So I’ve tried Mastodon, Pixelfed and didn’t like them. Mastodon is nice if you wanna ”tweet”, but that’s not for me. Pixelfed was dead.
I quit Meta because of tech bro fascism, and hated Twitter even before it was X because, let’s face it - nobody has ever changed their opinion on anything because of a Twitter conversation (I know I’m exaggerating, to get my point across). I was in Reddit for a few weeks, and the conversations there seem mostly friendly and constructive, but I decided I don’t want to have anything to do with social media corporations. Besides, I noticed I could scroll endlessly. And that’s not good for me.
Lemmy seems nice. There are still some topics I’m interested in that don’t have active communities, and I’m still learning on how to have my feed from multiple instances. But still, this is the way to go for me.
Against algorithms, against fascism, for free internet. Thanks for coming to my boring Ted talk and have a nice day.
I have started to like Lemmy too. I made an account here because I was IP banned in reddit for expressing my opinion on gender neutral laws in my country
That’s the worst part of reddit. You can’t say something which go against their ideologies. Although I still want my reddit account back because fediverse isn’t popular in my country and there aren’t much relevant subs for me in here
I quit Meta because of tech bro fascism, and hated Twitter even before it was X because, let’s face it - nobody has ever changed their opinion on anything because of a Twitter conversation (I know I’m exaggerating, to get my point across). I was in Reddit for a few weeks […]
I’m assuming you previously used Facebook mostly, right? If so, there’s also a Facebook alternative called Friendica, with pretty much the same core functionality as Facebook (sans Marketplace). Besides that, you can also format your posts and comments, add titles to them, get a dislike button and customize your experience more than you could do there. Plus you can also follow Lemmy communities straight from there, as well as Mastodon accounts, Flipboard publications etc.
Check out friendica.world to try it out.
I wonder why isn’t Friendica more popular by now.
Same. I have no interest in corporate social media.
Meh … I wish there was a middle ground. Non-corporate, yet effective. Unfortunately, the Fediverse is only the first.
Discovery algorithms can be great, if applied with care. And I really think ActivityPub is not very effective at showing interesting stuff, while from a user perspective it’s super intransparent. Personally I’d prefer a centralized user experience to the Fediverse fragmentation any day … I guess I’m really only here because I’m fed up with corporate bullshit.
I’m hoping Lemmy grows more so that the niche communities (that were still relatively active on reddit, even for their neichness) can start to have regular threads going.
What I’d also like to see is posts that I can spend 5-10 minutes in because they have more comments than the ~5 we have now.
Yeah, every time I see people saying that they like the amount of users now just makes me think “hmmm must be nice that all of your particular niches and tastes are accounted for”. It’s pretty silly to be so anti growth for this place anyway. Even on Reddit, you literally have a choice to take part in the bigger ‘default’ subs or find a smaller one if that suits you. And I like choice.
This place still has a long way to go IMO. I’m starting to resort to lurking chat / ask style communities more just for something to do around here and even there, it’s not quite as engaging or active as it should be. As a humble user, sometimes I don’t have something particular in mind that I want to see. Sometimes I just want to bed rot and scroll and read people’s stories and discussions, maybe give my two cents if I feel so inclined. And there isn’t really that here yet because once you’ve checked AskLemmy or whatever, you’ve already seen 90% of the content for the next week.
The biggest issue of community growth is the lack priority in search engines. If you ask a question on lemmy, stackoverflow, and reddit at the same time, you will get the two latter choices first even if the lemmy post has a better answer.
Either lemmy is not prioritized because of the age of the domain, or less visitors, but I think it’s purposely done. There are usually no ads on lemmy. Google prioritizes sites that use their products.
I think, as well as the issues you mention, another issue might possibly be duplication. Historically, search engines penalise duplicated content, even across different domains and federation kind of bakes that in.
That’s a great point.
Search engines should fix this for federated websites if they still want the best search results.
