41–50 of 187 posts
Insulting the people you want to join you seems line a poor way to get support: "...work-shy benefit scroungers, strike-hungry air traffic controllers, long-living pensioners, unruly refugees, and all other local pests from the neighborhood..."
> New tech companies are driving the rents up in the area higher and higher. The endpoint of this process can be seen in San Francisco, which once must have been a halfway livable city. This is more the fault of NIMBYs and supply&demand-denialists who work hard to prevent new housing from going up. Yes, tech companies brought the demand because of good jobs, but last I checked, we wanted companies to offer high payin…
Lack of highrise developments is what makes those areas attractive in the first place. Berlin has plenty highrise residential, yet Google and the like are decidedly avoiding those areas. Converting more of the cityscape into the kind of area where neither Google nor the protestors would want to be would make the situation worse, not better. Also, it's quite possible that you widely underestimate the existing density,…
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There's no space in that area to build more housing. Pretty much all the space is being used to build offices for tech companies. There's also the question of how people that do not work for one of those high paying tech companies are supposed to pay for their housing.
Always in Berlin the knee jerk response to what is going on "We have to keep the rents down!" in response to housing crisis....never "We have to raise pays!" Pay situation for many jobs in Berlin and to some extent most of Germany is just abysmal, even in tech in many cases. If people here put half the energy in fighting for fairer remuneration for their work rather than whining about the raising rent and property pr…
The solution is to build more housing to alleviate the pressure. This way you can keep the rents low without pumping up just a few salaries.
And in a city like Berlin the situation is vastly different from SF. Public transport and biking work like a charm so housing doesn't have to be smack next to the headquarters.
Companies want to reap the benefits of coming to a city with a qualified workforce but the disbenefits get to be "enjoyed" by everyone else around there. Tragedy of the commons. They should be supporting the housing market if they want a good reception.
Full disclosure: I'm saying this as one of the people who enjoys such benefits while some people around me bite the bullet.
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On a positive note, Uganda sounds lovely: 'Uganda is a landlocked country in East Africa whose diverse landscape encompasses the snow-capped Rwenzori Mountains and immense Lake Victoria. Its abundant wildlife includes chimpanzees as well as rare birds. Remote Bwindi Impenetrable National Park is a renowned mountain gorilla sanctuary. Murchison Falls National Park in the northwest is known for its 43m-tall waterfall a…
The scenery is simultaneously beautiful and heartbreaking: Idi Amin's ghost is still very much around. I knew very little about Amin until visiting and every third conversation ended up involving him somehow. You can still go see the caves where he kept prisoners, some of whom wrote messages in blood on the walls that are still visible. It really is a lovely country that's been through horrible situation after horrib…
Of course, she went on to get a western education and move to the US, but she never forgot how lucky she was.
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There's no space in that area to build more housing. Pretty much all the space is being used to build offices for tech companies. There's also the question of how people that do not work for one of those high paying tech companies are supposed to pay for their housing.
Always in Berlin the knee jerk response to what is going on "We have to keep the rents down!" in response to housing crisis....never "We have to raise pays!" Pay situation for many jobs in Berlin and to some extent most of Germany is just abysmal, even in tech in many cases. If people here put half the energy in fighting for fairer remuneration for their work rather than whining about the raising rent and property pr…
>>The Google Campus is intended to be a magnet for annoying young entrepreneurs whose IT-sweatshops (“start-ups”) promise to deliver new ideas to Google’s company business. Those are some pretty emotional words, but show how much in a bubble we tech people might live. Curious if anyone knows more about the movement behind this, I doubt it's a majority opinion of the public?
It shows how much of a bubble the protesters live in, too. Calling startups "sweatshops" is kind of absurd. To the extent that work is harder or pay is worse in startups, it's for the ownership (or at least a sense of ownership) and excitement. Most people working in startups could, if they wanted, sidestep into safe, boring corporate IT work. The protesters would be a lot more interesting if they'd start reading Mar…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Always in Berlin the knee jerk response to what is going on "We have to keep the rents down!" in response to housing crisis....never "We have to raise pays!" Pay situation for many jobs in Berlin and to some extent most of Germany is just abysmal, even in tech in many cases. If people here put half the energy in fighting for fairer remuneration for their work rather than whining about the raising rent and property pr…
Part of the German economic success story has been keeping housing cheap, so they can keep pay down, so they can export. As soon as housing prices rise, pay rises, and the story falls apart.
The only reason they're able to do this is because of years of fairly extreme mercantilistic policies combined with struggling economies in other parts of the EU (Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and to an extent Ireland).
It works out for Germany in the short- and medium-run, but it's bad for the EU as a whole.
It's also bad for Germany in the long run, because even if extreme mercantilism were sustainable in a free market in the long run (spoiler: it's not), excess surplus means, by definition, that the government is underinvesting in public infrastructure. It takes a while for the effects of that to become evident, but Germany is starting to see hints of it already, and if these policies continue, it'll become much more pronounced.
> New tech companies are driving the rents up in the area higher and higher. The endpoint of this process can be seen in San Francisco, which once must have been a halfway livable city. This is more the fault of NIMBYs and supply&demand-denialists who work hard to prevent new housing from going up. Yes, tech companies brought the demand because of good jobs, but last I checked, we wanted companies to offer high payin…
> If the people need more housing, the solution is, shockingly enough, to build more housing. I know this is a popular opinion, but is there empirical evidence for this? Isn't this solution based on the assumption that there was a one-time surge of people, leading to a one-time rise in demand for housing?
Insulting the people you want to join you seems line a poor way to get support: "...work-shy benefit scroungers, strike-hungry air traffic controllers, long-living pensioners, unruly refugees, and all other local pests from the neighborhood..."