>The loss of cheap Russian natural gas needed to power factories “painfully damaged the business model of the German economy,” Kullmann told The Associated Press. “We’re in a situation where we’re being strongly affected — damaged — by external factors.”
I would argue that betting the farm on a single unreliable (at best) partner for cheap energy and future development is an internal factor and not an external one.
And the same people who celebrated shutting down nuclear now put the blame on cars and block streets preventing working class people from getting to work. And as such, the far-right party polls at a record high right now.
I'm not sure what you intend to say. Nuclear supporters are far-right? Vote for a Nazi-like party because roads are blocked?
Shutting down nuclear makes sense, we have much safer ways nowadays to generate (transform) energy. Storing the nuclear waste is a unsolved issue that is passed on to our children.
There is no Nazi-like party in Germany. The AfD's platform of reducing immigration (not even eliminating it or repatriating!) is a far cry from the Third Reich's atrocities and trying to draw a comparison is obviously cheap and nasty rhetoric.
From my point of view, the biggest problem with the AfD is that there is a lot of variability in the political currents that it contains. Most of them are pretty normal and reasonable. Some of them make me a bit uncomfortable. All based on my personal views of course. However I'm also sceptical of taking random comments as proof that a guy has a shrine to the Führer in his finished basement.
No. Not based on that article at least. Maybe you know more about him. A 3 word quote does not proof make.
The German authorities are doing in their trousers because of the AfD's meteoric rise. They will do anything so that the average voter thinks that utter incompetent clowns like Scholz, Bärbock and Habeck are indeed good political choices. Any and all elements (like 3 word quotes) are going to be used to ban the real opposition.
The sad fact is that a stuffed animal could do better for Germany than the current coalition. The AfD is in the right place at the right time.
I don't find such views as yours very pragmatic. I am not an ideologue. But I'm also not German so I'll leave the choices to you lot. Whilst mentioning that my only horse in the game is the fact that a healthy and prosperous Germany is beneficial to me, whereas the opposite is absolutely not. Best of luck.
Whether or not we should shut down nuclear down the line, shutting down existing nuclear makes the opposite of sense if you think climate change is a serious issue. As a consequence, it caused severe damage to the German economy. The best friend of extremist parties like AfD is economic disruption that delegitimizes the status quo. There is a direct line from Merkel's panicked reaction to Fukushima and the AfD polling at 20% today.
Stop perpetuating these ignorant myths about nuclear energy.
Radioactive waste is radioactive because it still has stuff in it that can be refined into usable fuel ore for further use.
The reason this was not done was because it was cheaper to mine new ore than refine older waste. This is quickly changing.
When uranium pellets are used up they become depleted uranium and have industrial uses as ballests, armor, or (controversially) as weapons. These are about as dangerous as lead. Don't eat them but can be safely held on your hand or buried with minimum danger.
Nuclear power is our path to a green future and people like you spreading ignorance are why countries like Germany are now dependent on despotic totalitarian regimes.
If Germany were to rely just on solar and wind, the low capacity factor would likely require massive grid storage. The only large scale grid storage we have at this point is pumped hydro and that isn't scalable. For example, one estimate is that for Germany to rely only on solar and wind would require about 6,000 pumped storage plants which is literally 183 times their current capacity.
If making more grid storage was cheap and easy, we would have built it decades ago. This is why Germany is still burning so much coal.
What happens when the sun does sign?
What happens when the wind doesnt blow?
What happens when power demand rises and drops throughout the day?
Solar and wind cannot support a base load period. Battery tech is great and believe me it's cool but lithium ion batteries have been in place since the 70s and the chemistry hasn't improved.
Instead of sitting on our hands with a thumb up the bum, waiting for breakthroughs that never come, we have solutions today that work and should be leveraged before those gains in chemical engineering and material science happen.
Nuclear power is still expensive because those power plants have to be absolutely safe. They have to meet stringent safety standards making them expensive to build. Otherwise you get another Chernobyl.
Another red herring. Chernobyl had several design flaws in its RMBK reactors and what caused the melt down was operating it in a way that it was not designed for so a commie could look good for his bosses.
Modern reactors are far more resilient and safe. The reason building new reactors is so expensive comes down to the permitting and license process. Building is easy, dealing with the $300/hr lawyers and regulatory overhead that makes bringing new reactors online is why it's so expensive.
You want to know who has the safest track record of nuclear reactor operation? The navy.
Generation isn't the real issue. It's storage for base load that presents the real obstacle to shifting to renewable power. There are a variety of proposals to do so but none have yet proven economical at scale. The manufacturing capacity for batteries isn't remotely sufficient, and won't be for many years to come regardless of government subsidies.
ok, let me clarify my comment.. storage should occur once the fuel has been reprocessed and re-used enough times to have been exhausted, and then stored.
The "use once and store" attitude that results in needing safe places for highly radioactive material for 100's of thousands of years is insane, when you can just use the stuff until it's "worn out" and the resulting lower level waste only needs caring for for some small handful of decades.
And we need more fast-breeder reactors, too, FWIW.
Yes, that's what I meant. You can be either green or neo-Nazi, no middle ground.
People have different problems and priorities than you, and if you decide to annoy them on top of the hardships they've already been burdened with, this might be the straw that will cause them to eventually radicalize. Just look at the AfD banners of the day, and you will see that they use every opportunity like this to grab voters. I've seen posters that said "Klima-Kleber ins Knast", so this is a factor that may bend people down.