For a solution now, I wonder if a 307 (Temporary Redirect) status code, redirecting to the original instance post, could work for search crawlers.
Or maybe using the canonical URL meta tag? I don’t know if it works across different domains.
I really wish more people had taken on the “Community Ambassador” work that I’ve done for https://fediverser.network/. It could be really helpful in creating a focal point for everyone that wanted to help the migration of people interested in a specific niche.
Where can I read more about this? I’m not getting far with the link 🫤
- Sign up to Fediverser
- Search for communities for your interests.
- The community should be associated with a subreddit. If it’s not, you can make a suggestion for the change.
- Apply to become a Community Ambassador. I’ll approve it. Once you are approved, you will be able to do the following:
- See the posts from the subreddit that is associated to the community.
- Send DMs to people on Reddit, inviting them to join Lemmy and your community
- Add other sources of contents (RSS feeds)
There were more things that I had planned, such as the ability to do one-click repost of interesting links, but I didn’t get to it because that would mean effectively that I would have to turn the fediverser site into a an alternative Lemmy frontend.
I’ve already settled on making lemmy my new home a long while ago. I like it here and there is more than enough engagement.
What i can’t really find an alternative for is discord… it’s going through the “enshittification fascism techbro” phase.
I tried matrix but honestly it sucks, Its so incredibly buggy it’s barely even usable. I’m still willing to give it a try since it seems very promising but the instability is a big downside.
I may sound old but I don’t get what’s peculiar about discord. From the little I know is like a forum? with calls&messaging functionality.
Well… they went the enshittification route and they keep on censoring more and more. One of their latest stunts is that they’re going to implent an age check by making a video of you.
Yeah sorry but that is very privacy invasive. I’m all for trying to catch predators and shit but I’m not giving away my privacy for it.
As an added bonus they’re more and more ads so they can link all that juicy data you send them to a profile.
I manage a community on discord and see it going down the aggressive monetization route day by day. Also looked at Matrix, but the basic tools to support my community just aren’t there. I’m hoping the next two or so years produces an alternative rich chat/voice/video platform.
The problem with Matrix to me is that it is simply too unstable. I can open it up on any device and half the messages won’t load or are corrupted. Media won’t show at all. In contrast Lemmy has been super reliable and “just works”, so going from reddit to lemmy was no problem at all. And the communities are great too.
I just want working voice chat and group chats.
The entire streaming i don’t really care about. There are other apps for that.
But yeah as it is I’m probably better off using discord until the enshittification is so bad no one wants to use it anymore.
I keep a lot of personal notes in discord like it’s a journal. Is that now a bad idea? I’ve loved discord for years but what’s happening on Reddit currently scared me off that platform already, just like Xitter
Matrix and Xmpp are good for that sort of thing. Maybe there’s a way to export your notes.
What exactly do you need from a Discord replacement?
There’s a LOT of options, with varying features so if you don’t need certain things it gets a lot easier to suggest what might work.
Yes Lemmy communities are nice but you will notice quickly that there are part you may want to avoid. So each communities, even if they may have the same name offer a different experience. It’s all up to the mod team 😅
Btw, there are other software part of the forumverse as Mbin, NodeBB and PieFed that offer a slightly different experience and UI too
Welcome and enjoy :)
How did you find out about Lemmy out of interest?
From Reddit.
lol, as one does
If you want for something here, it’s a new place, make it. We’re all over here building a new way to do this thing, and everyone’s input is important. What do you want to see, that you haven’t found on Fedi?
What do you want to see, that you haven’t found on Fedi?
For me it’s mostly the regional subs I had in reddit, those aren’t here. And I also wanted Lemmy to some communities like which are relevant to my studies and work
smae! there wasn’t a community for my town, so I made one. Also I’m really into photobiomodulation, made a community, but it was on kbin which frittered away, so now I have to remake it. We’re building a whole new thing, new culture, new communities. No better time for it, with all the chaos, let’s make a shiny new garden here, tend it, watch it grow.
