I apologize, I think we’re getting tripped up on terminology.

Where ever you live, you are correct in believing you should strive to make that a home. Make a community, make a place of comfort and security and artistic energy etc. But that’s not what I mean.

Owning your place allows you the freedom to make your home better in a way that renting it doesn’t. How many people with they could add AC to their flat but can’t because the landlord doesn’t want them to? How many people wish they could add solar panels to their roof but can’t because the landlord doesn’t pay the electricity bill and therefore doesn’t care if it’s inefficient? How many people want to renovate a bathroom, tear down a wall, install permanent fixtures or shelves, etc etc but can’t because they don’t have permission or the rights to the place they live in?

The relationship between landlord and renter is one whose major purpose is to drain money from the poor to the wealthy. I don’t really wanna turn this into a rant against landlords, but they should be outlawed or taxed out of existence. Landlords are deincentivized to improve their properties, they are deincentivized to help you make your house a home, they are deincentivized to charge you the cost of that housing. The system should be abolished.

Going back to your ancedote, relativity is not a good measurement of objective truth. The fact that most people didn’t own their homes where you grew up doesn’t change the fact that that meant they were losing money every year, that they weren’t building wealth every year. Things should be improved based on and towards objective truths/metrics - not comparatively to bad examples. The US has worse public transit - does that means we shouldn’t strive for better train networks and services? It’s illegal to be a homosexual in Singapore - does that mean we should allowed gay rights to worsen simply because they’ll still have it better than other countries?

I make this point because this argument of relativity often hinders progress. Humans are creatures of relativity and if we allow our systems to be judged relative to others we will make progress slower than is possible (and arguably necessary).

You should be able to own a home. You should be able to own a home within the first 5 years of working at least and it shouldn’t cost you a loan that’ll last a lifetime. Housing shouldn’t be an ever growing cost. We can make this the reality if we vote correctly and hold our politicians accountable (and our neighbors).

If the CDU/SPD/AFD remain in power there will be plenty of countries that are at a similar quality of life and that are improving or worsening at a slower rate. Some country will eventually crack the code of taxing the wealthy and banning landlords and focusing on the working class (the 99%). It’s only a matter of time. The goal is just to avoid needing a WW to get us there.

I think the Germany benefits are amazing but I suspect people undersell how important baseline pay is for deciding on if you want to have kids. I’m a software engineer in Germany, I get paid a decent thriving wage, but I’ll never own a home as long as real estate is an investment option for large businesses and conservative governments continue to get elected.

Who would raise a child without a home to call their own? That’s what goes through my head. Even if all the costs for raising a kid were offset, I’d still be behind what I need to be in my opinion. I think some people answer that question and say “I would” and I think a greater percentage agree with that sentiment.

Couple that with the predictability of the political climate and you get an even more clear picture. Who would raise a kid in a world that’s getting worse? I might need to leave Germany if the CDU and AFD stay in power for too long. I may need to leave to a country that is making progress against inequality instead of expanding it. At the current pace of the world we are approaching another major Multi-national war in the next two decades, why would I have a kid in such an unstable time.

Having spoken to a couple women now in Germany about this subject - some of them broach the subject from a place of never wanting to but the few I’m spoken to also claim the factors above as major reasons against it.

I think countries need to start considering that extra pay and benefits for parents is not as effective as fixing the economy and political system for everyone is if their goal is to have kids.

An API is like a question a service provides that it will programmatically answer. So reddit provided questions for getting all of its content for free. People built front end apps for viewing the content to match their preferences, provide anonymity, avoid ads, etc.

There were a lot of good reasons for reddit to stop providing that service free of charge, but they went full Corporate enshittificatioon where they made the pricing so awful it forced most of the apps to shut down.

Couple that with the protecting of /r/theDonald and other non-humanist political subs and, for me anyway, it was clear that the company wasn’t run by good people but by greedy people and things would only get worse.

I left reddit during the API scandal. I had the energy and time to move platforms and so I did. Open software, FOSS, non-for-profit digital solutions are all things I’m trying to support more at the cost of not using those paid or private services. Every dollar out of their pockets (the rich) is another dollar in ours.

I think you’re misattributing things here that I think can and should be explained by wealth inequality. Big box stores don’t kill small towns because they destroy competition, they kill small towns because some percentage of money spent at a big box store leaves that small town. It’s not the lack of competition that kills small towns it’s the fact that after those small town businesses close less wealth exists in the hands of people in that small town. There’s less money moving around in that town because a portion of it is being siphoned off to big box store profits which go to shareholders and out of state C-suites and the likes.

Yes, higher density means more taxes are raised per area which means it’s easier to spend on infrastructure in high density areas but you’re missing the point. If wealth was distributed properly we’d have enough money to build all the infrastructure we want comparatively almost regardless of the density of the population. As wealth inequality grows less taxes are being paid to the government in high density and low density scenarios. As wealth inequality grows the more the government is in debt to the wealthy and the less it can spend on vital services. There’s enough money in the system to pay for Internet and hospitals and rail and school to service every person in the US but the money isn’t held by everyone, it’s held by people who have those services covered where they are and so they don’t care if they drain the rest of the country of those things. Wealth inequality explains why small towns are dying because it explains why they can’t afford to stay open, stay profitable, stay connected, stay healthy.

