I’m with you on the first paragraph, but in the second paragraph you may not be aware that Germany has a clear and legally binding roadmap to end coal mining. Could it be quicker? Sure. Would it have helped if nuclear power stations would have remained on the grid in Germany? marginally at best.
I haven't done the numbers, but there's also Russia's invasion of Ukraine to consider, and the shift from natural gas to coal triggered by that.
Germany's shutdown of their nuclear generating capacity, and their dependence on Russian natural gas was a major factor in the invasion, and hence Germany's necessity to shift back to coal.
Germany is mining ~10% (10 megaton/years) more coal than Poland, but is much less reliant on it for electricity and is significantly ahead at switching to renewables.
The notion of having a "clear and legally binding roadmap to end coal mining" in 2038 is a total joke. The politicians got to issue some nice press releases but most of the hard choices were foisted onto their successors. I guarantee that the deadline will be extended and exceptions will be made. Germans will still be mining and burning coal in 2039.
This comment betrays complete ignorance over the legal framework that these agreements are situated in, Germany’s political economy, the future and present cost structure of coal mining and comparable precedents in Germany’s recent history (including the abolishment of both hard coal and nuclear power).
The climate of the entire world is changing for the worse. ICE cars do not consider negative externalities.
Not to mention that EVs are enormously popular! They are only being produced now because Tesla is making them. EVs are far more reliable and cheaper to maintain than ICE cars, which is bad if you're a car manufacturer because people buy EVs less frequently than unreliable ICE cars.
"ICE only exists because customers only want them" has no basis in fact.
ICE cars are incredibly reliable. I buy a new car, drive it a decade, and outside of things like brakes, tires, which wear by their nature, often have no repairs to deal with. Typically I do 25000km per year.
Modern electric cars have 300+ mile ranges and charge about 80% of that in 20 minutes or less. For city dwellers without access to a charging point at home, it would be completely feasible to spend about as much time at public charging stations as they would have at the gas station every week or so. There is a lot of "range anxiety" (as reflected by your comment) going around, but in many cases that is not justified even today, let alone a few years in the future when more charging infrastructure has been built out.
ICE only exists because customers only want them" has no basis in fact.
You can only say this, if you stop your ears, and explain away anyone as wanting one.
For example, no EV has the range I require. There are many in my boat. No, I'm not wrong, and you can never be right, telling me I'm wrong in what I need. Ever.
As well, trying to claim EVs are more reliable is an amazing assertion, many buy ICE cars, put 250000km on them with only brake and tire changes, and drove them a decade. I know I do.
In fact, it's literally impossible to determine which takes more maintenance, because the majority of EVs aren't a decade old. And the ones that are, are very early models, and not indicatively comparable to the volume of ICE cars, even now.
I wonder, how.many decades of car ownership do you speak from? Do you have reliably studies going back decades for EVs, with large production runs?
You're just saying what you hope is true. That's not how reality works.
If no EV has the range you require you are a tiny minority of car users. Current Tesla models can have a 300+ miles/500+ km range. I've driven a Tesla Model 3 on long road trips and the range is more or less limitless in praxis: every few hours I stop to visit the restroom, grab a bite to eat or a coffee and in the time that takes me the Tesla loads for another few hours on the road.
So yes, you may have very specific needs that limit your choice of vehicles. But the needs of the vast majority of car owners can be served by current EV technology perfectly well.
Apart from that: EVs have less moving parts by an order of magnitude compared to ICE cars. Of course they are more reliable, especially when you take into account that many (most?) drivers do not adhere to the very stringent service/fluid change intervals on their cars. Again, you might be different, but most people abuse their cars. My parent's VW T5 for example just crossed 350.000 miles and already had several minor engine issues in addition to a costly particle filter swap.
So more or less a very typical commute. My 2016 Nissan Leaf could do this daily drive for 5 days without recharging, today's model's can do half a month of this before the battery is empty. Again: your needs might be on the extreme end and not suited to an EV (currently) but you are the absolute exception. This is not theorizing, it has been well studied and established.
This is not theorizing, it has been well studied and established.
For a densely populated country such as Germany, you have provided one study which speaks of averages.
Of course, this doesn't show the spread of that average. And of course, it is ridiculous to presume this is normal, as we all know how densely packed Germany is.
You are trying to claim that one of the outliers, that is, German driving habits, is an average!
This is more than the average German car drives daily, but still perfectly manageable for modern (or even 5 year old) EVs. Even assuming an EV can't be charged anywhere, it could still handle 6 days worth of these trips. Even if you commute 300+ miles daily, you could probably spend 20 minutes per trip at a public charger.
Again, maybe this isn't for you. That is fine. But EVs are perfectly suitable for the vast majority of car users and it would be up to you at this point to disprove that statement.
There are people who drive their car once a week, to get groceries. There are people who live 100km from work.
As I said prior, what is the spread?
And beyond that, if someone drives very little for 8 months, then drives a lot for 4 months, which happens a lot (kids, summer, vacations, cabins in the summer)...
Many people have range anxiety. People keep saying it's silly, and keep explaining why.
How about you just realise, instead, people with range anxiety aren't morons, and 100% have made a valid assessment?
How about you provide some data instead of anecdotes. You requested the same from me and I provided.
Of course people aren't "morons" and I never said as much. But people generally do what they are used to and what trusted authorities (and I use that term deliberately loosely) tell them what is ok. Nobody has time to research every little aspect of their lives in-depth to make a completely informed decision. So if people like you are telling everyone who will listen "many/most people will not be served well by an EV," that has consequences, the same way as if I would tell people "there is no justification whatsoever to drive an ICE" (which I'm explicitly not doing).
I've looked into this quite a bit and all data I can find points to EVs being a smart choice for most people if they intend to buy a new car or if they can find a suitable used one (the market availability for the latter is still small). It should be the natural choice if there is not some special circumstance in your life (as seems to be in yours).
> My parent's VW T5 for example just crossed 350.000 miles and already had several minor engine issues in addition to a costly particle filter swap.
It's funny, because my $70k Tesla Model Y will have to have it's whole battery pack replaced by the time it reaches 155k Miles.
Can you guess which part of any Tesla is the most expensive one? The damn battery pack...
Now compare replacing the whole car(yes, you can't just replace the battery pack) to VW having just "several minor engine issues in addition to a costly particle filter swap".
I like EVs and will switch my Chevy Colorado to an EV as soon as possible(they're always sold out). But your example is quite literally proof, that an ICE will outlast an EV.
If that's your experience with an EV it's most likely a warranty issue. Happens with ICE cars as well. So far, battery degradation for EV batteries (Tesla's to be exact) has been much less severe as has been feared: https://electrek.co/2018/04/14/tesla-battery-degradation-dat...
(also: I mistyped in my above comment. I meant to say 250.000km not 350.000 miles. Sorry about that)
The Tesla Model S has been out for more than a decade by now. Nissan Leafs, Renault Zoes and a couple of others have been available as production cars in decent numbers for a similar length of time. Tesla says that Model S and X cars experience a 12% degradation after 200.000 miles on average. My 2016 Nissan Leaf fares slightly worse than that but it is built on considerably less advanced battery technology as Tesla's of the same era.
Yes, batteries degrade to a certain extend. But especially with higher range cars, this seems to be an issue of limited severity and it certainly does not seem to impact i.e. resale values of EVs.
> The Tesla Model S has been out for more than a decade by now.
Which is hardly enough data, to make a claim that "people buy EVs less often". We will only be able to make that claim, after a while of EV usage - which should also include recycling of the batteries.
> resale values of EVs
Battery degradation definitely has little impact on EVs, it's also the case with ICE - the runtime of an engine doesn't affect the resale value. Mileage would be the primary objective number that impacts the resale value.
My 2020 Tesla's resale value is up and down, regardless of the battery pack. It's very clear, that it has very little to do with the batteries.
"negative externalities" as described by the people who handily have a solution to sell you; or instruction to give you on how you can Be Better, according to them.
There are about 500,000 electric cars registered in CA, out of about 15,000,000 registrations total. So, ~3.5%. When one factors out the owners who have an ICE vehicle in addition, the % probably goes to less than 1.
That's CA; the best-case scenario. This is also after CAFE tax credits have gone to subsidize electric vehicle production, as well as subsidies and tax credits to electric vehicle purchasers. The original CARB ZEV goal was to have 10% of California's fleet electrified. This goal was set in...1990, and was expected to happen by 2000.
I'm sure it was a hard choice to make. The manufacturers could ask for government support for their business until such a time that government ZEV goals could be achieved with a profitable product, or...they could build the cars that people would pay for.
I think there's a lot more nuance here than you're admitting.
Any major displacement to something as foundational as cars isn't going to happen overnight. Tesla made EV's cool, and that has driven the traditional carmakers to offer more and better EVs, but we're still far from parity when it comes to what you can buy. All the traditional carmakers have a relatively small number of EV options, and they're not available at all trim levels. Like carmaker XYZ but don't want to drive a hatchback? ICE car it is. Like carmaker ABC but don't like the single trim level sedan they chose to base their EV on? ICE car it is.
I would be surprised beyond belief if these manufacturers were not getting pressure from the oil industry to only do the minimum when offering EV models.
Regarding negative externalities: if the price tag of a new car included the cost of all the pollution you're going to be spewing into the air while driving it, EV pricing would look even more attractive, even if we did the same for EVs and included the externality costs of battery manufacture and disposal/recycling.
I was in the market for a new car a year and a half ago. I really wanted to buy an EV, but none of the available models were what I was looking for in a car. Unfortunately, I bought another ICE car. I'm very much hoping that, in 10 years, when I start thinking about another new car, the EV options will be much more varied. I expect there are a lot of people like me, who want to buy an EV, but the product they want isn't on the market (despite equivalent ICE options being available).
>I expect there are a lot of people like me, who want to buy an EV, but the product they want isn't on the market (despite equivalent ICE options being available).
If there was a suitably compelling electric vehicle for everyone, would the ICE market go to zero? Sure-very little of the market wants cars that burn gas for the sake of burning gas. But, that's not a useful observation.
>Regarding negative externalities: if the price tag of a new car included the cost of all the pollution you're going to be spewing into the air while driving it
Other than CO2, what pollution?
>I would be surprised beyond belief if these manufacturers were not getting pressure from the oil industry to only do the minimum when offering EV models.
The oil industry also produces the feedstock for generating the electricity used to charge the electric cars. "Journalist discovers Tesla charging station with a discretely-hidden diesel genset nearby" is practically a meme at this point.
> people buy EVs less frequently than unreliable ICE cars
Huh? The irony of you saying "no basis in fact"...
Design life for a typical ICE car is typically 10 years of service... but not limited to that, as many cars live way past 10 years.
The most expensive part of an EV are batteries, that have a few hundred cycles(the polymer batteries are yet to get to Tesla packs). Let's pretend that everyone gets a 310mile/500km ranges(which is one of the most expensive EVs).
That means that an EV will trash the battery(a critical, 100% unconditional, limit) within 155K miles/250K Km.
We're literally don't have statistics for how often an EV must be fully replaced yet. EV production boom is way less than 10 years.
So maybe you should consider the saying "Pot, meet kettle"
"people buy EVs less frequently than unreliable ICE cars" means EVs are totaled by mechanical issues (Something wears/breaks from normal usage, and the repair bill is greater than the vehicle's post-repair value), and then replaced at lower rates than ICE cars.
The current production Li-ion cells have a few hundred cycles. Once we actually get to that 1500 - we can talk.
