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Germany Falls into Recession

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Re: Germany Falls into Recession

#121

Post by erur »

slightwinder wrote: post #107
jonp888 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is about HackerNews and the obesession with the decision to remove Nuclear Power, which was only a minority component at it's peak, from the German energy mix, as somehow being the dominant factor in the entire German society and economy? A while back someone unironically described Germany's nuclear power policy as "the single most catastrophic decision ever made by any government in peacetime".

There is a good deal of misinformation, astro turfing, and I think also nerdy love for fancy toys. And there is also the problematic trend of the right wing to demonize environment- and green politics. It seems it has reached a level of conspiracy theories now.

How's advocating for nuclear power related to demonizing environmentalist politics? Shouldn't it be an obvious fit to help reduce CO2 - which is the currently the biggest topic of the green movement?

Re: Germany Falls into Recession

#122

Post by cheschire »

p-e-w wrote: post #92

We need new terminology to distinguish between macroeconomic recessions and living standard recessions. Traditionally, those two things are more or less intertwined, so the term "recession" carries connotations of both. With the steady increase of economic inequality, the link between the two meanings becomes less and less firm. The median living standard in Germany has been in free fall for 20 years. By that criteri…

Continuous downtrends, free falls, I'm interested what graphs and charts and numbers you're looking at to arrive at this conclusion. Especially when you've called out that someone (who specifically and where?) has been intentionally misleading.

You may be objectively correct about all of this but right now it doesn't come off that way to me.

Re: Germany Falls into Recession

#123

Post by achates »

j-pb wrote: post #100
modernpink wrote: post #65

China is outcompeting Germany as a manufacturer of high value goods, particularly cars [1][2]. Last year it overtook Germany as the second biggest car exporter. In the first three months of this year, China has surpassed Japan to become the world's top car exporter for the first time. This is due to its strength in EVs (while Germany's strength is in ICEs). Volkswagen holds a 2% share of the Chinese EV market while t…

> the shut down of nuclear power thanks to the Greens The decision to shut down our nuclear reactors came from a conservative government, where the greens were in the opposition. The prices have not been rising due to the shutdown of our nuclear plants, but due to price gauging by electrical companies, and due to russia falling away as a cheap gas supplier. Nuclear only made up 5% of our energy production 2023 and 11…

[dead]

Re: Germany Falls into Recession

#124

Post by cbmuser »

j-pb wrote: post #100
modernpink wrote: post #65

China is outcompeting Germany as a manufacturer of high value goods, particularly cars [1][2]. Last year it overtook Germany as the second biggest car exporter. In the first three months of this year, China has surpassed Japan to become the world's top car exporter for the first time. This is due to its strength in EVs (while Germany's strength is in ICEs). Volkswagen holds a 2% share of the Chinese EV market while t…

> the shut down of nuclear power thanks to the Greens The decision to shut down our nuclear reactors came from a conservative government, where the greens were in the opposition. The prices have not been rising due to the shutdown of our nuclear plants, but due to price gauging by electrical companies, and due to russia falling away as a cheap gas supplier. Nuclear only made up 5% of our energy production 2023 and 11…

> The decision to shut down our nuclear reactors came from a conservative government, where the greens were in the opposition.

Wrong. The nuclear phase-out original came from SPD/Greens:

> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomkonsens

> The prices have not been rising due to the shutdown of our nuclear plants, but due to price gauging by electrical companies, and due to russia falling away as a cheap gas supplier.

They have not been rising since last month, but that's not really a reliable statistics.

After all, the German Ministry of Economics is working on a law to subsidize electricity prices for the industry. They wouldn't do that if electricity was cheap.

> Nuclear only made up 5% of our energy production 2023 and 11% in 2021, with ~4.3Gw and ~8.5Gw respectively. Germany installed 7.2Gw of PV and ~2.4Gw of Wind in 2022. Replacing our entire nuclear capacity with renewables within a single year.

Nuclear provides baseload, wind and solar don't.

In fact, since 2022, Germany returned 19 coal-fired power units with a capacity of 7.3 GW to the electricity market:

> https://www.smard.de/home/rueckkehr-von-kohlekraftwerken-an-...

> The conservative government of the last 20 years spend an insane amount of effort to stop renewables by limiting the yearly installed PV capacity by law, and introducing NIMBY friendly limitations on where wind turbines can be build, bloating the documents required for clearance from a couple dozen pages to a full binder.

That's non-sense. Germany built more wind and solar capacity per capita the past 20 years than any other country in the world.

Even one of the strongest EE lobbyists in Germany, Volker Quaschning, admitted that:

> https://twitter.com/VQuaschning/status/1626149341730639872

> The conservative government were also the ones starting the NordStream projects and overseeing their construction. They are directly culpable for our dependence on russia.

That's a blatant lie. That project was started by SPD/Greens and the Greens even defended it against criticism:

> https://dserver.bundestag.de/btp/15/15186.pdf (p. 10)

> https://www.stern.de/wirtschaft/news/nord-stream-juergen-tri...

> https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/russland-juergen-...

> The greens have to spend a lot of effort on reversing those legislations, and they had to do this in addition to handling the Ukraine crisis, and while constantly fighting a conservative/neoliberal party that is part of the government but has made it their stated goal to sabotage everything the greens propose. (They are basically a lobby arm of the german car industry, with several scandals.)

