Funny, I actually go frequently to one or two of these, since I live in Berlin. I pay 42% taxes and still these government pools are not only a bit pricy (no discount if you want to go regularly) but they have terrible, irregular opening times. They will spontaneously close down for a month, without notice on their site or google maps, only putting a sheet of paper on the door. They will rotate opening times randomly. Even worse, they are not open (only charlottenburg, which is small) for around 6 months in the summer. This is because youre supposed to go to the outdoor pools but I want to go at 6pm after work when they close and even if they are open they are too cold. On hot days they might be fun but then they are notoriously overrun but low education bracket people that get into fist fights so vehemently it was a big topic in berlin this summer. As a response there where then a bunch of police people hanging out at the pool and now you need to show your id before entering.
The article claims Berlin is one of the best places for public swimming and yet whenever I want to go it's literally impossible for me to find one that's open at a time I can go (i work a normal 40 hour week). I haven't been swimming in years because the situation is just useless.
It feels like everything in Berlin requires you to queue or fight for an appointment slot, including the pools. Every public service without fail is a battle. It's tiring.
We just go to the lakes. It's a lovely bicycle ride.
Yeah, Berlin is a great city for many reasons, but its administration is not one if its strengths, to put it mildly.
The surrounding lakes are definitely nice, just not compatible with the climate for say 8 out of the 12 months, so a better/cheaper/more accessible selection of indoor pools would be nice. And a solution to the cesspool that is the open air pools, where a certain demographic is ruining it for everyone (and has done so for decades).
I don't know where you live or what experiences you've made but I just had a look into my municipalities online appointment system and there are 5 slots free to book just for tommorow.
The Germany federal government’s procurement process is kafkaesque at best (especially the armed forces); Germany spends as much on defence as France, yet France has a nuclear deterrent, nuclear subs, a nuclear aircraft carrier, and a sizable fighter jet fleet - all domestically designed and built. Germany’s government barely maintains its kit.
The railways are late a third of the time. The Swiss want to ban Deutsche Bahn trains because they’re causing so many problems.
The German telecom operators are terrible. Domestic internet is slow and the cell phone networks are the same.
The country just doesn’t invest in itself and when it does it can’t effectively execute.
I’m not saying Germany is a shithole, but its government bureaucracy is generally terrible and business administration lackluster (and yes, there are exceptions to the rule).
I’ll add that I’ll tear the shit out of my home country (Canada) similarly. We have similar issues with government procurement.
> The railways are late a third of the time. The Swiss want to ban Deutsche Bahn trains because they’re causing so many problems.
That's not quite correct. What the SBB (Swiss Federal Railways) started to do is to not allow German trains onto the network if they're massively delayed (I think massively being more than 15 minutes), which, of course happens a lot.
My take is that it's partially educational (as in get your shit together if you want to use our network) and partially it really is a logistical problem and messes up the network.
The train network in Switzerland is used so densely that allowing too many delayed trains onto it has a serious impact and would incur knock on effects.
There are many more good reasons to live in this dysfunctional hellhole of a city. Otherwise I'd have left a long time ago. No matter what, I still love it there.
>There are many more good reasons to live in this dysfunctional hellhole of a city
What are those reasons, that don't also exist in other better-run European cities, like Vienna for example? At least there you don't have to fight 200 other people for a shitty overpriced apartment.
I also like Berlin to visit, attend tech conferences or meet-up, concerts and parties, but moving there now would simply wear me out.
>They're personal, but it's just a fun city to live in
Sure that's understandable, but that's nothing objective in that, that's just a personal choice based on personal taste and circumstances, which can apply to any other city if you think about it.
There are so many other fun cities in Europe where you don't have to put up with all that nonsense.
That's nothing special to warrant overhyping Berlin even further, it already suffers from a branch of the Paris syndrome they could call it Berlin syndrome.
Agree. DACH countries are among the most desirable for immigrants globally. Natives are hyper self-aware about their desirability and one can feel it when negotiating a job with them or making business with them. Many immigrants (ehem.... expats) masochistically buy into their hosts' superiority. Well if suffering if fun for them... in the end masochism is invention of German speaking world.
If that makes you feel better, in Paris even the city acknowledges that we need 2.5x the number of lines that we have to support the demand, and there is no way we ever reach that given how the city is built. And yet we often have entire pools closed for associative activities such as diving, training for "high level" clubs, and whatnot.
I'm all for children activities and aquatic gym for the elderly but I really don't see the value of using public pools for guys who "train" 3 hours a day just because they are part of some subsidized group, especially knowing that 99% of those have never done anything at the elite level. If you want to train at a high level just finance it for yourself, I'm locked out of my couple hours per week to get my back healthy (and many others are).
I'm presently pre-registering for a private pool that's going to be 10x more expensive (and I'm still paying the taxes that finances not only the pool but also the training programs of the subsidized orgs that train in my city's public pool).
A hint on fixing your problem, I have done my fair share of work in sports clubs, assuring the elite gets training time and money to be able to train. You need big support organization around the elite to make them viable.
