce becoming accepted is part of the equation at well, if you might end up single again you won’t stay home and be left without any income in you become separated.
There’s a whole lot of things mixed up together but in the end the stats are clear everywhere where countries develop, as women gain rights, birthrate lowers.
There’s still a lot of downsides to taking off work for one of the parents: not getting career progression, smaller pension, etc. Those are things that should also be fixed in an equitable manner, and as far as I know, no country does that. Basically treat raising children as the full time job it really is.
Quebec is one of the places with the most parental benefits in the world, you can even make money by having kids if you’re careful with your spendings, fertility rate is 1.5
People get a year off work with most of their salary paid by the government, then they get child benefits until the kids turn 18, school is super cheap, guaranteed pension fund for everyone…
Sure you have to deal with other issues that might get in the way of your career, but as I mentioned in another comment, unless you force women to stop working and make them depend on the State or their spouse (and making divorce illegal), you’re not reversing that trend… And I sure hope that’s not something you’re ready to do.
It’s a very small minority of women that will take a chance and become 100% dependent on others in case shit happens, the only reason they did back in the day was because they didn’t have a choice… by law! No body authority unless their father was dead and they weren’t married? Well no shit they’ll stay home and raise the kids, they can’t even open a bank account!
Give women equality and make contraception legal? Well turns out they don’t want to have to deal with all the stress that comes with raising children! Just like men!
What if the population is stabilizing? Unlimited growth is death. Anyone who thinks differently hasn’t looked at how life works. That a population that undergoes a huge increase crashes due to starvation and disease. This is observable from bacteria to humans. It could be Japan is entering a stable period where needs and resources are predictable and known. Sounds like a higher standard of living to me. The downside is the huge geriatric population will need more and more resources until that situation becomes part of the new stable norm.
Stagnant is how a capitalist mindset sees it. They can’t stand that since their scam depends on unlimited growth. So of course any take on this from the stand point of greed would think its a terrible thing for a population to shrink to fit its resources not keep growing to allow ever increasing profits.
Oh no, not our out of control population growth fueled by resources running out as I type this comment and causing unspeakable damage to the biosphere of the planet.
Whatever will we do if our numbers fall below 7 billion.
I don’t disagree, but the systems necessary to make this happen non-destructively just do not exist.
BTW, you may like the limits to growth study. https://archive.org/details/TheLimitsToGrowth
Although it is kind of a downer. In the 70s, they predicted the downfall of society. We’re on track with the prediction, more or less.
Cultural norms around marriage and work-life balance are strangling Japan’s future. Good article, minus one for not exploring innovative or radical solutions to the crisis.
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