16 ms·

The main point here was to remove certain blocking rights of environmentalists, that normally block such projects for years. They still can go to court but this

The main point here was to remove certain blocking rights of environmentalists, that normally block such projects for years. They still can go to court but this is not blocking anything anymore. If someone brings real issues up, they now can be handled while building, nit in the planning phase as before.

hnhg 4y ago
The whole point is about identifying real issues before it is too late. And it is not like German politics is free of corruption.
- petesergeant 4y ago
  Growing up, Germany always seemed like a paragon of virtue. Starting somewhere around the VW Emissions Scandal, my view has changed. Did Germany change over the last 20 years, or were my perceptions off from the get-go?
  - magic_hamster 4y ago
    That's a fascinating opinion, as I've never thought of Germany being a symbol of virtue. If anything, Germany is a paragon of bureaucracy. They have excellent engineering when used for good, but as history taught us, that's not always the case.
    - hnlmorg 4y ago
      Your comment here sounds like it is referencing WW2, which is a little silly. Germany changed massively after that (I mean, it was literally two countries for a few decades). Governments can look very different from one decade to the next. So it doesn’t make sense to reference a war-time government from 80 years ago as an example of how a current government behaves.
    - petesergeant 4y ago
      Maybe it's a Cold War propaganda relic? Growing up as an Englisher, history was divided into "Bad Germany" (1930-1945), and "Good (West) Germany", ever since, and the only real stereotype we had of the Germans was that they'd get up early to stake out spots by the pool on holiday. I have to assume that during the Cold War there was a great deal of propaganda highlighting the relative merits of West Germans.
      - someweirdperson 4y ago
        Many regulations from before and even during the war are still valid today.
      - andrepd 4y ago
        Yes. Most Nazis which held high-ranking posts before and during the war continued to do so in West Germany, under allied consent.
    - gumboza 4y ago
      Yes I have a German friend who spends 3 months a year filing their tax situation. German paperwork is insane. And because a lot of the country is surprisingly technologically backwards, everything is on actual paper still. Takes me about an hour to do the same in the UK and half of that is trying to remember how to log in and do it.
      - lnsru 4y ago
        It’s just not true. Elster is already electronic for couple years. If you know what are doing it takes 4 hours max. I recommend your friend to find good tax advisor if he/she is not capable to do it by himself/herself.
        sveme 4y ago
        The uninformed bullshit by the person you replied to is the reason I typically don‘t comment on German topics anymore on HN. Alas, my Gell-Mann-Amnesia is strong and I read comments on other topics even though they are probably as little based on reality as these comments on Germany.
        someweirdperson 4y ago
        Elster is an electronic version of paper forms. It requires redundant manual input of information that is present on different sub-sheets of the forms. Like the paper forms, it requires input of information that the government already has. Filing on paper doesn't take more time than filing through Elster. Also, it's not unlikely that the government is printing the electronically filed information in the traditional paper format to be able to process it the traditional way. (maybe not for taxes, but it's surely the case for some other processes.) But I agree that "3 months" is probably the time required to collect information, not the time needed to summarize the information for the government. Some banks take a couple of months to send the required yearly investment income/taxes-paid statement.
        fabian2k 4y ago
        Some information can be entered automatically in Elster, e.g. the information submitted by your employer. For people with simple tax situations, e.g. regular employee and no additional complications filing the taxes is pretty straightforward. It can be a bit intimidating if you've never done it before, but almost all the information you need to fill out will be automatically provided. You need to get your bank/broker statements and enter them as well, but those tell you exactly in which line you need to put the values. There's certainly a lot of improvement possible, but for simple cases it's pretty easy already (if you've done it at least once before).
    - andrepd 4y ago
      >They have excellent engineering when used for good, but as history taught us, that's not always the case. For what's worth, the "German efficiency in WWII" is mostly a myth.
  - herrherrmann 4y ago
    There’s an incredible amount of corruption among German politicians, especially among the “richer” parties CDU/CSU and FDP who are constantly being lobbied and bought by managers in the bigger industries (e.g. automobile and construction). That’s one of the reasons why Germany is so behind with environmental issues, technology/digitalization, and government transparency.
    - JanSt 4y ago
      Ah sure the CDU-Gazprom connection, who doesn‘t remember? (the left is equally corrupt as the liberals/conservatives)
