If it’s almost free and access is guaranteed depending on merit it’s a good thing. If it’s super expensive and for few people… early stage startups shouldn’t waste too much money on offices anyway…
It's private/public partnership with an established "makerspace" called Motion.Lab. Historically their cheapest memberships have been 250 EUR per month. Unless something changes this initiative is an incubator/business park.
It's interesting that the state is contributing, but it looks like the intention there is to encourage industrial startups to the city. That's probably a great thing to do but I think calling it a makerspace is stretching the definition a bit.
That said, it'll probably allow people to get more things done than at a community space, especially with professional operators making sure things are maintained properly.
Since it seems to be initiated and funded by the state, I give it between 2 to 4 years before funding runs out, politics change at the top, and the space shutters to make way for newer, more exciting ideas though.
Indeed. I believe it is a different category altogether and probably good that they are kept separate.
Just as cheap office spaces for fledgling machine sharing opportunities may give founders the help they need in the very first stages of a company.
Community spaces on the other hand move at a slower pace and are driven by the enthusiasm and volunteer time of their members. Both of which are hard to maintain if the effort ultimately benefits a commercial venture. These kind of "shared hobby cellars" are still very viable and can collect and impressive inventory of tooling. Sometimes people move from one to the other.
Different use cases different approaches. It's unfortunate that the same name is applied to both.
Liverpool had one of these. The universities bought in and in principle academics had access to use the space and materials costed to the institution. So yes, a co-working space with access to fabrication equipment and a few small companies in residence. Very expensive for private consumers and we were never sure who'd get the bill if we used the fancier machines, so it was underutilised. Eg some high end LPKF PCB equipment that could do printed antennas and all sorts of interesting stuff, but the rental cost was rarely worth it over rush ordering from places like oshpark.
Kind of an odd setup because any company that actually needed the kit (eg a darkroom for optical prep) would be better off renting a tiny industrial space and building out their own labs, and contracting out the rest.
And since the universities paid into it they could have pushed for ownership and made it a proper facility for students and researchers.
That matches my experience with this sort of makerspace. It launched with much fanfare and I was really excited. However it was far too expensive for me to use as a private individual, and didn't have enough high end or specialised equipment to make it worthwhile for most companies in the area. It was very disappointing all around. I walked past it on my way to and from work and never saw anybody there. A couple of years later it closed down.
I balked when I saw it refer to the makers as "stakeholders". It sounds like something a "policymaker" who's never set foot in a makerspace would say. Good luck, I suppose.
As a founder in Berlin, I get excited when my city does stuff like this and is well represented in the maker community. Germany has a long way to go to really create a culture that fosters innovation, but these are the right first steps.
I think this is something Americans (I'm American, born and raised on the west coast) don't understand: They talk shit about EU innovation and talk up their own dominance, but the tides are turning and the EU is motivated. The landscape will look very, very different in a few years.
We will see. To say that EU doesn't have systemically huge problems to innovation is delusional though. And I'm pretty sure those problems cannot be fixed by just announcing new things.
The announcement looks like a. Lot of fluff and pomp
Which is exactly the problem with most of Europe -- a lot of talk, but little action, not out of a lack of motivation but because of the amount of heavy-handed bureaucracy, taxation, and anti-startup culture. That last one might sound odd when many countries, including mine, has a lot of startup schemes -- from tax cuts to innovation funding etc. But all of that is so bureaucratic and slow and complicated that it's only by accident that it helps anyone.
"I'll believe it when I see it happen" is my approach to anything Europe, because I've lived within it for nearly forty years now. And I'm wise from experience. I've seen this before. Same song, worse bureaucracy, different faces (politicians).
> They talk shit about EU innovation and talk up their own dominance, but the tides are turning and the EU is motivated.
I'm waiting for the day when a country stands up and says their strategy is to be unmotivated and commit to outdated approaches. Most of them seem to have huge crowds of motivated and capable people who are then swatted down by the local court system because success makes the powers that be uncomfortable.
I'd feel more optimistic if you had a specific mistake that Europe was going to stop making. Maybe adjustments to tax laws. Motivation doesn't cut it against people like the Americans or the Chinese, there needs to be actual actions taken beyond makerspaces. Germany seems to have purposefully triggered a domestic energy crisis, that balances out a lot of makerspaces.
I'd feel more optimistic if you had a specific mistake that Europe was going to stop making. Maybe adjustments to tax laws. Motivation doesn't cut it against people like the Americans or the Chinese, there needs to be actual actions taken beyond makerspaces.
This whole Europe bashing is becoming a tiring trope. Europe has a lot of successful companies, including in computing (ASML, ASM, ARM, NXP, STM, etc.). What we don't have are hyper-growth companies that mostly profit from vacuuming up your data and selling you ads. Good riddance.
Yes, Europe would be nothing without the US. But the same is true the other way around as well, a few decades of globalism has distributed the production chains across countries.
At any rate, back to the GP's comment. I do see a lot of optimism and the EU is going to invest a lot in defense, chips, and AI. There will be plenty of money floating around.
Germany seems to have purposefully triggered a domestic energy crisis
Well, not purposefully. But certainly ill-considered. At any rate, the EU is on the renewable energy track, we'll get there, and it will give us energy independence. Which is better than going a few decades back in time and 'drill drill drill baby'.
I just want to point out that this is very much what I expect from Europeans. Motivated, optimistic but explicitly rejecting large profitable companies and cheap energy. The immediate plan is to invest in the military which, notably, generally has negative returns on investment.
> Europe has a lot of successful companies, including in computing (ASML...
The chart is interesting, but misses on an important thing: semiconductor production on it's own is complicated, but producing equipment for semiconductor production is the whole new level, that's why ASML.
>Europe has a lot of successful companies, including in computing (ASML, ASM, ARM, NXP, STM, etc.)
Having "a lot of companies" is a meaningless metric on its own when all those European companies combined make less money than Apple on a bad quarter. That's like me saying I do "a lot of deadlifts", without mentioning all those deadlifts are done with an empty barbell. Context makes the difference.
What matters is not how many companies, but how much money are you bringing into the economy and how many well paid jobs you're creating.
EU has a lot of traditional and mediocrely profitable companies that are still going through layoffs: Bosch, Siemens, VW, Audi, etc due to being mostly stuck in stagnating industries that are facing increasing competition from Asia.
>the EU is going to invest a lot in defense, chips, and AI
I've heard this political song and dance before yet it hasn't ever materialized in more and better paid tech jobs for Europeans.
Having "a lot of companies" is a meaningless metric on its own when all those European companies combined make less money than Apple on a bad quarter. That's like me saying I do "a lot of deadlifts", without mentioning all those deadlifts are done with an empty barbell. Context makes the difference.
Apple won't produce a lot of cutting-edge iPhone chips without ASML lithography. iPhones (at least some generations) also use NXP chips. ASML incidentally had a revenue of 28.26 billion in 2024 (slightly more than e.g. AMD).
I've heard this political song and dance before yet it hasn't ever materialized in more and better paid tech jobs for Europeans.
Which kinda shows that you (maybe?) don't understand Europe. Sure, more salary is always great. But many Europeans (also those working in the highly technical industry) prefer vacation days, good health insurance, unemployment benefits, being able to cycle/walk to work over concrete jungles, etc.
I know a lot of tech people who had job offers in the US, but would never want to move there. Some do work remotely for US companies though.
>Apple won't produce a lot of cutting-edge iPhone chips without ASML lithography.
Who cares who makes what widget in the supply chain of whatever product? That doesn't change the fact that Apple makes higher margins on the ASML-TSMC made chips than ASML themselves.
If you insist on being pedantic on the supply chain, then ASML couldn't build those machines without the EUV light sources from Cymer in California. iPhone are also made by Foxconn in China, so what?
Every country has some companies highly specialized in something specific, but what matters at the end of the day is who takes home the biggest slices of the pie from the end product, not who makes how many widgets inside the product.
>Phones (at least some generations) also use NXP chips.
NXP is highly toxic company to work for that just had another wave of layoffs, and also has lower profit margins that Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Nvidia, etc. basically all the US semi companies.
So I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve here but your chosen examples aren't selling the image of EU tech supremacy. Just look at market cap of EU vs US tech sectors.
"Apart from a complacent reliance on Russian gas throughout its period of fast growth, Germany’s energy policy faces a detrimental resistance to nuclear energy, a sluggish transition to green energy, and an incredibly slow bureaucracy, all contributing to the nation’s energy crisis." [1]
Especially companies rested on a relaxed foundation of artifically low energy prices due to lobbyism and dependence on cheap Russian gas.
Both is gone and companies face "true" prices and have to deal with them.
Nevertheless, energy generation from renewables is rising and rising, more and more renewable capacity is added to the grid each week and laws have been loosened to enable a faster transition.
I won't get into what might be considered "artificially low prices" and "true prices", but isn't what you describe an energy crisis, then?
I picked an illustrative article that explains things. Germany has been hit by an energy crisis as a matter of concensus and fact, not opinion. You can easily research the topic if you are actually curious and interested.
The dependence on Russian gas is still prevalent in Germany but it now comes through transit.
Consider that there are many machines that use it, which can’t be replaced immediately.