Yeah. But I can’t create communities now because my account is new so I gotta wait
Y’all are making communities for town tho? Man, i can’t even find an active community of my country 😂
Let’s see what can be done. Ape together strong!
Actually since I quit Insta etc. I’ve been pretty happy about leaving social media. Tried Bluesky also, but like Mastodon, the Twitter-kind of social media is not for me. Reddit felt helpful and people seemed nice. Right now I don’t feel like I need anything new. I hope Lemmy will be enough for me. I’m also trying to scroll my phone less.
I hear you on the scroll less. Time limits help me to not be obsessively scrolling. Emphasizing quality over quantity also helps. Cheers!
Cheers!
Given all you have tried the only thing more I could say is trust cafe by the wikipedia guy. Unfortunately its not federated but it does have this neat thing where you can rate everything. Its basically like nuanced subscribe and block. You rate things between zero and 100 and I think zero would effictively be the same as blocking (which you can still do) and 100 would be the same as subscribing (which you can still do). Everything by default starts at a rating of 50. So its like you can be. mmmm. I like this guys post I will move him to 60. Or this guy seems a bit annoying I will drop him to 40 for now. Then over time the blocks and subscribes come out naturally.
I’m an FC St. Pauli fan too…“Gegen Nazis,” but also against the Communists too.
I’m an FC St. Pauli fan too…“Gegen Nazis,” but also against the Communists too.
Whenever someone sees people oppose nazis and are like “I also oppose commies!” I assume they only actually oppose communists.
Your assumption is wrong in relation to my political views. Fuck them both.
But only when someone says “fuck nazis”
I assume they are Nazis.
yeah what’s even the difference between exterminating minorities and giving laborers ownership of the means of production anyway
Karl Marx, in theory is 100% correct, but humans will find a way to fuck it all up. The Communists were just as nasty, corrupt and power hungry as the Nazis.
Agreed. A lot of people who think Communism is the answer to Capitalism fail to recognize that both are just different sides of the same centralization coin. Sure the utopian vision of Communism is decentralized governance, but the minute there is one party with all the power, even with the intention of going full decentralization one day, never do. Why? Same reason as Capitalism…centralized power is a drug that humans cannot let go of. Communism is just what every capitalist wishes they had…complete control.
Karl Marx, in theory is 100% correct
No, he’s really not. He’s completely wrong. Life is about more than eating, sleeping and working. Communism is a good approach if survival of mankind is on the line, but not if we actually want to live our lives.
Thank god capitalism has that covered and everyone isn’t working and only getting bare survival out of it. If they’re getting that much.
Good that we can agree on that. :)
Internet Libre o Barbarie!
For some reason I feel like all of these things need to be three word phrases so this two word one, I must change it to “Alles Gegen Nazis”
Lemmy is just left wing politics in an echo chamber
It’s too bad you’re being forced to be here.
I actually am hahahhaa.
Imagine being too far to the right for reddit and then thinking that you will be met with enthusiastic agreement on lemmy.
Nah not really, I just said kill Elon musk for impacting German politics. Not because of anything he said, but because he’s not an elected European.
Impacting EU legislation, tsk tsk tsk.
Me being extreme right to extreme left depends on the topic.
Most people are politically, economically and financially illiterate.
They just have their brand (insert your preferred ideology) and just question themselves: is this what my brand wants? Then they do ☺️ or 😡
I vote for social democrats (freedom of expression is important to them). But clearly not everything I say is viewed as leftist.
There’s a lot I say that would get me to vote for other parties. I just vote what I find most important in society. But I still will heavily criticise it.
You’re not a Belgian if you don’t criticise the government (every single political ideology). It’s our national sport. We complain. A lot. Like the Italians, but without the passionate gestures and intonation.
Nah not really, I just said kill Elon musk for impacting German politics. Not because of anything he said, but because he’s not an elected European.