But again - a claim that "people buy EVs less" isn't grounded in any fact at all. You know, because people replace cars far more often than "engine failure" or "battery pack is bust"
My argument is simply to refute the claim that "people don't buy EVs as often"... Which is based on estimates and and gut feeling, not exactly backed by any statistics at this point.
Right now - we know for a fact that ICE vehicles can run for decades, we have only very limited data on Li-ion road use EVs. And even then, we will only have only a decade of a smaller number of older generation battery pack EVs.
There are plenty of decades old EVs that are specialized, but they aren't anywhere close to what a Tesla is. We can't compare electric golf carts and Tesla Model 3.
If customers had to pay the actual full cost of an ICE car, including the cost to clean up all the pollution the car will generate over its lifetime, I think it's safe to say customers wouldn't want them.
But yes, from a strictly capitalist point of view, the car companies did not screw up, at least in the short term. They sold their cars at prices that customers were ok with, and made a bundle of money.
So what? Capitalism successfully lined the carmakers pockets' with profits, but our world is becoming less and less habitable for humans every year. Great outcome.
I’d like to add to this that a negative externality that is not priced in is a classical example of market failure in economical thinking. It’s an example of capitalism failing. I’m all for free markets, they are an extremely effective way of getting some things done.but not always.
No, it isn't. You have freedom from restraint, but you never have the right to a specific route at a specific time (excepting corner cases where there is only one possible route out of a place, and blocking it would be de facto imprisonment).
...this is in reference to protestors blocking a road. Are you seriously trying to say that temporarily blocking a road infringes others' right of emigration?
The blockings of roads by the Last Generation are those „corner cases“, because of how they are executed: without a warning a road in front of you is closed and you are stuck. It would be easier to understand if they had left an emergency lane and gave a notice in advance.
We do have a crisis with climate change. It doesn’t justify the way of protest they have chosen, but the severity of the cause was confirmed by some German courts IIRC.
It's not about feeling sorry for them, it's about not abiding a society where you can be imprisoned for something you haven't done.
Nobody needs the right to say "I like ice cream" protected. Nobody would dare impinge on that in the first place. Protecting objectionable behavior is how rights are enshrined.
It's a crisis in the sense that we, the industrialized west, are blowing past all the guard rails and in the name of comfort and profit. The crisis is that somehow we can't really wrap our heads around how bad it can be.
There are quibbles about stuff like precisely what year do we kill the oceans entirely or ho much will melting the artic will really do to raise sea levels. Along the way we appear to be so busy debating the specifics that that we have missed the point That as a planet we need oceans. We are animals who eat and breathe and we can't live if we decimate the biosphere in the name of burning fossil fuels in constantly increasing numbers.
German here. In the article it says the law is there to prevent terrorism. But 9/11 isn't such a big deal here in Germany (except maybe for traveling). The problem is that those people can be detained for "bevorstehenden Begehung oder Fortsetzung einer Ordnungswidrigkeit von erheblicher Bedeutung für die Allgemeinheit" - "imminent commission or continuation of a misdemeanor of substantial public concern."
So they are arrested to prevent misdemeanors which only come with a fine or a super short jail time.
IMO the real reason for this is to protect the automotive industry which is a large part of the German economy
Asking because my context as an American may not apply: If an American were jailed for the maximum 60 days, then they would almost certainly be fired from their job for non-attendance and become 30+ days late on all of their bills since you cannot pay bills from jail. This includes car payments and/or rent, which can result in repossession/eviction proceedings being filed.
Is the situation for short-term prisoners similar in Germany?
I'm referring to the maximum length of detention under the German law being used (if I'm reading things right). I am aware that the US has some pretty serious problems that are at least somewhat related, but I'm trying not to digress into that.
This is outside criminal procedure, which is a federal matter. Since it's not a criminal proceeding, criminal courts don't have jurisdiction, and the rights you have in criminal proceedings do not apply. This is a state administrative matter instead. Legally speaking, this solitary detention is not even a punishment.
That right can be waived to give the defense time to prepare, and it isn't always enforced for non-citizens detained abroad (e.g. Guantanamo), but I'm unaware of anything similar to the article happening in the US.
Pretrial detention can often happen for years, it's one of the issues that makes guilty pleas so insidious. Even if you are innocent, wanting to get your day in court can require you to spend months in jail, so a guilty plea can actually be the more economical outcome.
It's worth noting that one of the examples was someone changing his lawyer repeatedly. I don't believe the right to a speedy trial is violated if you're the one that causes your own delay.
In many cases they would be if they subscribed to a political ideology and committed acts because of them.
In this case overthrowing is actual a protest that went out of control because of lax security. A real overthrow attempt would need to involve heavy weapons. Protesters didn't even have butter knives.
They are not political prisoners. They committed federal crimes while live-streaming it and the government has presented the evidence. It just so happens that the amount of evidence they generated while committing crimes overloaded the DOJ’s capacity to collect and organize it (both prerequisites for discovery by the defendants before they can build their defense).
There have been a few defendants who have successfully challenged the speed of the trial and courts have let them off. It’s far more likely that the DOJ attorneys are simply overwhelmed with the prosecution than they are purposefully persecuting the arrested.
> According to the George Washington Program on Extremism, the FBI has arrested 940 people in connection to January 6. Of those, 43 were convicted, 481 pleaded guilty, and 382 are still waiting for trial. Most of the people waiting are out on bail. [1]
It so happens that the defendants all committed crimes on the same day, causing a backlog in prosecution work. It also happens that DC is a strange jurisdiction that requires coordination between federal officers of different departments (Capitol Police, Parks Police, Secret Service, etc) in a town that must get all funding passed through Congress, which is functionally broken most of the year.
Terrible example of time-to-trial problems in the US, which is actually a significant issue, even in well funded jurisdictions.
Those aren't "political prisoners", they're merely normal criminals, but there's so many of them that the justice system is having a hard time dealing with it. There are only so many federal judges and prosecutors.
We have the right to a speedy trial and a the right to accept a plea bargain. You can decline a plea bargain and demand a speedy trial; the limits are defined by law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedy_Trial_Act
(As with other rights, these rights sometimes require active defense by civil rights organizations, nor are they completely absolute.)
Few people choose this because of the "trail penalty".
If you're found guilty in a trial, you get a 2-4 times longer sentence than the plea deal would have given.
So the theoretical right to a trial remains, but exercising that right is heavily penalized. To me that means the right is for practical purposes no longer exists.
Sure, that's why it's a deal. You say penalty, they say bargain. Both are true. For folks who've genuinely committed big-boy crimes, a plea bargain is great; for falsely accused innocents it presents an unpleasant dilemma at times.
My being able to opt to voluntarily testify doesn't mean the right to remain silent doesn't exist. We'd have no rights by your definition.
The nuance is the US court system allows additional punishment if a defendant chooses to go to trial. Also, plea bargaining usually involves lots of prosecutor bluffing before they have to show discovery which is the same time they can “throw the book at the defendant” (overload the charges beyond what they can actually prove to a jury).
It’s also worth mentioning that the speedy trial can sometimes come with strings attached (as Georgia’s statute which has been recently discussed ad nauseum in the cases of 2 of the 19 2020-electoral-college-RICO defendants)
It seems that GP has deleted their comment before anyone else could reply.
I'll report it here, verbatim, as i still have it open in another tab:
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Are you talking about US citizens?
I'm unaware of that in any recent decades, and I assume you're talking about recent history.
More complicated cases take longer to prepare for trial, but can you point to a single example of a US citizen jailed for political purposes where their trial has clearly been delayed for political reasons?
It's complicated, and the law leaves a lot of wiggle room. In principle, it can be a valid reason to end an employment relationship from the employer side if someone is unable to perform their work due to being in jail. However there's a lot of hoops to jump through for the employer - the absence has to be of "significant length", the employer has to be able to show they deeply looked into it when they came to this conclusion, they need to consult with the employee on it, they may have to look into alternative solutions to fill the gap, etc. As a guideline, if the absence is expected to be two years or longer, much of this is no longer expected by the employer.
I think most employers would not get away with firing someone in this case.
Your employer is not allowed to fire you if are in jail for less than 2 years. You also can't evict someone from their home because of jail. And the government might be paying your landlord for your time in jail as well (depending on the time etc.). It's complicated, but basically, Up to 6 months, all fine on all ends.
Germans don't have car payments usually. They pay for the car in cash, if they don't have enough, they buy a smaller car :)
1% of the purchase value is taxed, regardless of usage (company car could be used only for private purposes). That way the same cost for the employer leads to a bigger car (than if bought with taxed income) for the employee and less money for the government.
And a happy car industry, of course, being able to sell bigger cars.
That's corporate, mostly. But this is changing a bit, there are more private lease constructs but they are quite expensive compared to just owning the car.
And many other industry publications. Private lease is a very small fraction, but it is growing. Same picture in most of Western Europe, in Eastern Europe it is very variable from one country to another.
That's new cars. Which is mostly what employers buy for their employees. It's 35% alltogether.
Just wanted to highlight the different mindset. I am a German living in Canada with my family. The mindset is very different. Based on feeling, 70% of Canadians I know have car debt, whereas I know one person in my German friend circle who took out a loan. It's just not very common to take on debt for cars.
My impression of Germany is people are generally very anti-debt. Credit cards were barely used when I visited back in 2019 (although that changed by the time I went back in 2022)
The primary reason credit cards were rarely used is because Germany already had an electronic payment system (Maestro, formerly eurocheque), so there was no need and credit cards often came with a fee. Online shopping and a huge push by Visa/Mastercard to replace maestro changed this to some extend.
I have noticed that in the US people have much more tolerance for debt. Even relatively poor people in the US are much more likely to buy a new car (or even multiple of them!) than in most of the Europe.
For example, the proportion of financed new cars to all new cars sold is 84% in US vs 47% in Germany.
But that does not say anything how expensive are the cars, how expensive compared to income, how long they are being used or what is the proportion of new cars sold to used cars sold.
In Europe people tend to use the cars for longer after they buy them new and then the cars tend to be used for longer after they are sold used.
Also, in Europe people tend to buy smaller cars. And, historically, we preferred cars that use less fuel which means a lot of older cars are still very viable compared to older US cars.
In the US at least it has often (although not at present) been true that the interest rate on a new car loan with good credit is less than one could return from relatively safe investments. Thus the financially smart thing to do was often to finance the car, even if you could buy it outright.
Too much debt is a bad thing, but so is being excessively debt averse.
I would also say, historically, a dollar now is worth a lot more than a dollar 50 years from now, and your quality of life is probably better, too.
I see lots of people from my parents generation who saved their whole life… and now they have money but nothing to do as their health doesn’t
permit the sort of travel (or outdoor activity, or whatever) they wanted while a 20 or 30-something.
> Thus the financially smart thing to do was often to finance the car, even if you could buy it outright
I think the financially smart thing is to avoid debt as much as possible.
Also, if you absolutely need to take on debt and decided to buy a car, the financially smart thing to do would be to buy as cheap a car as possible. But that's not what really is happening, isn't it?
The reality is that taking debt changes how you think and make decisions and has far more reaching consequences than just the financial cost of the debt.
First of all, buying a car so that you can drive your ass around is very different from sticking those borrowed money into an index.
Second, there exists no index fund that can reliably return 5%. Borrowing money to put it in a financial instrument is called leverage and is a quick way to get poor, not rich (and I know a bit about it because I work with financial risk for a pretty large, well known bank).
Third, for some reason (and, do explain this if you can), people are not storming banks to borrow at 3% to then go to a brokerage house to buy a supposedly reliable index. Please, show me ONE person who got rich this way... I guess not. You see, this is not how people get rich... people get rich mostly by earning a bunch of money and then not losing it. You know, not losing it is kinda important part of getting rich.
