Germany is wildly underestimated in the current moment. The immigration wave has changed the demographics, Germany is not going to age quickly and it is growing in population.
Having lived in UK and Germany for some time, although I'm a big fan of the British culture, I keep maintaining that Germany is much much better country overall simply because it's not centralised as UK is centralised in London.
Germany is prosperous, maybe there are not as many Unicorns as in USA or even UK, the country works like a clockwork and everyone is very active in very wide range of stuff.
All those charts showing how Europe is behind because top 100 largest companies are mostly American tech giants, some petrol companies and some construction and bank stuff from China? Those are so so misleading into making people believe that Germany or mainland Europe is a wasteland that missed out on technology.
Especially Germany, they have very well educated and healthy population and even if they don't make the most trendy consumer products right now, they still have wast infrastructure and people who can produce things.
Of course not everything is rosy, but Germany's and mainland Europe's core problems all come down to cheap energy availability and that's solvable. It's much easier to solve than stuff like widespread social problems like decline due to drug use or political instability.
They tend to rely on paperwork a bit too much maybe, they don't use credit cards that much etc. all these stereotypes are true but technology is not limited to computers, other stuff is also important and they are still pretty good in these things.
> I keep maintaining that Germany is much much better country overall simply because it's not centralised as UK is centralised in London.
That's interesting. In Germany the decentralization is considered a main reason for the many problems on modernization in bureaucracy and other public areas.
> Those are so so misleading into making people believe that Germany or mainland Europe is a wasteland that missed out on technology.
I think the reason is more that Germany was an early adopter of many technologies, but was then trapped on old infrastructure and workflows, while some others simply failed for various reasons. So it's more an upgrade-problem, then "installation"-problem.
> Europe's core problems all come down to cheap energy availability and that's solvable. It's much easier to solve than stuff like widespread social problems like decline due to drug use or political instability.
In theory yes, in reality it goes hand in hand. Germany for example is cursed by people who poison the progress since a long time. And the harm is showing since a while now. Ironically, it usually only gets better when something catastrophically happened, like Fukushima, or the War with Russia.
That's for sure. But Germany at the moment is in a phase where the decentralization is biting it. While UK seems to succeed in some areas where Germany fails at the moment. So it's fascinating to see such a comment.
There are lots of tradeoffs with the current decentral/federated system for sure. But one key point is that it’s incredibly hard for an extremist or fascist party to take over the whole country and run it into the ground quickly(again!). And with the growing rightwing populism over here it’s a good thing to prevent the worst.
Of course the setup also slows down progressive policies or any changes in general due to conservatives/rightwingers blocking things, but that’s the price of it.
Germany is a powerhouse of medium-sized companies supplying precision engineering to a bunch of other industries. Those companies are mostly invisible to the consumer market but provide the machines which make machines, the German M&E (machinery and equipment) sector is massive, just not as flashy as tech unicorns creating yet-another ad-filled consumer product...
Look at southern Germany on Google Maps Satellite View. It's all small towns with immense commercial/production area around it. It's not some row of Motels/McDonalds/Walmart like in many areas of the US, but tons of specialised companies. Not many unicorns, but tons of innovative, profitable enterprises.
>Germany is a powerhouse of medium-sized companies supplying precision engineering to a bunch of other industries.
Sure, but looking at valuation of the likes of Apple versus German "hidden champions", the big money is in products targeting the general consumer and not niche machinery widgets. This is also reflected in things like work culture, treatment of workers and pay.
This missing out on the wave of consumer tech and software, and sticking to pushing dying tech like diesel engines all the way till the 2010's, is probably one of the reason the purchasing power of the average German has stagnated since the 90's when it peaked.
Source: have worked at a couple of Germany's hidden champions making some high end machinery widgets and wouldn't do it again unless I was facing homelessness. US companies for me all the way baby (operating on EU soil).
> Sure, but looking at valuation of the likes of Apple versus German "hidden champions", the big money is in products targeting the general consumer and not niche machinery widgets.
This isn't a particularly good comparison. Comparing the largest B2C company in the world to some SMB isn't particularly fitting. When comparing "valuations" it is also important to consider the fact that some of Germany's biggest companies are entirely privately owned and not exchange listed - and also popular in the US to an extent at least (Lidl, Bosch).