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - someweirdperson 4y ago
      > technology/digitalization This isn't held back by the bigger industries but by entrenched boundaries of responsibilities in the administration (defined in the regulations), data protection, and over-engineering. Latest example: Warning the population. Instead of simply sending SMS to all active phones in an area, it has to be cell broadcast, which doesn't work on old phones. The reason seems to be (information in media is... limited) that sending SMS would not provide a way to send a cancel/warning-end message. That's only possible with cell broadcast. And that hasn't been used so far due to data protection concerns (there's a list of phones that have been warned, i.e. were in the affected area). We cannot solve things the simple way.
      - hef19898 4y ago
        Oh, it aboslutely is held back by creative lobbying. Back in late 90s / early 2000s, Telekom (recently privatized telecom monopolist and owner of the landline network) lobbied hard against building up a fibre network by over selling wire based DSL using existing copper lines. Germany still pays for this.
      - foepys 4y ago
  - beardedman 4y ago
    Your perceptions were off. They have excellent engineering culture, which has bolstered every part of the economy & allowed them to perform poorly almost everywhere else IMO.
    - formerly_proven 4y ago
      Germany has been coasting on the inertia of the economic power provided by its industry for a very long time.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    I think Germans are asking similar questions. Brandenburg Airport was delayed a lot and for things which ought never to have gone wrong. I think Merkel made a joke about there still being plenty of high-quality German engineers, just that they all worked in Switzerland. But ich bin Ausländer, and my German isn't good enough to do an in-depth analysis of local media opinions on any topic, so I may just be focusing on a few headline cases and mistaking the details for the gestalt.
    - thomasz 4y ago
      The foreign conception of Germany as a paragon of effectiveness always did sound weird to me. The whole political system is set up to require broad consensus to move anything forward. That makes it really difficult to get any meaningful change out of that political system, unless there is a real, tangible pain that is felt throughout most of society. On the other hand, it should be noted that this approach has important positive effects.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - terminalcommand 4y ago
    Don't forget about the Wirecard scandal as well.
    - formerly_proven 4y ago
      Actually that dude was from Austria.
      - terminalcommand 4y ago
        Didn't he operate in Germany? The country that allowed the fraud was Germany.
        konha 4y ago
        Exactly. The scandal wasn’t so much that a company defrauded investors (happens) but that regulators didn’t catch on to it and actively interfered with attempts to uncover it.
      - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        >Actually that dude was from Austria. This is not the first time some Austrian dude causes trouble in Germany :)
    - hackandthink 4y ago
      WireCard was really bad. Journalists (FT) who investigated and reported on the Wirecard scam were prosecuted. BaFin (Financial Supervisory Authority) supported WireCard (prohibiting short selling). https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard#Berichterstattung_der_Financial_Times_und_Zeit_danach https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard#Berichterstattung_der...
  - lnsru 4y ago
    Since the businesses of relatives work/-ed for some time with big German businesses I heard from them locally unheard stories about cash only payments for the delivery drivers and re labeling the products with “made in Germany stickers” big style. I also used to work with experienced Siemens guys. They told me about old Siemens business development practices. Bribing clients was so normal like eating lunch every day. And now Germany has a chancellor involved in CumEx business in the past. For me Germany is another corrupt shady country with rich puppeteers pulling the strings from the shadows. Paragon of virtue is elsewhere.
    - ShredKazoo 4y ago
      >Paragon of virtue is elsewhere. Genuinely curious which countries HN users think are actually paragons of virtue. Multiple times, I've had the experience of thinking a country is a paragon of virtue, then finding a thread here or on reddit full of people from that country complaining about it... Seems like Singapore, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Finland, and the Netherlands are the "paragon of virtue" countries people complain about the least.
      - andrepd 4y ago
        Singapore is an authoritarian one-party state and Netherlands has the tax haven problem. I'd at least count them off.
      - actionfromafar 4y ago
        The Netherlands are captured by narcotics “gangs”. They have corrupted courts and politicians. Too much money for too small country.
        noiwillnot 4y ago
        As an continental European, first time I heard about Netherlands as a "paragon of virtue". Is this some UK/US talking point?
        4y ago
  - hannob 4y ago