What I don't like about Germany is that left-leaning people love to shout out their virtue with demos, banners, stickers, banter and whatnot, but when they are confronted with an actual working-class crowd, they just brush them off as "Nazis", and we don't talk to "Nazis".
I agree with your assessment. I see the extreme polarisation growing elsewhere too. Is there any basis to suggest that it is linked to a growing urban-rural divide? Or something else maybe in the media?
It might be, but I think formal education plays a role here too. German universities are very left-leaning, so people with a degree are more likely to hold left-wing positions. This is in comparison to my home country Poland, where there is an ideological divide in higher education - arts and humanities colleges are more left-leaning, while everything else is apolitical or leans right. I have a degree from an engineering college, and most people there (me included up until some point) had right-libertarian towards nationalist right wing positions. The technical colleges there are voter strongholds for the furthest-right fringe party, which initially incentivizes votes with promises of low taxation and resulting riches, and then sucks people in as a whole with conspiracy theories.
True about the political atmosphere in German vs Polish universities. I happen to have had a taste of both. There seemed to be more intellectual freedom in the Polish unis that I visited -- one technical, the other economics. (Just don't try to discuss delicate subjects like the Germans or the Russians.)
>...Shutting down nuclear makes sense, we have much safer ways nowadays to generate (transform) energy.
Unfortunately Germany took the approach of shutting down nuclear before they had eliminated all coal plants. An operating coal plant will kill many people just through its normal emissions.
>...The five EU countries whose coal power plants do the most harm abroad are Poland (causing 4,690 premature deaths abroad); Germany (2,490); Romania (1,660); Bulgaria (1,390) and the UK (1,350).
Besides killing people in neighboring countries, Germans are also prematurely dying due to their use of coal and being downwind of its neighbors:
>...The five EU countries most heavily impacted by coal pollution from neighbouring countries, in addition to that from their own plants are: Germany (3,630 premature deaths altogether), Italy (1,610); France (1,380); Greece (1,050) and Hungary (700).
While Germany has a long term goal of stopping the burning of coal, every year this is delayed is more people dying. Energy supply disruptions have actually caused them to increase their use of coal:
>...The ‘intensive use’ of German coal power plants lead to additional emissions of 15.8 million tonnes of CO2 in 2022, according to a report by consultancy Energy Brainpool commissioned by Green Planet Energy. Due to the energy crisis caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine, Germany temporarily reopened decommissioned and soon-to-be decommissioned coal power plants last year to avert gas shortages, which resulted in more CO2 being released. According to the authors, the emissions are ‘additional’ because they are not accounted for in the European Emissions Trading System (ETS). Germany's total emissions amounted to about 750 million tonnes last year
In the future there will be better solutions to deal with the rest of the waste. Newer reactor designs would also make it possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides) many of which last tens of thousands of years or longer and make conventional nuclear waste disposal so problematic. Most of the radioactive fission products (FPs) the reactor produces have much shorter half-lives: they are intensely radioactive in the short term but decay quickly. Through many cycles, the IFR ultimately causes 99.9% of the uranium and transuranium elements to undergo fission and produce power; so its waste is just the fission products. These have much shorter half lives; so in 300 years their radi...
I...do not understand this mentality in the West. Until we have a clean reliable alternative, Nuclear is the best we have.
Do I think it's amazing or perfect? Not at all. But I much prefer it to burning non-renewable and cancerous petrochemicals/carbons. So, it's the best we have until we have for now.
My understanding is a bit different. Gazprom and or the Nord Stream operator insisted on fulfilling its contractual obligations for delivery but the situation became overly complicated for the reception of payment and some foreign to be repaired turbines were stuck in Canada or Germany because of sanctions against Russia. Then boom.
Correct. From Wikipedia [1] "On 2 September 2022, the company announced that natural gas supplies via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline would remain shut off indefinitely until [...] compressor station [...] was fixed [...]. Gazprom justified this by claiming that European Union sanctions against Russia had resulted in technical problems".
From CNN Business [2] "On Friday [September 2 2022], shortly after the G7 announcement [of the oil price cap], Russian state energy giant Gazprom said it would not resume deliveries through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline on Saturday as planned."
On 26 September 2022, NS1 and NS2 pipelines were damaged ending any possibility of Russia using them for political pressure or profit.
Let's also not forget that blowing up those pipelines caused a sevear ecological disaster releasing an enormous amount of gas into the atmosphere. The pipes are keep under pressure even when no gas is moving.
Who ever did it committed an act of terrorism and a crime against nature.
It wasn't unreliable, and what alternative did they have? Do you know of one where they can get the same amount of energy at the same cost? Because Germany would love to know, quick.
Cheap Russian energy was the drug that Germany got hooked on. Every viewer of after-school specials knows you shouldn't get hooked on the drug dealer's freebies.
The whole world buys oil from Saudi Arabia and goods from China, singling out Russia as some particular evil that it would be a mistake to do business with is nonsensical. Trump wants Germany to drop Russian energy inputs because it benefits the US geopolitically and economically, it's not so clear that it's a benefit to Germany.
Natural gas isn't just a source of heat and power. It was also an essential feed stock for much of the German chemicals industry. That industry is now rapidly downsizing and migrating to other countries with cheaper gas.