I’m not sorry that elon isn’t far enough to the right for you either.
As I said, most people are politically, economically and financially illiterate. That’s why I can have a job providing such services. Which is a good thing. Even though it seems really easy to me. I like money, so keep it coming.
So we’re just making random statements now instead of responding to what was actually said?
Bro I am using Lemmy for the same reason. And honestly here people won’t understand your concerns either
I was IP banned in reddit for saying that gender neutral laws should be implemented in my country. And here I’m banned in a community for saying communism won’t save my country.
There is no difference as such between these two platforms. The only good thing about reddit is that it had more relevant subs and users
A good thing about Lemmy is that you can change instance/make your own and do and promote anything you like. That’s the fundamental difference.
You can be banned from a community, from instance, even. But not from Lemmy as a whole.
A fundamental shift may occur when more people of the same views start alternative communities where such pressures are absent.
I’m getting banned on a lot of communities here on Lemmy, I’m just taking it for a ride.
Fediverse is a great step forward. But it really creates echo chambers, even more so than on Reddit I feel.
On Reddit you have for example capitalismvsocialism or purplepilldebate.
Places that people come together to talk out their differences (or yell at eachother, 70% of the time).
If there’s an open source platform where people can create communities but can’t ban people on them. I’d join it in a heartbeat.
But then the problem would be things like CP.
So I suppose that’s just not going to be possible.
There’s always going to be abuse, difficult to find a middle ground
Yeah you’re right.
Fediverse is a great step forward. But it really creates echo chambers, even more so than on Reddit I feel.
But the difference is that you can create your own instances too if you don’t like their ideologies. Or even make your community. So it’s slightly better
Btw have you gotten any better alternative of Reddit?
If majority of Lemmy users come from .ml, then yeah. But there are also servers that do not care.
Then why do we keep arguing with each other?
Liberals Vs tankies
Leftist infighting is what happens here.
It’s not leftist infighting if one side isn’t leftist.
Liberals are socially leftist. LGBTQ stuff, women empowerment, environment stuff, pro universal healthcare, …
Personally I view american politics as right wingers compared to west Europe, but oh well.
They still are viewed as a hundred million people on this planet that vote for the left side of their country’s politicians.
It’s not that easy with USA. Bernie Sanders is likely the most left wing there. AOC likely the same.
Joe Biden was less left wing, but he still helped people out during the pandemic compared to what republican’s would have done.
Here in Belgium you have more choice. You can choose between anti immigration, regionalists, liberals, Christian centrists, environmentalists, social democrats and Marxists.
Broader choice. Here in Belgium the left wing is considered environmentalists, social democrats and Marxists.
While liberals, although socially left wing, are economically right wing. Basically the party for the small entrepreneurs. The other right wing party is more for the multinationals. While the anti immigration party actually is quite socialist economically, but the same old “own people first” shit. It just so happens that being a conservative in Belgium means being somewhat of a socialist economically.
Pretty funny, there’s not much difference between extreme right and extreme left here. Basically just… is the socialist a racist or not lol
Liberals are socially leftist. LGBTQ stuff, women empowerment, environment stuff, pro universal healthcare, …
Until the second it becomes evident that they might have to stand up for any of that.
Nah, America really spread a lot of information throughout the world on these things. So much even that people got sick of it.
America is all about branding, sure they might not structurally provide a good system for these people, but they do grant them a good brand to use.
The public opinion of these people have mooned quite a bit.
If your own child was on the LGBT+ spectrum and was right now in the US, your take would have been way different.
And you’re eager to jettison them.
