The Albanian town that TikTok emptied
codastory.com
codastory.com
People going to college and getting jobs nowadays are "NPCs", and the only true way to live is to go on luxury vacations and drive fancy cars full time. How do you afford it? By becoming an influencer yourself, of course.
The "hustle culture" pyramid scheme is going to collapse soon, and lots of young people are going to have a rough life because of it.
Maybe Elon can send them all to Mars, along with the telephone sanitation technicians.
What do you expect when there are no good jobs left over for college grads between the double whammy of a pandemic and LLM automation threats? Not everybody can be software engineers and most other entry level jobs simply don't pay well enough for a decent life in most cities. It's no wonder that the average non-STEM major are turning towards "hustling" on tiktok when their future contains either prostituting themselves on OnlyFans or being a perpetual serf in the service industry.
I think given the housing shortage there's a lot of untapped potential in construction/furnishings we'd only need a but of deregulation to unleash.
From the perspective of the ruling class (whether the capitalist elite of the haut bourgeoisie, or the pre-capitalist elite of the landed aristocracy) people with jobs have always been NPCs, and there’s always been a segment of society below that elite that spends money to conspicuously adopt outward trappings of elite lifestyle (and attitudes) for attention, as a tool for entertaining the masses, and for grift. Modern “influencers” may use a new medium to reach their audience, but they aren’t otherwise a particularly novel thing.
Even in the UK the young move from less prosperous areas to more prosperous ones.
Globally, people need to be educated on the reality of what's behind the camera not the illusion portrayed in front of it.
Additionally, though clearly unfair - 1-2 years of labor with pay seems like a reasonable trade off for the rest of your life to be significantly improved? Making immigration legal or at least legitizming parts of it even if the immigration remains illegal seems like it’d be a huge step.
Even before then I thought it might be great to make A4 phased array antennas with photographs of dictators on them so people could put them on their walls were satellite dishes are forbidden.
In general people should engage in more geographic mobility.
They're also abusing the asylum process to get to stay in the UK. It's a massive problem.
It takes one or two generations for that secondary effect of revitalization but it happens as children and grandchildren of those who emigrated want to return to their culture and find land prices very low.
I've seen it in rural China, India, and Italy before that. Even Russia had a large number of emigrant's (or their children) return during the economic book in the 2000's. Potion ruined that, and many have since left again, but it demonstrates the effect.
Eastern Europe will be the same.
It points at how miserable virtually all Albanians that get baited into traveling to UK have it
Remember that a greater number of people who stayed would have died as miserable alcoholics. Women are still beaten by their husbands in small towns. Boredom leads to drugs.
Even in the US suicides are 50% higher per capita in rural vs urban areas.
If someone is happy in a rural area they should stay. But if they aren't and they get up the gumption to leave who are you to sit in judgement of how stupid they are?
It is better to move out of towns like this. Better != perfect.
And it's an exponential process, for every 1 person, 5 probably leave. My hometown was nearly 100k in the 80s, down to 50k if that by now. And it's mostly elderly, children, who grow up, go to the capital or just immigrate.
And the fact countries can't use protectionist measures inside EU does not help either.
Baltics, Poland, Slovakia, Czechia, Romania and many other places are developing fine and less and less people are emigrating.
And the picture definitely is nowhere near as depressing as Albania and this region in particular.
Birthrates are low.
Abandoned cities will be everywhere over the next century. Especially after the population collapse in Asia.
On a slightly related note, I’d rather point the finger at urbanization - in my short lifetime I’ve witnessed multiple small villages (1.5 - 2k population) pretty much disappear as the younger generation moved out for multiple different reasons.
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/commentaries...
What's that?
Let's be real, there is no reason for any country to be granting Albanian citizens asylum. There isn't a genocide going on, it's a (relatively) free country:
...and most European countries don't.
Q: Why does the UK?
Q: Is there much war or persecution in France at present?
Talking about irregular migration, it's significantly harder to enter the UK directly from either Germany, Austria or Italy. Air carriers check passports and visas (indeed BA pulled a relative of mine this morning at a London airport for what the airline termed a "visa check" during an attempt to check in online).
Paying a people smuggler to take you across the Channel from France to the UK would appear to be significantly simpler. The UK government publishes detailed statistics on irregular migration routes, and for the last few years small boats represent by far largest proportion of irregular migration arrivals, not air.[0]
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/irregular-migration...