    You may want to check these for corruption scandals in Germany more than 20 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDU_donations_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDU_donations_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flick_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flick_affair
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    If you have one of the "cheater" VW diesels, and you smoke one cigarette while driving 100 miles, you have emitted more excess pollution than the car. The "Emissions Scandal" is largely bunk.
  - Garlef 4y ago
    > Did Germany change over the last 20 years, or were my perceptions off from the get-go? There has always been corruption. Germany under Kohl was also called Bimbesrepublik at times. "bimbes" being a cutesy/deragatory term for money in Kohl's idiom. https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article5883815/Ab-heute-steht-die-Bimbesrepublik-vor-Gericht.html https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article5883815/Ab-he...
    - tartoran 4y ago
      Petty or serious corruption? I too had quite good perceptions of Germany and they’re changing as of late
      - luckylion 4y ago
        I believe it's mostly just that more comes to light these days and private media companies are more willing to poke at it. A lot of it is also not super extreme, so you can argue it away if you want to and squint on each individual item, and ignore the sum.
  - verisimi 4y ago
    I think this was a fake scandal. The aim was to engineer a legislative and social move away from petrol and diesel cars, and engineer acceptance in environmental restrictions (or greater governance), in support of the fake climate crisis, that no one has seen. Except in statistics. Most of what we see are meta narratives playing out, that are meant to capture the minds, and get us to consent willingly to greater governance. Turkeys voting for Christmas.
    - andrepd 4y ago
      I struggle to comprehend the mental gymnastics where laws that prevent other people from gassing you are "taking away your freedom".
      - verisimi 4y ago
        I didn't say anything about taking away freedom. I said - "get us to consent willingly to greater governance". You believe the stories you are told, you trust the emissions testing, you trust the government to do something, the law-making process, the corrections to the bad acts on the part of corporations, etc. You've literally no idea whether any of that is true! I doubt you even think you are being gassed by cars. But you probably support early scraping of functional cars, subsidising of electric cars (even though they are dirty to produce and not fit for purpose), artificially increasing the cost of travel (fuel taxes), food production, deliveries, etc, you support forcing cumbersome travel options on everyone (public transport accessible via tracking ids), decreasing parking, pedestrianising of areas, etc. But these options are not ones you wanted either! You have simply been told they are good, you are saving the planet. You might not believe in religion, while you pay penance for your sinful nature. In the past, towns and cities were engineered in order to provide access for cars - people then were told that was good, and believed it! It seems to me, that whatever government tells people is good, if they see it on a screen, they believe it! Even though they are actually poorer and have less options. Its amazing to me, that this is all it takes! To take ever more money from people, for less - you simply tell them on TV! And I'm the one doing mental gymnastics! Do you actually notice the world at all? Do you verify any of your cherished beliefs? Has the water risen? Is it warmer? Was weather ever unchanging?
  - croes 4y ago
    They didn't. Remember the decades of corruption they found in Greece? Companies like Siemens were the ones who bribed greece politicians.
  - croes 4y ago
    BTW lots of that "virtue" is based on the fact that some things deemed illegal in countries are legal in germany. For instance if you pay a politician after they have done you a "favor" it's not corruption, it only is if you pay the beforehand. For years Germany is urged to implement certain anti-corruption laws but they don't do it because it would hinder their "politcal work".
  - coffeeblack 4y ago
    It changed quite a bit.
  - daniel-cussen 4y ago
  - philipkglass 4y ago
    I had a similar rosy view of the Japanese nuclear industry in 2010. After the Fukushima accident in 2011, I found that it would have been prevented if the Fukushima plant had followed regulations as strict as the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires, or if it had just built protections like the nearby Onagawa plant had built [1]. With further digging, I found that Japan had a rather poor nuclear safety culture before Fukushima too [2] [3]. I had even read about the 1999 criticality accident around the time it happened but downplayed its significance in my mind. Due to a combination of excellent consumer products exported from Japan and positive cultural stereotypes circulating in the US about Japanese attention to rules and quality, I incorrectly discounted prior evidence of defective nuclear safety culture in Japan. With hindsight I also think that language barriers play a role in leaning on stereotypes. When companies with English-speaking employees have internal problems that leadership is ignoring, I can read complaints from lower level employees (anonymous or otherwise) posted online. But I don't know where Japanese power plant workers hang out online. Even if I did I wouldn't be able to understand what they're writing. So my views get colored more by whatever makes it into English-language media, which may be less representative. [1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2014.0379 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2014.037... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accidents [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant#1995_sodium_leak_and_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant#1995...