I think In all honesty that we have different notions of what the word leftist means, and I’m not super keen on a discussion on semantics. Personally, I attach a very specific fixed non-relative set of ideals and principles to the word “leftist” (an acknowledgement that capitalism is neither fair nor efficient, a focus on building a state for the proletariat, cooperation over imperialism, etc etc). From your comment I get the sense that you have a more relativist approach. Whether or not someone is a leftist depends (additionally) on the political context in which they operate. In this light, you call Biden, a staunch neoliberal capitalist, a (lesser) leftist in the same breath as calling Belgian Marxists leftists. I am in no position of telling you that you’re using words wrong any more than you are in the position of telling me I’m using words wrong.
But there are some things you mentioned that I do think are worth discussing, under the assumption that we would both label the mainstream part of the democratic party as liberals. Because they do not support the policies you would label as socially leftist. The last time universal health care was part of a mainstream candidate’s campaign was Obama’s first campaign (17 years ago), and what we ended up with was essentially a handout to insurance companies, a very far cry from UH. No major mainstream candidate since even mentions it.
Then there’s the support for LGBTQ rights. I would like to focus on the T part first. Not only was there no countermessaging from the democrats to Trump’s virulent anti-trans rhetoric; after the race was lost, the MSNBC talking heads and major democrat campaign strategists were on national television claiming that part of the reason Harris lost was that she wasn’t tough enough on trans people. The transgender support by democrats is skin deep, and ready to be dropped when it becomes politically inconvenient. If the transgender folks are that easy to drop, don’t doubt the other letters won’t drop either. To finish off this section I’ll leave you with a nice Biden quote from 2006: “marriage is between a man and a woman and states must respect that”
Another policy you mention is environmentalism. I won’t be verbose. Big part of Harris’ campaign was that she was more pro-fracking than Trump.
Next women’s rights. Four years of Biden, nothing done to fix Roe v Wade. All these words about supporting women’s rights and here we still are with 12 year olds carrying their rapist’s babies to term. Actually, we don’t even get words, there’s a nice website which kept track of whether the Biden admin used the term ‘abortion’ in a press release (they did, once, more than a year in).
I’m going to take some liberty into what else you might consider socially leftist positions, namely a pro-immigration stance, and an anti-war stance.
War first. You can go back to the Senate and congress voting records. Democrats consistently vote in favor of bombing the middle east. The Biden administration pumped billions into the Palestinian genocide. During the Harris campaign, Waltz said that the expansion of Israel was crucial to the success of America. During the recent Signal gaffe from the Trump administration where a group chat leaked where they were planning to bomb Yemeni schools and hospitals, democrats were outraged not by the fact that the US would be bombing civilians, but rather about the fact that it leaked.
Immigration next. The kids in cages at the border that we were all (rightly) upset about during the Trump admin? Not only did the Biden admin do nothing whatsoever about this, the number actually increased during his presidency. The messaging from the conservatives is simple: the immigrants come in, they’re criminals, they take our jobs, and we need to do something about this. This is of course false, if you look at the actual statistics, undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes per capita than citizens, and the addition of immigrants to the workforce (and to the market as consumers) is actually a boon to the economy. Did the Harris campaign do any countermessaging on this, citing the statistics, and looking at reality? No. A big part of her campaign is that her border policies would be tough, and that she was tough on crime.
I’ve taken the US as an example, but the same pattern applies in Europe, at least in the countries I’m most familiar with (Germany and the Netherlands).
Finally, you mention that the extreme right wing is similar to the extreme left wing in Belgium, and that conservatives are left wing on an economic level. I can’t speak much for Belgian politics. I went to the Wikipedia pages of the leftmost and rightmost parties I’m aware of (PvdA and Vlaams Belang) and all I can say is that I don’t see it. I see stark differences on policies on a social level (one being incredibly pro multi-cultural) and on an economic level (one being very pro union and worker, and the other somewhere between neoliberal and protectionist). But again I know very little of Belgian politics.