They do pay and finance their own training but the elite can never afford to build exclusive infrastructure for youth to adult, you will always have an overlap with the club competitions. You need a good base to be able to build an elite. That is what that exclusive pool time is ment to build.
If you need more well run public pools the greatest partners are those "high level" clubs. They most certainly feel you pain.
Show me any major desirable city in EU where it's not the case. One contributes monthly to various social and public polls of money and is shifted at the end of the queue every time, as the queues are on the best effort basis but with too many privileged people and organizations. Real estate prices are the ultimate slap in the face.
Don't knock on diving! It's constantly under attack at pools all over the parts of the world where legal liability is any bit of a factor. So hard to find any place that will let you dive these days. Although too bad they close the whole pool. They should have a bulkhead or separate diving basin ideally.
You are not providing any argument, apart from you wanting to dive. But it procures much more health to many people to use basins for swimming, so diving should be removed. Besides, diving is a set of things to learn, so learning diving on holidays is sufficient. Like windsurf. “Don’t knock on windsurfing at my local pool” wouldn’t cross my mind.
Just to provide some counterpoint to this: I regularly go with my kids in the winter weekends, and aside from the Wellenbad ("wave pool") in Görlitzer Park, which had a plumbing problem once when I went, I've never run across randomly closed pools. We didn't go much last winter since they'd lowered the temperatures because of the war in Ukraine and rationing of gas, but we went a lot the year before and a couple times already this year. They've never been painfully crowded -- in fact, usually the opposite, usually pretty empty. We've gone in Kreuzberg, Neukölln, Lichtenberg and Schöneberg.
I live very close to stadtbad mitte featured in the article. It's a very nice building with a spectacular glass roof. As the article mentioned, it took a direct hit from a bomb during WW II but it landed in the pool so the building survived.
It has a nice 50 meter pool. Unfortunately it gets very crowded and the water can be a bit dirty when too many people have been in it. But it's great when you manage to find the pool empty (try late at night). The last few times I was there I came out with irritated skin. That's the chlorine reacting with the nasty stuff in the water. So, those two things are kind of keeping me from swimming there regularly. It's a pity because it's just a 3 minute walk from my door and I could definitely use the exercise. I've also used one of the nearby outdoor pools. Much better quality water. But you need to go early before the big crowds show up. And of course they are only open in the summer. The water being cold is a feature. Once you get moving you stop noticing it.
The summer closures are a bit annoying but understandable. And the opening times shifting around through the year and week are also annoying. Makes it hard to plan when to go. They are usually pretty good at putting those on the website though. Basically, they adapt to the schools and holidays, which are heavy users of these pools. Lots of classes of kids learning to swim during the week.
I wonder if the pool was water filled when the bomb exploded. I know nothing about explosives in buildings, but underwater explosions are nastier than unconfined air explosions.
I am not an explosion expert, but if a bomb explodes inside water, then the water surely will absorb energy. And I watched the controlled demolition of a WW2 bomb - where they indeed put lots of bags filled with water over it - to minimize the blast.
> I pay 42% taxes and still these government pools are not only a bit pricy
You're eligible only for making a shopping at Lidl and Netto after work, and for paying Rundfunkbeitrag. As I had heard multiple times while on full time employment in Berlin and seeing over 40% cut off on my monthly payslip: "beggars can't be choosers".
Do people not research the tax rate before moving to Germany? It comes with free roads, education and health care, by the way. Not saying we shouldn't get more out of it, mind you, but it's not like the taxes turn into thin air. And Berlin is a bit special in that its administration is kind of bad and always had been. You get the live and let live attitude and a lot less sticks up people's butts (compared to say southern Germany), but it also does feel at times like you're not getting as much out of the taxes as you should.
The Rundfunkbeitrag can eat a bag of dicks though, zero argument there.
Germany is one of the highest taxed countries in Europe, and I'm not aware of it having particularly higher welfare than e.g the Nordics where tax levels are lower. I'm generally skeptical to people complaining about taxes, but Germany and Belgium (which is the only one I'm aware of more expensive than Germany) appear to be outliers.
Yeah my eyes are bulging every time I find a job posting based in Brussels or Antwerp and then quickly run some gross-net simulations online. Whait... what?! Over 50% monthly on contributions and taxes? What the fucking fuck?! Employees of EU and other institutions have generous exempts and privileges, otherwise I have no idea what might be the motivation of a person employed in Belgium.
Looking at the OECD data, one thing that is striking is that Belgium "rejoins the pack" if you look at the tax burden for a two-parent single-earner family.
Looking at the list (OECD Taxing Wages), I'm going to hazard a guess that it's a cultural/religious thing - it looks like the drop in the average tax rate as a proportion of household income for a single-earner vs. the same income for a single person is far greater in countries with a significant proportion of Catholics.
It depends, there is no student loan debt, no healthcare debt, and you won't be homeless if shit hits the fan, so we got that going over what's happening across the pond. On the flip side, you get robbed a bit at the salary takeout.
It would be nice if it wasn't mostly middle class that gets fleeced though, and it would also lovely if more money would flow into keeping infrastructure intact, like schools. But again, that's Berlin for ya.