mrweasel 4y ago
That honestly completely insane that the legal process makes up for the vast majority of time in infrastructure projects like this. I'm all for environmental concerns, taking in complaint from future neighbors, all that stuff, but allowing it to drag out important projects years is problematic. Sometimes I feel like listing to possible complains from people living around affected areas is a waste of time. Denmark pretty much can't build windmills anymore, because they will: "Ruin my view". Seriously, the city I live in wants to close a coal fired power plant, and replace it with a number of windmills, on the same plot of land, but no, that will ruin someones view (which is currently a power plant). You also can't do cell phone towers, because they are ugly (fair enough), yet you still allow yourself to complain about poor coverage in the same area.
- Lutger 4y ago
  On the one hand: I agree that years of delay are pretty wasteful, considering a lot of projects are really needed to solve urgent problems. With windmills, the same thing happened in my village, which was all up in arms against them. On the other hand, democracy is inherently slow and wasteful, if you want to protect also the rights of the minority, that will have a cost. What if it isn't something like windmills that clearly are a net improvement for society over coal, and the objections aren't merely 'not a nice view'? For example, suppose some big corp wants to frack the environment to pieces for big bucks, leaving a poisoned, nearly unlivable habitat for the nearby village. How can we safeguard against this, in a way that the village inhabitants can protest against such threats with real teeth, without grinding everything to a halt that is a mere nuisance but offers real benefits to society?
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    Democracy is not inherently slow and wasteful, as you see here Germany created this large project in short order. They did not abandon democracy to achieve it. The key is that the "environmentalists", politicians, judiciary, activists, and people who would block the process were threatened with feeling the pain of the missing infrastructure. Amazing how quickly they abandon their high horses when it looks like it will cost them something, then it's full throttle with construction and fossil fuels. They like to be "all in this together" when they're inflicting this kind of pain on others though, so what seems to be inherent is people's desire to wield power and authority over others.
Angostura 4y ago
The road to environmental destruction is paved with "we'll sort it out later"
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  I don't know why this comment was down-voted. I feel exactly the same. When I saw the news source, Wall Street Journal, I wasn't surprised to see how much the article focused on sweeping away "pesky" environmental laws. Ask anyone who lived in Germany, UK, US, Japan in the 1970s. They can tell you all about life before environmental laws. It was hell. And sadly, the narrative is always stolen away by complaints about "my view will be ruined", ignoring all of the good these laws do for our environment. It would be better to improve the environmental laws to exclude "views" as something to be protected.
  - luckylion 4y ago
    > It was hell. That's crazy, and no, it wasn't. Yes, there was lots of pollution. No, it wasn't hell. And much of what enables the high quality of life today with less pollution is build upon what was done then. > It would be better to improve the environmental laws to exclude "views" as something to be protected. And to be more focused on humans. If you weigh a city's needs vs that of field mice and you side with the activists who pretend to speak for the field mice, you've lost sight of what's important.
    - asadotzler 4y ago
      >And to be more focused on humans. If you weigh a city's needs vs that of field mice and you side with the activists who pretend to speak for the field mice, you've lost sight of what's important. If you side with the humans in cities, and the only environmental laws you have are for their protection, you will screw your rural neighbors something awful. Countries already under-fund and often abuse the rights of rural communities and their citizens, which make up over 25% of the European people. Sure, the 75% in urban areas are able to out-vote the 25% rural population, but that doesn't make screwing over your neighbors a good thing.
_the_inflator 4y ago
Yes, but to add some context to it: The very party that initiated this complex, was previously instrumental in installing environmental blocking rights, Habeck's Green Party. ;)
- rad_gruchalski 4y ago
  Where you stand depends on where you sit.