> is probably one of the reason the purchasing power of the average German has stagnated since the 90's when it peaked.
This is a pretty widespread trend and just as prevalent in the US. Salary increases desperately lacking behind the countries' productivity. Some interesting reads [1] [2]
> Source: have worked at a couple of Germany's hidden champions making some high end machinery widgets and wouldn't do it again unless I was facing homelessness. US companies for me all the way baby (operating on EU soil).
That's a pretty personal and individul experience which comes down to personal preference. Certainly, both vastly different ways of working have their benefits and drawbacks. Having a few colleagues who switched from US based companies to a somewhat large German hidden champion, they seem to be pretty happy here for the most part. I'm under the impression that the focus on US companies is especially prevalent in software related jobs, which is not surprising given the $$$ and the interesting technical challenges (at least for FAANGish companies). I don't think such strong preference exists for other industries to be honest.
If they're large, then they're not really hidden anymore. Hidden champions are usually those sub-200 employee companies usually located in the county side. SAP, Porsche or Zeiss are not hidden champions.
I don't work for SAP, Porsche or Zeiss. I work for a company that is rather large but rather unknown outside the geographic region it operates locations and outside the industry it operates in, thus it perfectly fits the definition of a hidden champion, but not of a SMB (Mittelstand).
Whenever I tell someone where I work, there is a 80% chance they've never heard of the company, despite there being a high chance they use one or multiple of our products.
Amusingly I've found the experience of working at a German company in the US to be a huge upgrade. Maybe the real secret is just a foreign company to temper the culture of your own country's.
I would rather have a smaller GDP backed by real underlying industrial capacity rather than frothy valuations on photo sharing apps and exotic financial instruments.
We're not talking about GDP here. The local purchasing power of the average German worker has plummeted since the 90's, especially when you factor in housing costs.
GPD is relatively irelevant to the welfare average person as the GDP is a number that can be artificially inflated by a number of factors respectful of the average worker. Higher GDP doesn't automatically translate to higher wages and better standard of living for everyone.
You can be a tax heaven and if FAANG and big-tech corps simply use your country as a base station to funnel the sales and profits of an entire continent/economic area becasue they pay no taxes there, then your GDP will be insane but that might not mean much to your average worker who isn't getting a piece of that pie.
Germany is Europe's richest country, but that doesn't make the Germans as individuals automatically the wealthiest citizens in Europe. Think about hat for a second. In fact, when it comes to wealth, the avenge Germans net worth is significantly lower than most wealthy EU states, sometimes even on par with those form former Eastern block EU states.
Germans lag everyone in terms of home ownership, we are a nation of people renting appartments. Which explains the gap, the same way it did decades ago, the first time I remember people being confused by that statistic...
I recently was taking trains across Germany and while some where late and others went out of service there was always another to hop onto and it was easy to find.
Maybe not like clockwork but as a visitor from a country without a strong train network I was (easily?) impressed
Switzerland no longer accepts some DB (German Rail) trains crossing the border, they are forced to terminate early, and passengers have to change trains. Reason: DB delays are so frequent that if they did not do this the Swiss rail network would also collapse.
Germany's Liebling has always been the Autobahn, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
This reminds me when my DB broke down on the way to Zurich just past the border and I had to change trains, though I believe in that case it was a swap from broken DB to not-yet-broken DB. The scenery was great so I didn't mind terribly.
Sorry for the pointless post but got to reminiscing.
Yes, people in Germany love complaining about their trains. It makes sense, a decade ago they were way better. For everybody else that's experienced the train systems of other countries, it's still incredibly good.
I think the issue is that for a long long time we were a car nation wearing the coat of a train nation and while the stereotype (and expectation) solidified itself we privatized the railway system, converted many of the Western cities from public transportation focussed to car focussed (and back) and continued to make the car industry the bedrock of a few states' economies.
I think that's the chief difference between countries that do well with immigration and the ones that don't - I have some French friends, who have basically fled the country because Paris has become unlivable - too expensive, too little space, and if someone with a good education and income has found it a struggle to get a decent place and live a good life, how is life for the rest of society?
