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Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end
141–150 of 157 posts
Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Don't think it's age , but more that companies want people versed in the latest tech wizz-bangs but without the crust and habits from the old outdated tech.
If you don't have 3+ years experience in AWS, Kubernetes, specific frameworks with knowledge about system design, your employment prospects are in the toilet right now. Nobody values generalists anymore.
Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end
#143"political paralysis in Berlin is intensifying long-standing domestic issues such as creaking infrastructure"
That is exactly the opposite of my impression. I'm seeing lots of useful initiatives finally gaining momentum after the previous (conservative) party had delayed/suppressed them for years.
That said, it seems that some German companies refuse to pay high salaries on principle. And that's very dangerous, in my opinion, because it forces the most experienced employees to work for US companies instead.
Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end
#144"political paralysis in Berlin is intensifying long-standing domestic issues such as creaking infrastructure" That is exactly the opposite of my impression. I'm seeing lots of useful initiatives finally gaining momentum after the previous (conservative) party had delayed/suppressed them for years. That said, it seems that some German companies refuse to pay high salaries on principle. And that's very dangerous, in my…
Calling German infrastructure 'creaking' is also completely ridiculous. What would you call infrastructure in the UK, then? The US?
Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end
#145Im 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 o…
> Sure, but taxes also pay for infrastructure, healthcare and education which a country needs to flourish
German taxpayers are also now paying for 2nd highest word-wide foreign aid and €8 billion as military aid to Kyiv.
Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I looked at a dark, unremarkable 4 bedroom condominium priced at $400k, which was at least 6x my annual income. I suspect, people, even with comparatively high income, stopped being able to buy hard securities like houses. Why save up then? So, folk had a lot more "disposable income" to consume soothing, but overall transient consumable products and services like clothing, tech gadgets, food, subscriptions... – lif…
Your poetry (we don't have a good set of concepts to make this stuff prose, yet) reminded me of this[1]. 1. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-l...
Thank you. That blog post is a bit of a mindfuck, to be honest.
I see immediately why you thought of it. It's exactly the same theme, identifying the same developments, the same critique, same everything. But - It is not the same. Ha! I've been there!
Whatever the author is talking about can't be the same. Retrospectively, 2017 was infinitely more hopeful. He must be getting all raged up over merely a bow wave in the fog, a neighbor's new baby hippopotamus pet, the rape of Kathleen Maddox, that persistent cough, a first hottest summer.
All the developments were present already, but nobody could have foreseen the sick then. A quick fix: You take every observation in the article and add bath salts.
So, let's make a collage!
> Premium mediocre is food that Instagrams better than it tastes. > The essence of premium mediocrity is being optimistically prepared for success by at least being in the right place at the right time > But the demographic at the very heart of the phenomenon is the young, gentrifier class of Blue Bicoastal Millennials. The rent-over-own, everything-as-a-service class of precarious young professionals auditioning for a shot at the neourban American dream, sans condo ownership somewhere at a reasonable distance from both the nearest meth lab and minority ghetto. Venkatesh, gentrification is over. The minority ghetto became unaffordable all by itself. Oh, and the meth lab got acquired by Big Fentanyl. Must be popular, draws more people to the sidewalk than a Supreme store.
Oh dear! We're not faking enjoyment for our friends on Instagram anymore. We either made it early in the business of exploiting teenage insecurities, or we aspire for the Girl-Boss Dream on OnlyFans. On C-SPAN, Mark Zuckerberg is telling the judge, a child's suicide wasn't his fault. You can pretend you care, read about it behind the New York Times paywall, or retweet the trending blue check antisemitism spin on X, for free. X is what you called Twitter in 2017. But, you know, on bath salts. Anyway. Or... you come watch me unbox this gift from my sponsor Bad Dragon! You do this for me and I get under the knife for you. Backyard fillers minimum. Instagrams better than it feels, to be honest.
(BTW, I think you can buy optimism on BetterHelp, now. Link in the description.)
Everthing-as-a-service used to mean Office365 and outsourcing corporate infrastructure to The Cloud.. in 2024 we mean a paid subscription for a calculator app.
If you're ugly then there is only the option of a full stack bootcamp, the one in eight billion chance of creating your own means of extraction.
> It is a class for which I have profound affection, and one whose eventual success I am sincerely rooting for. Yeah. Because you haven't mentioned climate change even once, Venkatesh...
> Premium mediocrity is in part a theater put on by Maya Millennial in part to spare the feelings of parents. Inter-generational love, not inter-generational war. > the consumers of premium mediocre things are generally strongly and acutely self-aware about what they are doing.
... well, now best we can offer is this peace deal: We get the house and all the pre-war money left - and until you're dead, you will carry the sorrow, Daddy! Or, you know, next pandemic we won't stay home.
> That leaves the cryptocurrency lottery as the only documented way up open to all, regardless of skills. Crypto is over, so that's it, huh?
> Unlike a covered call, which is about promising to sell what you actually own, a naked call is about promising to sell what you don’t actually own. Rhetrotorical question. Funniest thing, you don't have to explain naked options in 2024! Lol.
If your parents death isn't that promising, you better haven't held the $GME and $TSLA bag, but got lucky with $NVDA or $RHM instead. Why Nvidia? Oh, boy!
> You either tell robots what to do, or are told by robots what to do. Why Rheinmetall?
Yeah...
Okay, lastly, our collage gets a center piece: A 2017 truth remaining faithful and a 2017 wish becoming true ...
> The public markets are no longer reliable wealth builders, while the private markets exclude almost everybody who isn’t already wealthy. > Because you see, while it is somewhat important that everybody drink some kool-aid, it is absolutely crucial that the leaders drink a lot of their own kool-aid. Underneath we put picture of Peter Thiel's survival bunker in New Zealand.
Nauseating nostalgia. I would really, really, really love a follow-up by the author!
Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end
#147Germany's strategy has been to offer higher quality products at a huge markup. Just using the auto industry as an example, in the past twenty years the difference in quality between a mass market vehicle and a luxury vehicle has compressed. Competing on quality seems to be getting harder. The Anglophone economies, whose shift to services away from manufacturing has been ballyhooed and decried in many quarters, embrac…
The problem with the "Anglophone" strategy of focusing on ideas -- like the old "Designed in California. Assembled in China" statement that used to be on Apple iPods, is what happens when China (and elsewhere) start having their own designers (which is starting to happen)? What value will California provide then?
Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end
#148Earlier 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…
Well, considering how great the Russia strategy of the German industry has worked out, I’m looking forward to bailing out basf
> Russia strategy of the German industry
Are you sure it's Russian ? /s
Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why would people retiring cause plants to close. The article talks about layoffs. But if they are having layoffs, and people can't find work, that would indicate they do have workers, not a shortage of workers.
Not just about the raw number of people. When your hear "the population is aging," it means the median age is increasing over time. It puts a lot of strain on an economy when the ratio of retirees to working age people gets too high. Retirees are expensive.
Perhaps it puts a lot of strain on an economy where 1% of the people get 50% of the wealth. Perhaps it is hard for current workers to send the lion's share of what they produce to the 1%, and still pay for the retirement of past workers.
The current trends are unsustainable, sure, but just unsustainable for our current economic regime.
Re: Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end
#150Earlier 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…
I think you and the op are both missing that the vast majority of those mid skilled jobs still exist, they just exist in countries whose labor costs are drastically lower. When you realize that, you then realize that betting that your workers will be able to maintain a quality gap large enough to justify keeping them around is extremely questionable over the medium to long term because you are assuming some combinati…
Well argued snapplebobapple. Japan isn't cheap anymore; and neither will China be either in the long run