Not forcing a scarcity of necessities like housing would be a start.
Peer competition is what makes everything work. You need scarcity of necessities to force people in to the system. Recent rulings allowing the criminalisation of homelessness are pushing this further. Your existence is default-illegal unless you work to outbid your peers for housing.
It has fallen due to many reasons, some of which are related to migration, many others with no or only tangential relations to it. You already mentioned the 'housing crisis' which is partly related to migration - where asylum seekers with residence permits ('statushouders' [1] in Dutch) get preferential treatment and now stand for 8% of the total, 20% of the housing for 'first time renters' and 78% of the 'first time renters with children' [2]. This is only part of the problem though and not the largest one, that being the fact that there are simply too few housing units (apartments, houses, etc.) available. This in turn is partly due to the fact that it is hard to get permission to build something due to the heavy regulatory burdens and especially the rules around nitrogen emissions ('stikstofregels' [3], nitrogen oxide emissions by diesel engines used in construction put strict limits on what can be built when and where).
Then there are problems like the childcare benefits scandal ('toeslagenaffaire') - again partly related to migration by way of Bulgarian migrant fraud [4] - where the tax department made erroneous claims about benefit fraud without every really acknowledging they were wrong. I have some experience with the Dutch tax authorities making clear mistakes without accepting responsibility, instead they come up with mysterious restitutions which somehow exactly match the erroneously claimed taxes due.
The restrictive and SARS2 unpleasantness hit trust in public institutions hard which caused the universities of Rotterdam and Leiden to publish a report calling the Netherlands a new low-trust society ('de laag-vertrouwensamenleving', [6]). This trend has not reversed, especially among those with 'higher educational levels' [7] who used to have a higher trust in governmental institutions but now slid down to resemble the trust levels seen among those with 'lower educational levels' - this could simply be related to the fact that the left-wing parties favoured by those with 'higher education' did not participate in the government at that time.
I grew up in the Netherlands and lived there until about 25 years ago. I have seen this slide in trust with my own eyes, from the country where I could open the front door by pulling the string which dangled through the letter slot when I cycled home from school at 6 years old to the Fort-Knox-with-cameras now required, from the police officer on his bike greeting the people on his beat to "romeo's" (undercover arrest teams) being accused of inciting riots [8], from nearly the entire village coming out to welcome Sinterklaas (St. Nicholas who brings presents to children at the 5th of December) to those events being cancelled due to the fear of violence and protests, etcetera.
If there were a string in the mail slot in the house where I grew up it would not end well, unfortunately. Even the mail slot itself is suspect since these have been used by burglars to open unlocked doors (metal wire through the slot, easy), by vandals to throw in fireworks (one house burned down that way), by creeps to pee through it (another house in the same area), by other vandals to put a garden hose in to flood the hallway just for kicks, etc.
This was in Amstelveen, to the south of Amsterdam. Where do you live?
The weird thing is all these people commenting who seem opposed to vaccination so that people are afraid to have sex.
I mean if you support lifelong monogamy or similar sure, you do you, but I don’t think more dead people is a good thing to advocate to promote your lifestyle choice.
I used to know a lot more people like that and I swear half of them left the church and had a hoe phase despite earlier professed beliefs.
Of course, the very idea of jaywalking was created to remove the obligation to not kill people from drivers and shift it to the very people being killed, but this doesn’t seem to bother the meddling grandmothers.
> Of course, the very idea of jaywalking was created to remove the obligation to not kill people from drivers and shift it to the very people being killed, but this doesn’t seem to bother the meddling grandmothers.
I'm kind of curious how you expect this to work.
A driver is driving down the road at the posted speed limit. Instead of crossing at an intersection, a pedestrian steps into the road from between two parked vehicles directly in front of the moving car. By that point the car cannot be stopped before it hits the pedestrian because of the laws of physics, so who would you have at fault and how was that person expected to prevent it?
These are generally the same boot licking demographics who'll sit and wait out a 2min light cycle at 1:45am rather than treating it like a 4-way stop. Putting their money where their mouth is puts them head and shoulders above the types that tend to dominate the discussion on such issues.
I was in Germany once at a red light for a pedestrian crossing. After the last pedestrian had fully crossed the street and the pedestrian light turned red I drove off. I did not wait for my own light to turn green which is typical in my country.
The person behind me flashed their lights. Cultural difference I guess. Why wait when there is nothing to wait for.
I live in Australia, which is culturally the polar opposite of Germany[1], and you'd get a similar response here. If the police saw it, you'd be fined at least $500, and risk losing your licence.
1: Australia is very egalitarian, rather than hierarchical. Pragmatic, rather than bureaucratic. Australians are direct and emotive communicators. Spontaneous planners, etc. etc.
In Southern Europe, not many people wait for a red light if there isn't anything to wait for. Even the police blasts through red lights if nobody is using the pedestrian crossing.
