When housing became a vehicle for investment instead of a place to live, it all fell apart. The only way forward is to discourage multiple property ownership through very draconian measures.
If you fix housing, you fix commitment, increase birth rates, and improve general happiness.
Housing is definitely in a very tough spot and causes a lot of issues among mostly young people.
I do agree that it would fix a few problems, but I don't think the birth rates will meaningfully increase. It would have a bump, but overall that ship has sailed, people just don't want to have a lot of kids (if any) in today's world.
Housing hasn’t been the biggest problem in Japan since 2000s. Like it is, but not the biggest one. Yet the birth rates have never increased after the initial bump.
People, especially women, have other things they can spend time on instead of giving birth to 3+ kids.
Japan is an ethnostate with unique problems and situations that no other country shares.
I agree with you that other factors, such as cheap international travel and constant bombardment of people's highlights on social media, make it less attractive to invest in having a family.
Still, housing is a huge problem for Western Mediterranean Europe (Spain, Portugal, and Italy) and most of Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Colombia).
I'm Mexican and have lived here all my 30 years of life on the Northeast side. You and your family will be safe. Cartels avoid messing with foreigners—too much heat. Look up Kiki Camarena. They (Cartels) are never as bad in the eyes of foreigners.
The low-status Mexicans working extraordinarily hard to make a living in the rural areas of Mexico have it bad, yes. They're usually exposed to minor crimes such as assaults.
But the biggest issue in Mexico is that you can't stand out. Middle, upper-middle, and high-class individuals (before having enough money to afford bodyguards) try to keep a low profile. There is a real risk that someone may want to kidnap you for as low as 25k USD. Even if you want to pay the ransom, something can go south and end badly. Crimes that are catastrophic if they happen to you.
You can't really have an apples-to-apples comparison of how safe something is because it is context-dependent. I may feel "safer" in South Chicago compared to an American, as I don't quite grasp how or why it is unsafe.
Pieter and Danny businesses are not startups, these are "lifestyle" business. They even say that continuously. They see what's trending and feasible, glue some generative APIs with an okish frontend and publish it. Repeat.
At least for the Monterrey locations, the economics do not make sense to me.
I'm a member of one of the newest locations which, when packed "full," still tops out at 200 people, and in 3 months, I have never seen more than 100 people in a single day.
I expect about 400k MXN per month in revenue; let's double it to be safe, to 800k per month. Yet, most of the people are on the all-access plan, so that's 2k per customer per month only.
The rent for these two new floors is at least 1 million MXN per month. I also see 4 janitors, 4 front-desk staff, and 2 guards to operate the elevators, all full-time. This is not counting utilities and extra services such as coffee, mouthwash, etc.
This is really cool, body inflammation plays a huge role in our lives.
3 years ago I had a terrible case of atopic urticaria that lasted 9 months. My CRP was over 10 mg/dL.
I started to make a handwritten habit diary to look for triggers. Food, type of exercises, exposure to temperatures, mood state, etc. Never pinpointed the issue, but I got better suddenly.
Went deep into the body inflammation rabbit hole and found interesting papers on how it relates with depression. I truly believe that my acquaintances suffering from depression could benefit from tracking their CRP levels on a consistent basis and try to bring it down.
Use https://redwoodjs.com/. My journey has been from no frontend framework -> Vue.js -> React -> Next.js -> Redwood, and I'm the most happy with the tooling at the moment.
When housing became a vehicle for investment instead of a place to live, it all fell apart. The only way forward is to discourage multiple property ownership through very draconian measures.
If you fix housing, you fix commitment, increase birth rates, and improve general happiness.
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