There are problems with the Rundfunkbeitrag, such as that pensions for retirees from high positions are too high but it provides free* access to high quality and verified news and a diverse cultural and informational program. There is a strong argument this important public service should be funded independently from tax money.
It's really hard for me to not think of mallice when people say things like "The governments takes half my money!"
In germany, when having a (quite high) 100k pay, you effectively pay aprx. 32% taxes on it. I think thats fair considering wellfare, healthcare, studying, school etc. is free.
42% is just the percentage you pay on the income beyond ~65000. The first 65k are taxed lower (in increasing steps)
Sure, some financial things are very hard in germany. But especially as a "regular" citizen, or when you have hard times, you are cared for quite well.
I said clearly about total deductions seen on monthly payslip, gross to net. Income tax is only part of them.
> when you have hard times, you are cared for quite well.
In hard times you better don't lose Anmeldung (e.g. asshole host deregistering you by sending an email), because then the delicate and expensive support system collapses instantly for you.
I mean, okay, but the 42% tax bracket in Germany starts at around 60k Euros. It certainly seems possible that a person who makes what we'd consider a fairly normal-for-HN amount of money is seeing an overall tax rate that's pretty close to 42%.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you'd have to be making well over €300k in order to have an effective tax rate above 40% there—normal for senior engineers at FAANG in the US maybe, but definitely not as normal for the same roles in Europe.
...unless you count Social security contributions as taxes, in which case you will reach 42% taxes a lot quicker, especially if you also account for the 50% your employer pays or you are self-employed.
I used a german tax calculator and put in a 200k Euro income and it told me my take-home would be 102k. I dunno if I screwed it up or anything -- I don't know a lot of German tax law.
€200k is not a normal developer salary in Berlin. In fact, it's more like 3x a normal salary. It doesn't make sense applying Silicon Valley salaries to other places.
Okay, but on the other hand my parent poster made the claim that you'd need a salary of well over 300k to get an above-40% effective tax rate, and I notice that you don't seem to have taken issue with him. This feels like an isolated demand for rigor.
The person who set off this thread made no claim to be a typical Berlin developer, he just said that he paid 42% taxes, and someone challenged that claim. If everyone's being super careful about using very precise language, fine, but that needs to be everyone being super careful about using very precise language, not just people you disagree with.
And if you include the employer's tax contribution, sale tax, taxes on fuel, rent, electricity, etc. you are quickly approaching 70-80% of value produced going to the government in some way or another.
Berlin is infamously dysfunctional in many respects. All while being propped up by the Länderfinanzausgleich for decades (86 billion Euros received in 28 years, look at the leftmost column of https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A4nderfinanzausgleich#Fin...)
Small consolidation, but there’s a public outdoor pool across the street from my house. It’s never open when I can use it. In fact, it’s been closed for 3 years now, first because they couldn’t find lifeguards to staff it, then because it needed major overhaul. But, prior to that, it was open weekdays from noon-6pm. By the time I got home from work, walked the dog, and went for a jog, the pool was closed. Shame, it would be perfect for a summer evening dip. Oh well.
With your large earnings you will have no problem paying for membership of a nice spa club of which there are many in Berlin. These places are not overrun with 'low education bracket people' as you put it but sadly however a scourge of a different sort, namely what I would describe as 'clueless ignorant pricks'....
Would that apply to the https://www.tropical-islands.de/ too? I mean all of it, opening times, pricing, people, whatnot. Only catch would be the distance.
>I don’t understand the need to make this elitist statement?
What's elitist about some facts? Do you know many chemistry PhDs who get into fist fights or do they tend to avoid conflicts? Overall the more educated and intelligent a populace is, the less physical violence and crime there is.
Not everyone who is poorly educated starts fist fights, but people starting fist fights are always poorly educated and low intelect, who give in to their instincts telling them conflicts are solved by acting like a silverback gorilla.
I think there's a difference between a mutually agreed upon fight and an unprovoked attack which is what you'd have a good chance of seeing in swimming pools where I live.
Now that's some boomer bullshit. Look at adults, not at kids,.
Yes, we were all youngsters at one point and did stupid shit as kids (drunken parties, drugs, etc). That doesn't mean most of those haven't straightened up as adults and became peaceful, productive members of society and loving parents to well raised kids who will in turn do stupid shit as teenagers before growing up to become functioning adults.
This comment is not elitist, it is an unfortunate truth. Moreover, this happened only quite recently. What you are not supposed to say out loud is the fact that the majority of these "low education bracket people" who a behaving badly in public pools are young Muslim men who recently immigrated as refugees.
This is not at all a recent phenomenon. A couple of decades ago, when going to open air baths in Berlin after school, the same things could be observed. Same clientele as well though, low class, low education, patriarchal and religious young men, predominantly.
Then maybe you didn't visit public baths as a youth, because I don't know what to tell you, it's been an issue as long as I can remember (born here, close to four decades ago).