Unreliable, at best. Could you explain why you think so?
The historical record since the current contracts were signed (in the seventies): The Soviet Union delivered reliably throughout the eighties conflicts about short-range nuclear missiles, etc. Delivery continued reliably when the Soviet Union split up. Delivery was reliable when the transit country Poland had what amounts to a revolution. It continued reliably through Germany's reuinification. In the fifteen years following, Russia's economy half-died but delivery continued without change.
These were wrenching changes to every country involved and one fairly substantial conflict. If this record indicates unreliability, what would it take to indicate reliability?
Yes, but also the rationale of the Anglo-Saxons in general. Idea born in England that is a truly understated root cause of the present conflict. People will stuff their fingers in their ears and swear it isn't true.
"Major" and "developed" are not some kind of sneaky euphemisms. They're perfectly reasonable simplifications. They are more descriptive than "rich", and simply do not mean "European" at all.
What happened? Corruption, stagnation (CDU and Merkel), neo-liberalism, privatisation of profits and nationalisation of losses, slow internet, horrible public transport, massive bureaucracy, dismantling of social services, ...
From my limited perspective (non-German software engineer working in Germany), Germany is still a great country for people like me:
- prices are not that expensive like in the nordic countries. If you cook at home most of the week, you can easily spend only around 350-450 EUR/month eating healthy food
- renting is still hard (it's not so easy to find an apartment), but you can get a decent place for around 1.5K EUR/month (or less). I pay 1.2K/month for a 80 sqm (not city center, but not outside of it neither)
- if you have > 10 years of working experience, you can definitely reach the 100K EUR/year (not FAANG). It's not easy, but not insanely difficult. Reaching 80K EUR/year is even more standard. This puts you on the top 10-5% of earners in Germany, so you get to save a lot of money per month
- electricity/gas bills are getting more expensive, but still you won't notice with your kind of salary
- health insurance is good enough
- public transportation works just fine (not the best, but surely good enough). Tons of options (bus, tram, trains, bikes)
- big cities in the west are welcoming to people who don't speak German
Compare this with the situation of other european countries like France, Italy (a bit cheaper than Germany in general, but salaries are way lower in IT: around 30-40% lower) or even the Netherlands (not cheaper than Germany, and salaries are usually ~15% lower in general for IT). So, if Germany is doing bad, I cannot imagine how other EU countries are doing.
The only thing Germany needs to fix is the winter time (you cannot expect to have healthy people when the sun sets at around 3-4pm in winter).
P.S. And I love the work culture: "9-5 -> work. Outside of working hours -> don't even bother reaching me, I won't answer"
I didn't mean that there is a problem with such countries. I meant that prices are generally more or less the same (e.g., in the supermarkets, the price of an iphone, cinema tickets, etc.) but salaries are lower (at least in the IT industry, I see that one gets around 30% less in countries like France, Spain and Italy compared to what I could get in Germany, but definitely the cost of living in Germany is not 30% higher than in such countries).
This seems like such a common problem where I wonder if there is anything that can be done to break this cycle.
For an equivalent comparison, on this side of the pond tech salaries in Canada are abysmal compared to US salaries (at least from what I hear). And it's not like Canada is a ton cheaper (their real estate affordability crisis makes even places like California look a bit tame). But then I often here how policymakers in Canada wish there were "more tech" north of the border how they put in place programs to attract tech talent to the country. Of course, those programs are usually completely useless when engineers can double their salary coming to the US.
But a big part of the issue is that companies simply couldn't afford to double their salaries because they aren't as profitable as US tech giants (and not even FAANGs, but just other mid-tier tech companies as well). But it's going to be hard to build top tier tech companies if you can't attract top tier tech talent, so the cycle spirals.
I'm curious what tech salaries are like in bonafide EU tech standouts like Spotify.
Why can't Canadian tech companies be just as profitable? The North American market is fairly unified; there are few obstacles to Canadian companies selling in the USA. What are they missing?
It's a bloody good question.
From Nortel to BlackBerry, Canada has great potential that sort of goes pschitte in the end. Not to mention the continuing progress of the gaming or film sectors -- or even quantum computing. Universities are strong (at least in my home province) and I'd prefer them to anything that I've seen in the US, France or Germany.
There may be a more economic than social explanation behind Canada's mediocre performance. Resource extraction is very profitable and maybe this extractive logic is transferred to other economic activities. Just throwing the idea out there.
> I'm curious what tech salaries are like in bonafide EU tech standouts like Spotify.
Usual mid-high end of Swedish tech salaries in Sweden. Not sure about the USA.
> But a big part of the issue is that companies simply couldn't afford to double their salaries because they aren't as profitable as US tech giants
I don't understand why there's always a comparison to US's salaries, the US is the outlier in every discussion about labour and salaries, almost nowhere else in the world (maybe except for Switzerland and similar countries) pays such high salaries, the rest of the world won't pay as much as the USA, it's a fact, I'd prefer to stop comparing everywhere else to that outlier, it won't be the rule.
It's the top benchmark and it has a huge cost in terms of quality of life for a chunk of the population, the USA is a business-first, citizenry-after kind of society, I don't feel it's a way of being that other countries should emulate. At least after living there for a while I never really felt that it was so rich, it has loads of rich people with shiny toys but society in general feels poor: infrastructure sucks (passing by any airport in the USA is a trip back to the 80s/90s), stuck with the car-centric mentality from the 50s, a very palpable huge divide between rich and poor, etc.
