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Funny, I actually go frequently to one or two of these, since I live in Berlin. I pay 42% taxes and still these government pools are not only a bit pricy (no di

Funny, I actually go frequently to one or two of these, since I live in Berlin. I pay 42% taxes and still these government pools are not only a bit pricy (no discount if you want to go regularly) but they have terrible, irregular opening times. They will spontaneously close down for a month, without notice on their site or google maps, only putting a sheet of paper on the door. They will rotate opening times randomly. Even worse, they are not open (only charlottenburg, which is small) for around 6 months in the summer. This is because youre supposed to go to the outdoor pools but I want to go at 6pm after work when they close and even if they are open they are too cold. On hot days they might be fun but then they are notoriously overrun but low education bracket people that get into fist fights so vehemently it was a big topic in berlin this summer. As a response there where then a bunch of police people hanging out at the pool and now you need to show your id before entering.

thesaintlives 3y ago
With your large earnings you will have no problem paying for membership of a nice spa club of which there are many in Berlin. These places are not overrun with 'low education bracket people' as you put it but sadly however a scourge of a different sort, namely what I would describe as 'clueless ignorant pricks'....
yunohn 3y ago
> they are notoriously overrun but low education bracket people that get into fist fights so vehemently I don’t understand the need to make this elitist statement? In fact, why is shutting up and complaining on HN your preferred solution?
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >I don’t understand the need to make this elitist statement? What's elitist about some facts? Do you know many chemistry PhDs who get into fist fights or do they tend to avoid conflicts? Overall the more educated and intelligent a populace is, the less physical violence and crime there is. Not everyone who is poorly educated starts fist fights, but people starting fist fights are always poorly educated and low intelect, who give in to their instincts telling them conflicts are solved by acting like a silverback gorilla.
  - gnz11 3y ago
    Sometimes they are U.S. Senators [1] or CEOs [2]. [1] https://apnews.com/video/united-states-senate-sean-obrien-markwayne-mullin-national-national-dff91b6bde9348b49a05763e9e472afe https://apnews.com/video/united-states-senate-sean-obrien-ma... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_vs._Mark_Zuckerberg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_vs._Mark_Zuckerber...
    - tomashubelbauer 3y ago
      I think there's a difference between a mutually agreed upon fight and an unprovoked attack which is what you'd have a good chance of seeing in swimming pools where I live.
  - AniseAbyss 3y ago
    That's bullshit. I see drunk students every day. And they are supposed to be the future elites- may God help us all.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      Now that's some boomer bullshit. Look at adults, not at kids,. Yes, we were all youngsters at one point and did stupid shit as kids (drunken parties, drugs, etc). That doesn't mean most of those haven't straightened up as adults and became peaceful, productive members of society and loving parents to well raised kids who will in turn do stupid shit as teenagers before growing up to become functioning adults.
  - op00to 3y ago
    I was physically assaulted by a high ranking PhD in the lab where I worked. Anyone can be crazy.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      That's what academia does to ya'. /s (but only slightly) Yeah anyone can be crazy and assult others, but the frequency of occurrences is what makes the difference.
- cubefox 3y ago
  This comment is not elitist, it is an unfortunate truth. Moreover, this happened only quite recently. What you are not supposed to say out loud is the fact that the majority of these "low education bracket people" who a behaving badly in public pools are young Muslim men who recently immigrated as refugees.
  - jdthedisciple 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - earthnail 3y ago
      I think the parent poster clearly had some passive aggressiveness in their tone - “what you’re not supposed to say out loud” - but I also think it’s wrong to jump to a conclusion that they wanted to group these people with all Muslims in the world. As to the question on how one knows that they are Muslims: it is very apparent. The group of people parent poster describes take up a significant amount of attention. They also often come in larger groups to public spaces, making it extremely intimidating to approach them if you’d like to express some differences. I think it’s a huge mistake to not mention problematic differences under the pretense of political correctness. Berlin certainly tends to do that, and when problems grow so large that they can no longer be ignored, you will have already alienated people who did complain before by not having listened to them before. This is how extreme right wing parties get their voters.
      - sundvor 3y ago