And you can't use spot prices in the way you're trying to for a few reasons - firstly, those countries will all have interconnects with each other so the prices harmonise - if one country has a whole problem the whole area has a problem (which might be what we can see in the prices, coincidentally). Secondly the overall cost of electricity isn't set on the median day but by what happens on extreme days (dead of winter or height of summer, depending on where in the world you are). Thirdly, a lot of German policy seems to involve taxes applied after the electricity has been sold.
This shows per capita energy consumption steadily decreased from ~1985 to 2023 almost back to the level of 1960.
Should that indicate an energy crisis?
The graphs from the whole EU or the USA don't look much different so I don't see how the chart helps.
What numbers could be looked at to identify that energy crisis?
You seem to have spotted all the salient features, I'm not sure what you want me to add. To the questions - yes and those numbers.
I remain mystified by the people who can look at a 25% drop in energy use, steady relative collapse of power relative to Asia and the gentle collapse of the political fabric and just shrug and say everything is fine. I dunno what the AfD needs to poll at before the German elite admit that maybe they screwed up the last few decades.
The statistics suggest there is a massive problem here.
Yes. Do you not follow much politics? The US is currently undergoing one of the most spectacular political revolutions since the 1930s. The Overton window includes issues like the collapse of the US Not-An-Empire, invading Canada and deciding what form the civil war is going to take [0]. Driven by a gentleman standing up and shouting "drill baby drill" and talking about how the country needs cheap energy to drive a manufacturing renaissance as one of his central policies. Europe is currently re-arming because war has returned to the continent with around a million dead and escalating - discovering as they do so that service economies don't have an obvious path to stopping troop movements [1]. There is a mirroring political revolt brewing there as we see a large number of rather disgruntled alternative parties start to gain traction pointing out decades of failed policy that suggest living standards have been slipping. Most of the activity is the downstream impacts of energy policy. People are on edge because the real economic pie is not only stagnant, but shrinking and they're figuring it out.
[0] I recommend vicious debate, but physical violence seems to be a possiblity.
[1] And, realistically, if China ever openly supports Russia then Europe will probably lose any fight that eventuates. There is an interesting geopolitical balance forming.
Why would a 25% drop in energy use necessarily indicate an energy crisis?
Isn't it far more likely that a shift in economic composition changed the energy consumption? That shift might be a bad thing, but it's not an energy crisis.
I don't think you have a real point there. I'd draw a parallel with someone getting hit by a car and; someone shouts out "we need an ambulence this is a medical crisis!" and a helpful bystander pipes up to say the issue here is really more of a mechanical nature, nothing went wrong medically - this is all just a result of poor driving skills and is really a driver education crisis.
I mean, ok? Maybe call an ambulance anyway? Or in this case stop with the pressure against building out & using cheap energy.
EU has much better banking than the US. With VAT ID is paradoxically less fragmented as well. SEPA transactions is something the US can only dream about and will never materialize because Jim Texan's Right Bank ltd. will be against a common payment framework ;D because freedom or some other generic-murikan brainfart. America ban when cannot compete. Culture of guns and oppression.
We have plenty and have higher quality of life, better healthcare, better social services, vastly better public education, better infrastructure, much lower criminality, much better personal happiness and personal fulfilment, much less stress and live much longer...
Yeah enjoy your money, you will need it when getting older to finance basic services and needs.
Yes thats true, I also feel a bit regret for getting provoked (but never starting out of blue, just responding in similar manners).
Ifs fucking disappointing, Europe and US are by far the best allies and friends (Australia and New Zealand too) on the most important matters - our core values, our respect for democracy etc. France helped you with independence, you helped us defeat fucking nazis ffs.
I hate to see this breakup, because it feels permanent for foreseeable future. And there aren't even good enough reasons. I hate that 1 unstable person can literally drag a billion down down the mud.
We're all fucked and we don't want to admit it. So we squabble. Europe is obviously fucked already and America is getting fucked by the orange ringmaster. The future is bleak.
I live in Europe and moved here from California but so long as you can triple your pay by moving to America Europe will be a laggard. Retire at 40 or work until 70?
Not to mention that millionaires in their thirties and forties are the raw material startups are made of (who else can justify the opportunity cost?) and Europe lacks that, badly. Meanwhile one in fifteen Americans are millionaires. Which group is more likely to have the freedom to take risks?
Agreed, SEPA is objectively better than what the US has.
But it doesn’t matter how easy it is the transfer money if you increasingly don’t have any.
On average, governments in the EU centrally direct roughly 40% more economic activity than the U.S. (and Chinese) government does.
In the short term, this appears more efficient. Allowing markets and decentralized private players to sort things out is messy and aesthetically unpleasing at times (like democracy), but leads to greater growth and innovation overall. The Chinese Communist Party understands this, maybe the Eurocrats will figure this one out after a few more 6-course dinners in Brussels.
Please explain to me how efficient the US health care system is.
That’s right, it’s part of the money handled by public entities in my country, and "decentralized" in the US. Personally I don’t want any of the kind of "growth" the US has experienced in their health sector.
Nothing about US healthcare resembles a free market in any sense of the word.
The US in fact has government healthcare for anyone over 65, anyone under 22, anyone disabled, anyone who has been in the military, and anyone who is poor (essentially half the population).
The other half outside the government system is nothing like a free market either, due to the existence of the first half combined with well-meaning policies that ultimately create the worst kind of adverse incentives.
That said, the US funds basically half of global medical research while Europe funds only a third while having double the population. So again, the EU centralized government system is absolutely more efficient overall, but the messy (only slightly more decentralized) US system drives far more innovation.
> I'm waiting for the day when a country stands up and says their strategy is to be unmotivated and commit to outdated approaches.
There's a few examples that come to mind, some better than others — "commit to outdated approaches" is what "conservative" used to mean, Chesterton's Fence etc.
Bureaucracy can be about powerful people capturing institutions to prevent competition. Totally a thing. But it's not the only cause of rules and regulations, some of which are very much written in the blood of those who died by the absence of those rules.
I think taxation changes are unlikely to unlock anything EU-wide (consider what it's like today in China or what it was like in the USA in the decades after WW2); instead, I'd consider the impact of having 24 official languages and needing substantially different legal teams between each nation. Imagine how much harder it would be to do business in the USA if everything in Silicon Valley and Hollywood was in Spanish, everything in Louisiana was French, everything in New York was in Dutch, etc. — innovation is still possible, and common regulations in the form of the EU still help, but these barriers still remain.
Likewise, despite the Euro, there's eight currencies in the EU. Imagine if Texas still used Redbacks; Vermont used Vermont coppers; Pennsylvania, pounds; etc.
>but the tides are turning and the EU is motivated
In what way are the tides turning? We've been reading news articles on how Berlin is Europe's silicon valley for the past 10+ years but I don't see much VC or interesting tech giants coming out of there, or high paying job there. The only thing they seem to have copied form SV is impossible to find housing for outsiders, though I think it's easier to move to SV than Berlin now.
Tides turning and motivation aren't enough. You need venture capital, and EU has none. At this point, every EU city that has some web dev body shops and one built a food delivery app then calls itself the SV of Europe to the point it's become a meme.
SV is more than overhyped VC funded apps though, you have Berkeley and Stanford next door, the biggest defense contractors outside, with all the gray-beards of 3D graphics there, all the gray-beards of silicone and RF there, of CPU design, of kernel development, etc. You can't replicate this highly experienced melting pot of CS and HW expertise anywhere else by throwing some VC money in a hippie city that has a technical university.
Well in terms of amount of VC capital invested the UK is head and shoulder ahead of Germany and France... So "Berlin is Europe's silicon valley" is largely wishful thinking or a sales pitch.
Those "makerspaces" are, IMHO, totally irrelevant. Ease of access to capital, of setting up a company, of structuring it, of doing business, taxes, are what makes the difference and most EU countries rank consistently lower than the UK on any of those aspects.
I think the biggest challenge in Berlin/Germany is that very little of the capital that has been poured into the startup sector has made it's way back to the the engineers.
Part of this is due to severe restrictions on employee share schemes (changed recently), low employee turnover (3-6 month notice periods), enforceable non-competes, and heavy tax burdens on income. As a result you see a surprisingly low amount of engineer led/founded companies.
Germany has genuinely innovative companies though, but they don't look anything like SV, eg. Trumpf, Zeiss, etc.
You may be right, that there won't be any "SV" in Berlin. It's true that it's unlikely to happen for all the reason you've provided and others. And the real SV in California is clearly not the SV it used to be either. It's easy to see everything a bit more distributed going forward. Some things happening in Berlin, other elsewhere in Europe - and still some in California and elsewhere in the world - and maybe China is going to seize its chance this time, who knows... Let's see, we live in interesting times.
"but the tides are turning and the EU is motivated"
well EU didnt even have their own tech giant, most top 10 largest tech company is from US. also china catching up fast
this is down to a culture tbh, most german firm that I been work so far is very meticulous about their work and its great but sometimes tech is changing fast and you must make compromise
Your statement is factually incorrect, there are quite a few EU tech giants. But more to the point: in what universe is having a tech giant a requirement for anything? If anything, big pseudo-monopolies seem like an antipattern.