In fact, there is lots of people interested in how people actually get rich. And funny thing, nobody gets rich by repeatedly borrowing money and buying index funds. BECAUSE IT DOESN'T WORK.
Fourth, the act of taking debt changes how people think. I also know something about it because for large part of my life I had a lot of debt. Wonderful things happened to me after I paid it all. And while most of it might be in your head, the results are very real.
The avoidance of as much debt as possible is an irrational, emotional attachment to avoiding debt. Excessive amounts of debt is also financially unsound to collect, but the financially prudent thing is some debt, after which you end up with money, or equivalent, than if you not had taken on that debt.
"In Germany, while customers purchase 50 percent of stock cars through financing, they buy 35 percent via lease-based products and additional services."
Well that just sounds like taking a relaxing 6-month vacation from work while the law-abiding taxpayers pay your rent. Meanwhile, your employer and landlord are forced by the government to accept the employment and housing of someone with a criminal history?
I'm usually all for protecting the little guy over the corporate entity, but that sounds like n awful deal for everyone involved except the criminal.
> become 30+ days late on all of their bills since you cannot pay bills from jail
can't americans bind the utilities to their checking account? i (european) can do that. the bills are paid automatically from my balance (the same where i receive my salary). the web portal from my bank can lists all the entities allowed to pay bills from my balance, and i can revoke any of them unilaterally (in that case i'd have to go back to pay the bills one by one, manually).
They can but that's generally not the problem. You aren't getting paid while you're in jail, so those payments are likely to bounce (Americans often live paycheck to paycheck).
It is almost impossible to fire long term employees in Germany. But getting proper employment is very difficult for this reason. Most people are on yearly contracts, part time jobs etc...
Please provide a citation. In 2022, about 30% of new hires had a term limit. The peak was in 2004, with about 54% at a time when very few positions were available.
I already cited the share of term limited contracts above.
It’s not surprising that term limited contracts are a significant chunk of the Job offerings, even if they are a small share of the total contracts - a job posting that must be renewed annually will appear every year for the same position, while an unlimited contract only opens up when a replacement must be found or a new position is created. Another cause is that a lot of companies use a limited contract as a trial period and later convert to an unlimited contract at renewal time.
It is absolutely true that some sectors suffer from having a huge chunk of limited contracts (academia for example) and that there’s abuse (auxiliary teachers only being employed during the term and made redundant during vacations), but generalizing this to the entire German job market is neither warranted nor helpful.
This is just false, plain and simple. I’ll just take one of your statements and refute it, because the other parts are so broad and generalizing that you’ll just come around and make other shit up:
Absolutely untrue. Source: was fired from indefinite employment contract in Germany. If they hate you and start throwing at you Abmahnung, Aufhebung, and Kundigung, you need a lawyer immediately and the pile of papers and letters starts growing exponentially.
"and become 30+ days late on all of their bills since you cannot pay bills from jail"
Do Americans have to authorize all their recurring payments every month again and again? I certainly never paid such bills "one by one"; I set up a regular monthly payment and it would be done automatically on the Nth day of a month.
Some bills can't be autopaid either easily or at all, particularly utility bills. For those that can be autopaid, many people don't have them on autopay because of potential disruptions when living paycheck-to-paycheck. If you have to choose between food and rent, you better not have the rent on autopay, or you've accidentally made your choice.
60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, so this wouldn't matter. If they're not making money in jail they can't pay their rent, even if they have autopay set up.
Some people choose not to set up automatic payments, and the percentage of people who are living paycheck to paycheck or nearly so is high enough that, even among those who do, probably a significant percentage would see the second month's payments fail if they were set up using a bank draft or debit card rather than a credit card.
Most payments are done using SEPA mandates. The money automatically leaves your account, but you still get a piece of paper with the details.
I don’t remember paying a single bill manually for the past 3 years at least. Credit card is paid in full at the end of the month as well automatically.
Which all comes grinding to a halt pretty quickly when you stop getting paid because you're in jail.
I'm not sure about Germany specifically, but in the US the vast majority of people live paycheck-to-paycheck regardless of income bracket. Most are 2 weeks away from starting to have failing bill payments.
The rules about not paying employees for absences are a bit more difficult in Germany. Voluntary unannounced absence or unpaid vacation would be the simple cases, but involuntary absences don’t entitle the employer immediately to withhold payment, at least not for most employees on a fixed term contract. Things get more involved for workers that get paid by the piece. Freelancers would probably be the most hard hit here.
This would pretty clearly be an involuntary absence - these folks are not even accused of committing a crime.
Absence is reason to withhold payment in Germany, you can only expect continued payment if you are absent because you are ill (and then only for a certain period). There are some provisions like having to pay out leftover holidays and overtime before stopping payments altogether, but payment is contingent on really working in general.
Note that this is different from ending employment: If you are in jail, only an extended length of absence (usually 2 years) or a work-related crime is reason for dismissal. If you are in jail for 23 months you'll keep your job usually, you are just not getting paid.
> Der zur Dienstleistung Verpflichtete wird des Anspruchs auf die Vergütung nicht dadurch verlustig, dass er für eine verhältnismäßig nicht erhebliche Zeit durch einen in seiner Person liegenden Grund ohne sein Verschulden an der Dienstleistung verhindert wird.
The key terms here are “verhältnismäßig nicht erhebliche Zeit” and “ohne Verschulden”. That means that if you’re absent a relatively short time (usually compared to the duration of the employment and the notice period) and without being at fault for the absence, you get paid.
There’s a lot of interpretation here: for example if your bus is late, you’re responsible (you could have taken an earlier bus), if there’s an announced strike, you’re still at fault - you knew before etc. The cause must also lie in your person specifically - if you’re stuck in traffic with hundreds of other employees due to an accident, the paragraph does not apply. If you’re missing out on work because you were involved in that accident, it does.
But being imprisoned without having committed a crime is very unlikely to be considered a fault of the employee.
Your work contract or collective bargaining agreement may modify or specify where this paragraph is applicable. No legal advice, not a lawyer,…
> But being imprisoned without having committed a crime is very unlikely to be considered a fault of the employee.
I would (without being a lawyer and without having a case to cite) suspect that in those cases it would be considered to be the fault of the employee. In many, if not all cases, they had prior arrests, indictments and some were even found guilty, yet announced further blockades. I guess to a judge, that should make it their fault.
> Your work contract or collective bargaining agreement may modify or specify where this paragraph is applicable.
You have to be very careful with the word suspect here. No crime has been committed, not even alleged. The allegations are that the arrested may in the future cause disruptions - it’s currently even unclear whether these acts are crimes, misdemeanors or even public demonstrations and as such protected by law and the constitution. Legal opinions and court decisions are all over the place.
The jail time is even more problematic given that the acts that the imprisoned may commit in the future are not punishable by prison time in practically all cases.
(As a side note: I would also be extraordinarily careful citing an article in the Stern, which cites allegations that the Welt published, without having at least a second source that confirms it)
Most reasons in §14PAG for preventative arrest include a crime or misdemeanor that has been committed and will likely be repeated, or the proven announcement or planning of such an offense. So most will be suspects in the literal sense, otherwise they wouldn't be in preventative arrest: http://www.lexsoft.de/cgi-bin/lexsoft/justizportal_nrw.cgi?x...
Nah, you can buy a filter in Germany that goes between your wall socket and appliance. The device makes sure that only "good" electricity (ie. the kind that was generated by your preferred source) powers your appliances.
Do you really pay you bills manually each month? When regular payments (like rent) are not debited directly from my account, I set up an auto transfer that sends out rent to my landlord at the 1st day of each month.
Personally, I have everything automated. Including one incredibly dumb thing: I have to pay my homeowners' association dues (I live in a small condo building, so we have shared expenses) by check, so I have my bank mail a check to their bank. It's incredibly dumb that I can't easily set up an automated electronic bank transfer, but at least I can automate mailing a paper check.
US government agencies can also be annoying about this. For example, the city/county of San Francisco does not offer a way to automatically pay property taxes, which are billed twice a year. (My mortgage lender pays mine for me via an escrow account that gets funded along with my automatic monthly mortgage payment.)
But a lot of people in the US are un- or under-banked, and don't always have access to automation, if the people/orgs they have to pay support any kind of automation at all. Many landlords (especially those who cater to lower-income folks) will only accept cash or check. Many people who have to pay them don't have an online bill-pay system. And even many who could automate things, don't, because their finances are precarious enough that they will sometimes choose to skip a credit card payment, or pay their rent late, etc., and they'll make these decisions month-to-month.
If many people in the US were in jail for two months, after the first month (of not working, thus not getting paid) they wouldn't have enough money in their bank account to cover all their monthly bills. An unfortunate amount of people here live paycheck-to-paycheck.
Also consider that there's a lot of overlap between people who have unstable finances and people who are more likely to get caught up in the justice system, regardless of their innocence or guilt.
In America, several protestors and advocates have been mysteriously disappeared by the justice system as well. Of course, we know what happened with the Black Panther Party but similar tactics are still happening in current day.
This is a pretty big accusation without any kind of sources or links or whatsoever, you could at least name them or their cases so one can research on their own...
More topically, police in Georgia are filing RICO charges against 61 activists who are protesting a police training center down there. They've also filed money laundering charges against a group who tried to organize a bail fund: https://apnews.com/article/atlanta-cop-city-protests-rico-ch...
If anyone LSO/LG have earned the "reputation" for destructive or disrupting stunts
I actually do think they're indirectly being financed by the oil industry (LSO head figures go around in private jets) to antagonize and create a bad (but not unrealistic) caricature of the climate protestors. And of course there's plenty of people willing to play the roles
Greta looks like the serious grownup compared to LSO
I want to believe that there was a "specific action". An explicit announcement to block a road / airport / whatever.
Unfortunately, it is cheaper for the gonvernment to detain people than to send police to prevent it shortly before it is going to happen.
Also, the ruling party in Bavaria is mainly controlled by the opinions people exchange in pubs over a couple of beers (one beer being a quarter gallon), and there common sense isn't considered that much.
No art has been destroyed, it all sits behind glass so it's just a matter of cleaning/replacing the frame for the painting. And much as I love art, I think throwing food or paint at it is a good reminder that while you can make more art you can't bring back lost species or ecosystems.
There's a good chance Brexit would not have happened if the vote was done today, simply because of old people dying off (most over 65 voted for, most under 35 voted against).
It does look like a lot of climate legislation is facing similar situations, where the boomer generation is voting opposite to younger generations.
In both cases it's frustrating because the younger generations are the ones that will have to deal with the consequences of laws they did not agree with.
… to their children who won’t have much use for said property because of how fucked up their situation has become as a direct consequence of how that property was earned in the first place …
> The children have no future. The old have accumulated ownership of pretty much everything.
This is in general a myth. If you look at millennials or gen-z, ownership at their age isn't any different from the boomer generation. And it's still the best time to be born in.
We can all agree that climate change is a problem to be solved, but "the old" can remember plenty of doomsday scenarios that never happened, including past predictions that global warming would destroy the world by year 2000.
In the meantime, activists that prevent people from going to work, or that destroy property, are just jerks IMO.
Yeah this is what I believe, I'm very young and I imagine that the parent post is talking about my generation but I cannot really stand with these people, they, for example, rally against nuclear energy, it just show how performative these protests are in reality, and how they do more harm than good. Also of course vandalizing properties has given them a certain reputation.
past predictions that global warming would destroy the world by year 2000
This is a bullshit conservative trope. I'm 53 and no such prediction was ever advanced as a basis for policymaking. Just because someone might have made such a hyperbolic prediction in a TV show or magazine doesn't mean it ever had widespread currency in the scientific or policy community.
