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Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

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Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

#131

Post by konschubert »

_heimdall wrote: post #107
The_Colonel wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but you don't understand the western sanctions on Russian oil. The goal is to keep it flowing (so that the prices don't explode), but to squeeze the Russian profits. Make their (e. g. transportation) costs high and sale price low (price cap).

Sanctions cut off markets from Russian oil, they didn't attack profits directly. Sure there will be a short term hit to profit margins as the oil industry had to adjust and different markets have to buy up the sanctioned oil, but its a global market of a fungible commodity. Even if sanctions did somehow target profits directly, has it worked? Do we know that Russian oil profits are meaningfully less than they would o…

Yes we know that russia has to sell its oil significantly below market value, which means that sanctions are working.

Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

#132

Post by herbst »

nradov wrote: post #125
throwaway4good wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the media focuses on China, Germany invests much more in the US. And if you summarize the investment in eastern europe, it is probably larger as well. The current government has famously green policies: Shutting down nuclear plants and perhaps have a willingness to accept heavy industry leaving Germany. It is however a very unpopular government so I don't know if those policies will hold long term.

There's nothing "green" about shutting down nuclear power plants.

There is nothing "green" about German politics either way

Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

#133

Post by ulfw »

fakedang wrote: post #75
JKCalhoun wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that we need to keep what you call here mid-skill jobs. Too often I see people say to the disappearance of manual labor jobs: good, retrain people to use computers. I have slowly come to the belief that there are some people for whom working with their hands is the only kind of sane work they can do. You can call them blue-collar, or working class (these are the people incidentally that raised me, the people…

> Too often I see people say to the disappearance of manual labor jobs: good, retrain people to use computers. I have slowly come to the belief that there are some people for whom working with their hands is the only kind of sane work they can do. The people who say these kinds of things are usually pathetic specialists with a sole focus on their singular task, without looking at the big picture. They have limited in…

Oh please. I am 47 and can't find a job, no matter how hard I try. And I'm in Product (coding is even worse). Ageism in tech is a real thing that's not often talked about.

Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

#134

Post by throwaway11460 »

throwaway4good wrote: post #63
skippyboxedhero wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. BASF is investing heavily in China. Nothing tells you more about this problem than the most German of companies moving to China. BASF's largest plant in Germany was hooked up directly to Russian gas. Russian gas is now going to China. So are BASF. I don't think regulation or subsidies are to blame either. Eastern Europe is receiving heavy investment because they have costs for workers under control and can p…

While the media focuses on China, Germany invests much more in the US. And if you summarize the investment in eastern europe, it is probably larger as well. The current government has famously green policies: Shutting down nuclear plants and perhaps have a willingness to accept heavy industry leaving Germany. It is however a very unpopular government so I don't know if those policies will hold long term.

> It is however a very unpopular government so I don't know if those policies will hold long term.

Doesn't matter as the investor trust is destroyed.

Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

#135

Post by rightbyte »

mendigou wrote: post #87
nwellnhof wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are hard workers Where does this cliché come from? Germans work less than any other country on the planet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

I also don't get it. I worked there for 8 years. I'm southern european and there was always a "half joke" about our lazyness. But we worked the hardest. My local colleagues were incredibly entitled and produced very little value. In my opinion, Germany was at some point at the top of the world in most aspects, and the people became complacent over time. Which leads us to where we are today. Enshittification is palpab…

> I'm southern european and there was always a "half joke" about our lazyness.

I think the trope is due to hotter weather. Like tourists visiting in the summer seeing outside workers hardly working due to hot weather.

Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

#136

Post by pgeorgi »

ulfw wrote: post #126
pgeorgi wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last new nuclear plant to go online in Germany was Greifswald 5 in November 1989. For 23 days. Given the massive failure of AVR Jülich, whose design was supposed to be "fail safe" while it's now the most 90Sr-contaminated nuclear facility world-wide, and the corruption around it, there's little trust that even if the technology is safe, operations would be. That accident in Jülich was 1979, rumors that something…

Germany getting rid of nuclear power will not make Germany any safer at all. Cattenom and Fessenheim to name just two examples are French power plants within viewing distance of the German border. The latter even having a German name due to history.

It's fewer operators that are full of shit and might mess up things.

Cattenom, Fessenheim, Tihange etc are already getting their share of criticism and protest, but that's all German citizens can do about foreign reactors that happen to be built right across the border.

Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

#137

Post by tim333 »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #32
Biologist123 wrote: post #4

Anecdata: investment in robot and 3D builders is ramping up in Germany in response to labour shortages and increasing costs. Source: a German friend in the sector. I guess it’s good this issue is being openly discussed. Having a good problem statement is always a good start. By contrast in the UK, deindustrialisation of the 80s/90s/00s was not a massive political topic. And the ensuing enshittification of the economy…

UK economy isn't shit, still a very wealthy country. The problem is that the ratio of productive to unproductive has shifted significantly. Look at how many lawyers, civil servants, other government workers, management consultants the UK can afford to support. Housing hundreds of thousands of economic migrants for free. That is a rich economy. The problem is that the productive section of the economy isn't growing (a…

>Economic inactivity rates are sky-high across Western Europe WHILST companies say there is a labour shortage. Who believes this?