The USA has amazing businesses, and makes a lot of money, but I don't think it trickles down into society; given how rich the country is in nominal terms I'm always surprised whenever I pass by and realise that wealth is not translated into a better general quality of life for most citizens, it's just that people can afford to buy more trinkets...
> I don't understand why there's always a comparison to US's salaries, the US is the outlier in every discussion about labour and salaries
The reason I brought it up is because the most profitable, dynamic tech companies are founded and based in the US (often by immigrants). Other countries will lose their edge to be able compete in tech globally if they don't compete in engineer pay.
And, of course, the difference is not just money that goes "to the government", but you get some of it back in form of various benefits, such as free education, a pretty nice high speed highway system (and other roads, of course), comprehensive health insurance (including dental), etc.
It’s harder to compare these numbers than you might think.
The US numbers get seriously fudged via the 12.4% cough 6.2% social security payments etc. Germany pays 7.3% for health insurance which looks bad except we pay 2.9% for Medicare without being able to use it so it’s more like 4.4% for health and dental insurance for 366/Month @100K which doesn’t look so bad.
Of course when people are talking 100k salaries in the US this stuff is baked in so the underlying numbers aren’t necessarily important only achievable take home pay and cost of living.
That's not the right metric. The right metric is what you would have paid if there was no coercion but also if free loading wasn't an option (aka you would pay up to the marginal benefit to you of the marginal tax. The benefit includes network effects, which gives you the logical framework for why someone would want to pay tax to benefit someone else (they get a positive network effect from helping that person)) It's hard to calculate but it's almost certainly lower than 42 %
Everyone I know would pay 0% if they could, and they do as much as they can to get close to that. But that's not how you build a country, especially not with the demography we have in the west
That's because everyone is naturally a free loader to some extent, especially under the current regime of blatant misallocation of resources, corruption, etc. If you instead asked them what the value to them of receiving the various direct benefits to themselves was (roads, partially functioning legal system, military protection from invasion, etc) and the value to them of the benefits provided to others (i.e. the fairly well educated workforce to work in their businesses and/or the businesses they are invested in for their retirement plan, management and/or eradication of many diseases they would otherwise be exposed to, etc.) it would be some non zero number and it would increase if the quality of the services increased or if new services that the person needed in of those pathways were added. Governments should endeavor to have taxes that approximate this number. They don't because it leaves no room for vanity projects that have no benefit to the tax payer and large benefit to the politician, no room for corruption and it focuses service provision on services that are of actual value to the tax payer rather than whatever stupid nonsense the politician wants.
The network effect of taxes represents far more than 50% of my salary. Which is a major reason why people in so many countries are so poor.
However, paying out the full benefit I receive isn’t a good baseline because at that point I may as well go somewhere else and keep a larger slice of the pie.
I thought it was crazy sauce with the average tax on an equivalent amount of CAD earnings (143,680) being ~26.2% in my province but apparently the Germans are paying 42%..... Canada provides (crappy) healthcare from that tax hit as well so it's more comparable than USA.
I think Canada's is also way too high for the services provided but my reaction above was just shock at how bad it was rather than a real discussion of tax policy. We really have to compare rates at the margin because that is what is actually pricing incremental services and in Canada that marginal tax rate at that income level is 38% quickly heading up to 48-52ish% depending on which province.
Depends on what you think is fair but I always think about tax from what would I be willing to pay for the service (and pay to provide to others) given what the service is if there was no coercion or free loading and that number is way, way less than what I am currently paying in taxes. This is due to a mix of services being provided that generate no network effect value or negative network effect value to me, poor cost management on the services provided that benefit me and/or benefit me through improving someone else in Canada and in some cases outlawing outside provision to me (i.e. healthcare) and forcing use of the government service that is inferior.
With a median income you'll pay quite a bit less, when I was working in Germany I paid about 35%. Income beyond ~65k is taxed at 42%, one of the many reasons why I left - it's really hard to get ahead with such a handbrake considering that a normal house sets you back 500k nowadays.
> The only thing Germany needs to fix is the winter time (you cannot expect to have healthy people when the sun sets at around 3-4pm in winter).
Short of taking Germany and pushing it further south I don’t think there’s much to do about that.
Permanent daylight savings will give people in parts of the country daylight for ~30 minutes after 5, at the cost of people commuting in the dark at their groggiest in the morning. A further change would compound that even more.
The reality is that if you live near the top of the world the winter daylight situation is gonna suck.
Europe is awful and NA is a million times better. You do not want to even consider moving to Europe (especially Germany, Czechia, Poland and even Ukraine! Everything is worse, even downtown SF or India are better!
Stay in the USA and Canada or you will regret it!
OP please delete this comment and stop trying to convince people your life is great.
The definition of "worst-performing" that they're using is relative to the prior year in the same country, i.e. Germany had the worst annual growth rate for their economy.
That says nothing about standards of living between countries. Even if Norway had -10% growth rate and Afghanistan had a +10% growth rate, I would still much rather be living in Norway.
The next time someone tells you how Germany is again the sick man of Europe, smile, make eye contact, and then say this: "German real per capita GDP is up 13% since 2007, France is up 6%, Spain is flat and Italy is down -4%. How exactly is Germany the sick man of Europe?"