The world has a long history of bad predictions. Search for example for the predictions made with the advent of the first Earth Day, 1970.
Some predictions were more accurate than others, which led to effective policies, so for example, thankfully, we still have an ozone layer and we haven't started a nuclear war yet.
Not sure what "poisoning the well" is supposed to mean here. I was replying to someone that predicts some sort of violent revolution. For what, I can only guess.
The fact that the old own much, much more than the young isn’t a bad thing—it’s evidence that the economy is a wealth-creation machine which works quite well.
A 60 year old has been working 4x years longer than a 30 year old. The average dollar a 30 year old saved between 20-30 has, by the time they’re 30, grown for five years to ~$1.30 (assuming historical S&P returns), while the average dollar a 60 year old saved from 20-30 has grown for 35 years to ~$7.20.
Any system where the old didn’t own much more than the young would be a nightmare.
> A generation with nothing to lose.
That’s what they said about millennials. Now the average millennial is 34, has kids and owns their home. Isn’t it just the pits when the system turns your would-be revolutionaries into homeowning parents with a stake in the success and stability of the system? Maybe it’s oppressing them through prosperity?
> Now the average millennial [...] owns their home
I found this suspect, and looked up some stats[0]. It's hard to tell exactly, since the age groups don't fall on generational boundaries. But it does seem like ~50% of millennials own a home.
However, the more concerning trend is that rates of home ownership have declined across all age groups since 2009[1]. In particular, the age of the average homeowner increased by 10 years between 2001 and 2019.
The homeownership rate was high in ‘09 because of the real estate bubble. Homeownership rates are fine from a historical perspective[0] and are trending up.
Good. These idiots are a net harm to the climate change cause. The only thing they have managed is accelerated resentment towards pro climate activities.
It is fully possible I have a naive interpretation of their goals and perhaps they're just looking for an excuse to be the biggest twats possible.
> The only thing they have managed is accelerated resentment towards pro climate activities.
I'm not so sure about that. I see a fair number of people who got woken up to how serious things are by these protests as well. Before they saw this kind of thing on the news, it didn't strike them as particularly real. It's a "sign of the times" for them.
How have they expressed that? How has it changed their minds?
I'd be genuinely amazed at the personality of a person who goes "Wow! They must be disrupting my day for a very important reason. Let me look up and better research their cause," versus "Oh f**, I'm going to be late to my appointment. What's going on? Oh, these idiots are blocking the street."
If you're going to interrupt my life based on some future, uncertain scientific reasoning, especially the lives of everyday working-class people who can't afford to spend their day blocking streets instead of working, it would turn me off to your cause, and that's the only sentiment I've heard from my friends.
Maybe we're wrong for that, but I'm curious how others would respond.
I think there's plenty of people who are surprised that some people take the climate situation as seriously enough that they would organize and do this, especially when others chime in with "you should expect more of this, the coming decades will see a lot of things destabilize". I've not encountered much anti-activism sentiment, at most a "they have a point, but it's the wrong way to do it".
I've not seen anyone leave their gasoline engine on idle on their behalf to spite them.
It definitely would be better digested by the general population if their actions avoided targeting the working class, like they did recently with blocking private jets.
In Italy they threw paint at statues, damaging them because they thought "washable" paint would be easily cleaned with water. Whereas it's the kind that most thoroughly repels it. That's not the way to get random people's sympathy.
See, thats the difference between you and me - you worship inflexible ideals even when they might destroy and corrupt the very thing they are supposed to protect, whilst I'm capable of seeing when something isn't working as intended and amendments are needed.
It’s not exactly that. This group (as a whole, maybe not the specific people) committed to continue their actions and people from it released in the past were participating in blockades again. It’s definitely not a Minority Report-style prediction of what they could do based on affiliation, personality etc.
Besides, it’s not just blocking highways or streets. They blocked runways in airports too - imagine what could happen if a plane with failed engine could not land because of them.
I don't speak German, could someone clarify this for me: did they publicly admit to that they were planning to commit crimes, or aid others in committing crimes? If they were publicly planning criminal acts I don't see much, if any, issue of physically removing them from the ability to commit the crime, but I would need more context to make a personal judgement.
No, as far as I know, they did not specifically post time & day & intent of any crimes. They were known activists, and using a very controversial law, were preventatively taken into custody in the lead up of Germany's largest automotive expo.
The bar you must jump to be able to do this to some one is state law, and differs by state. The bar in Bavara is, arguably, lower than in some other states by my (uneducated in the laws, so not very relevant) reading.
For example in many German states, it requires a crime to be imminent. In Bavaria this is not the case.
I assume so, yeah. The "Last Generation" is a loosely organized activist group that has been making headlines in the country for the past months, and by my understanding these were known associates/members of the org. One of their things to do is to glue themselves down in places to hinder others, think at events, on streets, tracks, airfields, etc.
I don't know if there was concrete evidence of past crimes/actions for them. By my reading, Bavarian state law does not require this. In some other States, it is listed as one of the conditions to meet or "likely to repeat" is somehow baked into the lingo.
I don't know why you put that in quotes, I don't believe there has been a single successful activist movement in history that never had to break the law. That doesn't mean that all illegal protest is justified, but it does mean that the legality of an action is not useful in determining whether it's justified and effective.
As far as the linked article says, at least some, if not all, of them were already found at similar blockades, some were also already judged guilty and fined:
> So entschied zum Beispiel das Landgericht Landshut, dass ein rund sechstägiger Präventiv-Freiheitsentzug für Klima-Aktivisten unzulässig sei, die sich 2021 auf Autobahnbrücken rund um die Internationale Automobilausstellung (IAA) in München ein paar Meter abgeseilt hatten, worauf die Polizei den Verkehr stoppte. Kernargument: Eine Wiederholungsgefahr sei nicht hinreichend erkennbar.
State attorneys in Germany are not independent from the Ministry of Justice (because of that, Germany is currently not allowed to issue European Arrest Warrants). Also courts tend to confirm the status quo.
Planning to do a crime is illegal too, so you could jail someone for that, if they are admitting to planning to do something criminal enough. However, the article states that there is no due process or actual accusation of a crime.
The activists have been arrested for participating in similar protests before and a court has deemed that they were likely to participate in similar protests again, and cause significant public disturbances. Others have pointed out that the state police law that these arrests are based on are very controversial and are currently challenged in court. I might add that the judiciary in Bavaria has a very pro-prosecution reputation in cases against progressive activists.
The cherry on top of this concerning totalitarian overreach is that even if the imprisoned would be found guilty of what they are accused of intending, it would not be punishable by prison, but fines only (!!). (Source: linked article)
I've been told that an ancestor of mine was escorted to jail when our king was passing by his city and sent back home when the king was gone. That was the 19th century.
I don't know much German, so I can't read the original article.
It would be helpful to know if by "they might otherwise engage in climate protests," the people in question had planned to just say things but otherwise stay out of the way, or if rather the people in question had made public their plans to break laws (like blocking traffic, which many climate protesters have been doing lately). In the one case there is no crime, and governments shouldn't be detaining people just in case they commit a crime later. In the other case, even if someone isn't a terrorist, planning on breaking the law is itself a crime, and it's not "preventative detention."
They haven't been convicted of anything, they're being detained anyway. This is not the same as pre-trial detention, if Google Translate is a remotely accurate rendering of the linked article:
"Legally, this police approach is called preventive detention because it is not detention for a crime that has been committed. The police laws of the different states allow this for different lengths of time. In Bavaria, up to one month in prison is permitted, which may be extended by a judge for a maximum of another month.
The so-called preventive or preventive detention is very controversial. The relevant laws were originally created to prevent terrorists from carrying out attacks. However, this form of detention is now also permitted in the case of the “imminent commission or continuation of an administrative offense of considerable importance for the general public,” as the Bavarian police law states. Lawsuits against this have so far been rejected in Bavaria. However, a final clarification about the legality of this approach is still pending."
The linked site in the toot almost certainly violates the GDPR since it requires either payment or tracking consent to access. Requiring payment is fine, but forced consent is not.
I don't think so, the GDPR requires to ask for consent but nobody is being forced to press the "I consent" button. Additionally I'd guess the website of a German newspaper of record is not breaking the law.
And there is absolutely a great number of major European news and media companies willingly ignoring the GDPR. Most people even remotely interested know this.
This is is a state law, not a federal one. As far as I understand it is limited to 2 months. Just a clarification, not a justification. It was a somewhat controversial law, and I think those cases clearly show why. Those laws always get justified with terrorism, and now they're jailing people that block traffic.
I don't think such laws should exist, and we should do better there. Unfortunately I don't expect that with the Bavarian politic landscape this will happen on the legislative way.
Also might be worth mentioning that the Bavarian state police law that these arrests are based on is actively challenged in court and there arrests could become part of that case.
Your freedom of movement doesn't entitle you drive a car, and the history of protest is soaked in examples of protestors effectively blocking specific forms of transportation to make a point.
You don't have a right to drive a car. It's a privilege, as indicated by your drivers' license.
You're entitled to be upset when someone blocks your car. But framing it as a civil rights issue rather than a practical one (and calling someone blocking your car "kinetic") makes you come across as un-serious.
This is a profound misunderstanding of civil liberties. Being inconvenienced by another person doesn't violate anything.
If the government were to install roadblocks and check your identity card before letting you leave your town, that would violate your freedom of movement. If a local private militia did the same thing, it would be as well. But being slightly delayed by a bunch of environmentalists blocking a specific form of transit doesn't meaningfully violate anything.
The counterstatement here would be "the state has the right to forcefully remove anybody who slightly inconveniences me"; it should be obvious why this would be a gross violation of civil liberties.
This is a useless distinction when the distances dictate pretty much this only mode of transportation: nobody's going to march 40km on foot unless their lives depend on it.
The counterstatement here would be "the state has the right to forcefully remove anybody who slightly inconveniences me"; it should be obvious why this would be a gross violation of civil liberties.
There is a whole slew of laws and regulations dealing with people who inconvenience others on purpose.
> nobody's going to march 40km on foot unless their lives depend on it.
Freedom of movement specifically exists for when "your lives depend on it" - it is a vital right to preserve and the freedom to make that 40 km walk has saved countless lives over the centuries.
Freedom of movement is a fundamental right in Germany. Your freedom to move the car everywhere, and without qualification is of course limited for the safety of everyone. But driving places is part of your personal freedom, which has to be weighed against somebody else's freedom to protest.
If people who wanted change always avoided breaking laws during their protests, there would be a lot less positive change int he world. You might want to read up on the history of protest, and, specifically, civil disobedience.
You're unironically repeating the same kind of rhetoric used against Martin Luther King Jr and Gandhi when their protests happened to mildly inconvenience people in power.
While voting should be done, it is not always effective/possible. An obvious example to bring up is the suffragist, since they were not allowed to vote.
The point of protesting in a manner that is truly disruptive is to force the problem to be dealt with. This concept seems to allude many, to them the only acceptable form of protest is one that is entirely ignorable. I’m not sure we would have many of the important freedoms we have today without people choosing to be disruptive in this manner you find unacceptable.
Good reading on this is “How to blow up a pipeline by Andreas Malm” … the disruptions we see right now are pretty mild & maybe this preventive detention is an attempt to reel in the more extreme activists before they do something truly disruptive?
"Voting is not always effective" is true especially in Bavaria, where the CSU has perfected populism to the point that they have managed to stay in power basically since the current Federal Republic of Germany exists (with a brief interruption from 1954 to 1957) - if they don't get more than 50% of the Landtag seats, they can pick and choose their coalition partner, and they have already excluded a coalition with the Green party, because other parties (FDP, Freie Wähler) are more pliant.
