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The German Mittelstand

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Re: The German Mittelstand

#41

Post by danmaz74 »

crote wrote: post #12
lz400 wrote: post #2

re: the crisis of the Mittelstand in competing VS China, I'm reminded of this tweet. It's a fictitious illustrative case not a serious study but I think it describes some of the root challenges of western industrial culture when it comes to competing against China https://x.com/AngelicaOung/status/1921364873444986888

This is why the West is getting its ass kicked in non-legacy industries. Our MBAs have internalized the idea that you "win at capitalism" by buying out your competitors, making products shitty and expensive, and making shareholders filthy rich. Their MBAs believe that it means selling the best product possible at razor-thin margins, killing your competitors by being the better choice . Everyone is always complaining…

Come on, it's not just MBAs. I remember when patio11 (nothing against him personally, it's just the best example I can remember) became a star here on HN by saying that the solution to every problem as a consultant was to hike your rates. The idea of just asking as much money as you can get away with, which was seen as reprehensible by most of the population (my guesstimate, I don't have hard data) until more or less the eighties, Reagan and Thatcher era, has now permeated Western society at most levels, not just MBAs.

PS Chinese companies were (and probably still are, when they can) stealing IP, just like the USA did when it had more IP to steal from Europe than to protect from others. Western companies were very happy to let that happen when in exchange they could make more profits in the short term by using cheap Chinese labor and infrastructure.

Re: The German Mittelstand

#42

Post by pjmlp »

close04 wrote: post #37
sassbadger wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, in my view it's not an issue of overregulation but a malfunctioning administrative apparatus. Too much power is concentrated in the hands of few administrators who can interpret the law according to their own vibes, leaving businesses with few options of recourse without resorting to spending money on lawyers. It's the mideval mindset in the local administration that makes it so difficult, not the regulatio…

Sadly even eliminating all bureaucracy isn't the Holy Grail of saving the local workshop. The company has to pay German level taxes, the workers have to pay German cost of living, and most business owners also want to enjoy the fruit of their labor and that fruit in Germany usually wears a Porsche badge. These are the obvious and "easy" ones but probably not the most important ones. The difficult problems are the ent…

Agreed, however there are only two ways to handle this, race to the bottom and then everyone has Chinese working conditions and salaries, or it is about time that we build our walls and kind of, no kidding, make each country great again, which is why right wing parties are going up all over the place.

I still remember how it was in most European companies before we started offshoring everything, textil, shoes, TVs, mobiles, software,..., the whole bunch, with the colonist mindset that of course the "slaves" would never have the skills to master the end to end production themselves, what a joke, naturally as humans they have exactly the same skills.

And it isn't only China of course, we even do it among ourselves across European countries, for the new factory in some random eastern country, a bunch of folks in western Europe join the job center line.

All for the bank accounts for the managers of course, as employees get thrown around like pawns in the MBA chess, more akin to mediaeval lords managing their feudal servants.

Re: The German Mittelstand

#43

Post by luke5441 »

close04 wrote: post #37
sassbadger wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, in my view it's not an issue of overregulation but a malfunctioning administrative apparatus. Too much power is concentrated in the hands of few administrators who can interpret the law according to their own vibes, leaving businesses with few options of recourse without resorting to spending money on lawyers. It's the mideval mindset in the local administration that makes it so difficult, not the regulatio…

Sadly even eliminating all bureaucracy isn't the Holy Grail of saving the local workshop. The company has to pay German level taxes, the workers have to pay German cost of living, and most business owners also want to enjoy the fruit of their labor and that fruit in Germany usually wears a Porsche badge. These are the obvious and "easy" ones but probably not the most important ones. The difficult problems are the ent…

Germany has such a supply chain for some sectors (e.g. cars, chemicals). The question is do we want to protect it to some extent or let the free market do its thing?

Re: The German Mittelstand

#44

Post by robocat »

biowaffeln wrote: post #31
camillomiller wrote: post #10

I was enjoying this until this signature sentence by Claude: >>Slowly but surely, it did, once again becoming a world-renowned brand, now separate from that of Thonet. The same town, the same factory, the same people—just a different name The moment I see this, the piece loses all of its credibility. I cannot take any of the factual informations I was enjoying as implicitly correct now, I just can’t. Authors should e…

don’t be too quick to judge, putting the text through pangram indicates it’s 100% human written. It didn’t strike me as too AI because it wasn’t superfluous; it literally was what happened. AI is using this phrase more as a stylistic device than an a factual statement

"I Wouldn't Say Pangram is Broken, But I Would Say That It's Brittle": https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-i...

Re: The German Mittelstand

#45

Post by customguy »

biowaffeln wrote: post #31
camillomiller wrote: post #10

I was enjoying this until this signature sentence by Claude: >>Slowly but surely, it did, once again becoming a world-renowned brand, now separate from that of Thonet. The same town, the same factory, the same people—just a different name The moment I see this, the piece loses all of its credibility. I cannot take any of the factual informations I was enjoying as implicitly correct now, I just can’t. Authors should e…

don’t be too quick to judge, putting the text through pangram indicates it’s 100% human written. It didn’t strike me as too AI because it wasn’t superfluous; it literally was what happened. AI is using this phrase more as a stylistic device than an a factual statement

> it wasn’t superfluous; it literally was what happened.