hnhg 4y ago

The whole point is about identifying real issues before it is too late. And it is not like German politics is free of corruption.

petesergeant 4y ago
Growing up, Germany always seemed like a paragon of virtue. Starting somewhere around the VW Emissions Scandal, my view has changed. Did Germany change over the last 20 years, or were my perceptions off from the get-go?
- magic_hamster 4y ago
  That's a fascinating opinion, as I've never thought of Germany being a symbol of virtue. If anything, Germany is a paragon of bureaucracy. They have excellent engineering when used for good, but as history taught us, that's not always the case.
  - hnlmorg 4y ago
    Your comment here sounds like it is referencing WW2, which is a little silly. Germany changed massively after that (I mean, it was literally two countries for a few decades). Governments can look very different from one decade to the next. So it doesn’t make sense to reference a war-time government from 80 years ago as an example of how a current government behaves.
  - petesergeant 4y ago
    Maybe it's a Cold War propaganda relic? Growing up as an Englisher, history was divided into "Bad Germany" (1930-1945), and "Good (West) Germany", ever since, and the only real stereotype we had of the Germans was that they'd get up early to stake out spots by the pool on holiday. I have to assume that during the Cold War there was a great deal of propaganda highlighting the relative merits of West Germans.
    - someweirdperson 4y ago
      Many regulations from before and even during the war are still valid today.
    - andrepd 4y ago
      Yes. Most Nazis which held high-ranking posts before and during the war continued to do so in West Germany, under allied consent.
  - gumboza 4y ago
    Yes I have a German friend who spends 3 months a year filing their tax situation. German paperwork is insane. And because a lot of the country is surprisingly technologically backwards, everything is on actual paper still. Takes me about an hour to do the same in the UK and half of that is trying to remember how to log in and do it.
    - lnsru 4y ago
      It’s just not true. Elster is already electronic for couple years. If you know what are doing it takes 4 hours max. I recommend your friend to find good tax advisor if he/she is not capable to do it by himself/herself.
      - sveme 4y ago
        The uninformed bullshit by the person you replied to is the reason I typically don‘t comment on German topics anymore on HN. Alas, my Gell-Mann-Amnesia is strong and I read comments on other topics even though they are probably as little based on reality as these comments on Germany.
      - someweirdperson 4y ago
        Elster is an electronic version of paper forms. It requires redundant manual input of information that is present on different sub-sheets of the forms. Like the paper forms, it requires input of information that the government already has. Filing on paper doesn't take more time than filing through Elster. Also, it's not unlikely that the government is printing the electronically filed information in the traditional paper format to be able to process it the traditional way. (maybe not for taxes, but it's surely the case for some other processes.) But I agree that "3 months" is probably the time required to collect information, not the time needed to summarize the information for the government. Some banks take a couple of months to send the required yearly investment income/taxes-paid statement.
        fabian2k 4y ago
        Some information can be entered automatically in Elster, e.g. the information submitted by your employer. For people with simple tax situations, e.g. regular employee and no additional complications filing the taxes is pretty straightforward. It can be a bit intimidating if you've never done it before, but almost all the information you need to fill out will be automatically provided. You need to get your bank/broker statements and enter them as well, but those tell you exactly in which line you need to put the values. There's certainly a lot of improvement possible, but for simple cases it's pretty easy already (if you've done it at least once before).
  - andrepd 4y ago
    >They have excellent engineering when used for good, but as history taught us, that's not always the case. For what's worth, the "German efficiency in WWII" is mostly a myth.
- herrherrmann 4y ago
  There’s an incredible amount of corruption among German politicians, especially among the “richer” parties CDU/CSU and FDP who are constantly being lobbied and bought by managers in the bigger industries (e.g. automobile and construction). That’s one of the reasons why Germany is so behind with environmental issues, technology/digitalization, and government transparency.
  - JanSt 4y ago
    Ah sure the CDU-Gazprom connection, who doesn‘t remember? (the left is equally corrupt as the liberals/conservatives)
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - someweirdperson 4y ago
