Zahlmeister
It all depends on your contract. Some contracts may put limits on rent increases in. Yes, in Germany there effectively is rent control that prevents a doubling of the rent within a year, but generally rents don't double within a year.
If those rent controls were good enough to satisfy the affected people, why are there protests and demands for additional laws for even more rent control in places like Berlin? Why is living in Munich so hard to afford? At what point does rent control start to "work"?
Rents don't go up proportionally, simply because the demand isn't there. During the US housing bubble, rents didn't go up either, while property prices went through the roof.
> Do you know nobody living cheaply with an old contract that they would never get today, and that their landlord can't increase to market rate? Cause I know loads such people and this would not happen in a place without rent controls.
That's because most contracts specify that increasing the rent follows the standard procedure: Over three years, rent can rise by up to 20% (15% in Berlin), if the comparable rents in the area have risen as well (which is influenced by market rate). Ultimately, this limits the pace at which rents rise, but not the extent. In Berlin, only very few areas could sustain such growth, whereas in places like Munich where people earn way more, rents have risen much higher.
This is also not the rent control specific to Berlin (which is what you originally referred to), these are federal regulations.
> Either way 15% in 3 years is still rent control.
...which affects very few people.
There are some places that suddenly became "hip", where rent increases drove out lots of low-income people, which caused political backlash. These people really just had to move to less popular places.
I'm not in an economics class, I'm following local developments.
> If they had zero opportunity in x country, they wouldnt go to x country.
That's a total fallacy. The majority people arriving here initially knew next to nothing about Germany. They were promised by their traffickers all kinds of nonsense, like that they would get a free house and a car. It took a while for the message to spread that it ain't all cotton candy over here. Some still had false beliefs, because people like to believe comfortable lies. Either way, if they come here they get refugee benefits, which is better here than in most other EU countries. It's not an opportunity in my sense, it's a handout.
> Any quota or restriction is meant to be protectionist. Trump didnt put the quotas.
I'm not talking about quotas. I'm talking about choosing who you let in. I'm not arguing for the exact same system that the US has, so stop pointing out its flaws. If we set the requirement that everyone would need to have at least basic literacy and English skills, a huge amount of the people coming in right now wouldn't be allowed. That would still be way more people than we actually need.
> It's important to call it oppression because it what it is: it's negative, it's the application of force to harm someone. If any person is in favor of such measures, I will call them on that, that they are advocating for harming other people, maybe to their own benefit.
Again, who cares? You're not convincing anybody that needs convincing.
You keep arguing in terms of idealizations (or outliers, like San Francisco). Your argument may make sense there, it won't win you anything in the real world. In the real world, you have to deal with real people. Even if the economic argument makes sense, it's a long-term development. Do you believe people want cheaper products later or keep their job now? If they lose their jobs now, they can't just retrain in a heartbeat to become something else, especially not here in Germany. They'll be unemployed, which is culturally a source of shame.
As for the backlash: We've had hundreds of arson attacks against refugee housing and we've had a right-wing populist party come out of nowhere and gain 10% in the elections. Again, well over 95% of refugees have no jobs and little job prospects, even after being here for over a year. How many years will it take, according to your calculations?
The German population is also assuming that these refugees will leave eventually, not stay. Of course, the same was assumed about the Turkish workers coming in in the sixties (they were referred to as "guest workers"). Most of them stayed, now Germany is 5% Turkish-Germans, which are perceived as neither "truly German" not "truly Turkish" by their respective peoples. Their level of success in this society is well below average, which tells you that the level of acceptance isn't as high as people would openly admit to.
If it wasn't for all the WW2 guilt, people would be very open about not wanting Germany to become a ethnic melting pot, like the US. Compare this with countries like Poland or Hungary, where the idea of defending ethnic homogeneity is part and parcel of mainstream politics. As WW2 becomes more of a distant past, the same ideas may take hold here as well.
As for the homeless, I'll just mention that 16 homeless people were murdered in Germany in 2016 alone, which is (per capita) more than in the US (tendency: rising). One of them has been set on fire, just for "fun". He burned to death.
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/gesellschaft/kriminalitaet/gewalt...
Rents in Berlin are a joke compared to London. You can actually get cheap and plentyful housing just outside the city, but then you'll need a car as well.
https://www.welt.de/finanzen/immobilien/article150877146/Die...
There's more than enough housing for higher-income people, so rent control there is moot.
Not as cost-effective as simply picking the cherries from other countries. Plus, the risk is lower. That's my point. If you appeal to economics (or utility, whatever), follow through.
> Then don't..who is asking for that?
If we don't educate them or don't give them the means to do so, they have zero opportunity here, as opposed to slightly above zero.
> U.S. is a good example of shooting itself in the foot. Unles some special circumstances are allowed, no foreign software engineer can get hired in the US until Oct. 2018...