Well you can look at the money but environmentally it's a disaster. Closing nuclear power plant was a mistake, reopening coal power plant is another. But I guess what's important is the economy...
If you close a nuclear plant while a non-zero number of fossil fuel plants are still online, you don't care about emissions as much as you claim, regardless of what you replace them with.
>Jobs were plentiful, the government’s financial coffers grew as other European countries drowned in debt,
That BS,Germany lived on the substance, the infrastructure was driven on wear and tear, important government agencies were cut so that experts were missing to avoid something like the odyssey of the Berlin airport, thanks to tax-free company sales and the introduction of Hartz IV, investors were able to make big profits while the workers could not participate in the rising profits but sometimes even had to accept wage cuts.
All that because Germany was once called the sick man of Europe
Germany is facing a minor recession after a once-in-a-generation energy shock and a once-in-a-generation spike in inflation. And they've had, what, a year and a half to adapt to the new world order? This sounds more like a best case scenario than a cause for alarm.
It's hardly fair to pick on Germany in this regard. Most of affluent Europe has seen between zero and negative real economic growth for 15 years, basically since the great recession crashed everything.
The standard we'll compare to is the US (it has tended to have a gradual upward sloping economic growth, somewhat consistent). Going with per capita figures, as that is almost always more important than the total figure.
US 1990: $29,000. US 2000: $36,000. US 2007: $48,000 (peak before great recession hit). Today: $80,000. $48k in 2007 is $73k today (painful inflation). The US per capita figure is up roughly 10% since the great recession, in real terms, which is not a great outcome (if you want to know why the US population is so restless, this is one reason; in real terms major costs (healthcare, education, housing) have skyrocketed over the past ~16 years and the economy has not). Since 2000 per capita GDP has increased by a bit over 20% in real terms ($65k to $80k). Since 1990 the US has added around 85 million people (close to a 1/3 increase).
The UK 1990: $19,000. The UK 2000: $28,000. The UK 2007: $50,000. UK today: $46,000. Since the year 2000, the UK has added 10% to its population and their inflation adjusted GDP per capita has contracted by almost 10%. Since the peak in 2007 their GDP per capita has dropped by 1/3 inflation adjusted (!) - $50k in 2007 is $75k today. That's a massive erosion over what will soon be two decades. In 2007 the UK briefly had a higher per capita figure than the US, now it's approaching half the US.
Germany 1990: $22,000. Germany 2000: $24,000. Germany 2008: $45,000 (peak before great recession). Germany today: $51,000. $24k in 1990 is around $43k-$44k today (via the BLS inflation calculator). So Germany has seen a bit under 20% real growth over 33 years, which is exceptionally poor by most any standard (but at least it's growth). Since the peak in 2008, they have seen more than a 20% drop ($45k in 2008 is $65k today). They are lagging behind, however there are clearly worse outcomes in Europe, including the UK.
France 1990: $22,000. France 2000: $22,000. France 2008: $45,000. France today: $44,000. Their population has increased by around ten million (~58m to ~68m) in 33 years. Since the year 2000 their per capita output has grown by a real 10% roughly. They're in the same boat as the UK, with a 1/3 drop in their per capita GDP since the peak in 2008.
Italy 1990: $21,000. Italy 2000: $20,000. Italy 2008: $41,000. Italy today: $37,000. $41k in 2008 is equal to $60k today. So Italy has seen a near 40% drop since 2008 in real terms. Obviously far worse than Germany.
Spain 1990: $14,000. Spain 2000: $15,000. Spain 2008: $35,000. Spain today: $31,000. $35k in 2008 is equal to $51k today. Spain has seen roughly a 1/3 decline since the 2008 peak in real terms.
Netherlands 1990: $21,000. Netherlands 2000: $26,000. Netherlands 2008: $58,000. Netherlands today: $61,000. $58k in 2008 is equal to $84k today. Nearly a 1/3 drop in real terms since the 2008 peak.
And so on it goes for most of Western Europe. The exceptions are the Baltics and Ireland.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 339 ms ] threadI would argue that betting the farm on a single unreliable (at best) partner for cheap energy and future development is an internal factor and not an external one.
Shutting down nuclear makes sense, we have much safer ways nowadays to generate (transform) energy. Storing the nuclear waste is a unsolved issue that is passed on to our children.
From what I know nuclear energy is not really cheaper than other sources. Also Germanys energy was 2021 only 12% nuclear.
Sounds for me they are very much Nazi-like.
[0] https://www.dw.com/en/afd-politician-h%C3%B6cke-charged-with...
The German authorities are doing in their trousers because of the AfD's meteoric rise. They will do anything so that the average voter thinks that utter incompetent clowns like Scholz, Bärbock and Habeck are indeed good political choices. Any and all elements (like 3 word quotes) are going to be used to ban the real opposition.
The sad fact is that a stuffed animal could do better for Germany than the current coalition. The AfD is in the right place at the right time.
https://www.volksverpetzer.de/hintergrund/25-hoecke-zitate/
In fact, his own party members are unable to tell apart his writings from "Mein Kampf": https://www.stern.de/politik/deutschland/bjoern-hoecke-oder-...
As for comparing Hitler quotes. Haha, very funny. But it turns out by that metric Taylor Swift is a genocidal monster[1].
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2013/08/who-said...
Yeah, and you were wrong. Newspaper rhetoric is not a tenth as cheap and nasty as what you hear from fascist assholes like the AfD.
