Being invaded by Russia.

The US, for one

We usually just import American issues but with a 2 to 5 year delay.

In Australia some right wingers are trying to copy American ‘culture war’ shit because no one cares about celebrating the date some British guy landed in Sydney.

And in typical response, no one cares what they’re trying to do so they’re getting more mad.

Netherlands here. We’re dealing with a couple of difficult problems, each of which making each other worse:

Nitrogen oxide emissions crisis

Nitrogen oxide emissions are a serious problem for biodiversity, and as a consequence the EU has put limits on how much nitrogen emissions can be emitted close to Natura2000 areas (which are a form of official nature reserve).
However, the Netherlands is a very densely populated country, and also has a lot of these Natura2000 areas.

Now it turns out that basically all human activity emits nitrogen oxide in some form, and it’s completely paralyzing the ability for anything to get done.
This problem is core to a lot of the other problems my country is dealing with right now.

The government is trying to limit nitrogen emissions, for instance through means such as buying out animal farms, but this is not very popular.

Housing availability crisis

About a decade ago the government abolished the ministry of people’s housing, because it was believed at the time that such a ministry was no longer necessary to provide enough housing. This coincided with the after effects of the 2008 housing crisis.
As a result, every year since too few houses have been built to meet demand, and now we are dealing with a crippling shortage in the housing supply.

The government has since realized the problem and is attempting to tackle it, but the aforementioned nitrogen oxide crisis also makes it very difficult for new housing development to obtain the necessary permits.

So instead the government tries to push hot-fixes like rent-caps, which ultimately just reduce the supply of rental properties even further. This is because land-lords cannot make a profit renting out these properties with the proposed rent-caps, so they just sell the property instead.

High inflation / High cost-of-living / High interest rates

Last year, like much of Europe, we were dealing with pretty high cost-of-living and inflation rates.
This is a direct result of our prior dependence on Russian gas, and the war in Ukraine disrupting the supply of that gas.

I stand with Ukraine, and I think it is good we quit cold turkey on our addiction to cheap Russian gas, but it had a lot of serious knock on-effects on the cost of living and the inflation rate.

The ECB (European Central Bank) has tried to fight the inflation rate with interest rate hikes (and it would appear they are succesfull at doing that). But by raising inflation rates, they do slow down the ability to invest in the economy. This in turn affects things like the ability for property investors to build housing, which worsens the housing crisis again.

Full electricity net

On top of all this, we are also running out of capacity on the electricity net.

This is going on at the same time that we are trying to eliminate our natural gas consumption for environmental reasons, as well as the need to reduce our reliance on potentially hostile foreign powers (see Russia).

This is causing numerous issues with regards to businesses switching away from gas, new businesses opening, new housing construction, etc…

Severe employee shortages

Despite everything, the Dutch economy has been running pretty well, and as a result there has been very low rates of unemployment. It’s gotten to the point that there are significantly more jobs available in basically every field, than there are people to work those jobs. That is causing other serious problems in turn.

As an example, public transit cannot find the necessary workers to get all the trains to run reliably on time.
Another example is a shortage of workers in the construction industry, which worsens the aforementioned housing availability crisis, and the electricity net being at capacity.
Another example is a shortage of engineers able to plan out extensions for the electricity net

This shortage can pretty much be extended to every industry right now.

Asylum crisis

On top of the other stuff going on, we also have a large amount of asylum seekers trying to obtain refugee status in the Netherlands.

Under normal circumstances these asylum seekers would apply for asylum in Ter Apel, which is an asylum processing center. They would stay there until they obtain refugee status, after which they would find a regular place to live elsewhere in the country.

However, the severe housing shortage is making that last step impossible, which is causing refugees to stay in Ter Apel for far longer than they reasonably should be. This is clogging up the system with people to the point where Ter Apel has long since exceeded capacity.
This causes numerous problems, and politically it’s very difficult to get other parts of the country to carry their weight in dealing with this crisis.

The main concern is that refugees take away houses from the Dutch people who are also unable to find housing.

14 years of a mainly liberal-conservative government (VVD), and a future mainly populist government (PVV)

While I think the VVD (liberal conservatives) is not as bad as some people make the party out to be, they are liberals… And liberals seem to be allergic to interfering with market forces, even if those market forces are actively making things worse.
Because of this, government action on all of these crises over these past 14 years has largely been too little, too late.