I don't think it's a good idea to take the culture war angle - I was just pointing out the fact that some countries/societies are set up in a way that promote their capitals into unhealthy economic centers of gravity, that attract way too many people. Which in turn, strains the local services and housing situation to an unreasonable degree, causing all sorts of misery for the inhabitants.
It's natural - and necessary for self regulation - for people to take the initiative and move out of these places.
I wasn't but I also couldn't get over the irony of it. However, the misery aspect must be much more complex. For example, why people are not building more homes? Are we out of bricks? Also, as you pointed out the centralisation around a major city is another aspect of it.
Unfortunately we are having hard times. IMHO, a huge part of it is the contemporary landed gentry.
>Are those friends enjoying the irony of becoming immigrants to escape immigrants?
Every country welcomes you with open arms if you're a skilled and educated laborer in areas of shortage and not migrating to be a burden on the welfare system.
I have some bad news for your friends. Cities are becoming more expensive everywhere regardless of immigration. Private equity is buying up houses/apartments en masse and "maximizing profit". Inflation is very real. Immigration will certainly be an issue in some cities, but it's not all roses everywhere else.
Exactly. People like to demonise the poor immigrants that would like to work and welcome the rich ones with open arms but the life has become so hard in cities especially due to the rich ones who don't add anything to the society because they don't even live there and even if they live, don't engage with the local population. They swoop in, claim the resources and actively extract them(for example by keeping the apartment empty).
The main critiques of Germany I hear are not demographic but rather have to do with problems in industrial and energy policy. Namely the failure to anticipate the shift to electric vehicles and the over-reliance on natural gas for energy.
Germany's energy policy failed badly, but consider Germany as part of the European Union with nuclear-powered France as its neighbour. Ensemble wir schaffen das !
You mean that Germany that shits in nuclear left and right, trying to block it from EU green agenda and then threatening it's neighbours when they wanted to went nuclear?
That is the funny part: when the sun is down and the wind is not sufficient (surprisingly often), nuclear-hating Germany buys power from its neighbours - chiefly France (nuclear) and Switzerland (hydro and nuclear)
> That is the funny part: when the sun is down and the wind is not sufficient (surprisingly often), nuclear-hating Germany buys power from its neighbours - including France.
I'm not sure if I understand that line of thinking. While the nuclear exit of Germany may have been short-sighted, it is what it is now. And when shit hits the fan in France because their power plants are down for maintenance or a lack of suitable coolant water, Germany exports electricity to France. That's what a supra-national electricity grid is for and that's not a topic that ever was open for debate.
Also, regarding the decision Germany made regarding nuclear power, I am not sure if it actually was the wrong one. Looking at the cost overruns and extended timelines of essentially any new nuclear reactor construction, the people complaining about nuclear power not being economically viable may have a point. Whether the much proposed alternative of small scale nuclear reactors can live up to it's promise on any kind of meaningful scale remains to be seen.
What I think is the biggest failure of German energy policy is the fact that Germany went from a leader in renewable technology to desperately lacking behind. While this demise was partially driven by the companies themselves, some extremely short sighted policy failures also are to blame.
France concludes resorption of a huge backlog of nuclear power plant improvements that resulted in exceptional downtimes in 2021-2022. With that done and investment back to the levels it should never have fallen under, the deficit of the 2022 winter will not repeat.
As for the alleged cooling water shortages, they are not shortages but regulatory limits on downstream water temperature - which only concerns some riverine plants in summer. With three litres evaporated per kW/h produced, plants with evaporative cooling are very far from enduring a water supply constraint.
Germany usually buys from France because it's cheaper, not because they could not supply it on their own. Europe has a tightly integrated market, and everyone is covering each other, which also allows to usually buy where it's cheapest.
At least there exists a reason to prefer nuclear power plants from being farther away from you.
What the US does with oil makes even less sense.
What the US does with the transportation of oil makes even lesser sense. If climate crisis is existential it seems like it would be worth having a few oil spills along a pipeline to save some carbon.
> At least there exists a reason to prefer nuclear power plants from being farther away from you.
Not at the distances this short. If anything happens to any of the nuclear plants in France the pollution will reach Germany within 24 hours.
I've actually seen this used as an argument FOR building nuclear power plants in Poland: we already have like 10 such plants within 200 miles from our borders, so we already have all of the risks, but none of the benefits.