I think the parent poster clearly had some passive aggressiveness in their tone - “what you’re not supposed to say out loud” - but I also think it’s wrong to jump to a conclusion that they wanted to group these people with all Muslims in the world.
As to the question on how one knows that they are Muslims: it is very apparent. The group of people parent poster describes take up a significant amount of attention. They also often come in larger groups to public spaces, making it extremely intimidating to approach them if you’d like to express some differences.
I think it’s a huge mistake to not mention problematic differences under the pretense of political correctness. Berlin certainly tends to do that, and when problems grow so large that they can no longer be ignored, you will have already alienated people who did complain before by not having listened to them before.
This is how extreme right wing parties get their voters.
Yup, 100%. You're not allowed to call a spade a spade anymore. Rightspeak and all that.
Everything is always awesome, and don't you dare go against the system.
I wish we could decouple this wokeness/madness from the political spectrum, ie have centrist parties with more traditional values without going to / having to go to the extremes.
Having traditional values (and I'd perhaps call not being a pest one such traditional value) is not an extreme right thing, believe it or not.
I am the last person to submit to political correctness.
However I ask you like I asked parent, why is their being Muslim more significant than their socio-economic status?
Again, I am not a fan of these hyper lax immigration policies either, but I know the difference between being critical of that and a pure hate for Muslims.
Their being Muslim is more significant than their socio-economic status by the rules of adjective coordination of the English language. Their religion/culture is more of a defining feature of their identity than how much wealth they have. It’s only recently that following this most basic rule has become politically incorrect.
The hyper lax immigration policies are only relevant in so far as they’ve changed the cultural makeup of the people the OP interacts with at their local pools.
It is obvious that they come from various Muslim countries and that they are male. But you will hardly find any women from those countries in those pools. Again, the best explanation is that they are indeed Muslim.
I strongly object to your attributing hatred to me. It is not hatred to point out obvious problems. It is however intolerable to try to shame people as "hateful" for pointing out things you deem contrary to your worldview.
I am not against pointing out obvious problems at all.
However, it seems more important to you to point out their being Muslim than anything else that could be and more likely is a common factor among them.
This is how the genuinely critical are easily separable from the bigoted/hateful.
And I say this as someone most staunchly opposed to the whole wokeness crowd.
So, what is your alternative hypothesis? What other thing do they have in common?
I can think of one thing, but you would consider that probably even more "bigoted/hateful". Again, these terms (just like "racist") are defamatory accusations. They shouldn't be used lightly.
Low socio-economic and educational status people have existed before in similar or higher numbers, yet the violent people in public baths are mostly young Muslim men.
> In my city, the asocials lingering around the stations are mostly native Westerners and not Muslims.
Are there even a significant number of Muslim refugees in your country? Otherwise it's hardly possible to make a comparison.
Opening hours of these pools are usually terrible. Many of them are closed on Sunday. Most of them are closed in the summer. If you are working 9-5 during the week you will have a hard time finding a pool close by where you can actually go swimming. E.g. in the article they write Berlin has 60 indoor pools. But at the moment only 28 are open: https://www.berlinerbaeder.de/aktuelles/detail/geoeffnete-ha...
And don't go there with family and small kids. Changing rooms are much too small for families. And most of these old indoor pools have no kids area to speak of.
These pools are just good for nice photos on Instagram or some blogs about architecture of the past.
The opening hours are actually quite good. I haven't found any on the list that are closed on Sundays. All of them are actually open from at least 10 am to 5 pm. And during the week there are also some that are open until 10.30am.
Official open hours are unfortunately not the real open hours. As https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38331076 writes, I was also standing several times in front of the building just to read on a sheet of paper at the entrance that the pool is closed.
Strangely the outdoor swimming pools in Berlin are unique for a completely different reason. The one or two of them I visited were unique in that the patrons were frisked for weapons on the way in!
There was a series of brawls in some of the outdoor pools this summer, which together with the eternal fear of immigrants caused a media frenzy. (Berlin's pools where suddenly national news)
This is probably the reaction to those events.
It will all work out fine, cause good intentions and idealism just force reality into pleasant shapes.. but then again, it is those who want it to work out fine, who constantly highlight group differences, preventing the melting pot from working. Its good that these places exist, merging the people into one meta-group identity (Menschen in Deutschland), its bad that people like you try to with the best intentions sabotage things by sweeping problems under the rug.
It is also not unique to pools. You can not go to parks anymore after dawn, Düsseldorf, Cologne and more cities check for weapons if you want to go to the city on a weekend and have fun.
I'd like to ask for a source on this. I live in Cologne and I've never heard of such unsafe parks.
I do see increased police presence during events like Karneval, but that's not unreasonable with tens of thousands of people drinking and partying on the streets.
What changed in German society is that police and especially prosecution have been underfunded for years.
For a law to be effective it is important that a transgression is addressed with high probability and low delay ( c.f. To Command and Persuade ).
Two decades of Underfunding and therefore understaffing prosecution and courts means that is not the case anymore.
The influx of immigrants is to a degree responsible for this, since it redirected large amounts of money.