    > technology/digitalization This isn't held back by the bigger industries but by entrenched boundaries of responsibilities in the administration (defined in the regulations), data protection, and over-engineering. Latest example: Warning the population. Instead of simply sending SMS to all active phones in an area, it has to be cell broadcast, which doesn't work on old phones. The reason seems to be (information in media is... limited) that sending SMS would not provide a way to send a cancel/warning-end message. That's only possible with cell broadcast. And that hasn't been used so far due to data protection concerns (there's a list of phones that have been warned, i.e. were in the affected area). We cannot solve things the simple way.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Oh, it aboslutely is held back by creative lobbying. Back in late 90s / early 2000s, Telekom (recently privatized telecom monopolist and owner of the landline network) lobbied hard against building up a fibre network by over selling wire based DSL using existing copper lines. Germany still pays for this.
    - foepys 4y ago
- beardedman 4y ago
  Your perceptions were off. They have excellent engineering culture, which has bolstered every part of the economy & allowed them to perform poorly almost everywhere else IMO.
  - formerly_proven 4y ago
    Germany has been coasting on the inertia of the economic power provided by its industry for a very long time.
- ben_w 4y ago
  I think Germans are asking similar questions. Brandenburg Airport was delayed a lot and for things which ought never to have gone wrong. I think Merkel made a joke about there still being plenty of high-quality German engineers, just that they all worked in Switzerland. But ich bin Ausländer, and my German isn't good enough to do an in-depth analysis of local media opinions on any topic, so I may just be focusing on a few headline cases and mistaking the details for the gestalt.
  - thomasz 4y ago
    The foreign conception of Germany as a paragon of effectiveness always did sound weird to me. The whole political system is set up to require broad consensus to move anything forward. That makes it really difficult to get any meaningful change out of that political system, unless there is a real, tangible pain that is felt throughout most of society. On the other hand, it should be noted that this approach has important positive effects.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- terminalcommand 4y ago
  Don't forget about the Wirecard scandal as well.
  - formerly_proven 4y ago
    Actually that dude was from Austria.
    - terminalcommand 4y ago
      Didn't he operate in Germany? The country that allowed the fraud was Germany.
      - konha 4y ago
        Exactly. The scandal wasn’t so much that a company defrauded investors (happens) but that regulators didn’t catch on to it and actively interfered with attempts to uncover it.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      >Actually that dude was from Austria. This is not the first time some Austrian dude causes trouble in Germany :)
  - hackandthink 4y ago
    WireCard was really bad. Journalists (FT) who investigated and reported on the Wirecard scam were prosecuted. BaFin (Financial Supervisory Authority) supported WireCard (prohibiting short selling). https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard#Berichterstattung_der_Financial_Times_und_Zeit_danach https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard#Berichterstattung_der...
- lnsru 4y ago
  Since the businesses of relatives work/-ed for some time with big German businesses I heard from them locally unheard stories about cash only payments for the delivery drivers and re labeling the products with “made in Germany stickers” big style. I also used to work with experienced Siemens guys. They told me about old Siemens business development practices. Bribing clients was so normal like eating lunch every day. And now Germany has a chancellor involved in CumEx business in the past. For me Germany is another corrupt shady country with rich puppeteers pulling the strings from the shadows. Paragon of virtue is elsewhere.
  - ShredKazoo 4y ago
    >Paragon of virtue is elsewhere. Genuinely curious which countries HN users think are actually paragons of virtue. Multiple times, I've had the experience of thinking a country is a paragon of virtue, then finding a thread here or on reddit full of people from that country complaining about it... Seems like Singapore, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Finland, and the Netherlands are the "paragon of virtue" countries people complain about the least.
    - andrepd 4y ago
      Singapore is an authoritarian one-party state and Netherlands has the tax haven problem. I'd at least count them off.
    - actionfromafar 4y ago
      The Netherlands are captured by narcotics “gangs”. They have corrupted courts and politicians. Too much money for too small country.
      - noiwillnot 4y ago
        As an continental European, first time I heard about Netherlands as a "paragon of virtue". Is this some UK/US talking point?
        4y ago
- hannob 4y ago
  You may want to check these for corruption scandals in Germany more than 20 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDU_donations_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDU_donations_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flick_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flick_affair
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  If you have one of the "cheater" VW diesels, and you smoke one cigarette while driving 100 miles, you have emitted more excess pollution than the car. The "Emissions Scandal" is largely bunk.
- Garlef 4y ago