I think you are confusing the ideas of "anything happen" with "if the worst case scenario happens". There are plenty of examples that disprove your theory.
And even in the worst case scenario the farther you are away the better.
The current discussion is France wanting to directly subsidize existing paid-off nuclear plants with EU money because they are not competitive on the European whole-sale market anymore.
The other side argue France can do it using their own funds if they deem it necessary.
If taking into account the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) in isolation, variable renewables are more competitive.
If taking into account the System LCOE (sum of generation, integration and storage costs to reach equivalent stable supply), then nuclear wins - and that doesn't even account for the VRE's huge land use.
"Firmed renewables" are cheaper than or equal in cost to new nuclear today [1]. Renewables and storage are on an exponential cost reduction and learning curve, while nuclear famously has gotten more expensive with each generation [2]. Given that nuclear is uncompetitive against against renewables today, adding a 15-20 year lead-time just makes it laughable. Then another 30-40 years to turn a profit.
Nuclear is a technological dead-end economically. Perfect for niche applications like submarines, but not for the grid.
Interesting Lazard study. First time I see such investment guys so optimistic about grid-scale storage beyond the currently supply-limited pumped hydro.
Last time I checked, we actually did manage it, the last time I mean. Care to elavorate which bad things happened because of it? Because happening since is pointless, we have the war in Ukraine and Covid for example since then, and neither has anything to do with it.
There is a difference between ignoring them and seeimg that they were blown way, way out of proportion...
And wow, it was in 2015? Forgot that it was almost a decade ago... People really, really should be able to move on... Well, they tried, but the endangered, lawless swimming pool narrative didn't really catch on, did it?
It's totally reasonable to say that these incidents are not significant enough to change immigration policy. But the attacks were not "BS", and falsely claiming them as such a big part of what fueled the rise of AfD and other far right parties. Even if you don't care about veracity, I'm sure you don't want to help support those parties, right? That's why you shouldn't call these events BS.
The attacks, few as they were, are not BS. What was made out of them was, is and always will be utter horse crap. What worries me is people, who believe that, pushing policy based on those believes.
Did you notice that almost every store in Berlin has a security personnel at the entrance? It wasn't like this before, but I remember being really confused when I saw this in Paris in the early 2000s. What happened? Do you think Hans and Jürgen have broken bad?
Ah, I totally forgot the swimmong pool scare of the summer of '23, thanks for reminding me!
I agree, armed border police having, if it was up to conservative politians, a mandatebto use force for illegal push bavks are propably not a net benefit for society.
Since when is it illegal to stop people who don't have the right to enter a country? That's exactly the job of the border security and why you pay taxes for and why borders exist and why countries that defend their borders the best and are most selective with who they let in tend to be the safest and most desirable to live in.
When you board off the plane in Germany try to make a run for it and bypass the the passport control/customs area and see what happens. I assure you, in case you don't get shot, you'll be swiftly put down by force and arrested with guns pointed at your face. Why shouldn't the same strict rules apply to everyone else?
Do you have locks at your house, or do you let everyone in off the street because stopping them would be illegal according to your logic?
It's not a human right to enter and live in whichever country you desire without a visa. Each country has the right to defend its borders, that's what the border police and the military is for.
Only if you can prove your life is in danger, then you're entitled to asylum in the first safe country you can reach, not 10 safe countries over in Sweden, Germany, UK, or whichever wealthy country you desire to live in once you throw away your passport because you're not from a county at war and you intentionally sink your boat so that the coast guard will be forced to pick you up.
That's how human rights work, everything else is just abusing the asylum systems for personal economic benefit.
It's not. It's only to those who qualify for asylum, but this system is so lax and poorly enforced that is abused by economic chancers, and not people ruining away from wars.
Look at the nationalities of those arriving form boats, 90% are not from war torn countries, they don't qualify for asylum.
Also, asylum means the first safe country you can reach, not your proffered EU country. To reach Germany you need to go through 4-8 safe countries which is where the asylum scam lies and why the system needs reformed.
Now we are getting somewhere, maybe. You don't agree with the current asylum.policies? Fair enough, you are not alone and even the SPD chancelor favors harder measures (no suprise here, I'm totally in tje opposite camp). Then argue for reform. But don't start with denying people their basic right of seeking asylum, don't argue for illegal measures to be taken, and please, pleade, try to really research and understand the basic legal principles of what you discuss. Otherwise you just come across as a radical, borderline racist blowhard.
