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What Germans Are Reading

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Re: What Germans Are Reading

#61

Post by Nasrudith »

bhaak wrote: post #8
maze-le wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This trope never gets old it seems... >> “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyranniz…

It also gets never old to tell that this quote is most likely not from Socrates. But you know that already, don't you? What we know from Socrates, this doesn't sound like something he would have said. Although, having done no writings of his own, we have two main sources for his life. But then again, Plato often put his own words into Socrates' mouth and this is something Plato could have said. :-)

Plus there is "professional speech" vs off the cuff. "Please pass the salt. - Barrack Obama" would probably technically be an accurate quote even if it wasn't documented.

There were accounts of cringeworthy even for the day dressing up in a dirty short cloak in immitation of Spartans.

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#62

Post by thecleaner »

petre wrote: post #35
thecleaner wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read somewhere that the German billionaire class controls 1T dollars. Why do people earn only 5k after tax ? There seem to be very little opportunities for investment in stock market. Real estate prices too seem insane.

Real estate prices are insane probably partly due to ECB negative interest rates which make buying on credit very attractive. I read an article on HN last week about zero interest 20y loans in Denmark. The DKK is pegged to the Euro. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20647651 Add to that all time lows (zero and below) for German bond yields which has bleak consequences for long time savers (future pensioners). Germ…

So what's a good strategy here ? Buy stuff on credit but sell to who ?

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#63

Post by lixtra »

RandomBookmarks wrote: post #51
s9w wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the Spiegel list removes books it doesn't like. https://www.welt.de/kultur/article167043384/Spiegel-verteidi...

Please be accurate. Correct would be: They removed a book they consider anti-semitic. That is quite different from what you stated. But great to include the source.

Funny enough the owner of Der Spiegel was himself considered an anti-semite by the Wiesenthal Center[1] a few years ago which stirred quite some debate back then.

[1] https://m.jpost.com/International/Wiesenthal-dean-labels-Aug...

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#64

Post by mxfh »

ekianjo wrote: post #42

> Since then, the entire eastern half of the country has been brought into the fold of Western liberal capitalism—but not entirely successfully. Unemployment is still higher in the east, and brain drain to the west remains common. Not sure how to understand this. I have traveled to the DDR and to East Germany after the reunification many times, and by far and large life is much better than it ever was. People can act…

The populist right AfD is doing also very well among gainers after the reunification. This is about perceived current inequality, not about a much needed compensation of double de-industrialization and de-capitalization of the east (post WWII and Post 1990-Treuhand). In saxony the local candidates are well off business men with a tendency to war lord like attiude to local power grabs and corruption.

AfD is not thematizing any of this but is currently on a well funded campaign run to retcon and ursurp the civil movement of 89/90 as a nationalist movement and branding itself of it's heir. All this while having no problems of having high ranking Stasi-Officers in the party itself.

East Germany's larger cities with significant university clusters (Leipzig, Dresden, Halle, Rostock, Potsdam, Jena-Weimar-Erfurt) are doing well, the rest is aging away on well paved streets. That populist reigns there is no suprise if educated post reunifcation youth works in those cities or elsewhere and might return some day. But wouldn't write off the east yet, since a populist right with maximum 1/3 support of electorate is not too uncommon and it's all about how conservative CDU positions itself in relation to that.

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#65

Post by romaaeterna »

I can't stand reading modern Germans. They generally read and think just like English, for one thing, so that you can barely tell you've entered another language.

It is pleasant, however to retreat to the 19th-century Germans, and bathe in their erudition and learning, from the period before the world went sour.

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#66

Post by chronial »

zuuow wrote: post #59
RandomBookmarks wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please be accurate. Correct would be: They removed a book they consider anti-semitic. That is quite different from what you stated. But great to include the source.

Both are correct. They removed a book they didn't like because they considered it to be anti-semitic. They are not exclusive.

Both statements are technically correct. One statement clearly transports the facts, the other is massively misleading.

The additional use of "books" is further misleading and technically not correct. It is one single book.

Is see no reason to defend this spreading of misinformation. Do you?