But I can say something about the conservatives portraying themselves as socialists. Please do not fall for it. This is a trick as old as Hitler. They put the “Socialist” in nazi only to trick workers into voting for them. They ended up privatizing more than any government before them (something I hope we can agree on isn’t very leftist), slashed minimum wage, culled unions, and put socialists in concentration camps. Not very left wing. Same with the current far right in power in the Netherlands. Portrayed (successfully) as economically leftist during the campaign, but every policy they’ve put in place is economically right wing. They tried putting a flat tax (unsuccessfully so), they’ve gutted public services, and they increased income tax while leaving corporate taxes fixed. They do this every time, do not fall for it.
Let’s see. Belgium has 0,26 gini income inequality. (EU 0,29). We have great hospitals. Uz Leuven and UZ Gent being world top class hospitals. When my wife will give birth, it will cost us 300 euros. Median income in the country is 3800 euros gross. Which comes to about 2600 euros net.
Schooling is tax paid. There are like no private schools here because who would want to fund that (there’s one in Brussels, would cost 500k euros to have your kid schooled there till age 18, while public schools get funding from taxes). Higher eduction costs like 1 month wage to fund a bachelor’s degree tuition wise.
Median net wealth per adult is 250k euros. Puts us alongside Australia, Luxembourg and Iceland.
We have unions, personally I’m with ABVV, which is the socialist variant. They help with certain stuff. Went there when I was unemployed for 3 months.
There’s unemployment benefits for 2 years. Only the first year is good income. Not really necessary to be longer than 1 year imo.
Quite some sick leave. Medical bankruptcy isn’t a thing here. There’s a maximum invoice per household per year. Which is a pretty low sum. Depends on income level too. Can easily be as low as 500 euros per year.
Maternity leave is decent, my wife is on maternity leave starting 1 august until 1 February.
Child benefits exist. My wife will get 250 euros from that every month I think. At birth she gets 1250 euros too. And we get a free stroller and car seat. Quite good quality too.
There’s an issue with the amount of daycares. Just no space. But starting age 3, the kid will just go to school. Which is properly funded.
Public transport… there’s rails everywhere. 80% of trains are for commuting in Europe. Belgium is no exception. I don’t have a car, there’s no need for it.
They are building bike lanes alongside the train rails for car free commutes.
It’s very tax friendly to lease an e bike with your company. It uses the taxes on your end of the year bonus. Basically turns a 1500 euros net bonus into a 4500 euros bonus. Allows people to lease a premium quality e bike for commute and buy it after 3 years for 15% of original value.
There’s always investment in social housing.
We’ve got quite a lot of immigrants. Immigrating is really easy. My wife basically went from Indonesia to Belgium with a tourist EU visum. We married and then she never had to leave. Since I have housing and a job.
Psychologist costs 11 euros per session, psychologist gets 85 euros for it.
Trans people can get sex change surgeries and hormones funded by tax money.
One of the earliest countries to allow gay marriage.
47% of EU electricity was generated with renewables in 2024.
Government funded the purchase of electric cars quite a bit until now. Same with solar panels.
Buying a house costs 3% tax if it’s your only house that you will live in. Otherwise it’s 12%.
There’s a lot of funding to teach immigrants Dutch.
Cleaning is the stereotype job for immigrants that don’t speak Dutch, since that job is funded 2/3rd with tax money. The client pays 10 euros per hour and the cleaner earns 13,64 euros per hour. + Free e bike. Can get this job without speaking Dutch, because there’s just such a high demand.
We have a lot of doctors per capita.
Walkable cities like Ghent, Brussels, Bruges, Antwerp, … All cities are walkable.
High social mobility. A lot can be achieved within 1 generation.
It’s a pretty nice country. But my wife does call it boring as fuck 🤷🏻♂️
Thanks for the detailed report, bout USA my only information is social media which is limited. I did see a rise in bottom 50%'s wealth % during Biden’s term. But the income gini is still 0,42 so I suppose that’s meaningless.
About 20% of the Flemish people voted for Vlaams belang, they are in general the less educated folks.
That’s why Vlaams belang has to portray themselves as “for the man”. Bring back industry to Belgium, promote manual labour jobs for Belgians.