Some would argue that a car highway prevents right of movement for pedestrians and cyclists.
I get what you're saying but you're very narrowly trying to define right of movement to make your argument and without your narrow definition it falls apart.
Driving cars is so much more than just driving cars. The practice of driving cars is one of the major practices that is leading to the destruction of our planet's ability to support our life.
There is a fundamental difference between killing people, placing bombs and gluing yourself to a road. If your definition of terrorism includes all of these, it's useless.
Not really hard to come up with situations where this actually kills people. Someone in an ambulance getting delayed in getting to the hospital, just for a start.
If the teamsters strike hospitals miss drug shipments and people die. Farming protests can lead to food supply chain disruptions. Transport strikes cause economic disruption which could theoretically lead to deaths.
That’s not what terrorism is.
Terrorism requires terrorising people through violence and intimidation. Not standing on a highway.
So you're saying that silently disconnecting all power stations of a country via software is not terrorism? Is it an attack to you at all? Or is it just a protest too? Cyberterrorism is a big thing. Where is the violence or intimidation in manipulating software?
Terrorism is a broad term but it is rarely used for its lower end as its also a term used as a tool to scare people. The idea that it mandates violence is outdated. Violence was the means to terrorize but it no longer is.
> So you're saying that silently disconnecting all power stations of a country via software is not terrorism?
This terrorises people. It causes mass fear and panic, and will cause pretty immediate loss of life. All people have good reason fear for the safety of them and their loved ones in the case of a catastrophic grid failure.
This is not true of blocking a highway. It’s an economic disruption. The response of those opposed to the action is one of anger and frustration. Society at large does not fear for their safety because people are occasionally blocking highways, unlike in a mass terrorist campaign.
Cyberterrorism as a term is applied too liberally, a direct result of governments wanting to expand their powers under the guise of combating terrorism. Software attacks that immediately threaten life and limb (eg attacks on health systems, major damage to critical infrastructure) can be argued to be cyberterrorism. Not every software attack is of that magnitude.
It's the same thing as both make life miserable. Hundreds/thousands may lose hours of their lives. Some may lose a job, a life opportunity, some may die. And all for nothing because this kind of protest is counterproductive as it associates climate change talk with narcissistic clowns.
There is no enumerated right in Germany, the US or Canada to have a pleasant life and plenty of people suffer far worse than the occasional traffic inconvenience. There is in fact a war going on in Ukraine right now which is making a whole bunch of peoples' lives quite legitimately miserable and depriving many of their lives - well beyond adding twenty minutes onto a trip to costco.
I think it's totally legitimate to argue over how effective an action like this is for the cause - but this is a quite reasonable form of protest.
There are surprisingly few ambulance rides that would result in a death if they encountered a 5 minute delay. Half the time they are empty and if they are not empty they first stabilize the patient and then bring them to hospital relatively stable. Ambulance is really more like a hospital on wheels than a fast taxi with space for a stretcher
Sports games kill people in this manner all the time - if a football game is letting out and causing a traffic jam we don't consider that to be manslaughter. And common sources of traffic like that provide a much higher widespread effect than protests (which can usually be routed around by emergency services - and which will often voluntarily disassemble for emergency health services).
The difference is that a sports game is generally not being organized by a group that's trying to use those consequences as an intimidation tactic to get what they want. I could say, "accidents with explosives at fireworks shows accidentally kill people sometimes," but there would still be a difference between putting on a fireworks show and bombing a mall.
You could come up with a scenario, sure. Bad in law though. [1]
Another scenario you could come up with is a future climate catastrophe, where millions die and/or are displaced because of this global boiling era.
Incidentally, which is the protest thought crime that is being prosecuted.
[1] Legally there's a world of difference between proximal causes and proximate causes. (Neighborhood vs causally related.)
How about we stop making up hypothetical situations to justify authoritarian acts by the state, violence or worse, death, and stick to the facts of the matter?
If protests actually cause deaths, we can always prosecute the people causing said death as manslaughter or negligent homicide.
Until then it’s just a protest, guaranteed in many countries as a civil right.
This is not restricting freedom of movement. Merely inconveniencing. But the bar is pretty low when you see the reaction you get from the driver behind you if you overtake with “only” 130km/h on the autobahn, instead of 150+ km/h like they do.
This is a really deep misunderstanding of what freedom of movement means - and if this qualified as interrupting freedom of movement then there'd be violations every time we needed to fill a pothole. There is no right to convenient movement - just to movement at all.
Hasn't Germany ratified the European Convention on Human Rights? Those are definitely breaching the above and could easily be considered as fascist laws. This should be a fairly easy trial.
I can't be alone in thinking that jailing people who obstruct traffic and jailing people who we believe intend to obstruct traffic are two totally different matters.
Usually that believe stems from the fact that those people explicitly announced they would do it again. And again. After being sentenced. In front of a judge.
I would still rather have them sentenced for the crimes they’ve committed - even if sentenced harshly due to their unrepentant disposition - than for the crimes they may commit in the future.
We are all hypothetical criminals and I would prefer that the state not have that freedom to lock people up.
I don't think most people have claimed they will commit a crime in the future. Not necessarily for climate protests, but in many cases in the US we do this same thing too.
I do believe it is reasonable to hold repeat offenders. And I hope this law will be upheld when tried. These people do not understand democratic dialogue and so I have no pity for them.
Specifically: in Bavaria. Which is, of course, in Germany, but also a bit of a "state within a state", ruled by one party (the CSU) since the beginning of time, er, of the Federal Republic of Germany, and where things like this, which would cause much more outrage elsewhere, can and do happen.
So then use nuclear power. Oh wait, you can't because there was an tsunami in Japan.
Germany: "oh well, we'll increase burning clean coal, but create some crazy roadmap that we'll be carbon free in a few decades or so"
Germany needs to get its shit together, energy-wise. You are a disgrace in the union, honestly. With your economical development and technical know-how levels you should be at the forefront.
We had technical know-how. Past tense. Then technology became evil incarnate.
Nowadays we are scared of everything, ignorant of any kind of science. All policy and all public outrage is purely based on ideology and wishful thinking. If one kind of wishful thinking fails, we do not reconsider, we double down or replace by another, even weirder kind of wishful thinking.
Basically, we are back to a pre-renaissance way of thinking. We are back in the dark ages.
The Danish Church is allowed to veto buildings of wind turbines if they were within the 28x the height of the turbine. This is quite a long distance if you consider the 160m tall 14MW Siemens (though I think that may be offshore only).
There are more than 2000 churches in Denmark. Only the minister of the interior could override that veto.
That’s very concerning. This bill came to life to prevent terrorist attacks like 9/11 but is now being abused in bavaria to jail climate protesters who could disturb the biggest automotive fair in the world.
What is the value of everyone here wrt to voters? It makes you wonder what other policies the politicians who championed the "jail you for any reason under the guise of terrorism" policy also advocated for to get people to vote for them.
The law is garbage and needs to go. I'm not defending it in the slightest.
Tangentially, saying "everyone warned this would happen" as a criticism of something is almost always hindsight bias or survivorship bias. There are plenty of things that "everyone" says will happen that never happen and for the ones that do happen, "everyone" tends to overstate how certain they were about it being the only possible outcome.
Yeah, Germans are actually kind of obsessed with Hitler, it's a bit freaky to hear them talk about it.
The weirdest one for me: every year the research group I'm part of has a group retreat, and our German boss (unknowingly) makes us do a pose that Hitler used a lot in our group photo...they still love everything that Hitler was, apart from the anti-semitic and racist part
There is no law against mentioning Hitler or something like that. There are laws against denying the Holocaust, glorifying the Nazi regime or using Nazi symbols (e.g. the swastika).
How can Europe call itself the bastion of liberty if you can detain someone because they participated in a protest, no strike that, because you feel they may participate in a protest. The bar has been lowered. Where does the rest of the world look up to now for the benchmark for fundamental rights?
This is a very particular place within Europe called "Bavaria", a quasi-kingdom ruled by the same political party since time immortal. A bit like North Korea, but inhabited mostly by rich Catholics ;)
(e.g. don't mix up "Bavaria" with "Europe", Bavaria's political situation is even atypical for Germany)
I'm pretty sure these "activists" are sponsored by oil and car companies. The idea is to provoke aggression towards climate activism, which would lead to increase in ICE car usage.
It seems far-fetched to me. Most people agree with the need for change. They disagree with the way they protest.
I also don't see why many people would use a car more frequently just because there are protests against it.
Additionally, many members come from Fridays for Future. They are frustrated as years of peaceful protest have led to no change. I see no connection to oil or car sponsorship in this.
There is very little sympathy with them by the common people. They have really overdone it with sabotaging common people's everyday life and calling it a "peacful protest". By that logic locking them away for a few days can also be described as peaceful.
That is not correct, the state attorney has investigated this and found that the climate activists had no impact on the death of a cyclist, they would have died either way.
Please cite your sources when making incidiary claims.
If only the state attorney was politically independent. Which is not the case for in some European countries. And climate activism is financially supported by German's green left wing parties. No wonder the state attorney came to such a conclusion
> The situation is completely different for public prosecutors: They are bound by instructions, and a long chain of examining authorities stands above them.
> Above all, the many reports in politically sensitive cases demotivate public prosecutors and tie up resources that could be used for investigations.
There's ton of information available, especially for the case of Germany.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 371 ms ] threadI'm sure protesting nuclear so they can keep ripping up towns for coal is fine, though.
https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-Enterpris...
Germany's shutdown of their nuclear generating capacity, and their dependence on Russian natural gas was a major factor in the invasion, and hence Germany's necessity to shift back to coal.
It was a stupid move, considering that Germany also pushed to classify gas power as "clean" in the EU.
The current government wants to push this date up to 2030 and is evaluating if and how that's even possible (https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/vorgezogener-k...).
That'll show 'em!
Not to mention that EVs are enormously popular! They are only being produced now because Tesla is making them. EVs are far more reliable and cheaper to maintain than ICE cars, which is bad if you're a car manufacturer because people buy EVs less frequently than unreliable ICE cars.
"ICE only exists because customers only want them" has no basis in fact.
They don't make them reliable.. I wonder why?.
Trick #2: many car platforms share engines. Try to buy a car with an engine that has been used for a few years.
These two things alone, will ensure you aren't a beta tester.
You can only say this, if you stop your ears, and explain away anyone as wanting one.
For example, no EV has the range I require. There are many in my boat. No, I'm not wrong, and you can never be right, telling me I'm wrong in what I need. Ever.
As well, trying to claim EVs are more reliable is an amazing assertion, many buy ICE cars, put 250000km on them with only brake and tire changes, and drove them a decade. I know I do.
In fact, it's literally impossible to determine which takes more maintenance, because the majority of EVs aren't a decade old. And the ones that are, are very early models, and not indicatively comparable to the volume of ICE cars, even now.
I wonder, how.many decades of car ownership do you speak from? Do you have reliably studies going back decades for EVs, with large production runs?
You're just saying what you hope is true. That's not how reality works.
So yes, you may have very specific needs that limit your choice of vehicles. But the needs of the vast majority of car owners can be served by current EV technology perfectly well.
Apart from that: EVs have less moving parts by an order of magnitude compared to ICE cars. Of course they are more reliable, especially when you take into account that many (most?) drivers do not adhere to the very stringent service/fluid change intervals on their cars. Again, you might be different, but most people abuse their cars. My parent's VW T5 for example just crossed 350.000 miles and already had several minor engine issues in addition to a costly particle filter swap.
