My general advice to young people is to avoid contributing to society, because the terms are just not fair towards you. You pay for pensions you’ll never receive yourself and you’re left to inherit a world that is rapidly becoming uninhabitable. The elderly have collectively chosen to be in denial about this problem and how they rigged the game in favor of themselves at the cost of you, so my advice has to be not to participate in the game they expect you to play. The reason young men without wealthy parents waste their time on cryptocurrency is because they wish to escape having to participate in a system that is rigged against them. They see no other option.
You’ll find the rigging of the game goes on everywhere, if you bother to look for it. But today I just feel like illustrating an example. Take a look at this house in Schiedam:
The house is on the market for 130k, even though it’s valued at 171k by the government. Unless it’s occupied by someone who is about to die however, you have to be a complete idiot to buy it. The reason for that is simple: There’s a renter.
You might imagine that’s fine, as it means you receive rent as a return on your investment. But here’s the thing: The total rent income amounts to €3225,60 a year. That’s €268,80 a month. This means your return on investment would be 2.5% a year, if you had zero costs for your renter. Real estate prices will go down for years to come, so you can expect no returns from there either. It is by all means a terrible investment for anyone dumb enough to buy the place.
Now have a look with me, at the cheapest place you could currently sign up to rent in the town:
The renthog is paying about 25% of what you would expect to pay for rent in a house like this.
How does that happen?
Well allow me to show you the Dutch laws on rent. This year, rent can be increased at a maximum of 2.3% for existing renters, even with inflation at 14%. If you’ve been renting the same house for thirty years or so, this is the scam you’ve pulled off for the past thirty years: Your rent increase is limited, even though prices for new renters keep going up.
There’s the problem. When the elderly bought a house thirty or forty years ago they made a terrific investment, as real estate values exploded. If the elderly rent a house, then they manage to avoid paying any significant amount of rent in this country. For young people, this means you’re left with one of two options:
-Go to work everyday, to hand over about 50% of your after-tax income to an elderly landlord.
-Sign up for a massive mortgage, to hand over a massive amount of money to the elderly people who sold the house to you.
There’s the thing. It’s almost cliche to complain about how much real estate prices have gone up since the babyboomers bought their houses. But what everyone tends to ignore, is how the same scheme worked out for renting babyboomers. They’re paying 250 euro a month in rent, for a house you would pay 1000 euro for today.
You have to be a complete lazy idiot as an elderly person in the Netherlands to live in poverty, because at every step along the way the government insulated you from having to participate in the real economy. Affordable real estate was fixed for you, jobs you can do without a college degree were arranged for you, pensions were arranged for you, the government now even insists on paying your heating bills for you. If you didn’t want to work the government would even help arrange that for you too, a lot of working class Dutch elderly just retired in their fifties back in the 90’s.
If you were to buy this house as an investment object, your only realistic way to see a return on investment would be to bully the current occupant into leaving the house.
Many Dutch elderly live in big houses and against all expectations they refuse to leave those houses for smaller assisted living facilities. But the reason should be obvious: When you’re paying 250 euro a month for a house that would cost young people at least 1000 euro a month, you would have to be a complete idiot to sign up for something smaller that would be more expensive.
The solution should be obvious: Allow a faster increase in rent for these elderly who had the whole system rigged in their favor for them. But nobody would vote for that and most young people are too stupid to realize this is in their own interest because the elderly rigged the game in their own favor for decades. People would hear “they want to hike rents for the poorest people in the middle of an economic crisis!” and approval ratings would plunge, because most people are just complete idiots.
We live in the worst of both worlds, where we have DDR style socialism for the elderly and Hong Kong style hypercapitalism for the young and the 1%. Rather than addressing the problem we have, which is that the elderly simply own and occupy too much space, the Dutch public and our government like to think the solution is to build more houses.
This sounds nice in theory, but it doesn’t work because we simply don’t have the space for it. A house is an investment that takes decades to pay off. Our country is overpopulated, so most proper places to build houses are already occupied. What happens now is that we construct houses in places where sea level rise will eventually make those houses worthless, as they will become subject to recurring floods. These are the houses that young people get to purchase today.