You trying to frame me as radical right wing racist, just for telling you how the asylum system laws work in practice and why it's consistently being broken and abused, is in poor taste, as you don't understand how the asylum laws work but keep harping on a flawed ideology that's not based in any laws.
I repeat one last time then I'm out for good: asylum, by law, is only for those people fleeing war and persecution, not for everyone who wants to come to a nice EU country with a great welfare system, and the asylum applies to the first safe country you reach.
If you come to Germany while having crossed 4-10 safe countries you're basically breaking the asylum laws. Asylum means living in a safe country where your life is no longer in danger from war, not entitling you to living only in Germany/Sweden/UK...wherever YOU choose.
The current German system of "open borders for everyone, come to Germoney please" is not an asylum policy, it's just leftist political madness that's harming the welfare state and the housing market (Denmark is already hard on this), it's harming the EU stability (Brexit was driven by this and other countries are against it as well by voting right wing), it's harming the Schengen system (Austria refuses to let Romania and Bulgaria in due to these migration issues, plus border checks are being introduced all the time harming commuters) and it's harming the migrant entry point countries in EU like Italy and Greece.
> Namely the failure to anticipate the shift to electric vehicles
I'm a _little_ confused by this narrative. VW Group is the largest seller of electric vehicles to the EU market. BMW is also pretty big. I mean, could German manufacturers be _more_ dominant? Perhaps, but it's certainly not a Toyota type case.
(I actually wonder how much of this is driven purely by the extreme... invisibleness of the eGolf and eUp; it was very difficult to tell that they weren't Golfs/Ups. Some people may think that the i3/4/5 are VW's first electric cars.)
While I'm still trying to get my head around things in Germany, I'd argue that those are symptoms of deeper cultural issues related to deeply-embedded conversatism and over-respect for hierarchy (e.g. status, age, seniority) in leadership, risk-taking, and decision-making throughout the private and public sectors.
You can call them cultural issues but that's just.. the German culture. I thought it was slow and needlessly tiring when I first moved here, but over time I've learned to appreciate the stability it brings. There is a method to the (lack of?) madness, although it may not be apparent at first.
Maybe Volkswagen et al. didn't innovate early enough in terms of electric cars, but it gets more interesting every day (to the point that I would by German instead of a Tesla).
But where the country is spectacular: in charging infrastructure. It has one of or even the densest high-performance-charger network in the world. 350kw chargers: world leading. Sure, the network is not finished yet. But having to actually have an electric car, Germany is one of the best places to be.
Few people noticed: Germany has also the leading hydrogen-fuelstation network outside Japan and South Korea.
Industry's failure to anticipate political enforcement of electric vehicle adoption? Over-relaince on Russia for energy (to decode the natural gas comment). Both political complaints. Perhaps German industry just predicts their long term future differently.
Look around, it's actively happening. Many jurisdictions have instituted deadlines, past which ICE vehicles won't be allowed. Where I live, I won't be able to register an ICE car manufactured after 2030.
Instead of looking I can read the data. Most western countries are selling between 2-20% of EVs. I think it is very reasonable to assume these "deadlines" will be extended.
But even in regards to this topic the small percentage of sales Germany manufactures might have missed out on EVs could easily be overcome with advertising or other external factors.
Germany is already at 18% and rising rapidly, there doesn't seem to be a problem selling EV cars even in larger countries. Norway is 80% but they have oil money, but even Sweden is at 32% and they are sparsely populated and not richer than Germany.
So I see no reason why banning non EV by 2030 in some countries is impossible, Germany and many similar countries are ahead of the curve needed to get there.
There is no evidence to suggest the rate will increase but evidence that it will decrease. The demand for non-EV worldwide is growing rapidly and if Germany doesn't want to compete on this market there will be other countries standing in line.
Its varied. I think there was no study that checks that for the whole of Germany, but in my town, most (>90%) of the Syrian refugees from a few years back are now settled down, have a job and and pay social security. A few have high paying jobs (construction, specialized metal-working, etc.), but many of them are in the medium to low income sector. Interestingly, they view food related jobs as high status jobs, whereas German people do not. So many of them are employed in restaurants, etc.
