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And you'd be fine in Germany. HN paints an overly gloomy picture of Germany. All points mentioned contain a kernel of truth but also a pessimistic linear regre

And you'd be fine in Germany. HN paints an overly gloomy picture of Germany. All points mentioned contain a kernel of truth but also a pessimistic linear regression concerning the outlook of the future. We've got a very minor recession going on, that's all. The economy will turn around next year. The energy crisis is of the higher price than usual variety (and is already way past its peak; look at the 5y chart: https://ycharts.com/indicators/germany_natural_gas_border_price https://ycharts.com/indicators/germany_natural_gas_border_pr...). The greenefication of our electrical grid is ongoing and will cost us a ton of money over the next 5-10 years, but will pay off after that (yes, it would have been better to keep the atomic power plants running until then; that's one of the few irrational decision done by the previous conservative government and confirmed by the current government). We had a large immigration spike in 2015 and another one in 2022 (Syria and Ukraine), overfilling the immigration centers. Aging population is a thing, as in any other western country. Turns out that immigration is one of the things that counteracts it! And we're currently (and for the next decade) in serious need of unskilled labor, so even the 40% of syrian refugees that haven't gotten work yet (many of those because of the slow bureaucracy...) will be needed. It's certainly not all sunshine and rainbows, but it's also certainly not a crumbling country without a future.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>Turns out that immigration is one of the things that counteracts it! But where will they live? Germany has a housing shortage it refuses to fix, but is constantly importing more economic cannon fodder.
- Xylakant 3y ago
  „Germany“ doesn‘t have a housing shortage. German cities do, and it‘s a huge problem. But on the other hand, Germany also has a huge infrastructure deficit in more rural areas - I live in Berlin and would happily vacate my flat to move to a 2nd or 3rd tier small town, but that means giving up on solid public transport, connectivity, supermarket next door, walkability and fast internet in many many places. Work wouldn’t be an issue, our company is remote anyways, but all of these things are a huge problem. Fixing those issues would mean less people want to move to the city, less pressure on the housing market etc.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >„Germany“ doesn‘t have a housing shortage. German cities do Yes, and everyone coming to Germany will also want to live only in the big cities, not in some desolate village full of empty homes and super conservative boomers. How is this sustainable?
    - Xylakant 3y ago
      Yep, true. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Other states have plenty of beautiful, livable, attractive mid-size towns because they have in fact managed to avoid these issues. Have good internet, have solid connectivity to places people want to go. The „village“ I grew up in has about 8000 inhabitants, it‘s 5 kilometers from a train station with trains every 15 minutes. About 70 000 people live in a circle of about 10-15 kilometers around that town. The next major town is about 20 kilometers away, or 15 minutes by train from that station. Yet, there‘s not a single bus to the train station. There’s no proper bike parking at that station. There‘s a bus every 30 minutes that takes an hour to reach the city center. Internet is capped at about 16MBit/sec. This is a densely populated area by most standards. Still, every bit of infrastructure sucks - except for cars. There‘s two different highways right around the village.
dauertewigkeit 3y ago
Germany will very likely never catch up technologically to the US. We aren't going to have the Germany equivalent of Open AI anytime soon, or the equivalent of Tesla or Space X. So if you care at all about being on the winning team, it's probably not going to be Germany or even anywhere in Europe. You'd have to choose between the US or China and South Korea.
coolThingsFirst 3y ago
"You'll be fine" is a very low bar for a country in 2023. The software salaries in Germany are just low.
blub 3y ago
> Aging population is a thing, as in any other western country. Turns out that immigration is one of the things that counteracts it! And we're currently (and for the next decade) in serious need of unskilled labor, so even the 40% of syrian refugees that haven't gotten work yet (many of those because of the slow bureaucracy...) will be needed. That calculation would work if Germany would be getting only kids and babies which would be adopted by local families. It’s getting some of those kids, with a lot of parents, grandparents and teens in addition. Many of those adults are economic migrants, without the education and the resources to succeed in any European country, never mind the highly demanding German labour market. They will be stuck in dead-end jobs delivering packages at best. If Germany has a serious need of unskilled labour, why don’t those 40% have any job after so many years? I see three possibilities: * living on state support is better than any of the jobs they could get * they don’t want to work * they can’t work They will all nevertheless use all the benefits provided by the state, putting pressure on the housing market, state budgets, availability of medical treatment, etc. Relying on immigration to fix plummeting birth rates is broken by design, with significant downsides. Nobody succeeded at doing this.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

>Turns out that immigration is one of the things that counteracts it! But where will they live? Germany has a housing shortage it refuses to fix, but is constantly importing more economic cannon fodder.

Xylakant 3y ago
„Germany“ doesn‘t have a housing shortage. German cities do, and it‘s a huge problem. But on the other hand, Germany also has a huge infrastructure deficit in more rural areas - I live in Berlin and would happily vacate my flat to move to a 2nd or 3rd tier small town, but that means giving up on solid public transport, connectivity, supermarket next door, walkability and fast internet in many many places. Work wouldn’t be an issue, our company is remote anyways, but all of these things are a huge problem. Fixing those issues would mean less people want to move to the city, less pressure on the housing market etc.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >„Germany“ doesn‘t have a housing shortage. German cities do Yes, and everyone coming to Germany will also want to live only in the big cities, not in some desolate village full of empty homes and super conservative boomers. How is this sustainable?
  - Xylakant 3y ago
    Yep, true. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Other states have plenty of beautiful, livable, attractive mid-size towns because they have in fact managed to avoid these issues. Have good internet, have solid connectivity to places people want to go. The „village“ I grew up in has about 8000 inhabitants, it‘s 5 kilometers from a train station with trains every 15 minutes. About 70 000 people live in a circle of about 10-15 kilometers around that town. The next major town is about 20 kilometers away, or 15 minutes by train from that station. Yet, there‘s not a single bus to the train station. There’s no proper bike parking at that station. There‘s a bus every 30 minutes that takes an hour to reach the city center. Internet is capped at about 16MBit/sec. This is a densely populated area by most standards. Still, every bit of infrastructure sucks - except for cars. There‘s two different highways right around the village.

dauertewigkeit 3y ago

Germany will very likely never catch up technologically to the US. We aren't going to have the Germany equivalent of Open AI anytime soon, or the equivalent of Tesla or Space X. So if you care at all about being on the winning team, it's probably not going to be Germany or even anywhere in Europe. You'd have to choose between the US or China and South Korea.

coolThingsFirst 3y ago

"You'll be fine" is a very low bar for a country in 2023. The software salaries in Germany are just low.

blub 3y ago

> Aging population is a thing, as in any other western country. Turns out that immigration is one of the things that counteracts it! And we're currently (and for the next decade) in serious need of unskilled labor, so even the 40% of syrian refugees that haven't gotten work yet (many of those because of the slow bureaucracy...) will be needed. That calculation would work if Germany would be getting only kids and babies which would be adopted by local families. It’s getting some of those kids, with a lot of parents, grandparents and teens in addition. Many of those adults are economic migrants, without the education and the resources to succeed in any European country, never mind the highly demanding German labour market. They will be stuck in dead-end jobs delivering packages at best. If Germany has a serious need of unskilled labour, why don’t those 40% have any job after so many years? I see three possibilities: * living on state support is better than any of the jobs they could get * they don’t want to work * they can’t work They will all nevertheless use all the benefits provided by the state, putting pressure on the housing market, state budgets, availability of medical treatment, etc. Relying on immigration to fix plummeting birth rates is broken by design, with significant downsides. Nobody succeeded at doing this.