And yet, the whole housing shortage would be easy to solve, if you would simply acknowledge the simple fact that old people own and occupy too much physical space. About 400,000 people in this country now own a second house. How many new houses does the country need? About 400,000! Sure, not all these houses will be in the correct location, but the problem should be obvious. The housing shortage is little more than an artifact of mass immigration and the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of the elderly.
If you want an industrialized nation’s population to go extinct, it’s pretty easy to accomplish: Distribute scarce resources away from reproductive-age humans, towards post-reproductive age humans. Here you can see the average value of houses by homeowner age category in the Netherlands:
You can see that up to 25 years, people live in houses worth 250k on average, then up to 35 years in houses worth 300k, then by the time we reach people beyond the age of menopause, we’re looking at 400k on average. Now tell me, what sort of house would you feel eager to reproduce in?
A two-room 250k apartment without a garden, or a 400k house with a garden and a room where a child could sleep? Young people literally don’t even have the physical space anymore for a child, because boomers occupy such houses and fill the empty rooms they don’t use with junk. It’s a solipsistic generation that has zero intent on leaving anything behind for future generations to enjoy, not even a habitable planet.
All true. It’s really gross. The boomers were the “me” generation and they never stopped being so. And as you say, the housing example, which is disgusting and egregious, is just one example. Another example in the U.S. is college, which is basically a huge wealth transfer from young students to baby boomer professors, administrators, and bankers. The “product” hasn’t changed in hundreds of years, but the inflation has been GALLOPING upward for decades. And the young people are FORCED into the scheme by baby-boomer-passed laws and regulations and policies that mandate 4-year accredited college degrees to hold most decent-paying jobs.
Society has become immoral, irreligious, selfish, and short-term. Once the “leaders” switched from light skimming to wholesale looting, the entire society decided it wanted in on the game. A few hundred years ago, the older generations WANTED the best for the younger generations. Now parents basically loot their own kids.
You start with “… and you’re left to inherit a world that is rapidly becoming uninhabitable …” and end up with finance babble.Sorry, but whoever starts with finance babble has lost my creditibility.Where’s your reasoning? As long as we have ten times more cold deaths than heath death there is no clima catastrophe!You had one simple rule to follow: Don’t be an annoying retard who expects me to do your homework for you.
If I have to explain to every single low status white male who shows up here why the talking point he memorized is wrong I would be left with no time to do anything else.
-RR
It is very different in the U.S. for renting baby boomers. Rents here are astronomical now; only a very few places have rent increase restrictions. There are loads and loads of homeless baby boomers in the U.S.; in December I will be volunteering at a homeless shelter and many of the people there will be baby boomers. They will be lacking teeth and will be diabetic and there will be formerly middle class ladies who have permanent damage to their hands from frostbite; I have seen that.
The baby boomers I know are a stupid yet kindly lot. I think we will miss them when they are gone. My generation, GenX, is horrible; we were raised in the 70s and most of civilization had blown away at that point.
Also, old people in the U.S. would be crazy to leave their houses to move into assisted living places, since during the early days of the pandemic they were death traps for old people. The governors of NY and NJ and PA stuffed covid positive people into those facilities directly from the hospitals – the facilities were required by law to accept them – and this spread the virus and killed monstrous numbers of old people who were innocently enjoying themselves playing bingo and eating pudding in an assisted living place. The only person I know who died of covid died that way. Once you give up your house and move into some group place you are the potential victim of all sorts of evilness; you are suddenly a “thing” that the government can regulate and kill off. I know several people who would happily sell their house and move into one of those places, except for what happened with covid; they saw what happens to you when you are institutionalized.
I know a Dutch girl who moved to the U.S. for grad school and soon found a totally ordinary low status American guy and they immediately married and reproduced twice. I think it was because of all the open space we have here; she was inspired. They have since moved back to the Netherlands, but she spends a lot of time in the U.S. for work. Maybe the U.S. will save the Netherland’s reproductive life.
“The baby boomers I know are a stupid yet kindly lot.”