Which is exactly not my point. That is Trump's protectionism at work, not the idea that you pick the cherries from other countries (instead of letting them just flow in).
> "We should use force to not allow other people to move so I can have higher wages" -> how is this not oppression to you?
We're talking about people at the very bottom of pay, how much lower are their wages supposed to drop? I suppose that you believe in the magic of an idealized market, but in the real world there's real people there defending their interests. The same kind of people that will gladly elect populists, by the way. If you want to call that oppression, fine. What difference does it make?
> That you find a beggar unsightly is a problem to you, not the beggars problem,and you are welcome to try to fix it by donating.
The beggars problem is going to become the mob of people that will ask for them to be locked up and deported, in case they become too much of a nuisance.
Again, you're arguing too much like an idealist, which isn't really useful.
You'd end up paying 25$ for a coffee just so that the barista can afford their overpriced housing.
If you're just raising the cost of living, but not the standard, you're not gaining anything for anyone.
> The case for germany to still provide financial support is that is a huge long term benefit that is tax beneficial, especially for a country with demographic issues. My understanding is that there are reports that justify the tax investment.
If you want to make an utilitarian argument, then so can I: We could just let people apply through a visa process, and decide who to take in. Why should we spend the extra effort to educate all these people when we could just take those already educated in other countries? You know, just like the US does it. Also, there are lots of lower-income EU countries whose citizens have the right to be here. They're performing a lot of the work that they could lose to even cheaper immigrants from even poorer countries, if the laws allowed it. The pressure for unskilled labor is higher than ever.
> With free passage, you would not even know how many peope pass, and it would have a marginal cost to the state (and a much higher benefit!)
People aren't gonna pass forever, they're gonna settle. Right now, they're settling here. If we didn't pay them, they'd be forced to beg on the streets once they run out of travel money.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/may/...
Quote: "In other words, the typical German was more likely to engage in crime than the average migrant."
Source: https://www.thelocal.de/20151113/police-refugees-commit-less...
Headline: "Police: refugees commit less crime than Germans"
Quote: "Interior Minsiter Thomas de Maizière responded to the news by saying: "The current trend shows that refugees are just as unlikely to commit crimes as comparable groups among the current population. The majority of them don't commit crimes, they are seeking protection and and peace in Germany."
Source: https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article148812603/Str...
Actual Quote: "Ganz allgemein sprach Innenminister de Maizière von derzeit verfügbaren „Tendenzaussagen, dass Flüchtlinge im Durchschnitt genauso wenig oder oft straffällig werden wie Vergleichsgruppen der hiesigen Bevölkerung“."
Translation: "We have have information that suggests that refugees commit crime about as often, or as rarely, as comparable groups in the local population".
First of all, the interior minister obviously has a big incentive to downplay whatever problems are caused by the decisions of his administration. Secondly, he's talking about the refugees, not migrants in general. Also, what are "comparable groups"? It's not defined. If it's "comparable", then it's not going to be "typical" nor "average". The information he references is kept "confidential", by the way. In any case, absolutely nowhere does it say that refugees or migrants are less likely to commit crime, even though that's what is being reported by both English sources.
The reality is that crime rate among migrants is higher, for whatever reason. Migrants were responsible for 10-20% (differing by state) of violent crime in 2016, well above their share of the population: http://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/kriminalitaet-in-deutschl...
This article does mention however that Syrians/Iraqis are less likely to commit those crimes than migrants from other countries.
Obamacare is basically the worst of both worlds.
We effectively have "free" movement of people from Africa to Europe. Once they're ashore, we can't readily send them back. We also used to have movement from Iraq and Syria through Turkey, but that was curbed.
We took in about a million refugees and we did not manage to integrate well over 90%+ into any form of employment. We don't have jobs for these people. It has cost us about 20 billion in 2016, about 3% of taxes earned total, to support these people. We've managed to "oppress" the flow of refugees with unpopular measures. If we didn't, how many more people are we supposed to take in?
Sorry, but that's complete nonsense. The crime rate among immigrants (and their descendants) is much higher than among "ethnic" Germans. That means the typical German is less likely to engage in crime.
In absolute numbers of course, there are much more Germans than immigrants, so Germans commit more crimes total, as you would expect.
This topic is sensitive, so people just fling around with percentages and relative numbers until it appears to fit whatever narrative they would like to be true. It's not really helping convince anybody, everybody just keeps believing what they already believe.
Of course, the idea that Germany is now "riddled with crime" is just another Trumpism. Considering that we have a million refugees, the increase in crime is rather low and all the alarmism isn't justified.
If you look at crimes without a profit motive, things tend to even out or turn around. You'll rarely see an immigrant responsible for arson or property damage, for example. In absolute terms, most crimes (that are persecuted) are of course profit-driven and the most crimes occur in poor areas.