All supposition, much as your assertions about reliability. Reliability doesn't come from the amount of moving parts alone.
You're just theorizing, which is fine in of itself, but not when you present it as fact.
So more or less a very typical commute. My 2016 Nissan Leaf could do this daily drive for 5 days without recharging, today's model's can do half a month of this before the battery is empty. Again: your needs might be on the extreme end and not suited to an EV (currently) but you are the absolute exception. This is not theorizing, it has been well studied and established.
For a densely populated country such as Germany, you have provided one study which speaks of averages.
Of course, this doesn't show the spread of that average. And of course, it is ridiculous to presume this is normal, as we all know how densely packed Germany is.
You are trying to claim that one of the outliers, that is, German driving habits, is an average!
This is more than the average German car drives daily, but still perfectly manageable for modern (or even 5 year old) EVs. Even assuming an EV can't be charged anywhere, it could still handle 6 days worth of these trips. Even if you commute 300+ miles daily, you could probably spend 20 minutes per trip at a public charger.
Again, maybe this isn't for you. That is fine. But EVs are perfectly suitable for the vast majority of car users and it would be up to you at this point to disprove that statement.
As I said prior, what is the spread?
And beyond that, if someone drives very little for 8 months, then drives a lot for 4 months, which happens a lot (kids, summer, vacations, cabins in the summer)...
Many people have range anxiety. People keep saying it's silly, and keep explaining why.
How about you just realise, instead, people with range anxiety aren't morons, and 100% have made a valid assessment?
Of course people aren't "morons" and I never said as much. But people generally do what they are used to and what trusted authorities (and I use that term deliberately loosely) tell them what is ok. Nobody has time to research every little aspect of their lives in-depth to make a completely informed decision. So if people like you are telling everyone who will listen "many/most people will not be served well by an EV," that has consequences, the same way as if I would tell people "there is no justification whatsoever to drive an ICE" (which I'm explicitly not doing).
I've looked into this quite a bit and all data I can find points to EVs being a smart choice for most people if they intend to buy a new car or if they can find a suitable used one (the market availability for the latter is still small). It should be the natural choice if there is not some special circumstance in your life (as seems to be in yours).
It's funny, because my $70k Tesla Model Y will have to have it's whole battery pack replaced by the time it reaches 155k Miles.
Can you guess which part of any Tesla is the most expensive one? The damn battery pack...
Now compare replacing the whole car(yes, you can't just replace the battery pack) to VW having just "several minor engine issues in addition to a costly particle filter swap".
I like EVs and will switch my Chevy Colorado to an EV as soon as possible(they're always sold out). But your example is quite literally proof, that an ICE will outlast an EV.
(also: I mistyped in my above comment. I meant to say 250.000km not 350.000 miles. Sorry about that)
We know ICEs can last for decades. We don't know how long Li-ion based EVs will last, practically. Theoretically they will not last as much as ICE.
While we don't have conclusive data - let's not pretend that anything about EV's longevity is a fact.
The only fact about EVs - they haven't been out long enough to make a statement based on empirical evidence.
(Take it from an EV advocate in general and someone heavily invested in Tesla stock)
Yes, batteries degrade to a certain extend. But especially with higher range cars, this seems to be an issue of limited severity and it certainly does not seem to impact i.e. resale values of EVs.
Which is hardly enough data, to make a claim that "people buy EVs less often". We will only be able to make that claim, after a while of EV usage - which should also include recycling of the batteries.
> resale values of EVs
Battery degradation definitely has little impact on EVs, it's also the case with ICE - the runtime of an engine doesn't affect the resale value. Mileage would be the primary objective number that impacts the resale value.
My 2020 Tesla's resale value is up and down, regardless of the battery pack. It's very clear, that it has very little to do with the batteries.
There are about 500,000 electric cars registered in CA, out of about 15,000,000 registrations total. So, ~3.5%. When one factors out the owners who have an ICE vehicle in addition, the % probably goes to less than 1.
That's CA; the best-case scenario. This is also after CAFE tax credits have gone to subsidize electric vehicle production, as well as subsidies and tax credits to electric vehicle purchasers. The original CARB ZEV goal was to have 10% of California's fleet electrified. This goal was set in...1990, and was expected to happen by 2000.
I'm sure it was a hard choice to make. The manufacturers could ask for government support for their business until such a time that government ZEV goals could be achieved with a profitable product, or...they could build the cars that people would pay for.
Any major displacement to something as foundational as cars isn't going to happen overnight. Tesla made EV's cool, and that has driven the traditional carmakers to offer more and better EVs, but we're still far from parity when it comes to what you can buy. All the traditional carmakers have a relatively small number of EV options, and they're not available at all trim levels. Like carmaker XYZ but don't want to drive a hatchback? ICE car it is. Like carmaker ABC but don't like the single trim level sedan they chose to base their EV on? ICE car it is.
I would be surprised beyond belief if these manufacturers were not getting pressure from the oil industry to only do the minimum when offering EV models.
Regarding negative externalities: if the price tag of a new car included the cost of all the pollution you're going to be spewing into the air while driving it, EV pricing would look even more attractive, even if we did the same for EVs and included the externality costs of battery manufacture and disposal/recycling.
I was in the market for a new car a year and a half ago. I really wanted to buy an EV, but none of the available models were what I was looking for in a car. Unfortunately, I bought another ICE car. I'm very much hoping that, in 10 years, when I start thinking about another new car, the EV options will be much more varied. I expect there are a lot of people like me, who want to buy an EV, but the product they want isn't on the market (despite equivalent ICE options being available).
If there was a suitably compelling electric vehicle for everyone, would the ICE market go to zero? Sure-very little of the market wants cars that burn gas for the sake of burning gas. But, that's not a useful observation.
>Regarding negative externalities: if the price tag of a new car included the cost of all the pollution you're going to be spewing into the air while driving it
Other than CO2, what pollution?
>I would be surprised beyond belief if these manufacturers were not getting pressure from the oil industry to only do the minimum when offering EV models.
The oil industry also produces the feedstock for generating the electricity used to charge the electric cars. "Journalist discovers Tesla charging station with a discretely-hidden diesel genset nearby" is practically a meme at this point.
Huh? The irony of you saying "no basis in fact"...
Design life for a typical ICE car is typically 10 years of service... but not limited to that, as many cars live way past 10 years.
The most expensive part of an EV are batteries, that have a few hundred cycles(the polymer batteries are yet to get to Tesla packs). Let's pretend that everyone gets a 310mile/500km ranges(which is one of the most expensive EVs).
That means that an EV will trash the battery(a critical, 100% unconditional, limit) within 155K miles/250K Km.
We're literally don't have statistics for how often an EV must be fully replaced yet. EV production boom is way less than 10 years.
So maybe you should consider the saying "Pot, meet kettle"
And EV batteries last 1,500+ cycles, not 300.
But again - a claim that "people buy EVs less" isn't grounded in any fact at all. You know, because people replace cars far more often than "engine failure" or "battery pack is bust"
The sort of shallow charge and discharge cycles you see with EV's aren't the same as spec 80% high rate discharges.
You could grossly estimate battery life by multiplying the spec battery life in cycles times the EV's max range.
My argument is simply to refute the claim that "people don't buy EVs as often"... Which is based on estimates and and gut feeling, not exactly backed by any statistics at this point.
Right now - we know for a fact that ICE vehicles can run for decades, we have only very limited data on Li-ion road use EVs. And even then, we will only have only a decade of a smaller number of older generation battery pack EVs.
There are plenty of decades old EVs that are specialized, but they aren't anywhere close to what a Tesla is. We can't compare electric golf carts and Tesla Model 3.
But yes, from a strictly capitalist point of view, the car companies did not screw up, at least in the short term. They sold their cars at prices that customers were ok with, and made a bundle of money.
So what? Capitalism successfully lined the carmakers pockets' with profits, but our world is becoming less and less habitable for humans every year. Great outcome.
Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
* Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
* Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Nobody needs the right to say "I like ice cream" protected. Nobody would dare impinge on that in the first place. Protecting objectionable behavior is how rights are enshrined.
insert "there was no one left for me" poem etc.
There are quibbles about stuff like precisely what year do we kill the oceans entirely or ho much will melting the artic will really do to raise sea levels. Along the way we appear to be so busy debating the specifics that that we have missed the point That as a planet we need oceans. We are animals who eat and breathe and we can't live if we decimate the biosphere in the name of burning fossil fuels in constantly increasing numbers.
I guess their activities fall under some weak definition of terrorism, intimidation against civilians in pursuit of political aims.
IMO the real reason for this is to protect the automotive industry which is a large part of the German economy
Is the situation for short-term prisoners similar in Germany?
In the US, political prisoners have been jailed for years without trial. 60 days would be a major respite.
It's not a German law but a state law. Some states only allow 4 days, Berlin only 2 days: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unterbindungsgewahrsam
Of course it's Baravia which allows the (by far) longest detention with two months.
That right can be waived to give the defense time to prepare, and it isn't always enforced for non-citizens detained abroad (e.g. Guantanamo), but I'm unaware of anything similar to the article happening in the US.
Pretrial detention can often happen for years, it's one of the issues that makes guilty pleas so insidious. Even if you are innocent, wanting to get your day in court can require you to spend months in jail, so a guilty plea can actually be the more economical outcome.
It's worth noting that one of the examples was someone changing his lawyer repeatedly. I don't believe the right to a speedy trial is violated if you're the one that causes your own delay.
In this case overthrowing is actual a protest that went out of control because of lax security. A real overthrow attempt would need to involve heavy weapons. Protesters didn't even have butter knives.
Only for some of the people involved. However, there were certainly people there attempting an actual overthrow[1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/14/oath-keepers...
There have been a few defendants who have successfully challenged the speed of the trial and courts have let them off. It’s far more likely that the DOJ attorneys are simply overwhelmed with the prosecution than they are purposefully persecuting the arrested.
> According to the George Washington Program on Extremism, the FBI has arrested 940 people in connection to January 6. Of those, 43 were convicted, 481 pleaded guilty, and 382 are still waiting for trial. Most of the people waiting are out on bail. [1]
It so happens that the defendants all committed crimes on the same day, causing a backlog in prosecution work. It also happens that DC is a strange jurisdiction that requires coordination between federal officers of different departments (Capitol Police, Parks Police, Secret Service, etc) in a town that must get all funding passed through Congress, which is functionally broken most of the year.
Terrible example of time-to-trial problems in the US, which is actually a significant issue, even in well funded jurisdictions.
[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/170991/cpac-january-6-riot-p...
In practice, 98% of criminal cases in the federal courts end with a plea bargain.
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158356619/plea-bargains-crim...
(As with other rights, these rights sometimes require active defense by civil rights organizations, nor are they completely absolute.)
The right exists whether or not your state has legislation defining a timeframe, too.
If you're found guilty in a trial, you get a 2-4 times longer sentence than the plea deal would have given.
So the theoretical right to a trial remains, but exercising that right is heavily penalized. To me that means the right is for practical purposes no longer exists.
My being able to opt to voluntarily testify doesn't mean the right to remain silent doesn't exist. We'd have no rights by your definition.
Another angle is that plead bargains are necessary to put as many people in jail as we do.
The judicial system would completely break down if it needed to have 50x as many trials.
Yes. I'd argue that's not universally or even mostly a good thing.
The nuance is the US court system allows additional punishment if a defendant chooses to go to trial. Also, plea bargaining usually involves lots of prosecutor bluffing before they have to show discovery which is the same time they can “throw the book at the defendant” (overload the charges beyond what they can actually prove to a jury).
