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.

The amount of investment you’d need to reduce your need to work takes the average person multiple decades, that’s literally what retirement is. And even if you only considered a part time retirement that still takes decades. In fact my current understanding is most people’s retirement funds will be insufficient when they go to retire.

No amount of investing will save the majority of people from needing to work for the majority of their life. The other alternatives to selling your labor to capital, like starting your own business, requires up front investment and even then isn’t a guarantee. The number of jobs that require minimal investment and can serve as a sole source of income do not exist in sufficient quantities.

So no, investing is not the solution, becoming an entrepreneur is not a solution, at the scale of our society there are few solutions and the primary one is taxing corporations more and taxing billionaires out of existence.

People deserve a right to live. I’m not saying people shouldn’t plan for retirement, I’m not saying don’t try and start a business. I’m saying to you stop framing it as dependency, that’s a fuckin crazy thought process. The overwhelming majority of people go to school and then get a job. Those people deserve to thrive without having a perfect stock portfolio which will materialize in 40 years, without having a second job, without turning their art into a commercial enterprise.

I’m responding to a comment on Lemmy, not the LinkedIn post. That should be obvious but here I am spelling it out just incase.

“Dependency on a single wage is the entire problem people are having” is a crazy statement to read from someone who is trying to give advice on the Internet. The entire problem is not that people have one job, it’s that all the profits are going to the fewest people in our society. No one should have to work two jobs to survive, that’s an insane status quo you’re attempting to defend.

Stop defending the status quo, stop defending corporations, stop trying to normalize surviving this system and start normalizing changing it. We need large societal reform and every additional person who has to work two jobs is another family ready to do so through violent means.

Yes, I confirmed. I live in Germany and hashtags like democrat or berniesanders are blocked and hashtags like Republican and donaldjtrump are not blocked.

I was only on Instagram for my friends to exchange reels and post life updates like once a year but this crosses another line. Migrating from all these monopolies is such a tax on my time but this is a small way to hurt these big giants.

I recommend everyone do the same when they have the time. I’d like to learn about RSS feeds and go back to a bunch of individual blogs for friends and family. Decentralized power is I guess the most important characteristic to look for these days. Fuck, this correction period is going to suck.

I appreciate these comments saying the tech hasn’t degraded and it’s been standstill, or that it was never great in the first place, all of which is true but I would like to interject my own Model 3 experience. When we first bought the Tesla in 2019 the self driving functionality on the highway felt safe and functional in nominal conditions. When we sold the Tesla 2 years ago (2022) the self driving felt noticably more finicky. It struggled to switch lanes, recognize when lanes started and ended, and had noticably more issues with maintaining proper speed and distance with other cars.

It probably wasn’t significantly more dangerous, but it felt like it was. What was a feature we used for the first year or two without much complaint turned into something we never used and our driving time when down in that third year not up so it wasn’t exposure time I don’t think.

It’s worth it. I’m almost two years in Germany. Wouldn’t move back for a million dollars (although at 3 I could be bought). Work on the local language, volunteer or other community involvement activities, treat it like the new home it is. We’re fortunate to be able to move to a new country, try to be a part of improving it and earning your spot there. I’m even more fortunate to be white, male, straight etc - assuming you’re at least some of those things, do your best to counter the anti-immigration fear mongering that comes out of the political right. It effects you now, but more importantly it’s ramping up and it’ll effect people less fortunate far worse.

Hope you love it and welcome to Europe.

I’ve read it, I read the discussion around it, idk man. One guy’s thoughts on a company and it’s founder isn’t enough to move me off of something without better proof, better alternatives, and worse crimes than maybe having a bad long term vision.

Hopefully every company outgrows it’s founder and becomes a system. We’ll have to see, right now I’m satisfied and that gets me off Google and signals to others I’m willing to pay.

I recommend Kagi, I’ve been using it for about six months now and results - especially small web results like blogs - are so much better. I also have a pretty good time image searching compared to when I was on Google.