Interestingly, the severity of the punishment does not matter as much as it’s certainty. Increasing the punishment associated with a transgression is usually a consequence of the states inability to effectively enforce the existing laws.
Ever increasing penalties e.g. for forms of sexual harassment can therefore be seen as an indicator of a gradual weakening of the executive and judicial branches.
This comment is badly informed. Germany's big wave of controversial Muslim immigrants came from Syria and other points east, not North Africa. I understand that as a Dutch person your own country's experience is with e.g. Moroccans, but you shouldn't assume the same for your neighboring country.
> More than 99 percent of the population is Sunni Muslim, and less than 0.1 percent of the population is Shia Muslim. Groups together constituting less than 1 percent of the population include Christians, Jews, and Baha'is.
Germany has very few NA immigrants. People like those above are hinting at muslim immigrants and asylum seekers. When you blow a dog whistle hard enough, it reaches frequencies everyone can hear.
There is no argument about the situation itself. I'm pointing out that this reference is so obvious that the author might as well own their xenophobia. It's cowardly.
It rubs me the wrong way because if they said "middle eastern immigrants" the comments would likely get flagged and deleted (here and elsewhere), but they can pick a very obvious reference and then everyone can hop onto the xenophobia bandwagon with impunity.
My annoyance comes from the last few weeks of this, sponsored by the Israel-Palestine conflict and the waves it makes in German society. Everyone is brave enough to call for drastic measures against Muslim immigrants, but too cowardly actually name the group they refer to.
How are you so sure it is phobia? From my impression in NL, it is groups of immigrants who create a (violent) atmosphere in public pools. Up to the point some swimming pools don't know what to do anymore.
It's used to shame people who say things while hiding behind plausible deniability. You want to complain about a group of immigrants? Go ahead, but own it. Stop saying you-know-who and have the courage to back your own thoughts. Then we can talk about it like adults.
That's not so easy. You can't just break straight through the Overton window. That could easily get you socially punished, e.g. here by downvoting and flagging. Some sensitivity is required.
I'd say that you already leave the Overton window but merely pretend that you don't.
It just makes it harder to have a frank discussion because you leave it to the other side to name the group for you. If you argue in bad faith you can even pretend that they brought it up, not you.
I find it disingenuous all around. Like I said, it became ubiquitous in the local debate since the Hamas attacks.
If comments get removed altogether because of lack of sensitivity, there is no discussion at all, frank or not. So there isn't much an alternative. A parent comment of this thread was already flagged regardless. You seem to underestimate how severe the problem is. You very much can't talk straight like with any topic inside the Overton window.
I don't like the accusation of of "bad faith". I don't even know what it is supposed to mean concretely. What defines "the group" exactly, is part of the question. I said more in neighboring threads.
That's kind of the issue here. Anything remotely negative about certain immigrant groups is automatically assumed in bad faith (you must be a racist/nazi) and gets flagged/downvoted and no free discussion on the topic can ever happen.
Less likely to get into trouble with the ultra left wing politically correct mobs who can't wait to call you a racist nazi for pointing out immigration related failures.
That is such a cheap argument.
I think the general “problem” is a bit exaggerated in the media - as a frequent visitor of the Berlin Freibäder I have not experienced any problems myself. However, the violence in my small home town city came mostly from German males with German ancestors.
Toxic masculinity (and social injustice) seem to be a major driving the problematic behavior - not immigration. The majority of violence also here in Berlin comes from males. Also, my impression is that is if there is violent behavior coming from males (also in other situations) their background foremost is a rather low social status and not dependent on their passport or their ancestors’ origin. A well educated rich woman is less likely to show violent behavior than the poor uneducated man.
I don’t know the difference of this between the German and the “Arab” (which is the group most people here blame rn) male of equal social status but id be very surprise to see a big difference if any significant at all..
We used to have lots of these in the UK, but their ownership was largely in the hands of borough councils, and as a consequence most have been torn down and replaced with a Tesco Express.
It's sad when this happens, but I've lived in various random places in England over the last 2 decades and one of the first things I do when moving to a new area is find one of these little swimming baths for my evening swim. I have to say, outside of city centers we don't seem to be doing too bad still. I think at least 3 of the 5 I've frequented were Victorian era or at least 100 or so years old.
E: just did a quick search and apparently of the 116 listed bath buildings, most of which were constructed before 1936, only 52 remain operational or are in the process of being operational. So perhaps you're right. Real shame, these places are often so valuable for the community, especially smaller/poorer ones.
(Shout out to Withington baths[1] which was my favourite place in the world back when I was a student)
Yeah. One thing I have said a few times is that if we still had the same relationship with local government we had in the past a lot of what are now subscription gyms would probably be owned by the taxpayer, for good or bad.
Build a council swimming pool, don't maintain it correctly for 30+ years, conclude it's beyond repairs and tear it down (But in fairness those 60s buildings were crap).
At least where I am they are building a replacement. But they have "awarded" management to a private company for some reason.
It's a lot simpler to do a single tender and outsource the whole problem of management to a large company than to recruit 20-30 people, project managers etc etc. Council staff are overstretched as it is. This just comes down to expediency and, to some extent, laziness.