I'm not ruling out that there exist other pointless mobile operating systems with 0.0% market share that use Wayland or even XWayland in some capacity.
My point however is that the "market" argument is nonsense when the market is practically non-existent.
Desktop Linux with Wayland has maybe 0.1% market share rising to maybe 1% over the next years in the best case. In the worst case, Wayland will just be another Linux Desktop fail. Other devices (Phone/Tablets) do not use Wayland.
The amount of resources any given company can allocate to Linux platform bullshit is limited. The "serious" NVIDIA Linux customers will probably stick with X anyway, in the foreseeable future.
As for bandwidth cost: I don't believe Sia can be successful and stay that cheap. Why would providers of bandwidth for Sia be able to offer it magnitudes cheaper than the biggest tech companies in the world? Answer: It's offered by a bunch of individuals with no caps on their data plans. If Sia takes off and lots of people start using terabytes of bandwidth, the ISPs will put an end to it.
Amazon S3 also offers "glacier" for longterm storage with few accesses, which is $4 per TB.
I'm not saying it's not viable at all, but the distributed aspect alone requires a certain amount of popularity to sustain it.
They do value simplicity of use above all and they do trust large companies (for better or worse).
What makes this system better than the other systems that fulfill essentially the same purpose? What does "getting it right" mean? Are they getting it right and how so?
That would be a huge overhead to be replicated across participants, driving out smaller players, lowering the "distributed" aspect of the system, creating larger points of failure and increasing the price.
As for price, AWS has some of the cheapest operating costs due to scale, something which smaller players will have trouble competing with. Moving data within AWS is fast and sometimes free.
Smaller players also pay the highest cost for bandwidth. If some plans don't have bandwidth caps yet (many already do), they will get caps as soon as serving bandwidth as an individual becomes profitable.
Pretty much all distributed systems have the following in common: You pay for resilience with overhead. If it wasn't that way, everything would become as distributed as possible over time.
The article is referring to "Duale Ausbildung", which works as I described and has nothing to do with university education.
"Duales Studium" in the modern sense is a novelty, clocking in at less than 4% in 2014 (but growing). http://www.zeit.de/2014/20/duales-studium
The article does talk about the majority, that's the whole point. "Duale Ausbildung" and regular "Hochschule/Fachhochschule" are the core of the German system. Whatever else there is isn't really relevant to the debate.
Yes, they learn a lot of stuff they won't need for the actual job they will perform. If they switch jobs, they probably won't need it either, unless it's a very related job. For instance, if they become a painter, they learn all kinds of painting techniques that they will never apply. That's all fine and dandy, except if they just want to work painting houses, why they have to spend three years as an apprentice?
> But at the Berufsschule you still learn all the other stuff, for an example how to wire electrical Garage doors. If you later decide to switch Jobs, you'll be prepared.
If you already knew the one thing, chances are you could've quickly learned the other thing as well. Otherwise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aren%27t_gonna_need_it
"By contrast, countries like Germany pursue a “dual educational” model that blends classroom education with on-the-job training through apprenticeships, equipping young people not bound for university with practical labor-market skills. From the beginning of the journey from school to work, dual-system participants establish close relationships with employers. Companies sign contracts with young people (typically around age 15 or 16) and provide them an hourly wage just below that of an entry-level worker. On-the-job training typically comprises two-thirds of the curriculum in the dual system."
This is clearly referring to "Duale Ausbildung", not "Duales Studium". The vast majority of people that study at university ("Studium") never do "Duales Studium", that's more of a novelty.
If you don't do that, you usually can't even get those jobs. It's a stupid system. It's basically what became of the medieval guilds, in modern times.
People like to connect our low youth unemployment rate with this system, but I believe in reality most of these people are attending some form of education or job training program, so they don't "count" as unemployed. When they're done with all that, they're so old they don't count as "youth" anymore. That trick only works when a country can afford it, though.
"Duale Ausbildung" has nothing to do with universities, if you go that route you spend up to four years working at (on average) well below 1000€ while attending a government school that teaches at a rather low level. The government has to subsidize the income of those people and the employer, in some cases.
https://www.azubiyo.de/gehalt/
Worse, if you don't buy into the "dual education" thing, you can't get most of these jobs. We're not talking about great jobs either, it's most jobs that don't require university education. A lot of that is stuff you could be trained for on-the-job in six months or less.
Don't trust German unemployment statistics, it's basically the government paying at every end to have people employed at all costs and often at very low pay.
Also, don't buy into the German educational model, it's one of the most discriminatory systems in the world, even though it is "free" on paper, it's all about weeding out people at a young age so they're not allowed to attend the "free" university. We have parents suing the teachers of ten-year-olds for the grades they give, because of the impact it can have on their careers.
http://www.focus.de/familie/rechte/das-kind-aufs-gymnasium-k...
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/hard-look-disc...