So? The demographics are very real: the Boomers are termites, eating the future. Just because you know a few that may be a little less malignant doesn’t change the basic facts.
“My generation, GenX, is horrible; we were raised in the 70s and most of civilization had blown away at that point.”
Maybe you’re horrible, but the rest of Gen X is simply responding to the “incentives” provide by the shitbag Boomers.
“Maybe the U.S. will save the Netherland’s reproductive life.”
You are an absolute fount of unwisdom. The US has a birth rate well below replacement (among citizens at least), how are they gonna “save” any of the other dwindling European nations?
The bible has the ratio of 6 days labor 1 day Sabbath. Land fallow every 7th year and so forth.
Perhaps the best ratio of welfare to capitalism is 1:7
Can’t have too much of a safety net but enough to recover according to that ratio.
Actually depopulation in China is helped by driving up hypergamy among women:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dlxAkSjFfU
Food for thought among technocrats worried about overpopulation.
“if you want an industrialised nation..to go extinct”..
Not “an”, all euro heritage nations, and various others too, and yes “they” do want it.
It’s called the Kalergi plan, and you just noticed and explained, quite well I might add, one of its many cogs.
We (all vaguely native people of the European cultured nations of the world) are not who the governments work for, anymore, if they ever did.
Interesting insight into the Dutch real estate market. Yes, you would have to be mental (or have some money burning a seriously big hole in your pocket) to buy a property with that kind of rental yield. As regards the way a certain older generation has pulled the ladders up after themselves, it is quite something. I would love to see the younger generations start to short the system. Why should Dutch young people want to stay in a country where they have to compete with all and sundry and where the system is so clearly rigged against them? But where to go? And how not to become the problem that one is trying to leave?
‘THE ETERNAL BOOMERS’ title makes me think of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n92-X6SK9e8 🙂
I am shocked at your idea to demand that people give up their homes…! A persons’ home is not a rabbit cage on a farm that can be allocated more profitably to a breeding pair, nor are people widgets that should be optimised and placed more conveniently. And the endgame for this path of thought is that we all end up living in minimal dorms in bunk beds, without roots or cultural identity(btw, the math of downsizing also does not work all that well either after all the costs are totted up. It usually isn’t worth it, and that is before we consider the social upheaval inflicted on the elder, which can easily end up killing them.)
Are boomers really so selfish?
A lot of them not only paid for university education for their kids and went to work all their life and instead of being a mom @ home (the woman were really working 2 jobs!) whilst providing a the highest standard of living to everyone else that the planet has ever seen — but they also are now looking after their parents who are currently at the age where Alzheimers hits and adult diapers are required, and either they DIY the care or hand over what little inheritance they could get to a nursing home.
Most likely, Boomers will never collect the pensions that they have paid in, because there isn’t anything left very soon, other than what can be printed and even then it will not be enough. There never was a ‘Pension pot’ where the money got stashed, it was all paid out as soon as it was received by the state.
Pension schemes by definition are Ponzi schemes and a very bad solution to the fact that humans get too old to earn their way for quite a long time of their natural life. But that was obvious to anyone who can calculate 2^n…, alas, people tend to insist on a reality they like, rather on the one that is 🙁
Btw, the vast majority of pensioners is very poor, don’t let the few heavily promoted ‘winners’ convince you that the game is fair or that the older generation has ‘stolen’ anything from you.
Why do you think people in the 60’s and 70’s turned to being ‘drop out’ hippies and the 80’s and 90’s kids became ‘no future’ punkers? Lots of them figured out the con because they could see what happened to their elders as the time came, and they realised that the fake dreams of careers and shiny lifestyles that were being sold are just manky carrots being dangled to keep the donkey moving.
Exit question: what do you think will the kids of the current generation think of their elders once they are adults?
No worries, the Rutte Regime will simply put hundreds of small farms out of business, and use some, but not all, of that land to build those “sustainable” monstrosity apartment blocks for the younger immunocompromised generations to rent at still high prices while eating insects and waiting for the ever-nearer date withlab-engineered death.