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I'm always wondering who is writing these articles about Germany and why. They criticize Europe in general, but the main focus seems to be on Germany.
by benterix 3y ago
I'm always wondering who is writing these articles about Germany and why. They criticize Europe in general, but the main focus seems to be on Germany.
- Maakuth 3y agoGermany is the biggest economy inside the EU and they've been fairly competitive globally so far. Also they've made some pretty unique political decisions, such as the nuclear phase-out.
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- ExoticPearTree 3y ago> Also they've made some pretty unique political decisions, such as the nuclear phase-out. They shot themselves in the foot in knee-jerk reaction to what happened in Fukushima. Nuclear is clean energy. All the scare mongering is done by hippies who think that somehow wind turbines and solar panels are made out of thin air and don't pollute.
- EspressoGPT 3y agoBecause the green party in the government abides by their ideology instead of pragmatism and retaining wealth.
- mr_mitm 3y agoIt was the conservative party, CDU, who made the decision after Fukushima to shut down nuclear power.
- ffhhttt 3y agoIt was the Social Democrats and the Greens back in 1998 who decided to stop all nuclear development and close all the existing plants over the next 10-20 years. Nuclear was already long doomed by the time Fukushima happened
- Phil_Latio 3y agoAnd the greens would have done it even sooner or could have stopped it now...
- mr_mitm 3y agoYes, would have, but let's not pretend it's now entirely the green's fault that we now don't have nuclear power, which the comment I replied to did. They could have prolonged the life of only three power plants for a limited amount of time. Going back to nuclear now is a decision that should have been made decades ago, when CDU was ruling.
- EspressoGPT 3y agoAnd it is now being enforced by the green party at the worst time since Fukushima – a period of very expensive and scarce energy – for idealogical reasons.
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- BurningPenguin 3y agoNope. The Greens are the first to give up their ideology to come to an agreement with other parties. It's called "Realpolitik". They were also the ones who warned against increasing dependency to Russia, but were ignored when CDU was in power. You know, the conservative party, that sat on their asses for 16 years doing almost nothing in terms of renewable...
- EspressoGPT 3y agoDoing Realpolitik? Fine. Decreasing dependencies to Russia? Fine. Expanding renewable energies? Fine. Shutting down nuclear power while in an energy crisis? Not-so-fine.
- unglaublich 3y agoNuclear is like airplanes: they look the scariest, but are statistically the safest.
- Gasp0de 3y agoAnd when they blow up, half of Germany can not be inhabited anymore. Germany is small and extremely densely populated. You can not compare it to the US where nuclear plants are in the middle of nowhere.
- ExoticPearTree 3y agoExcept they don’t. Othwerise France would have been a wasteland by now usimg this reasoning. We, as in the world, have enough experience with nuclear reactors to build safe ones.
- Gasp0de 3y agoThen why wasn't Fukushima safe? Was the experience only gathered afterwards? What knowledge was missing in 2011?
- BurningPenguin 3y ago> who think that somehow wind turbines and solar panels are made out of thin air and don't pollute. Nobody thinks that.
- samtho 3y agoOne of the problems is that solar and wind are being billed as a drop in replacement for gigawatt-scale electricity production, when in reality it’s likely going to find it place at the micro level to help alleviate the load and cost in smaller settings. The problem with energy is rarely the source (we can derive energy out of most anything that moves, heats, or shines), but the storage. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear are gigawatt-scale producers of energy because we can ramp up production at any time by simply shoveling more of our stockpile of fuel into the proverbial furnace. We can predict when solar or wind will give us power, but this is cold comfort if we need it now and it’s not windy or dark. This is why I’m bullish with hydrogen because it offers a way to store energy chemically that does not wear out like a battery and operates at 40-60% efficiency vs sub-25% for combination-driven power generation.
- Gasp0de 3y agoFuel cells and electrolyzation devices also wear out.
- karmakurtisaani 3y agoWell, there are things like universal health care and strong worker's rights in Europe, so you can't really let people think too positively about it. At least, that's what the cynic in me thinks.
- rnd0 3y agoYou're not wrong.
- localplume 3y ago[dead]
- carschno 3y agoThe scary thing is: worker's rights in Europe, notably including Germany, have been crushed in the last two to three decades. The remainders are just still relatively strong, compared to the rest of the world; including the largest economies, USA and China.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>The scary thing is: worker's rights in Europe, notably including Germany, have been crushed in the last two to three decades. Schröder's infamous Agenda 2010[1] that sought to crush unions power, workers rights and welfare programs, in order to force more Germans off welfare and taking poverty wages to pump up the economy. It pumped up the economy indeed but it didn't have the promised effect of increasing wages of living standards, quite the opposite, the rich got richer and the poor were poorer. When they ran out of poor Germans to exploit, they turned to Eastern EU workers form Poland and Romania. As those markets are drying up of cheap exploitable labor as well, they invited workers from Africa and the Middle east to make dangerous journeys to come to Germany, hence Merkel's Germany's famous open borders "Willkommenskultur", despite backlash from other Schengen and EU members who's borders and asylum centers got overwhelmed. The unpopular opinion that nobody is allowed to discuss is the country is unsustainably addicted to cheap immigrant labor for its exports to be competitive and to prop its over-inflated housing market. It's burning the economic candle at both ends to pump up the GDP. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_2010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_2010
- throwaway4good 3y agoSpooks.