Trump changed something here. Yes, there is not a United States of Europe. But there is Macron, there is a strong alliance of an European idea around France, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark many more and even Poland again. Hungary is right now the only EU example where not a majority is sharing these "European" values.
I think the alliance between France and Germany is as strong as never before. I think Most Germans want Macron to take the European lead right now (as we only have weak Merz to offer). Trump is like a catalyst for European unification.
It takes an American to speak like that (noting that for some reason, "an American" refers to someone in the US, which may explain why they don't understand the idea). Do you need "United States of Asia" to be "an Asian"?
I am not sure why you are starting this offensive comment, or what your ulterior motive is. The EU is built on mutual agreements and compromises among cultures, instead of federalistic imperialism.
You can always call von der Leyen if that's what you need to have someone to talk about. But you could have googled that yourself, so you were intentionally ignorant about that part, which makes your ragebait comment what it is: ragebait.
If this is what you want the US to be seen as, then go ahead. It's not like we're short of these kind of comments on the internet though. I can recommend to go outside once in a while, go touch some grass while reading a book.
>As Henry Kissinger once said: "Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?"
There are many answers today to this question depending on the diplomatic rank of who‘s asking. Most obvious choices are the president of European Commission for Trump and High Representative for Foreign Affairs for Rubio. JD can entertain himself with political freaks of his choice, his reputation is ruined anyway.
That's how buying works. You can conveniently forget who you bought it from, because it's yours now. Google Maps was bought from an australian company BTW.
You're both right ;) Google maps was indeed bought from an Australian company. Or to be more specific, Google bought a company that had a desktop mapping application that they were in the process of porting to the web, the web version was completed after the acquisition, and that was the original Google Maps. The Swiss company in your link was working on a similar project at the same time and got acquired by Google a couple of years later. The Swiss company was in many ways ahead of Google maps at the time and added a lot new technology and features to Google maps, and can to a great extent probably be considered the basis for the success of Google maps, but Google Maps existed before that acquisition.
Much more useful would be to make a list of all the reasons these innovations keep ending up in the US rather than staying in the EU, and then trying to do something about it. What does it matter how innovative the EU can be if no one in the EU wants to foster and grow those innovations, and if all those innovators are always looking for the first ticket out of there?
First, many innovations are bought by BigTech. Why are BigTech based in the US and not in the EU? Because the EU has more regulations, and the US famously doesn't do antitrust.
Now of course, if you are a founder, you'd rather go make more money in the US. Does that mean that the EU culture is inferior? I don't know. Go ask the average European if they would like to live like the average American.
Sure, the US have BigTech. But the EU has healthcare. Most Europeans wouldn't be proud to sleep under their desk while Musk does what he does. It's a different culture. If your only metrics is how big the biggest tech company is, then the US wins. If the metrics is how happy the people are... well...
"EU has healthcare" - I dare you to depend on public healthcare in poorer EU countries. As someone living in one of those - you go private for everything because by the time you get on the waiting list it will either be irrelevant or get critical. And lets not mention the shit level of care for non threatening conditions.
And this is already spreading to western Europe as well from what I hear from my friends. Giving the aging population situation every health care system is going to start breaking in the next 10-20 years because of how much health care elderly consume and how little they provide to economy.
So for now rich countries have better public healthcare than US. But EU is a very wide term, inequality between EU countries is larger than US states.
And on the point of why most companies gravitate to US - its to access the richest market and leverage their capital pool - EU is not a single market despite the decades of EU efforts, and EU investment into companies is way behind of US, even EU pension funds invest significant funds in the US stock market.
I thought it was mostly the point of startups to be bought like this? EU should stop allowing them to be bought by American megacorps and make sure they cannot use their power and money to not compete on the merits of their product.
I am writing a long post. I hope some people read it.
A very distant relative of mine lives in Germany. He is from India (where I live). He met his German wise in Australia where she was working and they married and later they settled in Germany. He has been asking me to come to Germany for work and start exploring work there and I have always been hesitant about it. Lots of things come to mind - a lot of them are unfounded and/or are just the apprehension of the unknown I am guess. One of the fear is I do not want to settle in Germany. I want to live a decent healthy life and probably return back to India (I don't know after how long; I have a strong feeling/assumption that I will be lonely there and may not be able to connect and I am scared of it) so it seems that I will have no savings essentially when I come back as I have assumed based on stereotypical description or media portrayals fo salaries in Germany/EU.
How is it for skilled foreigners in Germany as a job market currently? Esp. seeing EU is warming up to self sustenance/dependence etc. Are the jobs there? Are those foreigners welcome? This is a tricky question but is there a trend of preference of source geographies for those skilled jobs in Germany? Also, I am in software with 10+ years of experience and my last drawn salary in India was ~70K Euro (in INR) and 5% bonus and 25% startup stock which value at zero now and I was able to save a huge portion or % of it (I know I won't be able to save that % in EU).
Are the salaries really bad? If I am not able to save 1500-2000 EU a month as a single person with no luxurious needs at all there, it may not make much sense for me if I plan to return to my home country eventually).
I am kinda apprehensive about the resurgence of the so called "right" there (which is happening, no happened, in my home country as well but I am a native here :|) - how is that? From a distance everything looks very problematic and scary or rather "very risky".
What I am stuck at is - I actually believe this is not something I can just play on "I won't know until I actually do that". I guess I am being too risk averse and maybe very narrow-minded or paranoid.
I would love to hear this from the locals either native or the ones who are immigrants in tech there.
PS. I apologise if anything sounds absurd or untoward. I do not mean to start an argument or something. I just want to hear about it.
PPS. If a single person with no family falls sick in Germany and has sufficient money (not "rich" money) and health insurance, can they just be admitted in the hospital (assuming hospitalisation was needed and doctors okayed it) and that person be taken care of? Or will they demand a "caretaker" family or friend to be present in the hospital always (that's kind of a requirement here in India) and the person can trust the system to do that? (This is my ONE BIG fear of remaining in India, esp. in old age as someone with no immediate family at all - I know this is counter to what said that I might return if I immigrate).
1. Salaries are lower than in USA, but if you have 15-20 years planning horizon you can still accumulate some wealth. For that you find a decent job, around 70-90k€ and after few years get a mortgage and buy an apartment. You can get a mortgage contract for 10 years and have significant reduction in taxes for your property. Just enjoy your life then and in 10 years or more sell tax-free. Your income may be on 100-300k€ scale. If you choose a minimum payment for mortgage, you may have extra cash for other investments. Check Hypofriend.de for details.
2. In Berlin 2-3.5k€ (depending on your rent or mortgage payments) is enough for a comfortable life with occasional travel (whole Europe at your service, flights are cheap). You can put the rest in savings, buy some ETFs. You can use an online calculator to see how much netto salary you can get (google „Brutto netto rechner“).
3. You will have insurance for healthcare which will cover hospital and ambulance and insurance for job loss which will cover up to 1 year while you are searching for a new job. You will contribute to pension insurance so you can retire in Germany too.
4. Germans aren’t all welcoming to foreigners, that’s true, but I don’t think you should be seriously concerned about far right. The success of AfD is based on protest voting, not because every fifth German is nazi.
IMO you are rationalizing too much because, as you said, you are being paranoid and risk averse.
I moved from a third world country to the UK (London) and at some point I had similar concerns as you have now.
At the end of the day, living means taking risks everyday no matter where you are. My final conclusion was that if I didn't move I would regret not taking the risk, I wanted to know how it feels to live where I live today. I wanted to live an adventure rather than staying on my home country and developing regret.
I don't know you but just reading through your post it seems that you want to do it but fear is holding you back. Are your fears unreasonable? Probably not. Should they dictate what you do with your life? Absolutely not.
It's also fine if you decide to stay, just don't allow this to become a source of regret in your life, be in peace with whatever you choose.
Thank you. I think that's exactly what it is. Fear but I might want to get past them and yes it could go either way, but still. It's just that I am waking up to it kinda at a very wrong time.
It’s not the topics you should discuss with strangers in online forums. We don’t know your needs, desired lifestyle and future plan. It’s you negotiating the salary in Germany and it’s you deciding what rent to pay. So if you’re better than 6000 recently laid off Siemens or 7500 Audi employees you have good chances in Germany.
Edit: salaries are low unless get faang job in Germany. It’s very geographically dependent. You could start in Munich with 3000€ after taxes with included medical insurance. Medical insurance is not good. For modern things you need to pay additional 50-500€ depending on complexity. Rent for garage sized apartment gets close to 1000€ per month. The same apartment to buy costs 200000€ and is bad investment.
It’s you who should decide where to go and what to do. My colleague is telling, that Modi does great job and his family will move back to India. But I have seen too many families, that postponed the great comeback home to the time when kid goes to school and then when the kid graduates and so on.
As a German, I think the issues are much more high level and deeply, deeply rooted in society (culture and official administration) than most tech people realize.
1. Germany has built it's entire identity around a social contract similar to Japan that roughly goes like this: We will have a backbone of well paying industrial jobs (both white and blue collar) which we'll use to generate large trade surplusses by exporting physical goods gloablly to fund our internal high cost social security and healthcare systems. As the state, I prefer low worker mobility, cause that keeps unemployment and hence all costs to the state low.