Risk/cost ratio? A pedestrian acting irresponsibly can of course do a lot of damage, but the likelihood of killing someone is much lower than if a vehicle is breaking the rules.
Isn't that the argument for the alternative? The risk of being distracted by other traffic and missing a pedestrian who was obscured by another vehicle is much lower when there are no other vehicles or traffic, and then the rules are indecorous for not taking into account the change in risk.
"Bootlicking"? I guess you'd love if non-bootlicking neighbors decided to do a rave party outside your window at 3am. Every day. Or maybe a nice drag race on your street at 1am.
I mean, only people who think for themselves can do that!
There is a huge difference between someone being annoyed by some thing based on how it affects you and that thing just so happening to be against the rules vs being annoyed by a thing that's of no consequence to you for no reason other than because it's against the rules.
Regardless, I don't share those values. I have stared into the abyss of what people who praise conformity and the common good will do to a municipality if given free reign to regulate it's minutia and I do not want. My neighbors on one side blast music in a language I don't speak until a couple hours after my bedtime most nights and the neighbors on the other have barking dogs. I don't even notice them anymore, same with the nearby highway noise.
What consequences? Who doesn't like music?!? Oh, and I'll just throw that candy wrapper on the ground. After all, it's of no consequence.
You THINK that your rule-breaking has no consequences. This is called in the safety science "normalization of deviance", and it usually leads to more and more rules being ignored. And not necessarily by _you_ but by other people.
This is colloquially known as "being a bad example".
Litter is a great example. You people and your rules for everything weren't what changed it's prevalence. Social changes and general attitudes were.
Like I said, I've stared into the abyss of what you people will do to a society if left unchecked. You are worse than the alternative. That's why I live where I do.
Fine then. They drive the speed limit in the left lane or whatever. Point is that the people who advocate for the rules in obscenely trivial situations when deviating them them is in fine taste tend to be drawn from the pool of "robotic rule follower with no extra thought given" type people. Which has the side effect of making them consistent with what they preach.
Sadly, everybody using a browser from a massive ad company and an idp (not to mention a company with an interest in crawling the entire web for AI at the same time site owners are dealing with better scrapers) means the entire web will be login-only over time.
We're quite a few years into this period of technology. At a certain point, these "AI is going to kill the web!" predictions either need to come true or just be dismissed as false.
I don't see how those points bolster your conclusion. These pressures predate AI by over a decade and haven't forced a significant tidal change in the way the internet is used.
Europe is like the US, money is owned by private but they are old money, not new tech billionaires, and does not take the risks as the US. In China, money is owned by the state, and they are willing to take the risks as the US. In this way, I think China is more similar to US than Europe.
Next is an ok choice (IMO), but there are definitely some things Next does that you want to be aware of up front.
* It wants to be your back-end. If you have a separate back-end, get ready to write back-end auth code twice, and probably in 2 different languages, and some brittle proxy code that will break the next time the Next guys decide they want to change how middleware works (again).
* The maintainers aren't particularly helpful. Having built a couple sites using Next, many of our questions ended up being answered with some variation of, "You're holding it wrong," but it was clear they just didn't want to support our (and other users' submitting issues) scenarios.
* Whether you are on Vercel or not, the team behind Next is very motivated to get you onto Vercel. You can expect their technical choices to go more towards that path. This is at odds with the goals of this project. Coupled with the above, expect to have little to no agency to raise issues and have them solved beyond simple/obvious bug fixes, even after you've invested your project into their platform.
* Next really struggles in situations where your users are your customers' customers, and your customers want something more white-labeled. As soon as this bleeds into the arena of using custom domains per customer and such, some of the advantages of Next start to become disadvantages.
Many of the pieces Next offers are sort of optional, but if you don't fit their idea of how a piece (such as auth via next-auth or their take on server-side components) should work, you're left to solve on your own. It's not the end of the world to have to implement your own auth flow with oidc-client, but it can be a little risky and my brain doesn't hold onto OIDC or OAuth2 so every time I implement an auth flow from scratch I end up having to look up how it should work.
That said, if you end up having to deal with more than a couple of the above things, Next moves from an ok choice for the project to a poor choice.
This is really helpful context, thanks for writing it out.
You’re right that Next wants to be your backend and thats exactly why I kept the real backend separate in Go.
The Go backend handles all auth, billing, database, everything.
Next is just a frontend that calls the API. So if Next keeps changing things or pushes too hard toward Vercel, you swap it out. The backend doesnt care.
The white-label / custom domain point is interesting, hadnt thought about that edge case. Good to keep in mind.
Honestly the backend is the important part here. The frontend is just one way to consume it
Peer competition is what makes everything work. You need scarcity of necessities to force people in to the system. Recent rulings allowing the criminalisation of homelessness are pushing this further. Your existence is default-illegal unless you work to outbid your peers for housing.
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