It’s the same reason companies outsource things which aren’t their “core competency”. It’s the same reason that people outsource their infrastructure to Amazon.
Why they don't put the Tesco over them? In Turkey, there's this tradition(?) of renting part of the public infrastructure to businesses. Mosques are especially popular, many mosques have a shopping centre or a supermarket at the ground floor.
Not a chance, 13 years of the tories have seen to that. They shredded local authority finances early on and as a result a lot of the services have been closed as they still limit the tax raising powers of local govt - local authorities were and are heavily reliant on grants from central govt. This is one of the biggest weaknesses of the UK: it's a complex country of 60+ million people governed almost entirely from a few blocks in London.
It's too convenient to blame the Tories for everything.
Many local authorities have very badly managed their finances. We've seen it in the recent bankruptcies of Slough and Birmingham (both Labour-led by the way) where incompetence and possibly corruption was rife.
I was in London in the first decade of the 2000s, and pools were closing left, right and centre then too. The councils are terribly badly run, and the old buildings, with higher upkeep costs, are just too tempting to close when they're on a balance sheet with everything else.
As bad as the mayor and councils may have been, from my outside perspective it would be hard to do as poorly as the UK government has over the last decade. It’s been farcical, and the show continues.
There's actually remarkably little that they can decide properly for themselves these days, but they have low budgets, and eventually the low budgets lead to underqualified and overstretched staff, who then compound the problem with poor decisions.
It does not mean that they don't face challenges in general because of cuts in funding. But, as always, bad management makes the shit hit the fan when times are leaner.
I am convinced that it is possible to balance the books on a leisure centre, for instance.
Heating costs for pools quadrupled over the last 18 months. They’ve come down a bit, but that’s still a massive impact.
Salaries have shot up too, and have done for 20 years, as minimum wage has increased well beyond average wages or inflation.
But the largest impact on council funding in general is the increased money going into looking after the elderly, and that sometimes means selling off the land a leisure centre was on to pay for that for a couple of years, doesn’t matter that the centre was slightly profitable, it was occupying a large amount of land value that could be spent on Generation Me instead.
the tories used that as an excuse. There has always been badly run councils - so instead of fixing the problem they used it to reduce the power of local councils
this is a very common theme in the uk -
find an edge case and use it to justify anything you want. But while conveniently and hypocritically coming up with excuses to justfy the things you want (or just sweep crap under the carpet)
If there has always been badly run councils then it's too convenient to blame them on the Tories.
I feel that this is the cost of being in power for 13 years (for either side). At some point some people forget, or don't know, that the other party is not the panacea, either, and that not everything can be pinned on the party in power.
There is a massive amount of crap that has nothing to do with the Tories and, again, we've recently seen that in Slough and Birmingham.
So if you think that when the next Labour PM is going to be appointed by the King the crap will disappear you're bound to be very sorely disappointed.
>So if you think that when the next Labour PM is going to be appointed by the King the crap will disappear you're bound to be very sorely disappointed.
until PR is put in place this pantomine will continue (it will still take a long time before it gets much better). For me the main difference is intent - both parties crave power, but the tories have a seriously much lower bar than labour in the things or people they will screw over
the system we have place was designed for two parties only - it gives the party in power a dictatorship with informal controls (Boris knew and abused this)
any more than two parties messes everything up - specifically for left leaning parties, becasue labour and lib dems typically have a bigger overlap than the tories and lib dems (espically since ukip has seemlingly taken over the tories)
the current system is monterously unfair and very undemocratic. but the conservatives and labour like the idea of unlimited power and will fight it all the way.
Coming from Wroclaw, Poland, those pools look very similar to this one [0] which turns out to be German-built in late 1800s (Wroclaw used to be a German city before WWII).
> Perhaps more than anywhere else, this is where travellers can experience Germany's "textile-free" culture head on.
Understatement of the century. I visited here about 7-8 years ago. The big dome pool pictured has a unique acoustic property of transferring sound from one side of the giant pool to the other. You can expect to hear the heavy breathing of amorous couples from about 20-30m away as if they were next to you. That said, aside from the inappropriateness that seems to be common nowadays in these high-end spas, it was a beautiful venue.
Any kind of inappropriateness or sexual activity is usually both forbidden and frowned upon in textile-free spas - even staring is considered extremely rude. That said, sure those things happen, but by any means are they not representative nor to be expected.
If you go to a sauna, enjoy being allowed to just be for once, without any need to hide something. I promise you it’s transformative to see hundreds of other naked people at once, and realise your body is perfectly normal and okay.
I think the boundary is somewhat fluid. Haven't seen actual inappropriate behaviour in a spa yet (and I think especially saunas are mostly spurring the imagination of people who never visited one: you're usually too exhausted from the heat and/or humidity to even want to do anything)
However it's clearly a place for couples to go to and especially in the actual bathing area (i.e. not the saunas), you can whitness a lot of "public displays of affection".
Whether this this upsets you or not, is something that everyone has to decide for themselves I guess.