        Yup, 100%. You're not allowed to call a spade a spade anymore. Rightspeak and all that. Everything is always awesome, and don't you dare go against the system. I wish we could decouple this wokeness/madness from the political spectrum, ie have centrist parties with more traditional values without going to / having to go to the extremes. Having traditional values (and I'd perhaps call not being a pest one such traditional value) is not an extreme right thing, believe it or not.
- pelasaco 3y ago
  > they are notoriously overrun but low education bracket people The poster was already pretty educated in his comment. Let's say that after every summer the right wing party in Germany is earning new voters...
sharperguy 3y ago
The article claims Berlin is one of the best places for public swimming and yet whenever I want to go it's literally impossible for me to find one that's open at a time I can go (i work a normal 40 hour week). I haven't been swimming in years because the situation is just useless.
- nicbou 3y ago
  It feels like everything in Berlin requires you to queue or fight for an appointment slot, including the pools. Every public service without fail is a battle. It's tiring. We just go to the lakes. It's a lovely bicycle ride.
  - danielbln 3y ago
    Yeah, Berlin is a great city for many reasons, but its administration is not one if its strengths, to put it mildly. The surrounding lakes are definitely nice, just not compatible with the climate for say 8 out of the 12 months, so a better/cheaper/more accessible selection of indoor pools would be nice. And a solution to the cesspool that is the open air pools, where a certain demographic is ruining it for everyone (and has done so for decades).
    - lippihom 3y ago
      Check out the public pool in Kleinmachnow during the summer - far fewer crowds and very nice water.
    - hylaride 3y ago
      > but its administration is not one if its strengths, to put it mildly. You've just described the whole country, TBH.
      - h4ckerle 3y ago
        I don't know where you live or what experiences you've made but I just had a look into my municipalities online appointment system and there are 5 slots free to book just for tommorow.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
I live very close to stadtbad mitte featured in the article. It's a very nice building with a spectacular glass roof. As the article mentioned, it took a direct hit from a bomb during WW II but it landed in the pool so the building survived. It has a nice 50 meter pool. Unfortunately it gets very crowded and the water can be a bit dirty when too many people have been in it. But it's great when you manage to find the pool empty (try late at night). The last few times I was there I came out with irritated skin. That's the chlorine reacting with the nasty stuff in the water. So, those two things are kind of keeping me from swimming there regularly. It's a pity because it's just a 3 minute walk from my door and I could definitely use the exercise. I've also used one of the nearby outdoor pools. Much better quality water. But you need to go early before the big crowds show up. And of course they are only open in the summer. The water being cold is a feature. Once you get moving you stop noticing it. The summer closures are a bit annoying but understandable. And the opening times shifting around through the year and week are also annoying. Makes it hard to plan when to go. They are usually pretty good at putting those on the website though. Basically, they adapt to the schools and holidays, which are heavy users of these pools. Lots of classes of kids learning to swim during the week.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  > As the article mentioned, it took a direct hit from a bomb during WW II but it landed in the pool so the building survived. Pools near me (New Zealand) have ‘no bombing’ signs. I wonder if the jump-into-pool-holding-knees manoeuvre is called ‘bombing’ in German?
  - bmicraft 3y ago
    Yes it is
  - op00to 3y ago
    In the US we call it a cannonball! Splooosh!
  - Argorak 3y ago
    It is and there's the variant where you go bottoms first which is called... "Arschbombe" - "Ass-Bomb".
herbst 3y ago
I pay like half of the taxes and most public baths in my area are free and indoor ones are reasonable priced. No idea why Berlin should be special in that regard.
- RGamma 3y ago
  Berlin is infamously dysfunctional in many respects. All while being propped up by the Länderfinanzausgleich for decades (86 billion Euros received in 28 years, look at the leftmost column of https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A4nderfinanzausgleich#Finanzvolumen https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A4nderfinanzausgleich#Fin...)
expertentipp 3y ago
> I pay 42% taxes and still these government pools are not only a bit pricy You're eligible only for making a shopping at Lidl and Netto after work, and for paying Rundfunkbeitrag. As I had heard multiple times while on full time employment in Berlin and seeing over 40% cut off on my monthly payslip: "beggars can't be choosers".
- danielbln 3y ago
  Do people not research the tax rate before moving to Germany? It comes with free roads, education and health care, by the way. Not saying we shouldn't get more out of it, mind you, but it's not like the taxes turn into thin air. And Berlin is a bit special in that its administration is kind of bad and always had been. You get the live and let live attitude and a lot less sticks up people's butts (compared to say southern Germany), but it also does feel at times like you're not getting as much out of the taxes as you should. The Rundfunkbeitrag can eat a bag of dicks though, zero argument there.
  - expertentipp 3y ago