  > Did Germany change over the last 20 years, or were my perceptions off from the get-go? There has always been corruption. Germany under Kohl was also called Bimbesrepublik at times. "bimbes" being a cutesy/deragatory term for money in Kohl's idiom. https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article5883815/Ab-heute-steht-die-Bimbesrepublik-vor-Gericht.html https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article5883815/Ab-he...
  - tartoran 4y ago
    Petty or serious corruption? I too had quite good perceptions of Germany and they’re changing as of late
    - luckylion 4y ago
      I believe it's mostly just that more comes to light these days and private media companies are more willing to poke at it. A lot of it is also not super extreme, so you can argue it away if you want to and squint on each individual item, and ignore the sum.
- verisimi 4y ago
  I think this was a fake scandal. The aim was to engineer a legislative and social move away from petrol and diesel cars, and engineer acceptance in environmental restrictions (or greater governance), in support of the fake climate crisis, that no one has seen. Except in statistics. Most of what we see are meta narratives playing out, that are meant to capture the minds, and get us to consent willingly to greater governance. Turkeys voting for Christmas.
  - andrepd 4y ago
    I struggle to comprehend the mental gymnastics where laws that prevent other people from gassing you are "taking away your freedom".
    - verisimi 4y ago
      I didn't say anything about taking away freedom. I said - "get us to consent willingly to greater governance". You believe the stories you are told, you trust the emissions testing, you trust the government to do something, the law-making process, the corrections to the bad acts on the part of corporations, etc. You've literally no idea whether any of that is true! I doubt you even think you are being gassed by cars. But you probably support early scraping of functional cars, subsidising of electric cars (even though they are dirty to produce and not fit for purpose), artificially increasing the cost of travel (fuel taxes), food production, deliveries, etc, you support forcing cumbersome travel options on everyone (public transport accessible via tracking ids), decreasing parking, pedestrianising of areas, etc. But these options are not ones you wanted either! You have simply been told they are good, you are saving the planet. You might not believe in religion, while you pay penance for your sinful nature. In the past, towns and cities were engineered in order to provide access for cars - people then were told that was good, and believed it! It seems to me, that whatever government tells people is good, if they see it on a screen, they believe it! Even though they are actually poorer and have less options. Its amazing to me, that this is all it takes! To take ever more money from people, for less - you simply tell them on TV! And I'm the one doing mental gymnastics! Do you actually notice the world at all? Do you verify any of your cherished beliefs? Has the water risen? Is it warmer? Was weather ever unchanging?
- croes 4y ago
  They didn't. Remember the decades of corruption they found in Greece? Companies like Siemens were the ones who bribed greece politicians.
- croes 4y ago
  BTW lots of that "virtue" is based on the fact that some things deemed illegal in countries are legal in germany. For instance if you pay a politician after they have done you a "favor" it's not corruption, it only is if you pay the beforehand. For years Germany is urged to implement certain anti-corruption laws but they don't do it because it would hinder their "politcal work".
- coffeeblack 4y ago
  It changed quite a bit.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
- philipkglass 4y ago
  I had a similar rosy view of the Japanese nuclear industry in 2010. After the Fukushima accident in 2011, I found that it would have been prevented if the Fukushima plant had followed regulations as strict as the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires, or if it had just built protections like the nearby Onagawa plant had built [1]. With further digging, I found that Japan had a rather poor nuclear safety culture before Fukushima too [2] [3]. I had even read about the 1999 criticality accident around the time it happened but downplayed its significance in my mind. Due to a combination of excellent consumer products exported from Japan and positive cultural stereotypes circulating in the US about Japanese attention to rules and quality, I incorrectly discounted prior evidence of defective nuclear safety culture in Japan. With hindsight I also think that language barriers play a role in leaning on stereotypes. When companies with English-speaking employees have internal problems that leadership is ignoring, I can read complaints from lower level employees (anonymous or otherwise) posted online. But I don't know where Japanese power plant workers hang out online. Even if I did I wouldn't be able to understand what they're writing. So my views get colored more by whatever makes it into English-language media, which may be less representative. [1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2014.0379 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2014.037... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaimura_nuclear_accidents [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant#1995_sodium_leak_and_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monju_Nuclear_Power_Plant#1995...