It’s just a stunt, because they (together with the Marxists) are banished from being in the government. They always are in opposition. The other parties long ago agreed to that.
Vlaams belang is the 2nd largest party now, but in opposition. Luckily. The only issue is that they can always complain about anything that went wrong and promise heaven if people vote for them. Then when shove comes to push “oops, sorry guys we can’t help, we wish we could, but we’re in opposition”. They’ve never actually had to prove themselves capable leaders. They get paid well though.
Hardly an echo chamber, then. Echos don’t argue, they just repeat the same stuff back.
Tankies go to .ml while liberals go to the other spaces. You don’t really interact with eachother, there’s several types of leftists etc.
I’m banned on several ml’s and several liberal’s.
They do not like people to talk back.
They moderate the places so that it works as an echo chamber. Mainly for leftists. Not many right wing people are coming towards Lemmy.
It’s pretty silly, Lemmy is at one hand designed so that everyone can see eachother’s content and opinions.
But at the other side, the spaces are moderated so that only their own opinions are allowed.
So there’s a lot of polarisation instead of compromise.
Then you end up with extremists having power that wrecks havoc.
Compromise is the enemy of extremists. They love it that we separate ourselves so easily.
I’m constantly arguing with liberals, the whole reason I’m on .ml and not one of the defederated instances is because I want to talk to y’all instead of stay in an echo chamber of people that agree with me.
Also liberals aren’t leftists 😘
Aight, I’m a social democrat. Am I a leftist?
Do you want to abolish capitalism? Not just reform it, but completely abolish it.
That’s the bare minimum.
I guess you’re getting downvoted by those offended. It absolutely is.
Note: I am left, communist in fact, but the way political topics are discussed is a clear doomer circlejerk. I’d love to at least see more variety over “Trump is stupid, Elon is mad, senators are bootlickers, death to Nazis, we’re all gonna die”. Like, yeah, we got it and we know it. What next? Any political action, maybe?
Believe it or not, but I also am a leftist. Social democrat.
I say a lot of bad stuff though. Like: old people that did not have kids, should have less pension and use the money they have been saving up by not having kids.
This is seen as insane, but… old people are the wealthiest class in most societies.
Yes there are exceptions and these people need help. High minimum pension for sure. They need a decent life.
But why would I want someone who didn’t even have a kid to replace themselves as productive entity to gain a fantastic passive income on top of their already passive income generating assets?
a compromise would be something as simple as: retired person above age 65 gets +amount of euros per working child in insert home country.
It would incentivise having kids.
The reaction I get usually is that it’s inhumane, that people are seen as production houses only, that people don’t wanna be born… A lot of doomer stuff to be honest.
It would be fun if there’s a place where you can only deny an idea if you can replace it with your own solution to the issue. In this case “aging population” (popular issue in Belgium right now)
I fail to see advantages over the expansion of direct support for families with kids.
If such families would be adequately supported, parents wouldn’t be so financially disadvantaged and this would automatically resolve the issue of assets as well.
Paying it as part of pensions on the condition of children working in the home country makes people’s finances directly reliant on the actions of independent actors (their adult children) and punishes people who, for example, cannot have children in the first place due to medical reasons, lack of a partner, etc. It also doesn’t bring financial support when it’s needed the most.
And relying on asset accumulation and personal investments as a source of pension funding is quite odd to me to begin with, as salaries don’t always reflect the good done for society (for example, public sector work is often paid more poorly, despite bringing maximum value for the state), and also because personal investments cannot be done with the same precision, competence and risk management as the funds do (and even if you invest in funds, they take a cut). I believe asset accumulation should be minimized in favor of public support nets (including decent pensions and good living conditions for everyone).
These families already are adequately supported. We need to find a way to guide people into the actions we want them to do.