2. Financial markets/ access to capital/ investments/ taxation work the same way: Allocate capital to physical goods manufacturers with high working capital requirements, long investment horizons, tax the shit out of labor vs. capital gains, make the already strong companies stronger instead of gambling on upstarts.
3. There are workers and there are capitalists and these two should not mix: Labor is taxed insanely high, stock options/ labor equity participation basically unheard of and nobody cares about that in the government. It's only relevant to a tiny fraction of the electorate. It's a non-issue for the federal government.
4. No incentive for "the winner takes all", all incentive on "stable, low fluctuation employment".
It's a sh*tshow as clearly showing with the abysmal growth Germany has experienced over the past 5 years.
It will 100% get worse before it gets better (if not for politics simply due to demographics, where a disproportionally large share of social welfare consumers will need to be supported by an ever-shrinking share of tax payers). There are already talks about further tax increases and as the demographics worsen, the state will come looking for new income sources. Guaranteed.
Yes, quality of life is great for now (esp. in places like Berlin) and yes, there is an evergrowing tech eco-system, but this is in no way indicative of where Germany as a whole is going systematically.
You assume it only takes one month to find an apartment, all while you're constantly battling 200 other people in apartment visitations, for the chance to let a estate agent and landlord shit on you. Is that lifestyle enjoyable?
Apartment search may take 6-12 months, so it’s more like 48 of 60. People hold to their rent-controlled contracts as long as possible for this reason. If you are new to this city, bad luck. If you live here long enough, you may pay ca. 1k€ per month for 90 sqm in Mitte or neighboring parts of the city and absolutely enjoy your life in Berlin.
Honestly, not much of this is typically a problem for "new" tech transplants.
Their income still allows them to pick from what's on the market.
Sure, if you become picky with regards to area, extras (balcony etc.) the supply is just so low it will take some time, but the reality is far from being unable to house yourself.
And if you move _after_ getting a job, you also instantly get an access to a whisper network about people that want Nachmieters too; which is also immensely helpful.
With all due respect, if you do not understand what that sentence meant; I do not think discussion about rental market situation in Berlin with you will be productive.
Anyone who actually ever lived in Berlin would have no trouble parsing that sentence; and I do not think having this conversation with someone who does not have that experience is really useful.
Where did I claim I lived in Berlin? I was asking because I'm looking to move there, but in your opinion that doesn't make me eligible for the conversation? Wow.
Yes, I think not having personally experienced looking for apartment in Berlin makes you ineligible to comment on that, and I don’t think that’s a particularly radical stance.
I wish you luck in finding a lovely place if you do decide to move, and hope you’ll have a great time!
So I'm not allowed to comment on this topic because I havent lived there, but you're an expert because of your pre pandemic experience that isn't valid in the current real estate market? Bruh....
Yes, I think “relevant but potentially outdated experience” is better than “literally no experience whatsoever”; but I suppose reasonable people can disagree.
The arguments about Berlin being “over” and it being impossible to find a place nowadays are constant since ~2012? I’ve definitely heard that I missed “the good times” when I got there in 2015.
Did it get worse since? Sure, in some ways. Is it as hard as people make it out to be, if you’re not rejecting 90% of available supply outright? Not really.
Again, I’m not trying to say that the situation is great, and it should be a model for other cities.
But it genuinely does not take half a year to find a place, unless you’re trying to find a unicorn or have very specific needs/limits.
(I, of course, also have friends who still live in the city and have moved since, so I do feel like I know what I’m talking about; but that is somewhat besides the point being argued here.)
When people move out they often want to do it faster than their contract allows, so they are looking for someone to take over the contract (a "Nachmieter"). If you have any connections e.g. people at work, you may hear about those offers time to time and there really good apartments can be found.
IME it’s not just about people wanting to move out faster; but in general it seems that most places get offered to friends/coworkers first, just as a gesture.
Often having a Nachmieter is handy because you can sell them any of the furniture (or appliances) (…or entire kitchens) you no longer want, and they can also take over responsibility for any modifications to the place you’ve made.
I once lived in an Altbau that had very high (~5.5m?) ceilings, and the previous tenants added a lofted bed to the space. By finding someone (me) to take over the contract, they didn’t have to remove it and fix the holes in the wall etc, and the next tenant after me also got to keep the bed setup.
Admittedly the last time I had to look for an apartment in Berlin was pre-COVID; but the search took more than a month only if you were limiting yourself to only the places that were close to Mietspiegel (or below), and the competition shrunk dramatically if you were willing to pay even slightly more.
I know that made me a bad Berliner, but I’d rather just take the hit (and it wasn’t _that_ much more, we’re talking maybe 15%, not 2-3x) rather than try to find the perfect place for half a year? Or did the situation deteriorate much more since then?
It of course depends. For a single engineer things are certainly easier than for a family with children when one of the parents is on parental leave. At 75-80k salary that would be only a median income per person and you may not be able to afford paying 2500€ per month or more for 3-4 rooms, so you will want rent-controlled apartment.
> My googling tells me the median Berlin salary is around 55K per year.
Right, so it’s even below average.
> How many families can afford 2500k rent? I'm talking about average people
That must be 7500 netto and should be affordable to families where both partners work and earn average salary. I don’t know the statistics and cannot give you exact number. My point is that a family with a single working partner is unlikely to afford it even if it’s an IC tech job.
>That must be 7500 netto and should be affordable to families where both partners work and earn average salary.
How is 7500 netto affordable to average families when the yearly income per person is around 55k gross which is around 2900 netto per person so just below 6000 per household?
>Do what?
How do you get a rent controlled apartment. Given the shortage in housing. I thought that was clear from the context.
I think the disconnect here is that; as much as I wish that was the world we lived in (and it might have been possible in Berlin ~15-20 years ago), I don’t think “wide availability of four bedroom apartments affordable on a single middle-class income” is a reasonable expectation.
In Germany we don’t say “four bedroom apartment”, we say “4-Zimmer Wohnung” usually meaning 3 bedrooms and a living room with kitchen. And no, this is absolutely an expectation that a middle-income family with children should be able to afford a decent place to live in. We have an artificial housing crisis in most Western countries, but there’s no objective economic reasons for it. It’s possible to build at scale and with good quality 3-4 times cheaper than current market prices.
>In Germany we don’t say “four bedroom apartment”, we say “4-Zimmer Wohnung” usually meaning 3 bedrooms and a living room with kitchen
Haha, yes, sorry — I wrote "four room apartment" first, but then spending too much time with Americans online rubbed off on me and I "corrected" myself :)
> And no, this is absolutely an expectation that a middle-income family with children should be able to afford a decent place to live in. We have an artificial housing crisis in most Western countries, but there’s no objective economic reasons for it. It’s possible to build at scale and with good quality 3-4 times cheaper than current market prices.
I think we're mostly in agreement here!
It _should_ be possible, and that _should_ be how our society works! We _should_ demand more!
But currently, it just straight up is not.
You can both be realistic about what living options are available as a single middle-class earner, _and_ be dissatisfied with the status quo. I don't think these are exclusive.
Not to be pedantic, but effort required to find housing has almost no correlation to daily quality of life for inhabitants.
Sure, housing is one factor, but as attested to by the net migration statistics, inflow into the city has accelerated and reached record levels in the past years.
That is a clear indicator that quality of life is desirable for residents, simple as.
But the EU hasn't abolished or even reformed the AI act with the ridiculous FLOPs limit and bureaucracy that hurts innovation.
Same for the Digital Services Act, Cybersecurity Act, GDPR, etc. - all just more make-work and bureaucracy, just look at all the tools around auto-generating cookie banners for websites, and auto-accepting / hiding them for users!
Nevermind the crazy taxation issues, in Sweden I pay 56% income tax and 30% capital gains - that destroys a lot of motivation to innovate. You can work hard and risk a lot and the government just steals it from you anyway.
If the presence of regulations and taxes destroys a portion of motivation to innovate, then that specific portion was likely harmful to society and I will not mourn that loss.
It's not just the motivation, but the ability to take a risk and have it be a viable and financially sustainable option.
The more the government steals from you, the more sales you need early on to reach the same net income.
This isn't rocket science - there's a reason Britain was home to the industrial revolution after the liberal reforms of the Glorious Revolution, and that the USA is today with their nation literally founded on those principles of free speech, liberty and free competition.
The concept of a hacker space was exported to the US from the CCC which started in 1981 in _West Berlin_.
That idea mutated a bunch of times to become more palatable to the main stream and ended up as the bloodless maker spaces you can find in universities today.
Makerspaces are fantastic. I've spent a bunch of time in a few in Amsterdam. The only thing that would make them better is a tiny more focus on the business side of making. I've seen amazing things being built, but if there's zero thinking spent on getting it in the hands of people, nobody can benefit from the amazing work that happens within those walls.
Your link talks about a "fun experiment" in an "area underprovisioned with bandwidth", where they are faster to deliver a DVD 10km away than uploading it.
I can't even begin to explain how this is nothing more than a fun anecdote that has absolutely nothing to do with innovation in Europe.
> CD is that shiny piece of plastic that you can put your data, if you youngsters do not know what it is
They are sending 4.5GB on a DVD. DVD is that thing that looks like a CD on the outside, but can hold more data. Since you don't seem to know the difference.