Quite a lot of the problems come from property speculation. Older property owning folk have enough rent and the like to not bother working. Meanwhile younger people have to work long hours and can't afford to buy a house. A lot of incomes for the lawyers and the like come from people flipping property rather than actually making stuff.

Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

#138

Post by FirmwareBurner »

b212 wrote: post #115

Im Polish. 20 years ago my parents were taking 1-2 months of PTO every year to work on German farms. 2 months * 2 people and you could’ve renovated a whole mid-sized flat or get a decent 3 years old car. Now I’m making 2-3x more after taxes than my German friends. Yes, I’m self employed and yes I’ll need to take care of my own retirement but I’ll be better off after 1-2 years of putting $100k in ETFs than they could…

>Now I’m making 2-3x more after taxes than my German friends. Yes, I’m self employed and yes I’ll need to take care of my own retirement but I’ll be better off after 1-2 years of putting $100k in ETFs than they could ever be with their state pensions.

It's just means you're in a way more privilege Position as a dev in Poland than devs in Germany, but how does that look at scale, is the average Pole also much better off than the average German?

>The taxes will kill the old Europe.

Sure, but taxes also pay for infrastructure, healthcare and education which a country needs to flourish. Those high German taxes also contributed to the EU budget out of which Poland has been the highest net beneficiary over the years.

How would Poland look today in those areas without the EU money from German taxpayers, and, if every Polish worker was a tax-evading ..err..sorry I mean tax-optimzing IT worker like yourself?

What you're advocating is basically "fuck you I got mine, time to kick the ladder down now" as in you enjoyed the benefits of someone else's high taxes to grow but now that you've made it big, are against high taxes, and that my friend doesn't scale, nor build a successful society long term unless you're some small tax heaven country or bracing for rampant wealth and income inequality which I assume is starting to happen in Poland.

Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

#139

Post by FirmwareBurner »

Helmut10001 wrote: post #123
mendigou wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Germany similar to the US? Perhaps in the enshittification of society, but certainty not in the forces that drive innovation. Germany could be that innovation hub in Europe, and it seems incredibly resistant to do so. And all of the EU is trailing behind, unfortunately.

This is what I meant with timing: Germany's innovative younger people are held captive by a large conservative older generation that is pushing for security, which leads to overarching bureaucracy. This is especially bad in Germany because the government tries to regulate every tiny detail. Due to missing digitalization, they are failing on a grant scale. On the other hand, this doesn't mean as you say that Germany h…

>you will see many good signs: Open source is strong. Chaos Computer Club mentality spreads and there is a fighting back against the government digital opression.

Sure, but those things alone don't build future product companies and market leaders worth trillions of dollars.

Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

#140

Post by jillesvangurp »

mamonster wrote: post #68
jillesvangurp wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Dutch. Just look across the border at what will happen. We're having lots of fun with our dearly beloved Geert Wilders trying to get a government together and having to suddenly deal with the notion that 100% percent of his party program is a combination of impractical, impossible, or in conflict with the constitution, international treaties, and what his own voters actually want. Which of course is a hot topic o…

I would agree with you but there is a key difference in Germany: CDU/SPD boomers will never defuse the AfD by letting them into power because they don't think like that. They will use all the tools at their disposal (Bundesverfassungschutz, punishing secessionists like Maassen, etc) to prevent AfD from ever getting into government, which will only make them more powerful. You might have a different idea of AfD's stra…

Again, I can point at my own country and point out that CDA (similar to the CDU) and the PVDA (similar to the SPD) are shadows of their former selves. Both parties pretty much got wiped out in recent elections. PVDA combined with the green party for the last round of elections and managed to recover a little bit. But the CDA which once had the same status as the CDU in Germany of being the defacto governing party was all but wiped out this election round. 5 seats in a 150 seat parliament. They've become a fringe party. NSC founded by a former member managed to grab 20 seats.

That's a party that did not exist until a few months before the elections. And they were polling in the lead at 35 seats at some point. A completely new party. Their main competitor is another new party that peaked a few months before the elections but didn't manage in the end. The polls kept changing right up until the elections and the outcome caught a lot of people by surprise as, evidently, some 10-15 seats ended up shifting in the last days/hours. VVD (which supplied the prime minister for the last ten years), was expected to win, but ended up losing badly to a populist that had previously been written off and made a miraculous recovery and won over two other parties that both been polling in the lead as well.

This is just to provide a little insight into how things can change and how there are no certainties in politics. The VVD never lead a government until the CDA imploded after their last government in 2010. Now the CDA is wiped out and the VVD is at risk of being wiped out as well. Voters have flocked to new parties that didn't even exist until a few years ago.

The same dynamics are at play in Germany and elsewhere. Lots of Germans are not really committed to voting on any of the traditional parties. And the ones that still are, aren't feeling that great about it. Everybody assumes that everything will just revert to people voting for the same parties because nothing ever changes in Germany. But when change comes, these things stop being true. If CDU/CSU ends up forming a government with the AFD, they could end up paying a heavy price. That's exactly what happened in the Netherlands in the last 20 years. It completely wiped out the CDA. This was unthinkable until about 20 years ago.

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