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#67

Post by em500 »

thecleaner wrote: post #22
WA wrote: post #5

There has been at least one book about how "Germany/Germans are getting dumber", "The Big Crash is Coming" or something similar on the Spiegel Bestseller list at all times. So far, the big crash didn't come yet. These books don't talk about a market correction or a financial crisis like in 2008, but a total economic crash, because "a finite world can't have unlimited growth", because "capitalism", because "climate ch…

I read somewhere that the German billionaire class controls 1T dollars. Why do people earn only 5k after tax ? There seem to be very little opportunities for investment in stock market. Real estate prices too seem insane.

> Why do people earn only 5k after tax ?

It's not clear what your point of reference is. If you're wondering why it's much lower than in the US (where the 90-percentile household is probably around 170k USD pre-tax or 9k-10k post-tax), there are many many factors that contribute to the difference. The most important ones (unordered) are IMO:

- USD is probably overvalued by 15%-20% [1]. In the past 10 years, the EUR/USD rate fluctuated between 1.05 and 1.55, currently it's 1.12. It's unlikely that the relative living standards between the US and Germany fluctuated as much as 50% in this period, so a lot of the nominal incomes differences are not real.

- Americans work 30% more hours than Germans [2]

These two factors can explain most of the pre-tax income differences.

The net difference is a bit higher still, due to higher taxes/mandatory payments. I don't have references at hand, but at the €100k level, take-home pay is around 60%-62% of gross, while for an American at $112k it's closer to 70% (federal, state and payroll). No comment about justness, proper accounting for transfers, subsidies, other taxes, mandatory insurances, etc. This is a huge sprawling debate topic, but it's indisputable that disposable income at the same gross is higher in the US than in Europe. IMO, the first 2 factors accounting for differences in gross incomes are more important anyway.

A fairly mainstream economic theory is that the higher European (marginal) taxes are actually a major cause of the lower working hours (and hence lower personal income) [3]. The highest marginal rates actually don't differ that much (typically around 50% in Europe, 45% federal+state in the US), but in Europe the higher rates typically kick in at much lower levels: US marginal rate at $100k is probably around 30%, whereas in many European countries it's already in the 40%+ bracket.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-11/trump-has... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_average_annual_labor_h... [3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109830788286551061

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#68

Post by DavidSJ »

rexgallorum2 wrote: post #60
ekianjo wrote: post #37

My German is rusty but: > Toleranz: Einfach Schwer (Tolerance Isn’t Easy) is an improper translation. That's "Tolerance: Simply Difficult" and that translates fine in English too since you can keep the same style while being accurate.

'Tolerance Isn’t Easy' is okay, freely translated. The trouble with translating it literally is that you lose the wordplay. 'Einfach' means both 'easy' and 'simple'. 'Tolerance: Easy and Difficult' is even more exact, but sounds kind of stupid in English, so I would prefer the original.

Simply Difficult definitely maintains the wordplay. Simple and easy can be synonyms in some contexts, such as when contrasted with difficult.

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#69

Post by jaclaz »

thecleaner wrote: post #22
WA wrote: post #5

There has been at least one book about how "Germany/Germans are getting dumber", "The Big Crash is Coming" or something similar on the Spiegel Bestseller list at all times. So far, the big crash didn't come yet. These books don't talk about a market correction or a financial crisis like in 2008, but a total economic crash, because "a finite world can't have unlimited growth", because "capitalism", because "climate ch…

I read somewhere that the German billionaire class controls 1T dollars. Why do people earn only 5k after tax ? There seem to be very little opportunities for investment in stock market. Real estate prices too seem insane.

>Why do people earn only 5k after tax ?

As a side note, the 5k are not actually "purchasing power" or really-really "after tax" as it is usually intended in the US, in the EU there is VAT:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_tax

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_value_added_tax

which is similar to the "sales tax" in the US but that is usually much higher.

In Germany (Mehrwertsteuer) it is (relativaly) low at 19% standard.

Re: What Germans Are Reading

#70

Post by zuuow »

chronial wrote: post #66
zuuow wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both are correct. They removed a book they didn't like because they considered it to be anti-semitic. They are not exclusive.

Both statements are technically correct. One statement clearly transports the facts, the other is massively misleading. The additional use of "books" is further misleading and technically not correct. It is one single book. Is see no reason to defend this spreading of misinformation. Do you?

I disagree that it's misleading, because the reason is not stated.

"Books" may not be correct in this context because it's been a single one thus far, but if another antisemitic book appears, they'd probably delete it too, so I'd argue it sounds more like a norm than a one-off event. By removing a book they didn't like, they opened a can of worms, so to say.

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