Why should Germany be any different?
"We have so many foreigners in our country that a holocaust would be fruitful once more."
"We should found an SA[1] and clean up!"
"Homosexuals in prison? We should do that in Germany as well!"
"Such people we obviously have to dispose of."
Source: https://www.volksverpetzer.de/analyse/afd-zitate/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung
Radioactive waste is radioactive because it still has stuff in it that can be refined into usable fuel ore for further use.
The reason this was not done was because it was cheaper to mine new ore than refine older waste. This is quickly changing.
When uranium pellets are used up they become depleted uranium and have industrial uses as ballests, armor, or (controversially) as weapons. These are about as dangerous as lead. Don't eat them but can be safely held on your hand or buried with minimum danger.
Nuclear power is our path to a green future and people like you spreading ignorance are why countries like Germany are now dependent on despotic totalitarian regimes.
If making more grid storage was cheap and easy, we would have built it decades ago. This is why Germany is still burning so much coal.
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/144985/1/cesifo1_wp5...
Solar and wind cannot support a base load period. Battery tech is great and believe me it's cool but lithium ion batteries have been in place since the 70s and the chemistry hasn't improved.
Instead of sitting on our hands with a thumb up the bum, waiting for breakthroughs that never come, we have solutions today that work and should be leveraged before those gains in chemical engineering and material science happen.
Modern reactors are far more resilient and safe. The reason building new reactors is so expensive comes down to the permitting and license process. Building is easy, dealing with the $300/hr lawyers and regulatory overhead that makes bringing new reactors online is why it's so expensive.
You want to know who has the safest track record of nuclear reactor operation? The navy.
If one looks at France, for example, one can see that they have been doing this quite successfully for 30+ years.
It's not a know-how problem, it's a political problem.
The "use once and store" attitude that results in needing safe places for highly radioactive material for 100's of thousands of years is insane, when you can just use the stuff until it's "worn out" and the resulting lower level waste only needs caring for for some small handful of decades.
And we need more fast-breeder reactors, too, FWIW.
People have different problems and priorities than you, and if you decide to annoy them on top of the hardships they've already been burdened with, this might be the straw that will cause them to eventually radicalize. Just look at the AfD banners of the day, and you will see that they use every opportunity like this to grab voters. I've seen posters that said "Klima-Kleber ins Knast", so this is a factor that may bend people down.
What I don't like about Germany is that left-leaning people love to shout out their virtue with demos, banners, stickers, banter and whatnot, but when they are confronted with an actual working-class crowd, they just brush them off as "Nazis", and we don't talk to "Nazis".
Unfortunately Germany took the approach of shutting down nuclear before they had eliminated all coal plants. An operating coal plant will kill many people just through its normal emissions.
>...The five EU countries whose coal power plants do the most harm abroad are Poland (causing 4,690 premature deaths abroad); Germany (2,490); Romania (1,660); Bulgaria (1,390) and the UK (1,350).
Besides killing people in neighboring countries, Germans are also prematurely dying due to their use of coal and being downwind of its neighbors:
>...The five EU countries most heavily impacted by coal pollution from neighbouring countries, in addition to that from their own plants are: Germany (3,630 premature deaths altogether), Italy (1,610); France (1,380); Greece (1,050) and Hungary (700).
https://caneurope.org/report-europe-s-dark-cloud-coal-burnin....
As a comparison, in 2022, there were 2,776 road traffic fatalities in Germany.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1331134/road-traffic-fat...
While Germany has a long term goal of stopping the burning of coal, every year this is delayed is more people dying. Energy supply disruptions have actually caused them to increase their use of coal:
>...The ‘intensive use’ of German coal power plants lead to additional emissions of 15.8 million tonnes of CO2 in 2022, according to a report by consultancy Energy Brainpool commissioned by Green Planet Energy. Due to the energy crisis caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine, Germany temporarily reopened decommissioned and soon-to-be decommissioned coal power plants last year to avert gas shortages, which resulted in more CO2 being released. According to the authors, the emissions are ‘additional’ because they are not accounted for in the European Emissions Trading System (ETS). Germany's total emissions amounted to about 750 million tonnes last year
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/intensive-use-german-co....
>...Storing the nuclear waste is an unsolved issue that is passed on to our children.
In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can be recycled (as it is in France) which would reduce the amount of waste:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
In the future there will be better solutions to deal with the rest of the waste. Newer reactor designs would also make it possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides) many of which last tens of thousands of years or longer and make conventional nuclear waste disposal so problematic. Most of the radioactive fission products (FPs) the reactor produces have much shorter half-lives: they are intensely radioactive in the short term but decay quickly. Through many cycles, the IFR ultimately causes 99.9% of the uranium and transuranium elements to undergo fission and produce power; so its waste is just the fission products. These have much shorter half lives; so in 300 years their radi...
Do I think it's amazing or perfect? Not at all. But I much prefer it to burning non-renewable and cancerous petrochemicals/carbons. So, it's the best we have until we have for now.
From CNN Business [2] "On Friday [September 2 2022], shortly after the G7 announcement [of the oil price cap], Russian state energy giant Gazprom said it would not resume deliveries through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline on Saturday as planned."
On 26 September 2022, NS1 and NS2 pipelines were damaged ending any possibility of Russia using them for political pressure or profit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_1
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/09/02/business/russia-oil-price...