    I indeed did some net-gross calculations online but the last glimmer of hope was saying "people live there it cannot be that bad, can it?".
    - danielbln 3y ago
      It depends, there is no student loan debt, no healthcare debt, and you won't be homeless if shit hits the fan, so we got that going over what's happening across the pond. On the flip side, you get robbed a bit at the salary takeout. It would be nice if it wasn't mostly middle class that gets fleeced though, and it would also lovely if more money would flow into keeping infrastructure intact, like schools. But again, that's Berlin for ya.
      - pb7 3y ago
        It appears that Germany has more homeless per capita than the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_homeless_population#List https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...
wheels 3y ago
Just to provide some counterpoint to this: I regularly go with my kids in the winter weekends, and aside from the Wellenbad ("wave pool") in Görlitzer Park, which had a plumbing problem once when I went, I've never run across randomly closed pools. We didn't go much last winter since they'd lowered the temperatures because of the war in Ukraine and rationing of gas, but we went a lot the year before and a couple times already this year. They've never been painfully crowded -- in fact, usually the opposite, usually pretty empty. We've gone in Kreuzberg, Neukölln, Lichtenberg and Schöneberg.
bionsystem 3y ago
If that makes you feel better, in Paris even the city acknowledges that we need 2.5x the number of lines that we have to support the demand, and there is no way we ever reach that given how the city is built. And yet we often have entire pools closed for associative activities such as diving, training for "high level" clubs, and whatnot. I'm all for children activities and aquatic gym for the elderly but I really don't see the value of using public pools for guys who "train" 3 hours a day just because they are part of some subsidized group, especially knowing that 99% of those have never done anything at the elite level. If you want to train at a high level just finance it for yourself, I'm locked out of my couple hours per week to get my back healthy (and many others are). I'm presently pre-registering for a private pool that's going to be 10x more expensive (and I'm still paying the taxes that finances not only the pool but also the training programs of the subsidized orgs that train in my city's public pool).
- expertentipp 3y ago
  Show me any major desirable city in EU where it's not the case. One contributes monthly to various social and public polls of money and is shifted at the end of the queue every time, as the queues are on the best effort basis but with too many privileged people and organizations. Real estate prices are the ultimate slap in the face.
  - qwaxys 3y ago
    Ghent, Belgium
- pastage 3y ago
  A hint on fixing your problem, I have done my fair share of work in sports clubs, assuring the elite gets training time and money to be able to train. You need big support organization around the elite to make them viable. They do pay and finance their own training but the elite can never afford to build exclusive infrastructure for youth to adult, you will always have an overlap with the club competitions. You need a good base to be able to build an elite. That is what that exclusive pool time is ment to build. If you need more well run public pools the greatest partners are those "high level" clubs. They most certainly feel you pain.
lm28469 3y ago
> I pay 42% taxes no, your highest bracket is 42%, what's under that threshold is less taxed
- pallas_athena 3y ago
  https://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/ https://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/ put 5000€/month, Klasse 1, Berlin. Netto = 3094,05 €. That's 38,11%. 42% is not that far.
- aetherson 3y ago
  I mean, okay, but the 42% tax bracket in Germany starts at around 60k Euros. It certainly seems possible that a person who makes what we'd consider a fairly normal-for-HN amount of money is seeing an overall tax rate that's pretty close to 42%.
  - BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you'd have to be making well over €300k in order to have an effective tax rate above 40% there—normal for senior engineers at FAANG in the US maybe, but definitely not as normal for the same roles in Europe.
    - aetherson 3y ago
      I used a german tax calculator and put in a 200k Euro income and it told me my take-home would be 102k. I dunno if I screwed it up or anything -- I don't know a lot of German tax law.
      - wheels 3y ago
        €200k is not a normal developer salary in Berlin. In fact, it's more like 3x a normal salary. It doesn't make sense applying Silicon Valley salaries to other places.
        3y ago
alistairSH 3y ago
Small consolidation, but there’s a public outdoor pool across the street from my house. It’s never open when I can use it. In fact, it’s been closed for 3 years now, first because they couldn’t find lifeguards to staff it, then because it needed major overhaul. But, prior to that, it was open weekdays from noon-6pm. By the time I got home from work, walked the dog, and went for a jog, the pool was closed. Shame, it would be perfect for a summer evening dip. Oh well.
LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
Would that apply to the https://www.tropical-islands.de/ https://www.tropical-islands.de/ too? I mean all of it, opening times, pricing, people, whatnot. Only catch would be the distance.