- throwaway4good 3y agoSo under the cold war Germany was the main battle ground. Both Russia and the US setup massive spying and influence operations there. In particular journalism and foreign correspodence were perfect for this. After the Berlin wall fell, Russia dismantled its spook apparatus. The Americans kept theirs intact. Now that the real business of journalism is smaller than ever. The spooks have an even higher weight than they used to. So what is WSJ pushing? In short the Washington line: Don't invest in Germany. They are too reliant on China and Russia. Ultimately they will have to do what we have done - implement protectionist subsidies like the IRA, expand military spending, and run massive fiscal deficits.
- dv_dt 3y agoIn general if you see criticism in US media of economic conditions of other nations, you’ll have to do extra research to see if it’s more wish fulfillment than facts.
- ffhhttt 3y agoNot sure US media is somehow significantly worse at this (assuming we’re talking about at least somewhat semi legitimate news outlets)
- dv_dt 3y agoWSJ is US media, but ad a certain us business slat and more recently is now owned by a world wide media magnate Murdoch whose bias in owned outlets is also renowned. So while wsj is “legitimate”, one need to look past the labels of legit/non-legit as there is context for everything.
- ffhhttt 3y ago> WSJ is US media Yeah but I don’t see how could I disagree with this article too much. > whose bias in owned outlets is also renowned I’m not sure. High degree of bias seems to be the standard (with a few exceptions) regardless of ownership.
- worklaptopacct 3y agoThe recurring accusation is that paper and fax is king. And as a Polish immigrant, I find this true. I can do most of the bureaucracy online for the Polish state and it's not the case in Germany. In turn, the lengthy path has its end; in my home country, you can be chased by the authorities in circles, because there's never a way to be 100% compliant with the law.
- ant6n 3y agoI started a company in Germany recently, which is like a 29 step 3 month process that costs around 1000€. I’m trying to get some seed funding support from the government, because seed investing from angels in Germany is weird (odd angel rounds with multiple angels, who require the company to have revenue already but also true innovation but also want a high percentage of the company). Anyway, there’s lots of funding programs, which on paper is a great offset for the lack of risk and venture spirit. But the programs are all Byzantine in their requirements, long applications, small print in their rules which exclude you etc. For one application of a R/D program for small companies, which is done in a smart acrobat pdf (wow), on the cover page, it asks for the company stamp. What is a company stamp? I’m not quite sure, it doesn’t seem to be a legally required thing. It’s just a ink stamp with the company name and some basic info, that you can stamp paper documents with to make them appear more official. So I spent another 25€ to get a company stamp and ink pillow for my startup. Another startup expense, and strangely representative of the entrepreneurial experience in Germany overall.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>and strangely representative of the entrepreneurial experience in Germany overall Not if you're in the German "company stamp business". :)
- martin_a 3y ago> I started a company in Germany recently, which is like a 29 step 3 month process that costs around 1000€. To put this in perspective: You can also start a company in Germany for 30 Euro and 15 minutes of time. That's a so called "Kleingewerbe" where you can make up to 22.000 Euro/year turnaround with _much_ easier regulations on pretty much everything. If you want to test something or have some side hustle going on, that's the way to go. Don't be scared by all the reports like the above.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>but the main focus seems to be on Germany Because it's EU's beigest economy and saw the biggest economic drop in the block due to its poor political decisions on over-reliance on cheap Russian gas and cheap labor to maintain competitive exports. It's not some conspiracy, but genuine concern that if EU's richest country is struggling, the rest of the EU members will bear some of the fallout too. Whether we like it or not Germany has always been the benchmark in Europe. If the Danish or Austrian economy would drop by 0.5% probably nobody would care, but if the EU's richest members like Germany and France were to do that then it's more concerning for everyone. That's why Germany pops up a lot because it's a very important member of the block.
- Keyframe 3y agoPretty much. Germany and France are engines of EU
- c4mpute 3y agoNot to forget ever-rising sky-high energy prices due to a premature end of coal and nuclear, and a distinct lack of energy storage for renewables.
- fnord123 3y agoThe end of coal is not pre-mature.
- Waterluvian 3y agoClimate change is, in a sense, a massive store of value that you can take from without the consent of those who pay. Which makes it very hard for economics-minded thinking to overlook as a lazy way to thrive.
- c4mpute 3y agoThe end of coal is premature if your only other GW-scale energy source, nuclear, is being phased out at the same time, and you don't even have a replacement planned.
- ulrischa 3y agoGermany bashing is always working in the media
- nottheengineer 3y agoBecause germany is on a very slippery slope. Our politicians are occupied with idiotic things like tearing down nuclear power plants before the coal ones and the economy is going downhill. If nothing changes and the job market stays as bad as it is, I'll seriously consider moving to a different country.
- Gasp0de 3y agoThe economy is not going downhill, its stagnating. And this is due to the dependency on cheap russian gas that the conservative party somehow thought was a great idea. The decision to phase out of nuclear was good, as import of nuclear fuel has similar problems as the import of fossil gas. Additionally, there is the nuclear waste problem and the risk of a major reactor catastrophe which would make Germany uninhabitable. It is debatable whether this should have been done after coal phase out, but this decision has been made by CDU in 2013 and is currently not reversible anymore. There is no fuel, no functioning reactors and no companies willing to operate any reactor and no insurance willing to insure them.
- jonp888 3y agoI don't know how much this is present in US culture, but in the UK the prospect "beating" Germany in any form makes politicians and media outlets of a more nationalistic bent very excited indeed. That they are also very fond of references to Britain's "finest hour" in World War II probably gives away the reason why. It probably also helps that Germany has the kind of onshore manufacturing economy coveted by those same people(even if this is now turning into a problem) whereas the UK is actually more service orientated. There is no football match that an English football fan will more willingly talk about than Germany's 5-1 home defeat against England during the 2002 World Cup qualifiers!