Yeah, so I gave that sentence to ChatGPT in a new context and asked it to make it longer without saying anything additional, several times, and it still reads fine, more than. The truth is the truth no matter how you put it.

https://pastebin.com/gKhCbmNQ

https://pastebin.com/9HpkN4tc

https://pastebin.com/J6znwxZf

https://pastebin.com/wXs84csy

https://pastebin.com/LrjVm4JT

The last one really speaks to me. I wanted to go on but it raised all sorts of questions in me that I think I should investigate instead.

It was, in that sense, a change that changed the thing that was being called something without changing the thing that was being called.

and

Everything that was not the name remained the same.

Everything that was the name was no longer the same.

Really makes you think.

Re: The German Mittelstand

#46

Post by close04 »

pjmlp wrote: post #42
close04 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly even eliminating all bureaucracy isn't the Holy Grail of saving the local workshop. The company has to pay German level taxes, the workers have to pay German cost of living, and most business owners also want to enjoy the fruit of their labor and that fruit in Germany usually wears a Porsche badge. These are the obvious and "easy" ones but probably not the most important ones. The difficult problems are the ent…

Agreed, however there are only two ways to handle this, race to the bottom and then everyone has Chinese working conditions and salaries, or it is about time that we build our walls and kind of, no kidding, make each country great again, which is why right wing parties are going up all over the place. I still remember how it was in most European companies before we started offshoring everything, textil, shoes, TVs, m…

> race to the bottom and then everyone has Chinese working conditions and salaries

I think it’s doable to be competitive even under Western conditions assuming you have the rest of the ultra optimized supply chains because you can find ways to support them even with just a nudge here and there, compared to when the only German part if the business is the one who says “designed un Germany”.

> or it is about time that we build our walls and kind of, no kidding, make each country great again, which is why right wing parties are going up all over the place.

Right wing parties are going up to say they’ll make the country great again. Can’t think of a significant time in history when these parties actually did make a country great.

Re: The German Mittelstand

#47

Post by robocat »

AdamN wrote: post #28
HawtAds wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do know em dashes are a normal part of formal prose right? If you go through pre GPT New Yorker and the Atlantic articles, there are plenty of em dashes too.

The New Yorker has a whole style guide. Most people aren't writing "née" or "reëlected" very often but the New Yorker keeps those formats and even has a custom typeface. Yes em-dashes are real but aside from a few NY-based magazines with real editors, writers aren't actually using them very much. I'm a bit sad because I like using them and now I think twice before doing so in case it is misinterpreted as an AI signat…

Also people are generally more aware of the American-English usage of them. The UK (and splitters) uses them differently, as do non-English languages.

Re: The German Mittelstand

#48

Post by luke5441 »

lz400 wrote: post #32
Incipient wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the fundamental premise is much of an issue - it's what a (mostly) free market is meant to do. Someone sells a chair for $100, someone else believes they can sell it for $80, so they do. There are two main complicating factors (outside of brand reputation and possibly some others?) 1) quality - someone accepts the $80 chair which is a little bit more wonky 2) the $100 company spent a few years developin…

Agreed, it's that the free market _allows_ you to do. What's concerning is that we're used to the "semi-benevolent" image of the free market where a company succeeds and then returns value to stock holders, and the employees and the investors and the country all share of the riches. Of course the executives and main shareholders get outsized returns, inequality might raise, but many people see a bit, and capitalism w…

You forgot the last part about now no one having money anymore to buy the companies products, so you go into a deflationary spiral.

To solve that you'd want to increase wages by e.g. improving workers rights, giving them mandatory pensions etc. But that is scary: They might get too much power and revolt!

This works for China currently for a while, because they are exporting more and more. They have realized that they need to grow internal consumption, but are not managing to grow that sufficiently.

Re: The German Mittelstand

#49

Post by decimalenough »

Incipient wrote: post #3
lz400 wrote: post #2

re: the crisis of the Mittelstand in competing VS China, I'm reminded of this tweet. It's a fictitious illustrative case not a serious study but I think it describes some of the root challenges of western industrial culture when it comes to competing against China https://x.com/AngelicaOung/status/1921364873444986888

I don't think the fundamental premise is much of an issue - it's what a (mostly) free market is meant to do. Someone sells a chair for $100, someone else believes they can sell it for $80, so they do. There are two main complicating factors (outside of brand reputation and possibly some others?) 1) quality - someone accepts the $80 chair which is a little bit more wonky 2) the $100 company spent a few years developin…

The original Aalto stool, consisting of three pieces of bent wood and a circle, costs $479: https://www.finnishdesignshop.com/en-au/product/aalto-stool-...

The IKEA copy, identical except that the circle is more of a triangle, costs $19: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/kyrre-stool-birch-60416925/

Both companies are very profitable, but I'm sure IKEA shifts a lot more units. And the Aalto stool is solid wood and will last forever, while the IKEA copy is probably laminated cardboard or something.

Re: The German Mittelstand

#50

Post by vrganj »

ahartmetz wrote: post #38
vrganj wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But consolidation is the inherent end game of capitalism. It's almost as if it was full of contradictions that will always result in crises and a bad way to organize a society...

Some of these contradictions can be fixed well enough by government intervention to make capitalism the best known system. It used to work pretty well for several decades.

Several decades being 1.8 decades since the last major crisis?
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