thesaintlives 3y ago

With your large earnings you will have no problem paying for membership of a nice spa club of which there are many in Berlin. These places are not overrun with 'low education bracket people' as you put it but sadly however a scourge of a different sort, namely what I would describe as 'clueless ignorant pricks'....

yunohn 3y ago

> they are notoriously overrun but low education bracket people that get into fist fights so vehemently I don’t understand the need to make this elitist statement? In fact, why is shutting up and complaining on HN your preferred solution?

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>I don’t understand the need to make this elitist statement? What's elitist about some facts? Do you know many chemistry PhDs who get into fist fights or do they tend to avoid conflicts? Overall the more educated and intelligent a populace is, the less physical violence and crime there is. Not everyone who is poorly educated starts fist fights, but people starting fist fights are always poorly educated and low intelect, who give in to their instincts telling them conflicts are solved by acting like a silverback gorilla.
- gnz11 3y ago
  Sometimes they are U.S. Senators [1] or CEOs [2]. [1] https://apnews.com/video/united-states-senate-sean-obrien-markwayne-mullin-national-national-dff91b6bde9348b49a05763e9e472afe https://apnews.com/video/united-states-senate-sean-obrien-ma... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_vs._Mark_Zuckerberg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_vs._Mark_Zuckerber...
  - tomashubelbauer 3y ago
    I think there's a difference between a mutually agreed upon fight and an unprovoked attack which is what you'd have a good chance of seeing in swimming pools where I live.
- AniseAbyss 3y ago
  That's bullshit. I see drunk students every day. And they are supposed to be the future elites- may God help us all.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    Now that's some boomer bullshit. Look at adults, not at kids,. Yes, we were all youngsters at one point and did stupid shit as kids (drunken parties, drugs, etc). That doesn't mean most of those haven't straightened up as adults and became peaceful, productive members of society and loving parents to well raised kids who will in turn do stupid shit as teenagers before growing up to become functioning adults.
- op00to 3y ago
  I was physically assaulted by a high ranking PhD in the lab where I worked. Anyone can be crazy.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    That's what academia does to ya'. /s (but only slightly) Yeah anyone can be crazy and assult others, but the frequency of occurrences is what makes the difference.
cubefox 3y ago
This comment is not elitist, it is an unfortunate truth. Moreover, this happened only quite recently. What you are not supposed to say out loud is the fact that the majority of these "low education bracket people" who a behaving badly in public pools are young Muslim men who recently immigrated as refugees.
- jdthedisciple 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - earthnail 3y ago
    I think the parent poster clearly had some passive aggressiveness in their tone - “what you’re not supposed to say out loud” - but I also think it’s wrong to jump to a conclusion that they wanted to group these people with all Muslims in the world. As to the question on how one knows that they are Muslims: it is very apparent. The group of people parent poster describes take up a significant amount of attention. They also often come in larger groups to public spaces, making it extremely intimidating to approach them if you’d like to express some differences. I think it’s a huge mistake to not mention problematic differences under the pretense of political correctness. Berlin certainly tends to do that, and when problems grow so large that they can no longer be ignored, you will have already alienated people who did complain before by not having listened to them before. This is how extreme right wing parties get their voters.
    - sundvor 3y ago
      Yup, 100%. You're not allowed to call a spade a spade anymore. Rightspeak and all that. Everything is always awesome, and don't you dare go against the system. I wish we could decouple this wokeness/madness from the political spectrum, ie have centrist parties with more traditional values without going to / having to go to the extremes. Having traditional values (and I'd perhaps call not being a pest one such traditional value) is not an extreme right thing, believe it or not.
pelasaco 3y ago
> they are notoriously overrun but low education bracket people The poster was already pretty educated in his comment. Let's say that after every summer the right wing party in Germany is earning new voters...

