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Comment by twixfel | Hacker News Reader

I understood the claim to be that if you are at the bottom of the social points scale then you are sufficiently vulnerable for it not to matter. That the people who really benefit from Germany's strong labour laws are those with kids, disabled people, old, etc... but not just a standard young person.

Germany is just a strange country IMO. Lots of "nice" stuff like this that sounds great but really only works for the older generation and doesn't really work for young people, who are already hugely disadvantage by the German boomerocracy (probably one of the worst boomerocracys in the world).

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I'm not a lawyer, but AFAIK, age doesn't influence your social score, tenure does. If I'm a 30 year old with 10 years in the company, I will have a better score than 50-year-old you who got hired 7 months ago.

The idea is that working at a company "squeezes juice out of you", so you should not be so easily fired after a long tenure, because the company got all the rewards from your juice, but you don't have much left. You can agree or disagree, but I have to admit that there is a logic.

I understood the logic to be instead that older people nearing retirement find it much harder to get new jobs.

And I agree there is logic to all of these things we are discussing. The problem is rather that everything is falling apart in other ways so young people get the raw end both times. Many of these older folk will be on rent controlled flats that are not available to young people, for example.

> but not just a standard young person.

This makes sense in a way, since "standard young people" are very flexible [in Germany]. There are multiple different safety nets and ways to get money, jobs, support, and a lot of basic needs are taken care of by the social system.

Source: I'm a "standard young person" German SWE ;)

Yes it makes sense, certainly on paper, and in a world in which the older generation actually are disadvantaged by their age and younger people are not. Actually it's the other way around. Like so many things in Germany, it's just outdated and from a time when things were actually really good and everything was not falling apart. The boomer generation are the richest, have pensions we will never have, and get to pay far smaller rents than we do. I pay 3x the rent that my boomer neighbours pay for a mirror image flat across the hall.

Well, boomers are on their way out.

But why do you think that Gen X will be better ?

I don't think any generation is better than the other. They are just the biggest. If Gen X were the biggest then there would be some big political distortion in their favour instead.

And no they are not on the way out, they are still here and will be here for a long time. To the extent that Gen Xers will be better or worse, it is only because the demographic pyramid won't look quite as crazy or distorted.

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