mrweasel 4y ago

That honestly completely insane that the legal process makes up for the vast majority of time in infrastructure projects like this. I'm all for environmental concerns, taking in complaint from future neighbors, all that stuff, but allowing it to drag out important projects years is problematic. Sometimes I feel like listing to possible complains from people living around affected areas is a waste of time. Denmark pretty much can't build windmills anymore, because they will: "Ruin my view". Seriously, the city I live in wants to close a coal fired power plant, and replace it with a number of windmills, on the same plot of land, but no, that will ruin someones view (which is currently a power plant). You also can't do cell phone towers, because they are ugly (fair enough), yet you still allow yourself to complain about poor coverage in the same area.

Lutger 4y ago
On the one hand: I agree that years of delay are pretty wasteful, considering a lot of projects are really needed to solve urgent problems. With windmills, the same thing happened in my village, which was all up in arms against them. On the other hand, democracy is inherently slow and wasteful, if you want to protect also the rights of the minority, that will have a cost. What if it isn't something like windmills that clearly are a net improvement for society over coal, and the objections aren't merely 'not a nice view'? For example, suppose some big corp wants to frack the environment to pieces for big bucks, leaving a poisoned, nearly unlivable habitat for the nearby village. How can we safeguard against this, in a way that the village inhabitants can protest against such threats with real teeth, without grinding everything to a halt that is a mere nuisance but offers real benefits to society?
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  Democracy is not inherently slow and wasteful, as you see here Germany created this large project in short order. They did not abandon democracy to achieve it. The key is that the "environmentalists", politicians, judiciary, activists, and people who would block the process were threatened with feeling the pain of the missing infrastructure. Amazing how quickly they abandon their high horses when it looks like it will cost them something, then it's full throttle with construction and fossil fuels. They like to be "all in this together" when they're inflicting this kind of pain on others though, so what seems to be inherent is people's desire to wield power and authority over others.

Angostura 4y ago

The road to environmental destruction is paved with "we'll sort it out later"

throwaway2037 4y ago
I don't know why this comment was down-voted. I feel exactly the same. When I saw the news source, Wall Street Journal, I wasn't surprised to see how much the article focused on sweeping away "pesky" environmental laws. Ask anyone who lived in Germany, UK, US, Japan in the 1970s. They can tell you all about life before environmental laws. It was hell. And sadly, the narrative is always stolen away by complaints about "my view will be ruined", ignoring all of the good these laws do for our environment. It would be better to improve the environmental laws to exclude "views" as something to be protected.
- luckylion 4y ago
  > It was hell. That's crazy, and no, it wasn't. Yes, there was lots of pollution. No, it wasn't hell. And much of what enables the high quality of life today with less pollution is build upon what was done then. > It would be better to improve the environmental laws to exclude "views" as something to be protected. And to be more focused on humans. If you weigh a city's needs vs that of field mice and you side with the activists who pretend to speak for the field mice, you've lost sight of what's important.
  - asadotzler 4y ago
    >And to be more focused on humans. If you weigh a city's needs vs that of field mice and you side with the activists who pretend to speak for the field mice, you've lost sight of what's important. If you side with the humans in cities, and the only environmental laws you have are for their protection, you will screw your rural neighbors something awful. Countries already under-fund and often abuse the rights of rural communities and their citizens, which make up over 25% of the European people. Sure, the 75% in urban areas are able to out-vote the 25% rural population, but that doesn't make screwing over your neighbors a good thing.

_the_inflator 4y ago

Yes, but to add some context to it: The very party that initiated this complex, was previously instrumental in installing environmental blocking rights, Habeck's Green Party. ;)

rad_gruchalski 4y ago
Where you stand depends on where you sit.