Like, they want me to stop using the car to work. Okay, they allow everyone at my hospital to use their taxes to pay for a commuting e bike. It’s a financial incentive. (Don’t worry I’m not a healthcare worker, just administration, I am not the right person to work with people in need).
Indeed there are exceptions and therefore exemptions. If a medical examination says that it’s difficult for you or your partner to have children, then they’d be exempted of any punishment.
I don’t think it’s psychologically a smart move to punish not having kids, but to reward having kids. That’s why I say “extra pension”. (By behind closed doors reducing pensions in general first, but they don’t know that).
Helping people that can’t have kids… We could allocate resources to them to help them adopt a child. Something like that. Once again, psychologically it would help them accept this. People give them the option that nature didn’t provide them.
We’re competing against the funds actually. I own ETFs that tracks the Stoxx 600. It has a yearly expense of 0,07% while bank funds would take like 2% or whatever.
Personally I’m not even thinking about my pension, cannot know what will happen in 37 years so I’m definitely taking it into my two own hands to accumulate assets.
Now, I understand why a pension is desirable. It’s a safety net. And I agree with that. High minimum pension for anyone who is unable to work due to old age. Just like for people who can’t work for other reasons.
But as Belgian, I know a lot of people that try and take advantage of our social safety nets. For a lot of people it’s not because they need it, but view it as an extra passive income while doing nothing.
That’s damaging to the social democrats. We need to get rid of the abuse, the corruption. We need to motivate people to do effort and reward that. And we have. Minimum wage in Belgium is quite high. Income inequality is 0,26 gini. Median net wealth is 250k euros.
Motivating people to have kids is also a necessity. To live more together in the same household. To use fewer resources. Be economically sustainable in the long term.
People are scared in Belgium, everyone is retiring. We’ve been accepting a lot of immigrants to help us out with this. Luckily, second generation immigrants are tremendously helpful.
To have a meaningful social net, we do need a good amount of people that can work. That can be parents.
We need to motivate people. And everyone that really cannot help society with this, they are exempted of course.
My friend her parents never worked a day in their lives. It’s absolutely normal. Her dad’s disabled and her mom takes care of him.
But another guy “didn’t work for 10 years cuz his knees hurt” while he randomly showed up at our hospital working, magically, when he’d lose his free passive income. He’s doing a desk job. Like everyone else.
In my eyes, being adequately supported means not having any financial difference between having vs not having children. If that would be the case, there wouldn’t be a financial incentive to not have them.
If we go above that (incentivise parenting even more), it’s just throwing money at the problem in hopes it will go away. If someone will only have kids if they’ll be rewarded on top of having extra expenses covered, they are basically parenting for money and this won’t end well.
As per taking advantage of the social system - the more people overclaim something, the better the regulations become. There could be a certain ceiling on the types of support that could be taken at the same time, for example. As per unemployed folks living on subsidies - unless they have a valid reason they can’t work (and there are those), they should get mandatory public employment if they stay in the unemployed status for a while - one that would respect their disabilities and limitations, if there are any, of course.
I’m literally going to financially reward my wife for taking time off work in order to take care of our kid.
Parenting is labour. When you’re parenting, you can’t be doing a different job.
My wife’s parents in Indonesia don’t have a pension much. It’s barely anything. Her mom just gets money from my wife and her 2 sisters.
That’s how it used to be for a long time, pension is relatively new.
So in the vast majority of history, parents always were financially rewarded for having children.
Median age in Indonesia is 30, while in Belgium it’s 42. While we’re far wealthier in resources. People just stopped having children because it wasn’t necessary anymore.
We can’t act like this isn’t a problem, unless the people that willingly caused the aging population issue take full responsibility and go through hardships in order to help the society battle a period of low work force.
That’s you, but it should be on the state level so that every parent is given everything to make parenthood go smooth.
People got used to comfort and are not willing to sacrifice their standards of living for having children, especially through a recession. Make them feel secure about their present and future - and birth rates will grow.