sharperguy 3y ago

The article claims Berlin is one of the best places for public swimming and yet whenever I want to go it's literally impossible for me to find one that's open at a time I can go (i work a normal 40 hour week). I haven't been swimming in years because the situation is just useless.

nicbou 3y ago
It feels like everything in Berlin requires you to queue or fight for an appointment slot, including the pools. Every public service without fail is a battle. It's tiring. We just go to the lakes. It's a lovely bicycle ride.
- danielbln 3y ago
  Yeah, Berlin is a great city for many reasons, but its administration is not one if its strengths, to put it mildly. The surrounding lakes are definitely nice, just not compatible with the climate for say 8 out of the 12 months, so a better/cheaper/more accessible selection of indoor pools would be nice. And a solution to the cesspool that is the open air pools, where a certain demographic is ruining it for everyone (and has done so for decades).
  - lippihom 3y ago
    Check out the public pool in Kleinmachnow during the summer - far fewer crowds and very nice water.
  - hylaride 3y ago
    > but its administration is not one if its strengths, to put it mildly. You've just described the whole country, TBH.
    - h4ckerle 3y ago
      I don't know where you live or what experiences you've made but I just had a look into my municipalities online appointment system and there are 5 slots free to book just for tommorow.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

I live very close to stadtbad mitte featured in the article. It's a very nice building with a spectacular glass roof. As the article mentioned, it took a direct hit from a bomb during WW II but it landed in the pool so the building survived. It has a nice 50 meter pool. Unfortunately it gets very crowded and the water can be a bit dirty when too many people have been in it. But it's great when you manage to find the pool empty (try late at night). The last few times I was there I came out with irritated skin. That's the chlorine reacting with the nasty stuff in the water. So, those two things are kind of keeping me from swimming there regularly. It's a pity because it's just a 3 minute walk from my door and I could definitely use the exercise. I've also used one of the nearby outdoor pools. Much better quality water. But you need to go early before the big crowds show up. And of course they are only open in the summer. The water being cold is a feature. Once you get moving you stop noticing it. The summer closures are a bit annoying but understandable. And the opening times shifting around through the year and week are also annoying. Makes it hard to plan when to go. They are usually pretty good at putting those on the website though. Basically, they adapt to the schools and holidays, which are heavy users of these pools. Lots of classes of kids learning to swim during the week.

lostlogin 3y ago
> As the article mentioned, it took a direct hit from a bomb during WW II but it landed in the pool so the building survived. Pools near me (New Zealand) have ‘no bombing’ signs. I wonder if the jump-into-pool-holding-knees manoeuvre is called ‘bombing’ in German?
- bmicraft 3y ago
  Yes it is
- op00to 3y ago
  In the US we call it a cannonball! Splooosh!
- Argorak 3y ago
  It is and there's the variant where you go bottoms first which is called... "Arschbombe" - "Ass-Bomb".

herbst 3y ago

I pay like half of the taxes and most public baths in my area are free and indoor ones are reasonable priced. No idea why Berlin should be special in that regard.

RGamma 3y ago
Berlin is infamously dysfunctional in many respects. All while being propped up by the Länderfinanzausgleich for decades (86 billion Euros received in 28 years, look at the leftmost column of https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A4nderfinanzausgleich#Finanzvolumen https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A4nderfinanzausgleich#Fin...)

expertentipp 3y ago

> I pay 42% taxes and still these government pools are not only a bit pricy You're eligible only for making a shopping at Lidl and Netto after work, and for paying Rundfunkbeitrag. As I had heard multiple times while on full time employment in Berlin and seeing over 40% cut off on my monthly payslip: "beggars can't be choosers".

danielbln 3y ago
Do people not research the tax rate before moving to Germany? It comes with free roads, education and health care, by the way. Not saying we shouldn't get more out of it, mind you, but it's not like the taxes turn into thin air. And Berlin is a bit special in that its administration is kind of bad and always had been. You get the live and let live attitude and a lot less sticks up people's butts (compared to say southern Germany), but it also does feel at times like you're not getting as much out of the taxes as you should. The Rundfunkbeitrag can eat a bag of dicks though, zero argument there.
- expertentipp 3y ago
  I indeed did some net-gross calculations online but the last glimmer of hope was saying "people live there it cannot be that bad, can it?".
  - danielbln 3y ago
    It depends, there is no student loan debt, no healthcare debt, and you won't be homeless if shit hits the fan, so we got that going over what's happening across the pond. On the flip side, you get robbed a bit at the salary takeout. It would be nice if it wasn't mostly middle class that gets fleeced though, and it would also lovely if more money would flow into keeping infrastructure intact, like schools. But again, that's Berlin for ya.
    - pb7 3y ago
      It appears that Germany has more homeless per capita than the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_homeless_population#List https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...