Story from 2021, lots has happened since then. The 800 people village, right in the middle of nowhere, where I'm from, has Gbit fiber connection now. Lots of places have.
I've been hearing the same spiel for more than a decade where Berlin (or some other "hip" city) was supposed to be Europe's incubator of cutting edge tech & business.
It never works out, it'll be the home of some minor SaaS startups but that's all. The main problem in Europe in regards to tech are the regulations but even more so the mindset - European's are much more risk-averse than Americans, you'll never get the funding you'll need for a scale-up like Uber because it's too risky.
The alternative path is the Asian one (heavy-handed government that top-down constructs the companies, market and tries to grow them blocking buy-out from western competition) but Europe is in some strange hybrid-mode between the two which doesn't seem to work.
Currently I think for European countries there is a big chance to shake-up the military&weapons market considering current geopolitics instead of artificially propping up worthless IT startups hoping for an unicorn.
> European's are much more risk-averse than Americans, you'll never get the funding you'll need for a scale-up like Uber because it's too risky.
The key difference is that Europe has actual pensions backed by some sort of government scheme where the current working generation pays into a pool that gets then distributed to the current pensioner generation. That means we don't have trillions of dollars of money that is desperately screaming for the even most minuscule return and is spread so wide across all possible investment asset classes that even a complete collapse of one investment won't wipe out even close enough money to be actually felt by the pensioners.
One might of course argue "hey let's just change over to stock-market based schemes", but that's effectively the same - if you are working now and paying in into an ETF or whatnot, someone will have to be working 30 years in the future to generate the wealth you will be drawing off of.
I'm not going to argue for or against it, but it's literally not a Ponzi scheme. There's no need for infinite growth for it to function, it can work at equilibrium.
The stock markets, as I detailed, are also a Ponzi scheme - and I'd argue, at least for pensions, an even worse Ponzi scheme than government redistribution systems. The latter are at least government backed, but when the stock markets crash, your investments go kaboom because you got duped into investing in Bernie Madoff investments or whatever you have zero recourse.
During Covid, there actually were a few suicides in the first lockdown era when the markets dipped 20%.
>an even worse Ponzi scheme than government redistribution systems
Government redistributions systems as retirement, are an unsustainable political weapon where politicians keep promising higher pensions in exchange for votes from boomers, which will be extracted by higher taxes on the youth rather than from any economic productivity gains like the stock market. But they youth can choose to not have kids anymore or emigrate out to places that won't fleece them. See Greece.
> but when the stock markets crash, your investments go kaboom because you got duped into investing in Bernie Madoff investments or whatever you have zero recourse.
You either don't understand the difference between the stock market and pensions, or don't understand the difference between investment and speculation. Private pension plans have all kinds of stock in them you can't avoid them, but at least they're based on economic productivity and not working population in your country which doesn't seem to want or able to afford kids.
If the stock market were to crash, as you suggest, then the government based pension would also collapsed because the economy as a whole would collapse so there wouldn't be any jobs to pay taxes for the current retirees.
>During Covid, there actually were a few suicides in the first lockdown era when the markets dipped 20%.
Were those pensioners or people who put their savings in meme stocks? Because long term investors don't fear any dips as they've been long int he market to not be affected by a temporary dip which is cancelled out by the long term gains over 40 years. Since we're talking about pensions, not speculations.
Edit: Never mind, I just realized I was explaining basic economics to someone calling himself "proud Antifa" in his profile.
> The key difference is that Europe has actual pensions backed by some sort of government scheme where the current working generation pays into a pool that gets then distributed to the current pensioner generation. That means we don't have trillions of dollars of money that is desperately screaming for the even most minuscule return and is spread so wide across all possible investment asset classes that even a complete collapse of one investment won't wipe out even close enough money to be actually felt by the pensioners.
I disagree with the diagnose, the issue as I see it is that there is indeed more risk averse behaviour in European Investment Banking and VC's.
Also there is not enough competition in banking in Europe it's effectively the same banking group's since the 1800's which again impacts risk behaviour. They can all get very attractive returns with near zero risk in real estate investment.
Anyone in the VC scene in Europe will demand a huge amount of due diligence and large fraction's of the company for moderately small amounts of investment, because they probably struggled a lot more to round that funding.
You either have central European banks ear marking specific loans for R&D/Seeding only or you need to make real estate less attractive to park money into.
I think one of the problems in Europe is the cost of living compared to your salary, so it's difficult to save up money. You basically need a very understanding partner or parents that you can live with until you have enough profit to write yourself a paycheck.
The problem is that business model of German (software) companies is speedrunning regulatory capture by enforcing byzantine bureaucratic regulation and supplying the software needed to comply with it.
They thrive in overregulated industries like healthcare, industrial automation, automotive, etc. where they make the bulk of the profits from B2B sales, with deals between people who'll never use the software they buy.
The MO of every German company I've seen is that 'our company's products have a stack of paperwork ensuring its high quality' and/or 'our companies products help you ensure you can get the stack of paperwork necessary for selling your product', with the actual quality of what you sell mattering very little beyond meeting the bare minimum predicated by said standards.
And once your company has these big customers (the ones who care about said stuff) in the bag, they can sit back and relax, and sell the same stuff for decades while doing the bare minimum. Quality of the product and the people does not matter, so salaries are not high, and companies are as much as 50+% middle management by headcount.
Think about what the successful German companies/endeavors are:
- SAP - a B2B company hated by anyone who has to use their products whose main sales pitch is 'if you don't use us, other companies won't do business with you'
- SonarQube - another horrible, slow inaccurate code quality metric product, which focuses on making pretty dashboards for their horrible, unusable metrics - again aimed at middle managers who don't look at code, but only see the bar charts and dangerous sounding warnings
- AutoSAR - not a company, but a horrible byzantine automotive standard, complying with which requires specialized overpriced hardware, software and expertise you can only buy from Germans - vendors usually supply hardware/software stack that's 1000xthe price than it should be
- Various industrial automation companies - again, these make products that are simple, and don't require any technology that changed substantially in the past 20-30 years, like PLCs whose function is to read an analog input and turn a relay on/off - yet somehow again cost thousands of euros (because of paperwork!)
Germany is a in local minimum where you can have a secure income with barely any work and risk, at the cost of the world slowly passing them by.
It's clear that the real problem in Europe is access to risk capital. Startups are no problem, scale-ups are.
Nobody was able to replicate Silicon Valley, not even within US. My opinion is that it's a chicken and egg problem, and Silicon Valley already has crazy risk capital, which will generate more crazy risk capital.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadThis feels like it'll have none of the community character that makes maker's spaces what they are
And more of a rental machines co-working space sort of character
It's interesting that the state is contributing, but it looks like the intention there is to encourage industrial startups to the city. That's probably a great thing to do but I think calling it a makerspace is stretching the definition a bit.
That said, it'll probably allow people to get more things done than at a community space, especially with professional operators making sure things are maintained properly.
Since it seems to be initiated and funded by the state, I give it between 2 to 4 years before funding runs out, politics change at the top, and the space shutters to make way for newer, more exciting ideas though.
Just as cheap office spaces for fledgling machine sharing opportunities may give founders the help they need in the very first stages of a company.
Community spaces on the other hand move at a slower pace and are driven by the enthusiasm and volunteer time of their members. Both of which are hard to maintain if the effort ultimately benefits a commercial venture. These kind of "shared hobby cellars" are still very viable and can collect and impressive inventory of tooling. Sometimes people move from one to the other.
Different use cases different approaches. It's unfortunate that the same name is applied to both.
Kind of an odd setup because any company that actually needed the kit (eg a darkroom for optical prep) would be better off renting a tiny industrial space and building out their own labs, and contracting out the rest.
And since the universities paid into it they could have pushed for ownership and made it a proper facility for students and researchers.
https://lbndaily.co.uk/sensor-city-in-liverpool-could-reopen...
I think this is something Americans (I'm American, born and raised on the west coast) don't understand: They talk shit about EU innovation and talk up their own dominance, but the tides are turning and the EU is motivated. The landscape will look very, very different in a few years.
The announcement looks like a. Lot of fluff and pomp
"I'll believe it when I see it happen" is my approach to anything Europe, because I've lived within it for nearly forty years now. And I'm wise from experience. I've seen this before. Same song, worse bureaucracy, different faces (politicians).
I'm waiting for the day when a country stands up and says their strategy is to be unmotivated and commit to outdated approaches. Most of them seem to have huge crowds of motivated and capable people who are then swatted down by the local court system because success makes the powers that be uncomfortable.
I'd feel more optimistic if you had a specific mistake that Europe was going to stop making. Maybe adjustments to tax laws. Motivation doesn't cut it against people like the Americans or the Chinese, there needs to be actual actions taken beyond makerspaces. Germany seems to have purposefully triggered a domestic energy crisis, that balances out a lot of makerspaces.
This whole Europe bashing is becoming a tiring trope. Europe has a lot of successful companies, including in computing (ASML, ASM, ARM, NXP, STM, etc.). What we don't have are hyper-growth companies that mostly profit from vacuuming up your data and selling you ads. Good riddance.
Yes, Europe would be nothing without the US. But the same is true the other way around as well, a few decades of globalism has distributed the production chains across countries.