It’s also worth mentioning that the speedy trial can sometimes come with strings attached (as Georgia’s statute which has been recently discussed ad nauseum in the cases of 2 of the 19 2020-electoral-college-RICO defendants)
I'll report it here, verbatim, as i still have it open in another tab:
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Are you talking about US citizens?
I'm unaware of that in any recent decades, and I assume you're talking about recent history.
More complicated cases take longer to prepare for trial, but can you point to a single example of a US citizen jailed for political purposes where their trial has clearly been delayed for political reasons?
-----
and here is what i wanted to reply:
> I'm unaware of that in any recent decades
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuAAPsiD768 - " The secret US prisons you've never heard of before | Will Potter"
I think most employers would not get away with firing someone in this case.
Germans don't have car payments usually. They pay for the car in cash, if they don't have enough, they buy a smaller car :)
There's a lot of leasing.
And a happy car industry, of course, being able to sell bigger cars.
Stats would be nice.
https://www.ibisworld.com/germany/industry/car-rental-leasin...
And many other industry publications. Private lease is a very small fraction, but it is growing. Same picture in most of Western Europe, in Eastern Europe it is very variable from one country to another.
[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1065113/umfra....
Just wanted to highlight the different mindset. I am a German living in Canada with my family. The mindset is very different. Based on feeling, 70% of Canadians I know have car debt, whereas I know one person in my German friend circle who took out a loan. It's just not very common to take on debt for cars.
For example, the proportion of financed new cars to all new cars sold is 84% in US vs 47% in Germany.
But that does not say anything how expensive are the cars, how expensive compared to income, how long they are being used or what is the proportion of new cars sold to used cars sold.
In Europe people tend to use the cars for longer after they buy them new and then the cars tend to be used for longer after they are sold used.
Also, in Europe people tend to buy smaller cars. And, historically, we preferred cars that use less fuel which means a lot of older cars are still very viable compared to older US cars.
Too much debt is a bad thing, but so is being excessively debt averse.
I would also say, historically, a dollar now is worth a lot more than a dollar 50 years from now, and your quality of life is probably better, too.
I see lots of people from my parents generation who saved their whole life… and now they have money but nothing to do as their health doesn’t permit the sort of travel (or outdoor activity, or whatever) they wanted while a 20 or 30-something.
I think the financially smart thing is to avoid debt as much as possible.
Also, if you absolutely need to take on debt and decided to buy a car, the financially smart thing to do would be to buy as cheap a car as possible. But that's not what really is happening, isn't it?
The reality is that taking debt changes how you think and make decisions and has far more reaching consequences than just the financial cost of the debt.
This sort of knee-jerk debt avoidance on principle is not smart.
Second, there exists no index fund that can reliably return 5%. Borrowing money to put it in a financial instrument is called leverage and is a quick way to get poor, not rich (and I know a bit about it because I work with financial risk for a pretty large, well known bank).
Third, for some reason (and, do explain this if you can), people are not storming banks to borrow at 3% to then go to a brokerage house to buy a supposedly reliable index. Please, show me ONE person who got rich this way... I guess not. You see, this is not how people get rich... people get rich mostly by earning a bunch of money and then not losing it. You know, not losing it is kinda important part of getting rich.
In fact, there is lots of people interested in how people actually get rich. And funny thing, nobody gets rich by repeatedly borrowing money and buying index funds. BECAUSE IT DOESN'T WORK.
Fourth, the act of taking debt changes how people think. I also know something about it because for large part of my life I had a lot of debt. Wonderful things happened to me after I paid it all. And while most of it might be in your head, the results are very real.
They do actually :-)
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/...
"In Germany, while customers purchase 50 percent of stock cars through financing, they buy 35 percent via lease-based products and additional services."
I'm usually all for protecting the little guy over the corporate entity, but that sounds like n awful deal for everyone involved except the criminal.
can't americans bind the utilities to their checking account? i (european) can do that. the bills are paid automatically from my balance (the same where i receive my salary). the web portal from my bank can lists all the entities allowed to pay bills from my balance, and i can revoke any of them unilaterally (in that case i'd have to go back to pay the bills one by one, manually).
All my bills go to credit cards and I even get 2% cash back on them all that way too.
I guess you will run into your credit limit that way eventually too if you are behind on payments for it.
https://doku.iab.de/arbeitsmarktdaten/Befristungen_bei_Neuei...
I already cited the share of term limited contracts above.
It’s not surprising that term limited contracts are a significant chunk of the Job offerings, even if they are a small share of the total contracts - a job posting that must be renewed annually will appear every year for the same position, while an unlimited contract only opens up when a replacement must be found or a new position is created. Another cause is that a lot of companies use a limited contract as a trial period and later convert to an unlimited contract at renewal time.
It is absolutely true that some sectors suffer from having a huge chunk of limited contracts (academia for example) and that there’s abuse (auxiliary teachers only being employed during the term and made redundant during vacations), but generalizing this to the entire German job market is neither warranted nor helpful.
The share of part-time employment in Germany was 7.4% of all employment contracts in 2021. Nothing significant changed since then. https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/Arbeitsmarkt/Qualit...
Do Americans have to authorize all their recurring payments every month again and again? I certainly never paid such bills "one by one"; I set up a regular monthly payment and it would be done automatically on the Nth day of a month.
https://ir.lendingclub.com/news/news-details/2023/60-of-Amer...
I don’t remember paying a single bill manually for the past 3 years at least. Credit card is paid in full at the end of the month as well automatically.
I'm not sure about Germany specifically, but in the US the vast majority of people live paycheck-to-paycheck regardless of income bracket. Most are 2 weeks away from starting to have failing bill payments.
This would pretty clearly be an involuntary absence - these folks are not even accused of committing a crime.
Note that this is different from ending employment: If you are in jail, only an extended length of absence (usually 2 years) or a work-related crime is reason for dismissal. If you are in jail for 23 months you'll keep your job usually, you are just not getting paid.
> Der zur Dienstleistung Verpflichtete wird des Anspruchs auf die Vergütung nicht dadurch verlustig, dass er für eine verhältnismäßig nicht erhebliche Zeit durch einen in seiner Person liegenden Grund ohne sein Verschulden an der Dienstleistung verhindert wird.
The key terms here are “verhältnismäßig nicht erhebliche Zeit” and “ohne Verschulden”. That means that if you’re absent a relatively short time (usually compared to the duration of the employment and the notice period) and without being at fault for the absence, you get paid.
There’s a lot of interpretation here: for example if your bus is late, you’re responsible (you could have taken an earlier bus), if there’s an announced strike, you’re still at fault - you knew before etc. The cause must also lie in your person specifically - if you’re stuck in traffic with hundreds of other employees due to an accident, the paragraph does not apply. If you’re missing out on work because you were involved in that accident, it does.
But being imprisoned without having committed a crime is very unlikely to be considered a fault of the employee.
Your work contract or collective bargaining agreement may modify or specify where this paragraph is applicable. No legal advice, not a lawyer,…
I would (without being a lawyer and without having a case to cite) suspect that in those cases it would be considered to be the fault of the employee. In many, if not all cases, they had prior arrests, indictments and some were even found guilty, yet announced further blockades. I guess to a judge, that should make it their fault.
> Your work contract or collective bargaining agreement may modify or specify where this paragraph is applicable.
That might very well be the case, since actually many protesters are being employed as protesters: https://www.stern.de/gesellschaft/letzte-generation--so-viel...
The jail time is even more problematic given that the acts that the imprisoned may commit in the future are not punishable by prison time in practically all cases.
(As a side note: I would also be extraordinarily careful citing an article in the Stern, which cites allegations that the Welt published, without having at least a second source that confirms it)
Road blockades are very often judged to be coercion, "Nötigung", a crime according to §240 StGB. Repeat offenders in this matter have been sentenced to some jail time: https://www.merkur.de/deutschland/kleber-aktivisten-letzte-g...
Further sources for your side note: https://www.merkur.de/welt/verdienst-klima-krise-kleber-geha... https://www.businessinsider.de/wirtschaft/letzte-generation-... https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/letzte-generation-akt... https://www.magdeburger-news.de/?c=20221228093058
Oh, and the best source, their own wiki: https://wiki.letztegeneration.org/de/%C3%B6ffentlich/allgeme...
Probably none of those kids have a Job, so no worries.
I wish I was kidding.
I had to switch my google results to German and search for "anti-akw-strom adapter" (AKW - atomkraftwerke).
http://www.nucleostop.de/
How does this work in the US?
Personally, I have everything automated. Including one incredibly dumb thing: I have to pay my homeowners' association dues (I live in a small condo building, so we have shared expenses) by check, so I have my bank mail a check to their bank. It's incredibly dumb that I can't easily set up an automated electronic bank transfer, but at least I can automate mailing a paper check.
US government agencies can also be annoying about this. For example, the city/county of San Francisco does not offer a way to automatically pay property taxes, which are billed twice a year. (My mortgage lender pays mine for me via an escrow account that gets funded along with my automatic monthly mortgage payment.)
But a lot of people in the US are un- or under-banked, and don't always have access to automation, if the people/orgs they have to pay support any kind of automation at all. Many landlords (especially those who cater to lower-income folks) will only accept cash or check. Many people who have to pay them don't have an online bill-pay system. And even many who could automate things, don't, because their finances are precarious enough that they will sometimes choose to skip a credit card payment, or pay their rent late, etc., and they'll make these decisions month-to-month.
If many people in the US were in jail for two months, after the first month (of not working, thus not getting paid) they wouldn't have enough money in their bank account to cover all their monthly bills. An unfortunate amount of people here live paycheck-to-paycheck.
Also consider that there's a lot of overlap between people who have unstable finances and people who are more likely to get caught up in the justice system, regardless of their innocence or guilt.
I actually do think they're indirectly being financed by the oil industry (LSO head figures go around in private jets) to antagonize and create a bad (but not unrealistic) caricature of the climate protestors. And of course there's plenty of people willing to play the roles
Greta looks like the serious grownup compared to LSO
Letzte Generation
Unfortunately, it is cheaper for the gonvernment to detain people than to send police to prevent it shortly before it is going to happen.
Also, the ruling party in Bavaria is mainly controlled by the opinions people exchange in pubs over a couple of beers (one beer being a quarter gallon), and there common sense isn't considered that much.
It’s going to be real ugly I can tell you that for sure.
The children have no future. The old have accumulated ownership of pretty much everything.
A generation with nothing to lose.
EDIT no climate future
It's not a soothing platitude for the next generation, that the most they can work towards is inheriting their father's achievements.
Let's be honest, if we've come this far down the 'argument heirarchy' for growth and expansion, we know things are bad.
It does look like a lot of climate legislation is facing similar situations, where the boomer generation is voting opposite to younger generations.
In both cases it's frustrating because the younger generations are the ones that will have to deal with the consequences of laws they did not agree with.
Property tends to go to descendants, but politics affect all.
This is in general a myth. If you look at millennials or gen-z, ownership at their age isn't any different from the boomer generation. And it's still the best time to be born in.
We can all agree that climate change is a problem to be solved, but "the old" can remember plenty of doomsday scenarios that never happened, including past predictions that global warming would destroy the world by year 2000.
In the meantime, activists that prevent people from going to work, or that destroy property, are just jerks IMO.
This is a bullshit conservative trope. I'm 53 and no such prediction was ever advanced as a basis for policymaking. Just because someone might have made such a hyperbolic prediction in a TV show or magazine doesn't mean it ever had widespread currency in the scientific or policy community.
Please stop poisoning the well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well
Some predictions were more accurate than others, which led to effective policies, so for example, thankfully, we still have an ozone layer and we haven't started a nuclear war yet.