Who ever did it committed an act of terrorism and a crime against nature.
https://phys.org/news/2023-03-hidden-environmental-danger-no...
Cheap Russian energy was the drug that Germany got hooked on. Every viewer of after-school specials knows you shouldn't get hooked on the drug dealer's freebies.
The historical record since the current contracts were signed (in the seventies): The Soviet Union delivered reliably throughout the eighties conflicts about short-range nuclear missiles, etc. Delivery continued reliably when the Soviet Union split up. Delivery was reliable when the transit country Poland had what amounts to a revolution. It continued reliably through Germany's reuinification. In the fifteen years following, Russia's economy half-died but delivery continued without change.
These were wrenching changes to every country involved and one fairly substantial conflict. If this record indicates unreliability, what would it take to indicate reliability?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der
Bad policies for energy security, richly rewarded.
Similar to the current situation in the U.S. where profits are rising but workers are not benefiting much.
Economic prosperity seldom means higher wages.
- prices are not that expensive like in the nordic countries. If you cook at home most of the week, you can easily spend only around 350-450 EUR/month eating healthy food
- renting is still hard (it's not so easy to find an apartment), but you can get a decent place for around 1.5K EUR/month (or less). I pay 1.2K/month for a 80 sqm (not city center, but not outside of it neither)
- if you have > 10 years of working experience, you can definitely reach the 100K EUR/year (not FAANG). It's not easy, but not insanely difficult. Reaching 80K EUR/year is even more standard. This puts you on the top 10-5% of earners in Germany, so you get to save a lot of money per month
- electricity/gas bills are getting more expensive, but still you won't notice with your kind of salary
- health insurance is good enough
- public transportation works just fine (not the best, but surely good enough). Tons of options (bus, tram, trains, bikes)
- big cities in the west are welcoming to people who don't speak German
Compare this with the situation of other european countries like France, Italy (a bit cheaper than Germany in general, but salaries are way lower in IT: around 30-40% lower) or even the Netherlands (not cheaper than Germany, and salaries are usually ~15% lower in general for IT). So, if Germany is doing bad, I cannot imagine how other EU countries are doing.
The only thing Germany needs to fix is the winter time (you cannot expect to have healthy people when the sun sets at around 3-4pm in winter).
P.S. And I love the work culture: "9-5 -> work. Outside of working hours -> don't even bother reaching me, I won't answer"
What's the problem in France?
For an equivalent comparison, on this side of the pond tech salaries in Canada are abysmal compared to US salaries (at least from what I hear). And it's not like Canada is a ton cheaper (their real estate affordability crisis makes even places like California look a bit tame). But then I often here how policymakers in Canada wish there were "more tech" north of the border how they put in place programs to attract tech talent to the country. Of course, those programs are usually completely useless when engineers can double their salary coming to the US.
But a big part of the issue is that companies simply couldn't afford to double their salaries because they aren't as profitable as US tech giants (and not even FAANGs, but just other mid-tier tech companies as well). But it's going to be hard to build top tier tech companies if you can't attract top tier tech talent, so the cycle spirals.
I'm curious what tech salaries are like in bonafide EU tech standouts like Spotify.
Usual mid-high end of Swedish tech salaries in Sweden. Not sure about the USA.
> But a big part of the issue is that companies simply couldn't afford to double their salaries because they aren't as profitable as US tech giants
I don't understand why there's always a comparison to US's salaries, the US is the outlier in every discussion about labour and salaries, almost nowhere else in the world (maybe except for Switzerland and similar countries) pays such high salaries, the rest of the world won't pay as much as the USA, it's a fact, I'd prefer to stop comparing everywhere else to that outlier, it won't be the rule.
It's the top benchmark and it has a huge cost in terms of quality of life for a chunk of the population, the USA is a business-first, citizenry-after kind of society, I don't feel it's a way of being that other countries should emulate. At least after living there for a while I never really felt that it was so rich, it has loads of rich people with shiny toys but society in general feels poor: infrastructure sucks (passing by any airport in the USA is a trip back to the 80s/90s), stuck with the car-centric mentality from the 50s, a very palpable huge divide between rich and poor, etc.
The USA has amazing businesses, and makes a lot of money, but I don't think it trickles down into society; given how rich the country is in nominal terms I'm always surprised whenever I pass by and realise that wealth is not translated into a better general quality of life for most citizens, it's just that people can afford to buy more trinkets...
The reason I brought it up is because the most profitable, dynamic tech companies are founded and based in the US (often by immigrants). Other countries will lose their edge to be able compete in tech globally if they don't compete in engineer pay.
What ends up in your bank account is about 20% higher in France than in Germany after going from brut to net though
https://www.valoris-avocats.com/comparatif-sur-la-remunerati...
Before taxes and contributions. If you are single without kids 100k is ~58k net.
The US numbers get seriously fudged via the 12.4% cough 6.2% social security payments etc. Germany pays 7.3% for health insurance which looks bad except we pay 2.9% for Medicare without being able to use it so it’s more like 4.4% for health and dental insurance for 366/Month @100K which doesn’t look so bad.
Of course when people are talking 100k salaries in the US this stuff is baked in so the underlying numbers aren’t necessarily important only achievable take home pay and cost of living.
However, paying out the full benefit I receive isn’t a good baseline because at that point I may as well go somewhere else and keep a larger slice of the pie.