At any rate, back to the GP's comment. I do see a lot of optimism and the EU is going to invest a lot in defense, chips, and AI. There will be plenty of money floating around.
Germany seems to have purposefully triggered a domestic energy crisis
Well, not purposefully. But certainly ill-considered. At any rate, the EU is on the renewable energy track, we'll get there, and it will give us energy independence. Which is better than going a few decades back in time and 'drill drill drill baby'.
> Europe has a lot of successful companies, including in computing (ASML...
visualcapitalist has a wonderful chart I thought of when I saw that: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/semiconductor-production-by...
Having "a lot of companies" is a meaningless metric on its own when all those European companies combined make less money than Apple on a bad quarter. That's like me saying I do "a lot of deadlifts", without mentioning all those deadlifts are done with an empty barbell. Context makes the difference.
What matters is not how many companies, but how much money are you bringing into the economy and how many well paid jobs you're creating.
EU has a lot of traditional and mediocrely profitable companies that are still going through layoffs: Bosch, Siemens, VW, Audi, etc due to being mostly stuck in stagnating industries that are facing increasing competition from Asia.
>the EU is going to invest a lot in defense, chips, and AI
I've heard this political song and dance before yet it hasn't ever materialized in more and better paid tech jobs for Europeans.
Apple won't produce a lot of cutting-edge iPhone chips without ASML lithography. iPhones (at least some generations) also use NXP chips. ASML incidentally had a revenue of 28.26 billion in 2024 (slightly more than e.g. AMD).
I've heard this political song and dance before yet it hasn't ever materialized in more and better paid tech jobs for Europeans.
Which kinda shows that you (maybe?) don't understand Europe. Sure, more salary is always great. But many Europeans (also those working in the highly technical industry) prefer vacation days, good health insurance, unemployment benefits, being able to cycle/walk to work over concrete jungles, etc.
I know a lot of tech people who had job offers in the US, but would never want to move there. Some do work remotely for US companies though.
Who cares who makes what widget in the supply chain of whatever product? That doesn't change the fact that Apple makes higher margins on the ASML-TSMC made chips than ASML themselves.
If you insist on being pedantic on the supply chain, then ASML couldn't build those machines without the EUV light sources from Cymer in California. iPhone are also made by Foxconn in China, so what?
Every country has some companies highly specialized in something specific, but what matters at the end of the day is who takes home the biggest slices of the pie from the end product, not who makes how many widgets inside the product.
>Phones (at least some generations) also use NXP chips.
NXP is highly toxic company to work for that just had another wave of layoffs, and also has lower profit margins that Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Nvidia, etc. basically all the US semi companies.
So I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve here but your chosen examples aren't selling the image of EU tech supremacy. Just look at market cap of EU vs US tech sectors.
[1] https://hir.harvard.edu/germanys-energy-crisis-europes-leadi...
Especially companies rested on a relaxed foundation of artifically low energy prices due to lobbyism and dependence on cheap Russian gas.
Both is gone and companies face "true" prices and have to deal with them.
Nevertheless, energy generation from renewables is rising and rising, more and more renewable capacity is added to the grid each week and laws have been loosened to enable a faster transition.
I picked an illustrative article that explains things. Germany has been hit by an energy crisis as a matter of concensus and fact, not opinion. You can easily research the topic if you are actually curious and interested.
And you can't use spot prices in the way you're trying to for a few reasons - firstly, those countries will all have interconnects with each other so the prices harmonise - if one country has a whole problem the whole area has a problem (which might be what we can see in the prices, coincidentally). Secondly the overall cost of electricity isn't set on the median day but by what happens on extreme days (dead of winter or height of summer, depending on where in the world you are). Thirdly, a lot of German policy seems to involve taxes applied after the electricity has been sold.
This shows per capita energy consumption steadily decreased from ~1985 to 2023 almost back to the level of 1960. Should that indicate an energy crisis? The graphs from the whole EU or the USA don't look much different so I don't see how the chart helps.
What numbers could be looked at to identify that energy crisis?
I remain mystified by the people who can look at a 25% drop in energy use, steady relative collapse of power relative to Asia and the gentle collapse of the political fabric and just shrug and say everything is fine. I dunno what the AfD needs to poll at before the German elite admit that maybe they screwed up the last few decades.
The statistics suggest there is a massive problem here.
[0] I recommend vicious debate, but physical violence seems to be a possiblity.
[1] And, realistically, if China ever openly supports Russia then Europe will probably lose any fight that eventuates. There is an interesting geopolitical balance forming.
Isn't it far more likely that a shift in economic composition changed the energy consumption? That shift might be a bad thing, but it's not an energy crisis.
I mean, ok? Maybe call an ambulance anyway? Or in this case stop with the pressure against building out & using cheap energy.
Europe is just a collection of crises - migration, energy, age demographics, productivity.
Yeah enjoy your money, you will need it when getting older to finance basic services and needs.
Ifs fucking disappointing, Europe and US are by far the best allies and friends (Australia and New Zealand too) on the most important matters - our core values, our respect for democracy etc. France helped you with independence, you helped us defeat fucking nazis ffs.
I hate to see this breakup, because it feels permanent for foreseeable future. And there aren't even good enough reasons. I hate that 1 unstable person can literally drag a billion down down the mud.
Not to mention that millionaires in their thirties and forties are the raw material startups are made of (who else can justify the opportunity cost?) and Europe lacks that, badly. Meanwhile one in fifteen Americans are millionaires. Which group is more likely to have the freedom to take risks?
But it doesn’t matter how easy it is the transfer money if you increasingly don’t have any.
On average, governments in the EU centrally direct roughly 40% more economic activity than the U.S. (and Chinese) government does.
In the short term, this appears more efficient. Allowing markets and decentralized private players to sort things out is messy and aesthetically unpleasing at times (like democracy), but leads to greater growth and innovation overall. The Chinese Communist Party understands this, maybe the Eurocrats will figure this one out after a few more 6-course dinners in Brussels.
That’s right, it’s part of the money handled by public entities in my country, and "decentralized" in the US. Personally I don’t want any of the kind of "growth" the US has experienced in their health sector.
The US in fact has government healthcare for anyone over 65, anyone under 22, anyone disabled, anyone who has been in the military, and anyone who is poor (essentially half the population).
The other half outside the government system is nothing like a free market either, due to the existence of the first half combined with well-meaning policies that ultimately create the worst kind of adverse incentives.
That said, the US funds basically half of global medical research while Europe funds only a third while having double the population. So again, the EU centralized government system is absolutely more efficient overall, but the messy (only slightly more decentralized) US system drives far more innovation.
There's a few examples that come to mind, some better than others — "commit to outdated approaches" is what "conservative" used to mean, Chesterton's Fence etc.
Bureaucracy can be about powerful people capturing institutions to prevent competition. Totally a thing. But it's not the only cause of rules and regulations, some of which are very much written in the blood of those who died by the absence of those rules.
I think taxation changes are unlikely to unlock anything EU-wide (consider what it's like today in China or what it was like in the USA in the decades after WW2); instead, I'd consider the impact of having 24 official languages and needing substantially different legal teams between each nation. Imagine how much harder it would be to do business in the USA if everything in Silicon Valley and Hollywood was in Spanish, everything in Louisiana was French, everything in New York was in Dutch, etc. — innovation is still possible, and common regulations in the form of the EU still help, but these barriers still remain.
Likewise, despite the Euro, there's eight currencies in the EU. Imagine if Texas still used Redbacks; Vermont used Vermont coppers; Pennsylvania, pounds; etc.
In what way are the tides turning? We've been reading news articles on how Berlin is Europe's silicon valley for the past 10+ years but I don't see much VC or interesting tech giants coming out of there, or high paying job there. The only thing they seem to have copied form SV is impossible to find housing for outsiders, though I think it's easier to move to SV than Berlin now.
Tides turning and motivation aren't enough. You need venture capital, and EU has none. At this point, every EU city that has some web dev body shops and one built a food delivery app then calls itself the SV of Europe to the point it's become a meme.
SV is more than overhyped VC funded apps though, you have Berkeley and Stanford next door, the biggest defense contractors outside, with all the gray-beards of 3D graphics there, all the gray-beards of silicone and RF there, of CPU design, of kernel development, etc. You can't replicate this highly experienced melting pot of CS and HW expertise anywhere else by throwing some VC money in a hippie city that has a technical university.
Those "makerspaces" are, IMHO, totally irrelevant. Ease of access to capital, of setting up a company, of structuring it, of doing business, taxes, are what makes the difference and most EU countries rank consistently lower than the UK on any of those aspects.
Part of this is due to severe restrictions on employee share schemes (changed recently), low employee turnover (3-6 month notice periods), enforceable non-competes, and heavy tax burdens on income. As a result you see a surprisingly low amount of engineer led/founded companies.
Germany has genuinely innovative companies though, but they don't look anything like SV, eg. Trumpf, Zeiss, etc.
well EU didnt even have their own tech giant, most top 10 largest tech company is from US. also china catching up fast
this is down to a culture tbh, most german firm that I been work so far is very meticulous about their work and its great but sometimes tech is changing fast and you must make compromise
One word:
WireCard.
ASML literally uses US tech, US literally give their tech to manufacture not the other way around
I think the alliance between France and Germany is as strong as never before. I think Most Germans want Macron to take the European lead right now (as we only have weak Merz to offer). Trump is like a catalyst for European unification.