Not sure what "poisoning the well" is supposed to mean here. I was replying to someone that predicts some sort of violent revolution. For what, I can only guess.
> A generation with nothing to lose.
That’s what they said about millennials. Now the average millennial is 34, has kids and owns their home. Isn’t it just the pits when the system turns your would-be revolutionaries into homeowning parents with a stake in the success and stability of the system? Maybe it’s oppressing them through prosperity?
I found this suspect, and looked up some stats[0]. It's hard to tell exactly, since the age groups don't fall on generational boundaries. But it does seem like ~50% of millennials own a home.
However, the more concerning trend is that rates of home ownership have declined across all age groups since 2009[1]. In particular, the age of the average homeowner increased by 10 years between 2001 and 2019.
[0] https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/homeownership-rate-...
[1] https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/homeownership-rate-...
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
It is fully possible I have a naive interpretation of their goals and perhaps they're just looking for an excuse to be the biggest twats possible.
I'm not so sure about that. I see a fair number of people who got woken up to how serious things are by these protests as well. Before they saw this kind of thing on the news, it didn't strike them as particularly real. It's a "sign of the times" for them.
I'd be genuinely amazed at the personality of a person who goes "Wow! They must be disrupting my day for a very important reason. Let me look up and better research their cause," versus "Oh f**, I'm going to be late to my appointment. What's going on? Oh, these idiots are blocking the street."
If you're going to interrupt my life based on some future, uncertain scientific reasoning, especially the lives of everyday working-class people who can't afford to spend their day blocking streets instead of working, it would turn me off to your cause, and that's the only sentiment I've heard from my friends.
Maybe we're wrong for that, but I'm curious how others would respond.
I've not seen anyone leave their gasoline engine on idle on their behalf to spite them.
Wild
These people haven’t been charged with anything. It’s “preventative”.
But wait you can’t, cause that won’t actually hold up in any actual court.
“Bad operators” - they’re doing more for the climate than the rest of us are.
Thoughtcrime and Minority Report-style policing is unjust and contrary to the principles of a free society.
Besides, it’s not just blocking highways or streets. They blocked runways in airports too - imagine what could happen if a plane with failed engine could not land because of them.
The bar you must jump to be able to do this to some one is state law, and differs by state. The bar in Bavara is, arguably, lower than in some other states by my (uneducated in the laws, so not very relevant) reading.
For example in many German states, it requires a crime to be imminent. In Bavaria this is not the case.
> They were known activists
Does "activist" hear mean they'd previously engaged in illegal activity, i.e. blocking roadways or similar "protests"?
I don't know if there was concrete evidence of past crimes/actions for them. By my reading, Bavarian state law does not require this. In some other States, it is listed as one of the conditions to meet or "likely to repeat" is somehow baked into the lingo.
One would think that people gluing themselves to things is a self limiting problem.
https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2023-09/letzt...
> Zehn von ihnen waren laut Münchner Polizei während einer Blockade am Freitag in Gewahrsam genommen worden.
Also, courts seem to perform some checks, there are reported cases where even repeat offenders were let go:
https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/vorbeugender-freiheitse...
> So entschied zum Beispiel das Landgericht Landshut, dass ein rund sechstägiger Präventiv-Freiheitsentzug für Klima-Aktivisten unzulässig sei, die sich 2021 auf Autobahnbrücken rund um die Internationale Automobilausstellung (IAA) in München ein paar Meter abgeseilt hatten, worauf die Polizei den Verkehr stoppte. Kernargument: Eine Wiederholungsgefahr sei nicht hinreichend erkennbar.
And there are several records of perpetrators announcing followup crimes right after having been judged. Some were even committing their next crime within a few hours: https://www.merkur.de/deutschland/kleber-aktivisten-letzte-g...
It would be helpful to know if by "they might otherwise engage in climate protests," the people in question had planned to just say things but otherwise stay out of the way, or if rather the people in question had made public their plans to break laws (like blocking traffic, which many climate protesters have been doing lately). In the one case there is no crime, and governments shouldn't be detaining people just in case they commit a crime later. In the other case, even if someone isn't a terrorist, planning on breaking the law is itself a crime, and it's not "preventative detention."
"Legally, this police approach is called preventive detention because it is not detention for a crime that has been committed. The police laws of the different states allow this for different lengths of time. In Bavaria, up to one month in prison is permitted, which may be extended by a judge for a maximum of another month.
The so-called preventive or preventive detention is very controversial. The relevant laws were originally created to prevent terrorists from carrying out attacks. However, this form of detention is now also permitted in the case of the “imminent commission or continuation of an administrative offense of considerable importance for the general public,” as the Bavarian police law states. Lawsuits against this have so far been rejected in Bavaria. However, a final clarification about the legality of this approach is still pending."
And there is absolutely a great number of major European news and media companies willingly ignoring the GDPR. Most people even remotely interested know this.
I don't think such laws should exist, and we should do better there. Unfortunately I don't expect that with the Bavarian politic landscape this will happen on the legislative way.
Resorting to kinetic means throws all of that out the window.
You want to make a point, and be heard? Stop committing crimes and taking other people's rights away.
You're entitled to be upset when someone blocks your car. But framing it as a civil rights issue rather than a practical one (and calling someone blocking your car "kinetic") makes you come across as un-serious.
If the government were to install roadblocks and check your identity card before letting you leave your town, that would violate your freedom of movement. If a local private militia did the same thing, it would be as well. But being slightly delayed by a bunch of environmentalists blocking a specific form of transit doesn't meaningfully violate anything.
The counterstatement here would be "the state has the right to forcefully remove anybody who slightly inconveniences me"; it should be obvious why this would be a gross violation of civil liberties.
The counterstatement here would be "the state has the right to forcefully remove anybody who slightly inconveniences me"; it should be obvious why this would be a gross violation of civil liberties.
There is a whole slew of laws and regulations dealing with people who inconvenience others on purpose.
Freedom of movement specifically exists for when "your lives depend on it" - it is a vital right to preserve and the freedom to make that 40 km walk has saved countless lives over the centuries.
The point of protesting in a manner that is truly disruptive is to force the problem to be dealt with. This concept seems to allude many, to them the only acceptable form of protest is one that is entirely ignorable. I’m not sure we would have many of the important freedoms we have today without people choosing to be disruptive in this manner you find unacceptable.
I get what you're saying but you're very narrowly trying to define right of movement to make your argument and without your narrow definition it falls apart.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_sit-ins
If the teamsters strike hospitals miss drug shipments and people die. Farming protests can lead to food supply chain disruptions. Transport strikes cause economic disruption which could theoretically lead to deaths.
That’s not what terrorism is.
Terrorism requires terrorising people through violence and intimidation. Not standing on a highway.
Terrorism is a broad term but it is rarely used for its lower end as its also a term used as a tool to scare people. The idea that it mandates violence is outdated. Violence was the means to terrorize but it no longer is.
This terrorises people. It causes mass fear and panic, and will cause pretty immediate loss of life. All people have good reason fear for the safety of them and their loved ones in the case of a catastrophic grid failure.
This is not true of blocking a highway. It’s an economic disruption. The response of those opposed to the action is one of anger and frustration. Society at large does not fear for their safety because people are occasionally blocking highways, unlike in a mass terrorist campaign.
Cyberterrorism as a term is applied too liberally, a direct result of governments wanting to expand their powers under the guise of combating terrorism. Software attacks that immediately threaten life and limb (eg attacks on health systems, major damage to critical infrastructure) can be argued to be cyberterrorism. Not every software attack is of that magnitude.
I think it's totally legitimate to argue over how effective an action like this is for the cause - but this is a quite reasonable form of protest.
Blocking a highway is a form of terrorism. If people blocked a highway with violent means would you consider that a protest too?
You are taking a double standard. They're all terrorism.
Another scenario you could come up with is a future climate catastrophe, where millions die and/or are displaced because of this global boiling era. Incidentally, which is the protest thought crime that is being prosecuted.
[1] Legally there's a world of difference between proximal causes and proximate causes. (Neighborhood vs causally related.)
If protests actually cause deaths, we can always prosecute the people causing said death as manslaughter or negligent homicide. Until then it’s just a protest, guaranteed in many countries as a civil right.
> cars
Maybe they should've take the subway then? Because "Klimakleber" usually only operate in the city
Well, if you define "civil society" to mean "society where everyone is subject to absolute milquetoast civility at all times", then sure.
Kinetic means things being in motion. Throwing rocks is kinetic, taking up space or forming a barricade is not.
https://www.merkur.de/deutschland/kleber-aktivisten-letzte-g...
We are all hypothetical criminals and I would prefer that the state not have that freedom to lock people up.
https://www.bostoncriminaldefenselawyers.com/threat-to-commi...
https://ravellawfirm.com/blog/can-someone-go-to-jail-for-thr...
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/373
EDIT: I'm being downvoted for this? They literally have total police surveillance, all the Germans here in Hamburg talk about it all the time
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
EDIT: Thanks for going through and downvoting all my recent comments
Very occasionally I'll ask if someone could clarify or substantiate concerns with a comment. But that's about as far as any notice should go.
Germany: "oh well, we'll increase burning clean coal, but create some crazy roadmap that we'll be carbon free in a few decades or so"
Germany needs to get its shit together, energy-wise. You are a disgrace in the union, honestly. With your economical development and technical know-how levels you should be at the forefront.
Nowadays we are scared of everything, ignorant of any kind of science. All policy and all public outrage is purely based on ideology and wishful thinking. If one kind of wishful thinking fails, we do not reconsider, we double down or replace by another, even weirder kind of wishful thinking.
Basically, we are back to a pre-renaissance way of thinking. We are back in the dark ages.
And I'm honestly scared of that.
Our politics is all wishfull thinking and ideology, but arguing with the laws of thermodynamics isnt really working...
And I'm defenitely neither right wing, old, nor climate sceptic
There are more than 2000 churches in Denmark. Only the minister of the interior could override that veto.
Tangentially, saying "everyone warned this would happen" as a criticism of something is almost always hindsight bias or survivorship bias. There are plenty of things that "everyone" says will happen that never happen and for the ones that do happen, "everyone" tends to overstate how certain they were about it being the only possible outcome.
I’m not going to listen to Joe down the street saying Obama is gonna start putting people into FEMA camps.
I will however listen to civil right experts that explicitly warned against state overreach.
Germans talk about Hitler all the time. I was kind of shocked about how open they are about it
The weirdest one for me: every year the research group I'm part of has a group retreat, and our German boss (unknowingly) makes us do a pose that Hitler used a lot in our group photo...they still love everything that Hitler was, apart from the anti-semitic and racist part
Also, I'll do what I please while I use your country, thank you very much.
Probably wasn’t talking about him then.
>There are laws against denying the Holocaust, glorifying the Nazi regime or using Nazi symbols
There ya go. Clever cookie.
(e.g. don't mix up "Bavaria" with "Europe", Bavaria's political situation is even atypical for Germany)
They are very much a nanny state/set of states. Not sure how anyone could take them saying that seriously.
Additionally, many members come from Fridays for Future. They are frustrated as years of peaceful protest have led to no change. I see no connection to oil or car sponsorship in this.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/dozens-face-rico-charges-over-...
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-over-60-stop-cop-city...
Please cite your sources when making incidiary claims.
https://www.lto.de/recht/nachrichten/n/sta-berlin-keine-ankl...
https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000123389810/abhaengige-st...
> The situation is completely different for public prosecutors: They are bound by instructions, and a long chain of examining authorities stands above them.
> Above all, the many reports in politically sensitive cases demotivate public prosecutors and tie up resources that could be used for investigations.
There's ton of information available, especially for the case of Germany.