It has two sources of funding

Taxes is the same source of funding. Workers.

there isn’t a middle man skimming a cut

Er. The government.

The entire point of a Ponzi scheme is you are pretending there is money being generated that isn’t.

Exactly. State Pensions are promised but there is no money held aside for them.

It is literally not a Ponzi scheme by definition.

I’ve already given you the Ponzi literature, and shown that PAYG pensions satisfy the description.

I’m done man.

Cos, like your PAYG error, you just can’t admit being wrong.

In most PAYG state pensions the contributions made by workers are not invested. They are paid directly to pensioners.

Your misunderstanding of the process and confusion with private pensions doesn’t make it false.

PAYG funded State pensions fit the definition of a ponzi. Therefore they are a ponzi. The fact it is government approved and transparent does not negate the fact that current investors are directly paying early investors.

Early investors pensioners are paid off with money put in by later ones.

Sounds like a ponzi to me.

You understand that there will still be a lot of labor available. It’s not like there will NO workers.

And engines.

I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.

The UK State Pension is unfunded, which means that its obligations are not underpinned by an actual fund or funds. Such schemes are often referred to as “Pay As You Go” (PAYG). The pension payments made by the government for unfunded pensions are financed on an ongoing basis from National Insurance contributions and general taxation.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how these funds work.

This misunderstanding is on your side. There is a method of funding pensions refered to as pay as you go (PAYG).

The goal is not to pay people with the money from new people paying into the pot.

This is exactly how many unfunded, state sponsored pension schemes function. No pot of money exists. Only the ability to collect taxes.

They invest the money and then the pot grows and that money is used to pay out.

This is true for private pension schemes run by companies and individual pension schemes. Funded pension schemes are (usually) not ponzis.

Nah. Food is cheap and plentiful. We don’t need young people working in fields for old people to be fed.

We need to inhabit at least one other plant on a continuous basis before we encourage exponential population growth.

We are going to be resource constrained on this planet long before we expand to others.

Maybe this ponzi. Unfunded state pensions use workers contributions to pay current pensioners.

Less workers = less pensions.

Low birth rates are obviously not sustainable

Please explain why this is obvious. Less people seems more sustainable, not less.

You are gambling whenever you get in your car and drive. You are gambling if you get out of bed. You are gambling if you spend too much time in bed.

Risk being present isn’t enough. I think the definition of gambling should include a willful decision to increase the level of risk.

Company A sells widgets for dollars made from raw materials bought in yen.

Company B sells woggles for yen made from raw materials bought in dollars.

Both companies can reduce their risk by agreeing to exchange yen for dollars at an agreed fixed value. No one is gambling. Everyone is reducing their risk.

Interest rates, some companies may have floating income they wish to swap for long term fixed, and others may have too much long term debt which has a volatile mtm value.

Counterparty risk, usually mitigated by diversification. Companies pool their specific risk for a lower, but more certain, general risk (and use clearing houses).

Liquidity risk. Only a problem if you need to sell something quickly. Here there are gamblers taking advantage. There’s no-one that naturally wants to take the other side of illiquid assets.

Not necessarily. Two companies in different countries can both reduce their risk by entering into an FX swap.

bank is required to keep 10 percent in cash

Not correct. Your liabilities need to be sufficiently smaller than your assets. Capital reserves don’t need to be in cash.

someone else has 180, that money has been ‘created’ out of thin air

200 dollars went in. 180 dollars came out. 20 dollars stay in the bank. No dollars have been created.

Look up fractional reserved banking.

Look up solvency frameworks

Futures are still technically gambling.

If you enter into a futures contract to fix your costs (electricity, oil, steel etc.) then you are reducing your risk. This is the opposite of gambling.

Sometimes doing nothing is the risky option.

When a bank gives out a credit, that money is created on the spot, not drawn from somewhere.

Incorrect. Try starting your own bank and doing that. No other banks will do business with you and you’ll run out of money to give your borrowers.

The derivatives market is something like 7 times that.

The notional value is that size, but that’s not really representative. You can’t compare or even add notional amounts.

For example, temperature derivatives would have a notional value measured in millions of °C.

Lego batman had already gotten very close.