The Greens have always been fighting nuclear in Germany. So much, that they even preferred subsidizing coal:

> https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/10/014/1001407.pdf

> https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/11/056/1105633.pdf

> The fact that they managed to push for this much renewable energy, and for this much energy independence is a small miracle tbh.

What energy independence? Are you aware of the fact that the current coalition has new gas plants in their coalition agreement:

> https://www.bundesregierung.de/resource/blob/974430/1990812/... (p. 58)

And the Greens even have it in their election program:

> https://cms.gruene.de/uploads/documents/Wahlprogramm-DIE-GRU... (p. 24)

And even the government's own planning agency for the energy transition is projecting that we need lots of gas power plants:

> https://www.dena.de/fileadmin/dena/Dokumente/Pdf/9262_dena-L... (p. 29)

> Also if the conservatives hadn't sabotaged our "Energiewende" and had guided our car industry towards EV, we wouldn't have the issues you pointed out.

The only parties that have sabotaged Germany's electricity grid and climate goals are the Greens with their owngoing FUD campaigns against nuclear power.

I'm really surprised how one can put so much disinformation into a single comment post.

Re: Germany Falls into Recession

#125

Post by quickthrowman »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #72
malka wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How the f can you have such a big mortgage, with a variable interest rate, and sleep at night ? I'm french, and everyone I know has a fixed interest rate. dont know if it is mandatory, but God, I am so glad that my interest rate will never spike.

In 5 years you should have large portion of principal paid off so this would not matter. Average 30 year mortgage is paid off in 11 years.

The average duration of a 30 year mortgage being 11 years is due to refinancing or moving, it’s not due to large amounts of borrowers paying their debts early.

Re: Germany Falls into Recession

#126

Post by quickthrowman »

helij wrote: post #101
KptMarchewa wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 5 years you should have large portion of principal paid off so this would not matter. Average 30 year mortgage is paid off in 11 years.

Really interesting. Is it because people sell the property and get a new mortgage for a new place or they outright pay it off after 11 years?

It is the former, very few people are paying off their entire mortgage in 11 years.

Re: Germany Falls into Recession

#127

Post by starbugs »

jonp888 wrote: post #82
ThorsBane wrote: post #39

They shouldn't be shutting down nuclear. Build more nuclear reactors. That will provide more clean energy and a lot of jobs. Modernize the grid. Make it a smarter grid that is more resilient to harm. These projects pay for themselves quickly and are easy to finance with how much wealth Germany has.

What is about HackerNews and the obesession with the decision to remove Nuclear Power, which was only a minority component at it's peak, from the German energy mix, as somehow being the dominant factor in the entire German society and economy? A while back someone unironically described Germany's nuclear power policy as "the single most catastrophic decision ever made by any government in peacetime".

> A while back someone unironically described Germany's nuclear power policy as "the single most catastrophic decision ever made by any government in peacetime".

German here. Accurate description if you ask me. It's one of the dumbest and most irrational decisions ever made in energy politics. It's completely inexcusable.

Re: Germany Falls into Recession

#128

Post by dangwhy »

lokar wrote: post #108
malka wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How the f can you have such a big mortgage, with a variable interest rate, and sleep at night ? I'm french, and everyone I know has a fixed interest rate. dont know if it is mandatory, but God, I am so glad that my interest rate will never spike.

Cheap 30y fixed rate home loans are an American thing. The federal government subsidizes them.

> The federal government subsidizes them.

Curious how does federal govt subsidize them?

Re: Germany Falls into Recession

#129

Post by dangwhy »

0zemp2c wrote: post #33
edgyquant wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is not getting poorer nor is inflation still out of control

> The US is not getting poorer then why am I being asked to bail out a generation's college loans? then why is food bank use at an all time high? then why are more six-figure earners reporting to be living paycheck-to-paycheck? then why is personal credit card debt at an all time high?

Last two are because of YOLO spending. There is high inflation in useless luxury goods like fancy bags.

Re: Germany Falls into Recession

#130

Post by politician »

mistrial9 wrote: post #114
politician wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a trend that some people lean heavily on government intervention to solve their problems, rather than exercising personal initiative. This dependence can exacerbate issues in densely populated regions, where high living costs, limited housing, and food security concerns are rampant, despite surprisingly low out-migration rates. However, alternatives are readily available. Inland areas beyond the coastlines o…

> some people lean heavily on government intervention to solve their problems this lecture is better pointed at the naive.. look at system rules in place, benefiting "stall" politics and high tax on labor, local govt zoning, and access to capital projects. You explain to me how "Noah's Bagels" makes multi-hundred franchise with high-end remodelling, to sell bagels. A person "exercising personal initiative" goes out o…

Government is not able to fix the peoples' problems. Entrenched poverty and homelessness has been a problem in New York [3] and California for decades, but even though the same party has been in power for similar decades -- New York has been under single-party control since 1975 [1] and California since 1959 [2] -- the problems remain. There is no motivation to solve the peoples' problems, only "lectures pointed at the naive" around election time.

For the individual, the only realistic option is out-migration to lower density areas.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_strength_in_Ne...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_strength_in_Ca...

[3] https://council.nyc.gov/data/homeless/

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