Yes it’s paid, but that to me is the price of resisting enshittification. Find a company that isn’t a publicly traded for-profit world-burner and pay them for their service. Is the idea of paying for email and search an alien concept to me? Yes. But I’m either paying Google whatever €120 a year in eyeballs on ads and an increasingly worse experience, or I’m paying €80 a year and getting a markedly better experience.

Now it’s up to Kagi and Proton to not turn into shitty companies while other competitors catch up and we have a thriving ecosystem again.

He’s saying what you’re attributing to “a specific lack of willpower” now has scientific backing that disagrees. Your take is old school and misinformed if the current science is correct. I personally haven’t done research on the subject or read many studies but Adam Ragusea, a YouTube food science journalist covers this concept in one of his vids and several podcasts surrounding food science and (in my case) the drugs coming down the pipeline to regulate body weight touch on the research as well.

Just chiming in, I’m 28, American, immigrated to Germany. Can’t speak for Lemmy but I migrated from reddit when they shut the APIs down. Just want a shelf stable Aggregate site where I can stay up to date on my favorite hobbies and periodically connect with other humans. A healthy political debate is good every now and then but I’m also in the camp that the answers for our current problems are well researched and pretty fuckin obvious so debates have gotten… Idk stale.

Generally Lemmy feels like reddit but smaller, less polluted, but also less connected with every niche major update.

For these things I don’t think you have to prove anything, just a report to your govs food agency could prompt an inspection - or so I think.

Having no experience in the service industry I don’t have great advice so I’ll just say I’m sorry you’re going through this and I hope it gets better.

In gigs where politics matters more than output or social skills it can be hard to instigate change.

Is eating off of food a reportable offense to a health agency? That seems illegal or it should be.

I think the scenario I described applies to most Western countries.

Congrats on having rich renters then. If they’re wealthy enough to not take reduced rent then they are likely not your countries average renter.

Ya, seriously, their take is crazy. I’m a two income household, both software engineers, and to save enough money to afford the loan to buy the home would take us years. The cost of a mortgage right now is higher than my rent by a huge percentage and that still requires 20-30k of down payment.

Could we downsize to a 1 bedroom apartment, eat PBJs every night, and stick to cheap hobbies such that we could afford to start the loan in two years or something - yes. But why am I required to trade my youth for the ability to pay the bank the better part of a million dollars over the next 20 years of my life just so I can install a nice bathroom and AC and maintain the flat properly.

You are forming your opinion on a statistical anomaly worth of experiences. The reality is rent is priced fixed by very few algorithms - all of which by their nature drive the prices higher every year.

You are renting to people who choose to rent, the vast majority don’t get to choose. And even if they choose to rent, that’s because owning is too expensive in their eyes (money or time or paperwork or otherwise) - it does not mean they wouldn’t want to own if the cost was lower.

I can’t imagine anyone declining reduced costs unless phrased poorly or out of guilt.

My last Japan trip was 4 or 5 years back and spent time in multiple big cities with an express train pass. I think I budgeted a grand for the flight, a grand in food and hotel and spending a week. But with inflation being what it is I’d want to rerun the numbers based off of what flights and hotel/hostels I could find and assume 1k for just food and fun per week. I think there are active data sheets online that talk about the average cost of eating out in Japan right now.

You want to visit for “a few weeks” so I’d say plan for 2k + flight + hotel/hostel + train tickets/pass. I’d bet you spend less than 4k total for that time.

I like to visit 1 major city every 4-7 days, I normally do travel in, 5 days, travel out. So two weeks would let me see 2 major cities and a couple day trips or 3 shorter stays at 3 major places. Some cities are cheaper than others which is something to consider and how you eat out also dictates your budget more than anything. You could eat in Tokyo for dollars a day at gas stations or you could splurge on sashimi every night and find yourself burning money by the fist full.

I’m a big foodie so that’s where the 1k per week comes from.