Depends on what you think is fair but I always think about tax from what would I be willing to pay for the service (and pay to provide to others) given what the service is if there was no coercion or free loading and that number is way, way less than what I am currently paying in taxes. This is due to a mix of services being provided that generate no network effect value or negative network effect value to me, poor cost management on the services provided that benefit me and/or benefit me through improving someone else in Canada and in some cases outlawing outside provision to me (i.e. healthcare) and forcing use of the government service that is inferior.
With a median income you'll pay quite a bit less, when I was working in Germany I paid about 35%. Income beyond ~65k is taxed at 42%, one of the many reasons why I left - it's really hard to get ahead with such a handbrake considering that a normal house sets you back 500k nowadays.
Short of taking Germany and pushing it further south I don’t think there’s much to do about that.
Permanent daylight savings will give people in parts of the country daylight for ~30 minutes after 5, at the cost of people commuting in the dark at their groggiest in the morning. A further change would compound that even more.
The reality is that if you live near the top of the world the winter daylight situation is gonna suck.
I loved it! For me personally sunlight in the morning is a waste, I barely notice it before 3rd coffee. But afternoon/evening... lovely!
They get 12 hours of sunlight in September and March (which have equinoxes), so maybe one of those is what you were thinking of?
Any country in the world is great for people like us, even the dumbest IT worker will make 2x the min wage of the locals.
Don't forget we're the main cause of gentrification too, we're the reason why locals have to flee the city centers
Europe is awful and NA is a million times better. You do not want to even consider moving to Europe (especially Germany, Czechia, Poland and even Ukraine! Everything is worse, even downtown SF or India are better!
Stay in the USA and Canada or you will regret it!
OP please delete this comment and stop trying to convince people your life is great.
That says nothing about standards of living between countries. Even if Norway had -10% growth rate and Afghanistan had a +10% growth rate, I would still much rather be living in Norway.
That BS,Germany lived on the substance, the infrastructure was driven on wear and tear, important government agencies were cut so that experts were missing to avoid something like the odyssey of the Berlin airport, thanks to tax-free company sales and the introduction of Hartz IV, investors were able to make big profits while the workers could not participate in the rising profits but sometimes even had to accept wage cuts.
All that because Germany was once called the sick man of Europe
Importing 1-2 Mio people into the German welfare system, or was it caused by purposefully driving up energy costs massively?
Is it that both things are a double whammy for housing costs?
We might never know! (because the answer is - as always - absolutely racist)
The standard we'll compare to is the US (it has tended to have a gradual upward sloping economic growth, somewhat consistent). Going with per capita figures, as that is almost always more important than the total figure.
US 1990: $29,000. US 2000: $36,000. US 2007: $48,000 (peak before great recession hit). Today: $80,000. $48k in 2007 is $73k today (painful inflation). The US per capita figure is up roughly 10% since the great recession, in real terms, which is not a great outcome (if you want to know why the US population is so restless, this is one reason; in real terms major costs (healthcare, education, housing) have skyrocketed over the past ~16 years and the economy has not). Since 2000 per capita GDP has increased by a bit over 20% in real terms ($65k to $80k). Since 1990 the US has added around 85 million people (close to a 1/3 increase).
The UK 1990: $19,000. The UK 2000: $28,000. The UK 2007: $50,000. UK today: $46,000. Since the year 2000, the UK has added 10% to its population and their inflation adjusted GDP per capita has contracted by almost 10%. Since the peak in 2007 their GDP per capita has dropped by 1/3 inflation adjusted (!) - $50k in 2007 is $75k today. That's a massive erosion over what will soon be two decades. In 2007 the UK briefly had a higher per capita figure than the US, now it's approaching half the US.
Germany 1990: $22,000. Germany 2000: $24,000. Germany 2008: $45,000 (peak before great recession). Germany today: $51,000. $24k in 1990 is around $43k-$44k today (via the BLS inflation calculator). So Germany has seen a bit under 20% real growth over 33 years, which is exceptionally poor by most any standard (but at least it's growth). Since the peak in 2008, they have seen more than a 20% drop ($45k in 2008 is $65k today). They are lagging behind, however there are clearly worse outcomes in Europe, including the UK.
France 1990: $22,000. France 2000: $22,000. France 2008: $45,000. France today: $44,000. Their population has increased by around ten million (~58m to ~68m) in 33 years. Since the year 2000 their per capita output has grown by a real 10% roughly. They're in the same boat as the UK, with a 1/3 drop in their per capita GDP since the peak in 2008.
Italy 1990: $21,000. Italy 2000: $20,000. Italy 2008: $41,000. Italy today: $37,000. $41k in 2008 is equal to $60k today. So Italy has seen a near 40% drop since 2008 in real terms. Obviously far worse than Germany.
Spain 1990: $14,000. Spain 2000: $15,000. Spain 2008: $35,000. Spain today: $31,000. $35k in 2008 is equal to $51k today. Spain has seen roughly a 1/3 decline since the 2008 peak in real terms.
Netherlands 1990: $21,000. Netherlands 2000: $26,000. Netherlands 2008: $58,000. Netherlands today: $61,000. $58k in 2008 is equal to $84k today. Nearly a 1/3 drop in real terms since the 2008 peak.
And so on it goes for most of Western Europe. The exceptions are the Baltics and Ireland.
Figures are rounded to nearest thousand.