101–110 of 122 posts
Wow, 20 square meters for €480? That doesn't register as affordable on my books (even with utilities included).
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From what I've heard Lisbon is about the same cost as Berlin. But the economy is worse, the tax system seems more complex and it's less accessible to foreigners. I guess the weather is nicer, but the location is worse. To legitimately compete with Berlin I think one really has to offer something special, otherwise Berlin wins by default in the low-medium cost category. Lisbon would still be on my shortlist for Europe…
Why do you say it's less accessible to foreigners?
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>Registration takes ~3-5 months to get an appointment, god forbid you're a foreigner and have to also register at the ausländerbehörde and wait from 3am for the 1 of 50 tickets available that day. Your bureaucracy makes American bureaucracy seem amazingly efficient in comparison. I did not know such a thing was possible outside defunct communist states.
> Your bureaucracy makes American bureaucracy seem amazingly efficient in comparison. Yeah, and I thought waiting at the DMV in the USA was a bit of a pain as a foreigner. :) "Wait from 3am for the 1 of 50 tickets available that day" makes Berlin sound worse than even the third world country I come from.
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> Your bureaucracy makes American bureaucracy seem amazingly efficient in comparison. Yeah, and I thought waiting at the DMV in the USA was a bit of a pain as a foreigner. :) "Wait from 3am for the 1 of 50 tickets available that day" makes Berlin sound worse than even the third world country I come from.
Check out the driving license process in Germany.
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I've actually just moved offices in London, so I can say that it actually isn't much different. There's plenty of offices that are very comparable to that price.
She is talking about the price of a room, not office space.
Welcome to Berlin. :) I came to Berlin roughly 5 years ago before the investment started pouring in and most startups were existenz grundungs, this is when you get 50k from the government and you underpay some interns to build your MVP. It was pretty shabby back then, and things have changed dramatically in the intervening years, but most people came for this vague idea of living cheaply and doing what they want - yo…
"Existenz grundung" just means "founding a company". It doesn't imply anything about grants being taken. What you're probably referring to is a "Gründerzuschuss", which is a form of unemployment payment which gives you about 60% of your former salary with a fixed amount of time to get out of unemployment benefits via founding your own company. It's only available to those that were previously full-time employees. Als…
I should have mentioned the 500 was from a eXist funded startup and i worked at as an "intern" although i was qualified, i just wanted to keep myself fed until i found something that paid, but for internships that was a lot as most got ~300 or nothing, with 500 a month + coffee I could rent by day a bed off of WG gesucht and subsist on falafel. Back then the number of jobs in berlin was really minimal, i struggled to find anything so i moved to Munich.
[1] http://www.exist.de/DE/Programm/Exist-Gruenderstipendium/inh...
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>Registration takes ~3-5 months to get an appointment, god forbid you're a foreigner and have to also register at the ausländerbehörde and wait from 3am for the 1 of 50 tickets available that day. Your bureaucracy makes American bureaucracy seem amazingly efficient in comparison. I did not know such a thing was possible outside defunct communist states.
That's because he's exaggerating: You can still make an appointment at the Ausländerbehörde (foreigner's office) a couple months in advance, and then you just have to show up on time. And as recently as a year ago, the last time I needed something same-day, showing up two hours before they opened (6 a.m.) was still enough to be at the front of the line. There were at that time not a fixed number of tickets for the da…
Where those figures come from is the time my gf had her wallet stolen with her blue card inside, she was travelling outside of the EU and needed to replace it or get a note asap otherwise she would have a lot of trouble re-entering the country. We queued up from 3am on monday morning at the Ausländerbehörde and were turned away by the administrator because my gf was officially registered in mecklin-vorpommmern and she had to travel there to get this temporary pass. Problem is, she could only take the first train on tuesday morning so she got there at ~9:30am, she was ticket 51, and the office only deals with 50 tickets a day. i kid you not. she was the last in the line as turned away at just pass 17:00, and told to come back tomorrow and try again.
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They're essentially a group of neonazis who protest every monday for about two years now against immigrants and refugees.
They are more dangerous than that. There are straight neonazis in there, but it is a broad spectrum from straight Nazi to the "besorgter Bürger" (concerned citizen), which is a meme in Germany for the new right and far-right. For obvious reasons it was previously socially unacceptable to voice these viewpoints out loud. Pegida and the AfD party changed that a bit and like everywhere else in Europe the right is on the…
These are people who don't value freedom or equality. They are driven by hatred of anyone different from themselves and accept as moral only what confirms that hatred, sometimes bastardizing religion in the process.
They're not special. They are no different than the people so many have fought throughout human history to get the freedom and the approximation of equality we have reached today.
The only noteworthy thing about them is that they've shown that many people are too comfortable in their human rights. Those rights aren't natural and they aren't self-evident only our belief in them is. Human rights do require work not just to acquire but to maintain, wherever and whenever you are.