Seems to depend on demographics. The more you go towards early 30s expat age, the more likely you are to find that behaviour. Went to a spa in Berlin where I thought your description was quite accurate.
Otherwise I’d say it is actually precisely as parent poster described it. If you go to less “trendy” places, you’ll find you can really relax.
Yeah, I think my spa was one of the "trendy" ones. They did put up signs reminding people not to have sex in the pools, though they weren't at the "guards" stage yet. So I imagine there must have been some incidents.
As I said, it was more an issue in the (textile mandated) bathing area, not so much in the textil free saunas though.
It's good to know there are still other spas around.
Unfortunately it has become an issue in other places as well. In Switzerland we have also a saltwater tranquil bath with very little light and they had to put „guards“ because of the increasing amounts of couples enjoying themselves in these baths.
Some of these spas (e.g 47 in Baden) would be perfect for relaxing with the caveat of avoiding weekends and school holidays. In these times they are crowded with families. Their idea of a good day at the spa are often at odd with mine...
If you don't need a pool, the Stadtbad in the Volkshaus in Zürich is a great place for steam bath, sauna and relaxation
The dome pool is also the one part where you are required to wear a swimsuit. I'm pretty sure the reason is that if you didn't, let's put it like this, that water would become a health hazard pretty quick.
Swimsuit or not, people can behave inappropriately. Let me put it this way, the couple were having some form of sex and thought they were being discreet. The acoustics betrayed them.
I mean I don't doubt that it happens, but the swimsuit rule probably cuts down on it. And to be fair, that pool is possibly the sexiest place in Berlin.
There are areas where you must wear clothes (zB the central saltwater pool), areas where you are forbidden from wearing clothes (saunas), and areas where it's up to you (hot tubs, cold tubs, usw.).
These are nice pools, but I wonder how power efficient these old buildings are...
The Bauhaus one reminded me of the (at the time only) public swimming pool in a small town in Nort-East Poland built in a brutalist style I learned to swim in, in early 90-s. These windows, the lanes, the area surrounding the pool, the walls, were very similar, but the ceiling was concrete, and absolutely no plants of course.
>Because of the windows? Probably they have triple-paned windows.
No, because they look like they were built 100+ years ago and things like wall insulation wasn't very advanced back then. With any swimming pool of tgat size heating it is probably a large chunk of the cost.
Ozone works pretty well I think. Also enforcing shower with soap, I saw this during covid and was relieved they would do that. Unfortunately they stopped doing it.
Obviously our leaders are better. Our standard of living is higher, our life expectancy is 10 years longer, and our 20-year olds aren't dying in a meaningless war.
Putin's leadership is so atrocious that he's bad even by the standards of Russian leaders. No need to watch the news to come to this conclusion, just look at the numbers. All Russian statistics point to a society in decline, held afloat (briefly) by high oil prices, and unable (under present leadership) to reform itself.
Have you considered how much of that is caused by your great leaders imposing sanctions on Russia? I mean, to the extent that the numbers are even close to correct, and not simply propaganda.
All those conditions existed prior to sanctions and are basws on russias own figures. Why are you arguing in bad faith? There are legitimate arguments to be made if you can cool it and consider them.
The numbers are reported by the Russian government. It is plausible that the true numbers are worse, but unlikely that the Russian government would want to intentionally project economic and demographic weakness.
As for sanctions, they were instituted in response to Russian aggression. If Russia had left its neighbours in peace, Western countries and especially Germany would have happily continued liberalising trade.
You may want to consider that you might have your own issues with listening to propaganda. The sanctions introduced between Russia’s invasion of Crimea (also Putin’s fault) and 2022 were fairly anaemic.
Like, it’s really hard to come up with a scenario where Russia’s current crisis is _not_ Putin’s fault. Putin was there in more or less everything that lead to it. Whose fault did you think the sanctions were, if not Vlad’s?
Ah, er, yes, I think most people outside of Russia, and many in it, think that most European leaders are better than Putin.
Most European countries haven’t killed off 0.2% of their population over the last 18 months in a pointless, doomed war driven by their leaders’ personal vanity, for instance, so there’s that. At this point, Putin’s ridiculous project has killed nearly as many Russians as covid did.
One summer I essentially boiled myself in the open pools there as a teenager, because I had so much fun I disregarded early signs of sunburn.
Very underrated place, but I suppose it would have more visitors if it weren't for the language barrier. I remember we couldn't figure out which one is the men's room, because the information was only given via text and that was years before smartphones.
No mentions of Tropical Islands? Not in the city limits, but basically Berlin. Technically indoor, at least mostly. Pretty amazing if you ask me. I’ve never seen anything like it.
I only saw one picture with lane ropes. I assume this means these pools are just places for kids to play and not actual exercise (swimming laps) pools?
Most of the pools have the option to put ropes in. However, for some pools they're only installed some days of the week so you can pick a day based on whether you want to play with your kids or swim laps.
Some seem to go. Was in Berlin this week and visited the Schwimmhalle in the Velodrom and it was pretty crowded. Don’t think all swimmers were tourists.