wheels 3y ago

Just to provide some counterpoint to this: I regularly go with my kids in the winter weekends, and aside from the Wellenbad ("wave pool") in Görlitzer Park, which had a plumbing problem once when I went, I've never run across randomly closed pools. We didn't go much last winter since they'd lowered the temperatures because of the war in Ukraine and rationing of gas, but we went a lot the year before and a couple times already this year. They've never been painfully crowded -- in fact, usually the opposite, usually pretty empty. We've gone in Kreuzberg, Neukölln, Lichtenberg and Schöneberg.

bionsystem 3y ago

If that makes you feel better, in Paris even the city acknowledges that we need 2.5x the number of lines that we have to support the demand, and there is no way we ever reach that given how the city is built. And yet we often have entire pools closed for associative activities such as diving, training for "high level" clubs, and whatnot. I'm all for children activities and aquatic gym for the elderly but I really don't see the value of using public pools for guys who "train" 3 hours a day just because they are part of some subsidized group, especially knowing that 99% of those have never done anything at the elite level. If you want to train at a high level just finance it for yourself, I'm locked out of my couple hours per week to get my back healthy (and many others are). I'm presently pre-registering for a private pool that's going to be 10x more expensive (and I'm still paying the taxes that finances not only the pool but also the training programs of the subsidized orgs that train in my city's public pool).

expertentipp 3y ago
Show me any major desirable city in EU where it's not the case. One contributes monthly to various social and public polls of money and is shifted at the end of the queue every time, as the queues are on the best effort basis but with too many privileged people and organizations. Real estate prices are the ultimate slap in the face.
- qwaxys 3y ago
  Ghent, Belgium
pastage 3y ago
A hint on fixing your problem, I have done my fair share of work in sports clubs, assuring the elite gets training time and money to be able to train. You need big support organization around the elite to make them viable. They do pay and finance their own training but the elite can never afford to build exclusive infrastructure for youth to adult, you will always have an overlap with the club competitions. You need a good base to be able to build an elite. That is what that exclusive pool time is ment to build. If you need more well run public pools the greatest partners are those "high level" clubs. They most certainly feel you pain.

lm28469 3y ago

> I pay 42% taxes no, your highest bracket is 42%, what's under that threshold is less taxed

pallas_athena 3y ago
https://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/ https://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/ put 5000€/month, Klasse 1, Berlin. Netto = 3094,05 €. That's 38,11%. 42% is not that far.
aetherson 3y ago
I mean, okay, but the 42% tax bracket in Germany starts at around 60k Euros. It certainly seems possible that a person who makes what we'd consider a fairly normal-for-HN amount of money is seeing an overall tax rate that's pretty close to 42%.
- BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you'd have to be making well over €300k in order to have an effective tax rate above 40% there—normal for senior engineers at FAANG in the US maybe, but definitely not as normal for the same roles in Europe.
  - aetherson 3y ago
    I used a german tax calculator and put in a 200k Euro income and it told me my take-home would be 102k. I dunno if I screwed it up or anything -- I don't know a lot of German tax law.
    - wheels 3y ago
      €200k is not a normal developer salary in Berlin. In fact, it's more like 3x a normal salary. It doesn't make sense applying Silicon Valley salaries to other places.
      - 3y ago

alistairSH 3y ago

Small consolidation, but there’s a public outdoor pool across the street from my house. It’s never open when I can use it. In fact, it’s been closed for 3 years now, first because they couldn’t find lifeguards to staff it, then because it needed major overhaul. But, prior to that, it was open weekdays from noon-6pm. By the time I got home from work, walked the dog, and went for a jog, the pool was closed. Shame, it would be perfect for a summer evening dip. Oh well.

LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago

Would that apply to the https://www.tropical-islands.de/ https://www.tropical-islands.de/ too? I mean all of it, opening times, pricing, people, whatnot. Only catch would be the distance.