And to circle back around to your original paragraphs, I don’t care how much people like living in big cities they can’t live there on vibes alone. They have to go where the money is, and you best believe when Boeing opens up a new plant in a city they put a whole lot of money into that city (ignoring city special contracts for a moment). I like living in a big city, I want to move to an even bigger city, I’m not because I don’t have a job there right now. I live where the work is. And yes, denser cities means more jobs and more opportunities but that only gets less true and less meaningful the more wealth inequality grows. If I can’t afford to rent a flat in 10 years, the same way I can’t afford to rent a house today then what’s the point? If my job doesn’t pay me meaningfully more in 10 years because stocks have to go up (please read that as wealth inequality) then what’s the point? Cities don’t create jobs or high paying jobs because money moves fast, it’s because that’s where the wealth is. Look at any major city in the US (at least) and you can find the increasingly small list of increasingly massive companies that have offices there and you can trace the money. If Kansas city lost Garmin or Hallmark they’d feel it, if the government went further into debt and had to slash services Kansas City would feel it, if one of the massive freight companies left KC would feel it. The point is cities are built on wealth and the movement of wealth, but if it increasingly is drained out of those cities it will be harder and harder to sustain those cities. It won’t matter where people like living, they’ll have to move to where the money is.

I really do think looking at where money comes from and where it’s going is critical to understanding why the standard of living is declining while there’s never been more wealth or productivity in history. We could all own homes, all have healthcare, have highspeed rail, higher education, if only the rich didn’t exist. We have to tax them out of existence and build a system that works for the overwhelming majority of people instead of the 1%.

“Not as consumers, no. The 1% doesn’t consume more than the 90th percentile.”

But that’s the thing, as the wages of workers goes down their ability to consume goes down as well. Sure they’ll never stop needing food and clothes but new cars, sushi, new TVs, vacations, preventative healthcare, higher education, etc - these things become impossible. Debt will surely be the next step to keep the engine running but that will only accelerate the transfer of wealth because debt is paid to those who have assets. And quite frankly we’re already there - university (in the US), the rise of buy now and pay later programs, healthcare the moment you need to use it - these things require massive debt today. It’ll only get worse.

As wealth gets drained from the working class into the owning class, the only meaningful consumers for the majority of goods and services will be the owning class. Services will increasingly be focused on the wealthy or on methods of serving the poor via borrowing from the rich (which only exasperates their poverty).

I don’t think I am being over dramatic, I’d love to know what specifically you think isn’t grounded or reasonable.

Plenty of businesses do thrive off of the lower 90% of wage earners but those businesses are increasingly owned by the 0.1% and I’m talking about a slope here - a velocity. “Increasingly…” means there is a trend. When all wealth is increasingly owned by the wealthy 1% then we’ll see all possible wealth be within their immediate vicinity, within serving their needs. When there’s 50 businesses offering a service or product you can expect to see the wealth of those 50 companies spread out over many locations, but when all products and services are produced by 1 company you can expect most of their wealth to be situated in fewer places. Less competition means lower wages which means everywhere those workers are there is less wealth circulating. More wealth in fewer hands means less money flowing around to enliven cities, towns, villages.

More restaurants in cities because there’s more money in cities because there’s more people - but small towns used to have good restaurants too, with variety. But as wealth drains from the hands of the many into the hands of the few more corners have to be cut. More quality goes away. Another restaurant closes because people have to eat out less. It’s all a matter of how much wealth is in your community and owned by your community.

Things to do is facilitated by that same factor, but additionally by infrastructure. If the US had high speed rail connecting every major city and town, everyone would have a lot harder time justifying being within 30 minutes of city center by car when a train could take them into city center for cheaper, less hassle, and quicker from a much farther distance. We can’t build that infrastructure because… of a lot of reasons, but I’d argue most of them come back to too much money in the hands of too few people and that it’s only getting worse.

It’s why populism is so popular right now. It’s why the US is sliding rapidly into fascism. It’s why most European countries score as better places to live in nearly every metric, and it’s why if they’re not careful they’ll be in exactly the same situation in a few years time.

Wealth inequality is everything.

The more wealth inequality grows the less important 99% of the population is as consumers and the more important the 1% becomes. As our governments go increasingly into debt to the benefit of only the rich, infrastructure will continue to suffer. As wealth inequality grows the standard of living for the 99% will continue to decline, making the ability to own assets like housing an impossibility.

Add these factors together and you can see why people are forced to move to where the rich are, because that’s where the business is, because they’re the only people with enough money to constitute a customer, and because everyone else doesn’t have the money or infrastructure to go where they’d like to regardless of business smaller communities get choked out.

The only way to get the life you deserve, a better life for everyone in your country regardless of where you are in the world, is to tax the rich out of existence. Remove the possibility of becoming a threat to organized society, to democracy. Remove the threat of amassing wealth beyond reason and watch as your country becomes profitable, your job pays you more, the price of goods and services go down, and the quality of life for everyone begins to rise instead of plateau or decline.