Is Velodrom the big sports complex by the Landsberger Allee station? If so, it makes sense. Afaik it is the biggest pool complex in the city, supporting olympic swimming and diving.
Kinda weird to have lane markers on the bottom when the wall is cut out for the stairs in the Stadtbad Neukölln banner pic. I'm guessing the outside lines are more popular in this pool.
It's impossible to tell from the aerial perspective but the side of the pool with those stairs is extremely shallow (you would probably scrape your face on the bottom floor). This is basically the children's zone. There's usually a red barrier chain across the pool at the second to last column.
>I'm guessing the outside lines are more popular in this pool.
You guessed right. The inner lanes are preferred by the casual swimmers.
There's Swedish regional news every now and then of various types of sexual assault on minors by Arab and African gangs, and recently there was a story where they stomped on the father's head after he interfered.
Yeah, that's why I asked for sources. The only story I could find about this was, as mentioned, back in 2016. I hope your viewpoint is actually from proper reporting of actual phenomena and not some biased opinions. "Arab and African gangs" is as vague as it gets and you'd need a lot of strong evidence and analysis before you give such a statement.
In East Germany, nudism is a big thing. Of course, I checked this out after moving there and I must say I was not at all surprised to see the Ordnungsamt (public oder office?) at the nudist beach enforcing nudity.
Problem about non nude people is that they can make the nude feel uncomfortable.
In Austria a semi mixed bath recently closed their nudist area because it's surrounded by forest which was filled with perverts that made a lot of trash in the forest and would fap behind trees to nude people.
Same for any semi reachable other public nudist place I've ever been to, you have to expect perverts wandering around.
That's why I prefer places where non nude is not welcome, even thought I never have seen it enforced and nobody minds a clothed friend that doesn't feel it yet either.
Swanbourne north beach (the nudist part) is Federal land carved out from state title and exempt from local council rules - the inland area is SASR barracks and occasional training grounds .. you don't get a lot of perverts in the back dunes patrolled by squads with dispensation to black bag and interrogate anyone crossing an invisible line.
As for the nudist beach itself, it's mainly nudists who go there to be nude .. it's a tough search to find footage from that part of the beach as most people respect privacy.
The nudist beach is to the left, to the north, up the beach from the lifeguard building seen here in this drone footage:
it's a lot of empty space directly north of the clothed people with some dots of people in the far distance.
If you make it to the southern hemisphere you might like it .. people aren't prudish about nudity and mainly wear UV blocking clothes to avoid skin cancer .. people frequently strip and change in car parks when going out surfing | swimming | for a paddle.
"can expect to hear the heavy breathing of amorous couples from about 20-30m away as"
You are naked. But any kind of inappropriate activity is a big no no. Even staring at another person or something. Buddies of mine went to a sauna and there was even a famous actress in it. It is considered normal and egalitarian.
I spent my birthday with a bunch of mates in the Szechenyi Bath as we were travelling around Europe about 15-20 years ago - December with snow falling, playing chess in the outdoor pool with the old fellas. Just a standout memory and a great day
Biggest difference to Germany is that German saunas are usually mixed. Including mixed showers and changing rooms (in saunas, not in public swimming pools).
The showers are rarely mixed. On the other hand mixed changingrooms for public pools (and saunas) is the norm everywhere around europe. Its for capacity reasons and you have private booths for the changing part.
I think we are talking about different things. Typical saunas are the neighbourhood saunas, Kietz-Saunas. They do not have any separation. Not in dressing rooms, showers, nor in sauna areas. It's all mixed, except usually a women only day once a week.
Saunas in public pools etc may have different arrangements.
Tried to bring a US buddy of mine (non-mixed) into a Spa/hot bath/Sauna in Beijing. He got terribly scared of having to be naked and rejected. But it is a good place. And they have a good all you can eat buffet. Sweat. Eat a little. Rest. Repeat.
You basically spent there the whole day.
The reason is hygiene. You sweat into your sheet leaving very little behind on benches. Then you shower and bath and do it again.
With swimming clothes you soak everything then bring it back to the chilling pool and back to sauna.
Also imho nudity in sauna seems wierd first time but you quickly realize you can be covered all the time (with sheet) and that its not sexual at all because you are focusing on your body as does everybody else (heat stress).
Imho after few saunas everybody seems to shed this fear and even gain confidence and casuality about the nakedness part.
Because the sauna police will look down on you and give you some nonsense about how textiles are gathering sweat or something, all while they sit their sweaty asses on cotton towels which they carry around with them all the time.
The problem with German nudist is that if you take a group of Germans and group them by who you would like to see naked, and those who you absolutely would not to, it's every time the latter group who gets naked.
I would have to agree that architecture tends to be much less impressive when viewed through a microscope than when you can see more than a square inch of it.
The implication appears to be that indoor swimming pools contain disease, but obviously they would not differ from any other swimming pools in that respect. That is the reason for the chlorine that makes getting swimming pool water in your eyes so painful.
You're mostly spot on but your last sentence is flawed, as it's chloramines that are the problem with pools, not chlorine, and urine is all-too-often the root cause
