Home financing - please provide an assessment

My other brother is employed at a large German corporation. He automates processes. He says he automates about 30% of the work of people who retire in a few days.

Yep. Back then, though, gladly 48 or 45 hours per week. My father, as a civil servant, still had to go to the office every other Saturday, my grandfather worked piecework in the forest. Today you can be sure that almost no one will respond if a job posting includes the sentence "weltweite Reisebereitschaft (60%)".

Spoke with an old colleague today. My company brought him back from Rene because no suitable personnel could be found. Crazy. Borussia in MG hired retirees from the former company that produced the turnstiles. There is no one for maintenance and repair.

My grandpa worked piecework in the forest.

Mine too. He worked at the hut (which used to be the Thyssen company here in the Ruhr area) at the coking plant. Breaking slag out of the boilers in heat protection suits. Standing by the casting trough. Also about 50 hours/week. The work was very hard.
When things were decent. Half of the time he and the guys played cards, made metal supplies for allotment gardens with materials from the hut, pocketed tools and materials and: drank. Every foreman knew that they would only stand in front of the shovel if the booze was there. In return, they did tasks that today would be forbidden under penalty to assign as occupational safety. Physical slave labor that ruins your bones.

My regular working hours today are shorter, the job is not physically demanding. The variety of tasks has increased. I don't know anything like intermittent free time. The temporal compression of necessary tasks is enormous.
Want more about that? I could do that. But then after one or two years I’d be mentally done and my marriage ruined. Partners today also have different demands. My grandmas (at least one) would have kicked my grandpa out if she hadn’t been financially dependent like many women of that time. Transfer that to today.

That employees have higher demands for the work with which they spend a large part of their lives and can also enforce these demands is an indicator that there is a shortage of labor in these areas. But these are usually not jobs that one can perform alone and independently after two weeks of on-the-job training...

Conversely, in the jobs where they cannot do this, one can see where there is no shortage. Example: package delivery services: no training necessary (except for a driver’s license, not even that in cities, where there are now transport e-bikes), one of the highest personnel turnovers I know. There are also some prime positions (in our residential area, the post/package couriers from DHL don’t work themselves to death), but they are rare. The majority work under almost precarious conditions as (pseudo-)self-employed below the minimum wage. But everything is dictated. Shifts, schedules, how many packages one has to deliver within period X, etc. People let it happen to them (for various reasons) until they are exhausted or written off because they don’t perform well enough. And the next one is already in line to be exploited.

The problem is simply that we can no longer afford certain demands in view of the competition from the Far East. This is really just starting now; the Chinese are now on par with us Europeans in many areas, sometimes even superior. I recently read that the development engineers at BYD work in three shifts. At VW, the pen drops after 7 hours and that's it for the next 17 hours.

The German model, very expensive, but correspondingly innovative, reliable, and good, is slowly no longer working.

I was just in Sweden again for 10 days, and even for most of my highly qualified neighbors, that is already unthinkable. Anything over 2 or 3 nights away in a hotel is considered unacceptable.

That's not going to work for economic growth.