PS: I‘m German.
> "Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?"
What a silly question. "Who do I call if I want to speak to Earth? There's no such person? Therefore there is no such thing as Earth."
> So what is an "European" ??
Same thing as African, Asian, American.
With those two things together you can find the relevant official's office to call.
Or do you go straight to POTUS if you want to "speak to the USA"? (also note I wrote USA and not "America")
You can always call von der Leyen if that's what you need to have someone to talk about. But you could have googled that yourself, so you were intentionally ignorant about that part, which makes your ragebait comment what it is: ragebait.
If this is what you want the US to be seen as, then go ahead. It's not like we're short of these kind of comments on the internet though. I can recommend to go outside once in a while, go touch some grass while reading a book.
Anyways, happy weaseling, I guess.
There are many answers today to this question depending on the diplomatic rank of who‘s asking. Most obvious choices are the president of European Commission for Trump and High Representative for Foreign Affairs for Rubio. JD can entertain himself with political freaks of his choice, his reputation is ruined anyway.
We should make a list of EU innovations that just got acquired by US companies, who conveniently forget.
Ever heard of Google Maps?
Sure. But when you buy an innovation, you can't suddenly claim that you invented it.
> Google Maps was bought from an australian company BTW
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/science/google-maps-a-swiss-sto...
So that's twice non-US innovation ;-).
Now of course, if you are a founder, you'd rather go make more money in the US. Does that mean that the EU culture is inferior? I don't know. Go ask the average European if they would like to live like the average American.
Sure, the US have BigTech. But the EU has healthcare. Most Europeans wouldn't be proud to sleep under their desk while Musk does what he does. It's a different culture. If your only metrics is how big the biggest tech company is, then the US wins. If the metrics is how happy the people are... well...
And this is already spreading to western Europe as well from what I hear from my friends. Giving the aging population situation every health care system is going to start breaking in the next 10-20 years because of how much health care elderly consume and how little they provide to economy.
So for now rich countries have better public healthcare than US. But EU is a very wide term, inequality between EU countries is larger than US states.
And on the point of why most companies gravitate to US - its to access the richest market and leverage their capital pool - EU is not a single market despite the decades of EU efforts, and EU investment into companies is way behind of US, even EU pension funds invest significant funds in the US stock market.
A very distant relative of mine lives in Germany. He is from India (where I live). He met his German wise in Australia where she was working and they married and later they settled in Germany. He has been asking me to come to Germany for work and start exploring work there and I have always been hesitant about it. Lots of things come to mind - a lot of them are unfounded and/or are just the apprehension of the unknown I am guess. One of the fear is I do not want to settle in Germany. I want to live a decent healthy life and probably return back to India (I don't know after how long; I have a strong feeling/assumption that I will be lonely there and may not be able to connect and I am scared of it) so it seems that I will have no savings essentially when I come back as I have assumed based on stereotypical description or media portrayals fo salaries in Germany/EU.
How is it for skilled foreigners in Germany as a job market currently? Esp. seeing EU is warming up to self sustenance/dependence etc. Are the jobs there? Are those foreigners welcome? This is a tricky question but is there a trend of preference of source geographies for those skilled jobs in Germany? Also, I am in software with 10+ years of experience and my last drawn salary in India was ~70K Euro (in INR) and 5% bonus and 25% startup stock which value at zero now and I was able to save a huge portion or % of it (I know I won't be able to save that % in EU).
Are the salaries really bad? If I am not able to save 1500-2000 EU a month as a single person with no luxurious needs at all there, it may not make much sense for me if I plan to return to my home country eventually).
I am kinda apprehensive about the resurgence of the so called "right" there (which is happening, no happened, in my home country as well but I am a native here :|) - how is that? From a distance everything looks very problematic and scary or rather "very risky".
What I am stuck at is - I actually believe this is not something I can just play on "I won't know until I actually do that". I guess I am being too risk averse and maybe very narrow-minded or paranoid.
I would love to hear this from the locals either native or the ones who are immigrants in tech there.
PS. I apologise if anything sounds absurd or untoward. I do not mean to start an argument or something. I just want to hear about it.
PPS. If a single person with no family falls sick in Germany and has sufficient money (not "rich" money) and health insurance, can they just be admitted in the hospital (assuming hospitalisation was needed and doctors okayed it) and that person be taken care of? Or will they demand a "caretaker" family or friend to be present in the hospital always (that's kind of a requirement here in India) and the person can trust the system to do that? (This is my ONE BIG fear of remaining in India, esp. in old age as someone with no immediate family at all - I know this is counter to what said that I might return if I immigrate).
2. In Berlin 2-3.5k€ (depending on your rent or mortgage payments) is enough for a comfortable life with occasional travel (whole Europe at your service, flights are cheap). You can put the rest in savings, buy some ETFs. You can use an online calculator to see how much netto salary you can get (google „Brutto netto rechner“).
3. You will have insurance for healthcare which will cover hospital and ambulance and insurance for job loss which will cover up to 1 year while you are searching for a new job. You will contribute to pension insurance so you can retire in Germany too.
4. Germans aren’t all welcoming to foreigners, that’s true, but I don’t think you should be seriously concerned about far right. The success of AfD is based on protest voting, not because every fifth German is nazi.
I moved from a third world country to the UK (London) and at some point I had similar concerns as you have now.
At the end of the day, living means taking risks everyday no matter where you are. My final conclusion was that if I didn't move I would regret not taking the risk, I wanted to know how it feels to live where I live today. I wanted to live an adventure rather than staying on my home country and developing regret.
I don't know you but just reading through your post it seems that you want to do it but fear is holding you back. Are your fears unreasonable? Probably not. Should they dictate what you do with your life? Absolutely not.
It's also fine if you decide to stay, just don't allow this to become a source of regret in your life, be in peace with whatever you choose.
Edit: salaries are low unless get faang job in Germany. It’s very geographically dependent. You could start in Munich with 3000€ after taxes with included medical insurance. Medical insurance is not good. For modern things you need to pay additional 50-500€ depending on complexity. Rent for garage sized apartment gets close to 1000€ per month. The same apartment to buy costs 200000€ and is bad investment.
It’s you who should decide where to go and what to do. My colleague is telling, that Modi does great job and his family will move back to India. But I have seen too many families, that postponed the great comeback home to the time when kid goes to school and then when the kid graduates and so on.
1. Germany has built it's entire identity around a social contract similar to Japan that roughly goes like this: We will have a backbone of well paying industrial jobs (both white and blue collar) which we'll use to generate large trade surplusses by exporting physical goods gloablly to fund our internal high cost social security and healthcare systems. As the state, I prefer low worker mobility, cause that keeps unemployment and hence all costs to the state low.
2. Financial markets/ access to capital/ investments/ taxation work the same way: Allocate capital to physical goods manufacturers with high working capital requirements, long investment horizons, tax the shit out of labor vs. capital gains, make the already strong companies stronger instead of gambling on upstarts.
3. There are workers and there are capitalists and these two should not mix: Labor is taxed insanely high, stock options/ labor equity participation basically unheard of and nobody cares about that in the government. It's only relevant to a tiny fraction of the electorate. It's a non-issue for the federal government.
4. No incentive for "the winner takes all", all incentive on "stable, low fluctuation employment".
It's a sh*tshow as clearly showing with the abysmal growth Germany has experienced over the past 5 years.
It will 100% get worse before it gets better (if not for politics simply due to demographics, where a disproportionally large share of social welfare consumers will need to be supported by an ever-shrinking share of tax payers). There are already talks about further tax increases and as the demographics worsen, the state will come looking for new income sources. Guaranteed.
Yes, quality of life is great for now (esp. in places like Berlin) and yes, there is an evergrowing tech eco-system, but this is in no way indicative of where Germany as a whole is going systematically.
How can quality of life be great when you can't find housing if you want to move there?
The apartment situation in Berlin is bad, but I think it’s a bit silly to say you can’t have high quality of life because of it.
Their income still allows them to pick from what's on the market.
Sure, if you become picky with regards to area, extras (balcony etc.) the supply is just so low it will take some time, but the reality is far from being unable to house yourself.
Anyone who actually ever lived in Berlin would have no trouble parsing that sentence; and I do not think having this conversation with someone who does not have that experience is really useful.
I wish you luck in finding a lovely place if you do decide to move, and hope you’ll have a great time!
The arguments about Berlin being “over” and it being impossible to find a place nowadays are constant since ~2012? I’ve definitely heard that I missed “the good times” when I got there in 2015.
Did it get worse since? Sure, in some ways. Is it as hard as people make it out to be, if you’re not rejecting 90% of available supply outright? Not really.
Again, I’m not trying to say that the situation is great, and it should be a model for other cities.
But it genuinely does not take half a year to find a place, unless you’re trying to find a unicorn or have very specific needs/limits.
(I, of course, also have friends who still live in the city and have moved since, so I do feel like I know what I’m talking about; but that is somewhat besides the point being argued here.)
When people move out they often want to do it faster than their contract allows, so they are looking for someone to take over the contract (a "Nachmieter"). If you have any connections e.g. people at work, you may hear about those offers time to time and there really good apartments can be found.