The people are fed up with the inability of the government to solve these issues, and have voiced their displeasure in last year’s general election.
But instead of voting for a party which will tackle the fundamental issues mentioned above, they largely voted for the PVV (populists) who blames all problems on the refugees and migrants.

They propose to significantly reduce the number of people coming into the country.
However, they seem to ignore that our economy is highly dependent on skilled migrants coming in to work for companies such as ASML. They also seem to ignore that reducing the number of people coming into the country will worsen the general employee crisis we are already dealing with.

So while I hold out hope that they might be more effective than the VVD, I’m not holding out hope for any meaningful change in the next term.

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I probably forgot a few things, but these are the main issues my country is dealing with right now.
Sorry for the long post, but there is just a lot we are dealing with.

Housing crisis and inflation.

(Are we naming ourselves or are you guessing?)

The Democratic Republic of Congo is experiencing severe political violence involving large militant groups over natural resources and territory.

source

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That one dude in Argentina is basically doing a government cosplay of Evel Knievel

Portugal is dealing with a major housing crisis. Due to excessive tourism and privileges for digital nomads and foreign retirees our population is being priced out of our own country.

Everybody knows lots of people who were forced to emmigrate. Families broken apart, relationships ended, etc. Everybody has multiple stories like that. I mean EVERYBODY.

To make matters worse, tourism needs low pay workers, but there’s a lack of workers willing to live and work for 800 euros in a city where rents start at over a 1000. Instead of improving conditions for its citizens the solution was to bring in a wave of immigrants from very poor countries who are willing to work here in deplorable conditions. Right now our own capital is overrun by tourism and you can barely hear Portuguese being spoken. And it’s spreading to the other cities.

More and more people just give up and leave every day. Universities are failing to fill their quotas because it’s no longer affordable to live in their cities. Politicians and elites don’t care because they have their interests in tourism.

In the bigger cities, when you enter a shop or restaurant, you can feel the annoyance as soon as they hear you speak Portuguese because they think you won’t spend much. It’s not improving at all and the only measures we had to improve it are half-assed. Right now I’m wondering how long until I give up and leave to join the others.

Russia is sending migrants to Finland and after we closed the eastern border they started walking thru the forest and showing up on the yards of people living close to the border. These people are literally hiking thru deep snow in the freezing winter wearing sneakers.

…American neo-liberalism? No shot, in Norway we are seeing a return of poverty, and it’s mostly thanks to new public management and the two massive neo-liberal parties that front US ans UK economic policies.

Yes, it really is that bad. My job now is to remind everyone continually that poverty will grow, because as per usual, the politicians responsible will try to find a scapegoat.

It might be the socialist, might be brown and black people, might be the Jew, heck: it most likely will be the Polish who get blamed for the insane policies are being fronted.

So yeah, neo-liberalism, the political enabler of capitalism, is currently our biggest problem - but it shows, through deforestation, consolidation of ownership, the indirect banning of cooperatives, the milking of the European energy market at the expense of Norwegians, everything being centralised, ownership wise, and the propaganda and talking points remain the same.

Our politicians are gutless shills for yankie ambitions. Former prime minister and leader of the right wing party Erna Solberg has a large fucking painting of Ronald Reagen on her wall, and she was recently embroiled in a conflict of interests case, where her husband got favourable government contracts for his parking company.

Of course it had to be fucking parking.

Økokrim, the national economic crimes division, refused to actually investigate the situation, and all the neo-liberal fucks, including the other massive neo-liberal party (AP, or “the labour party”), who probably also are falling deeper into corruption, let it slide.

So yeah, poverty is on the rise, and crime will rise with it. When it reaches boiling point, you can bet I’ll have to verbally smack people in the face once the people in power have decided upon a scapegoat.

I’m betting Polish and Slavic people, or Africans. Anyone except the political and economic precedent set by the politicians in power.

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South Africa: Major energy crisis

Global: ADHD drug shortage

Not so far away but in Mexico the biggest problems are (in my opinion):

• Insecurity & violence (surprise huh?)
• Corrupt and mediocre politicians and all that stems from it
• Equality in wealth distribution
• Migration crisis from central and south America.
• The new one: water crisis (also because of mediocre politicians)