Often having a Nachmieter is handy because you can sell them any of the furniture (or appliances) (…or entire kitchens) you no longer want, and they can also take over responsibility for any modifications to the place you’ve made.
I once lived in an Altbau that had very high (~5.5m?) ceilings, and the previous tenants added a lofted bed to the space. By finding someone (me) to take over the contract, they didn’t have to remove it and fix the holes in the wall etc, and the next tenant after me also got to keep the bed setup.
I know that made me a bad Berliner, but I’d rather just take the hit (and it wasn’t _that_ much more, we’re talking maybe 15%, not 2-3x) rather than try to find the perfect place for half a year? Or did the situation deteriorate much more since then?
My googling tells me the median Berlin salary is around 55K per year.
>2500€ per month or more for 3-4 rooms
How many families can afford 2500k rent? I'm talking about average people, not SW engineers.
>so you will want rent-controlled apartment
How do you do that when you move there?
Right, so it’s even below average.
> How many families can afford 2500k rent? I'm talking about average people
That must be 7500 netto and should be affordable to families where both partners work and earn average salary. I don’t know the statistics and cannot give you exact number. My point is that a family with a single working partner is unlikely to afford it even if it’s an IC tech job.
> How do you do that when you move there?
Do what?
How is 7500 netto affordable to average families when the yearly income per person is around 55k gross which is around 2900 netto per person so just below 6000 per household?
>Do what?
How do you get a rent controlled apartment. Given the shortage in housing. I thought that was clear from the context.
You are right, that’s 6000-6300 for average income depending on tax deductions. 2500 rent may still be affordable.
> How do you get a rent controlled apartment.
Just like any other one. People move out, existing apartments go back to the market.
Haha, yes, sorry — I wrote "four room apartment" first, but then spending too much time with Americans online rubbed off on me and I "corrected" myself :)
> And no, this is absolutely an expectation that a middle-income family with children should be able to afford a decent place to live in. We have an artificial housing crisis in most Western countries, but there’s no objective economic reasons for it. It’s possible to build at scale and with good quality 3-4 times cheaper than current market prices.
I think we're mostly in agreement here!
It _should_ be possible, and that _should_ be how our society works! We _should_ demand more!
But currently, it just straight up is not.
You can both be realistic about what living options are available as a single middle-class earner, _and_ be dissatisfied with the status quo. I don't think these are exclusive.
Sure, housing is one factor, but as attested to by the net migration statistics, inflow into the city has accelerated and reached record levels in the past years.
That is a clear indicator that quality of life is desirable for residents, simple as.
Same for the Digital Services Act, Cybersecurity Act, GDPR, etc. - all just more make-work and bureaucracy, just look at all the tools around auto-generating cookie banners for websites, and auto-accepting / hiding them for users!
Nevermind the crazy taxation issues, in Sweden I pay 56% income tax and 30% capital gains - that destroys a lot of motivation to innovate. You can work hard and risk a lot and the government just steals it from you anyway.
The more the government steals from you, the more sales you need early on to reach the same net income.
This isn't rocket science - there's a reason Britain was home to the industrial revolution after the liberal reforms of the Glorious Revolution, and that the USA is today with their nation literally founded on those principles of free speech, liberty and free competition.
What are you talking about?
The concept of a hacker space was exported to the US from the CCC which started in 1981 in _West Berlin_.
That idea mutated a bunch of times to become more palatable to the main stream and ended up as the bloodless maker spaces you can find in universities today.
I sometimes visit Berlin and if I could add their news and events to my Berlin feed, that would be nice.
I want to help everyone live in a well designed environment where it’s easy to socialise and get around, for one
Makerspaces helped me kickstart my career almost 2 decades ago back in my country. Great memories.
Your link talks about a "fun experiment" in an "area underprovisioned with bandwidth", where they are faster to deliver a DVD 10km away than uploading it.
I can't even begin to explain how this is nothing more than a fun anecdote that has absolutely nothing to do with innovation in Europe.
> CD is that shiny piece of plastic that you can put your data, if you youngsters do not know what it is
They are sending 4.5GB on a DVD. DVD is that thing that looks like a CD on the outside, but can hold more data. Since you don't seem to know the difference.
It never works out, it'll be the home of some minor SaaS startups but that's all. The main problem in Europe in regards to tech are the regulations but even more so the mindset - European's are much more risk-averse than Americans, you'll never get the funding you'll need for a scale-up like Uber because it's too risky.
The alternative path is the Asian one (heavy-handed government that top-down constructs the companies, market and tries to grow them blocking buy-out from western competition) but Europe is in some strange hybrid-mode between the two which doesn't seem to work.
Currently I think for European countries there is a big chance to shake-up the military&weapons market considering current geopolitics instead of artificially propping up worthless IT startups hoping for an unicorn.
The key difference is that Europe has actual pensions backed by some sort of government scheme where the current working generation pays into a pool that gets then distributed to the current pensioner generation. That means we don't have trillions of dollars of money that is desperately screaming for the even most minuscule return and is spread so wide across all possible investment asset classes that even a complete collapse of one investment won't wipe out even close enough money to be actually felt by the pensioners.
One might of course argue "hey let's just change over to stock-market based schemes", but that's effectively the same - if you are working now and paying in into an ETF or whatnot, someone will have to be working 30 years in the future to generate the wealth you will be drawing off of.
How do you manage to sell a government controlled Ponzi scheme tied to demographics as a benefit?
During Covid, there actually were a few suicides in the first lockdown era when the markets dipped 20%.
Government redistributions systems as retirement, are an unsustainable political weapon where politicians keep promising higher pensions in exchange for votes from boomers, which will be extracted by higher taxes on the youth rather than from any economic productivity gains like the stock market. But they youth can choose to not have kids anymore or emigrate out to places that won't fleece them. See Greece.
> but when the stock markets crash, your investments go kaboom because you got duped into investing in Bernie Madoff investments or whatever you have zero recourse.
You either don't understand the difference between the stock market and pensions, or don't understand the difference between investment and speculation. Private pension plans have all kinds of stock in them you can't avoid them, but at least they're based on economic productivity and not working population in your country which doesn't seem to want or able to afford kids.
If the stock market were to crash, as you suggest, then the government based pension would also collapsed because the economy as a whole would collapse so there wouldn't be any jobs to pay taxes for the current retirees.
>During Covid, there actually were a few suicides in the first lockdown era when the markets dipped 20%.
Were those pensioners or people who put their savings in meme stocks? Because long term investors don't fear any dips as they've been long int he market to not be affected by a temporary dip which is cancelled out by the long term gains over 40 years. Since we're talking about pensions, not speculations.
Edit: Never mind, I just realized I was explaining basic economics to someone calling himself "proud Antifa" in his profile.
I disagree with the diagnose, the issue as I see it is that there is indeed more risk averse behaviour in European Investment Banking and VC's.
Also there is not enough competition in banking in Europe it's effectively the same banking group's since the 1800's which again impacts risk behaviour. They can all get very attractive returns with near zero risk in real estate investment.
Anyone in the VC scene in Europe will demand a huge amount of due diligence and large fraction's of the company for moderately small amounts of investment, because they probably struggled a lot more to round that funding.
You either have central European banks ear marking specific loans for R&D/Seeding only or you need to make real estate less attractive to park money into.
Also popular to add 'Silicon' to the naming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_technology_centers#Eur...
They thrive in overregulated industries like healthcare, industrial automation, automotive, etc. where they make the bulk of the profits from B2B sales, with deals between people who'll never use the software they buy.
The MO of every German company I've seen is that 'our company's products have a stack of paperwork ensuring its high quality' and/or 'our companies products help you ensure you can get the stack of paperwork necessary for selling your product', with the actual quality of what you sell mattering very little beyond meeting the bare minimum predicated by said standards.
And once your company has these big customers (the ones who care about said stuff) in the bag, they can sit back and relax, and sell the same stuff for decades while doing the bare minimum. Quality of the product and the people does not matter, so salaries are not high, and companies are as much as 50+% middle management by headcount.
Think about what the successful German companies/endeavors are:
- SAP - a B2B company hated by anyone who has to use their products whose main sales pitch is 'if you don't use us, other companies won't do business with you'
- SonarQube - another horrible, slow inaccurate code quality metric product, which focuses on making pretty dashboards for their horrible, unusable metrics - again aimed at middle managers who don't look at code, but only see the bar charts and dangerous sounding warnings
- AutoSAR - not a company, but a horrible byzantine automotive standard, complying with which requires specialized overpriced hardware, software and expertise you can only buy from Germans - vendors usually supply hardware/software stack that's 1000xthe price than it should be
- Various industrial automation companies - again, these make products that are simple, and don't require any technology that changed substantially in the past 20-30 years, like PLCs whose function is to read an analog input and turn a relay on/off - yet somehow again cost thousands of euros (because of paperwork!)
Germany is a in local minimum where you can have a secure income with barely any work and risk, at the cost of the world slowly passing them by.
Nobody was able to replicate Silicon Valley, not even within US. My opinion is that it's a chicken and egg problem, and Silicon Valley already has crazy risk capital, which will generate more crazy risk capital.
It's exciting and all, but I am quite certain no member of our team would be happy to commute to Mariendorf for work :D