Update: there are of course also other arrivals, but the Syrians make the bulk of them.
It's cheap labor for employers and bad news for German employees who felt the jobs weren't paid enough. The employees who wouldn't work for a "hungerlohn" are forced now as the emplyeers have absolutely no incentive to lower their profit margins, with all the Syrian refugees willing to work for less. I'm sure they're grateful and that they're doing better than in US occupied Syria (Isn't it great how much media coverage the Syrian invasion and civil displacement got?), but it's still an exploitative profit oriented system that's taking advantage of peoples situation.
Edit: Knowing HN, I'll be the one called racist as opposed to the comment right next to me that's saying terrible things about Muslims.
I downvoted you not because you said anything racist but because I strongly disagree with your argument about achieving high salaries through limiting the workforce availability.
The problem with this approach is that, the compensation becomes high for no good reason and since less people are working the output declines. Everything becomes more expensive because the consumption stays the same or higher but the production don't follow. Maybe you make more money by not letting a Syrian immigrant to cook food and compete with you but you also pay more to have your apartment painted because they didn't let some other Syrian immigrant compete in the painting business.
Immigrants that work create prosperity. If you are having trouble competing with a newcomers who barely speak the language, don't know anything of your culture and they grew up in a much poorer conditions in a country with much less opportunities, then it's on you. You should have taken advantage of living in this rich country that has given you all kind of opportunities, if you can't I don't see moral obligation to pay you well just because you are local.
People who want to participate in the society, create value and be compensated for it should not be stopped from doing it just because it might hurt someone else's prospect. This is basically the same argument against technology where some people would argue that we should limit robots and automation so that the workers can keep their jobs.
People are scared of change and don't want competition but if we artificially limit competition, the whole society will end up uncompetitive and catastrophe can happen. Protectionism is very dangerous, look what's happening to VW.
> if you are having trouble competing with a newcomers who barely speak the language, don't know anything of your culture and they grew up in a much poorer conditions in a country with much less opportunities, then it's on you.
I swear I encountered the same argument in Britain after EU enlargement in 2004, when they opened for all citizens of new countries. Cunningly DACH countries fiercely negotiated at that time the longest possible transition periods.
And UK left EU, no new people can come and wages are going up. Are the living standards going up too? Nope.
If you want to see a higher number in the bank account and pay higher numbers for everything, be my guest but that's not going to solve your problems. Inflation is not a saviour.
>If you are having trouble competing with a newcomers who barely speak the language, don't know anything of your culture and they grew up in a much poorer conditions in a country with much less opportunities, then it's on you.
It's funny to blame others for being wage dumped on as being their own fault, as long as it's not your job that's threatened form wage dumping.
So whose fault would it be? Let me rephrase the question: who is picking strawberries from the fields in the UK now?
I recommend everyone to watch the series called "Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole" (mostly available on YT). I don't even blame these people, they are just doing what the system lets them get away with.
That's just pointless whataboutism. Workers being wage dumped on by cheaper more desperate workforce that puts downward pressure on the labor market reducing their power to negociate higher wages, and people choosing to live on the dole because they're fuckups at life, are two different orthogonal issues that are unrelated.
Imagine you graduate form university and apply for jobs where your employer receives 1 resume for every position open. What happens with your bargaining power when your employer can now hire from anywhere in the world without any visa barriers and now receives 200 resumes for the same position?
> Workers being wage dumped on by cheaper more desperate workforce...
"Wage dump" - that word again. So this is how people pick up policital slogans and start repeating them, without even thinking about how much of it is true. I don't think it is true.
> people choosing to live on the dole because they're fuckups at life
Think about who is paying for their benefits.
> What happens with your bargaining power when your employer can now hire from anywhere in the world without any visa barriers
Right, because that's what's going on in the UK. I don't think anyone suggested anything even remotely like that. In fact, I don't know of any country that does that.
Yes, negociate, bargain, haggle, call it whatever you want. Everyone negociates their wage, or at least tries to. Do you not where you live?
>"Wage dump" - that word again. So this is how people pick up policital slogans and start repeating them, without even thinking about how much of it is true. I don't think it is true.
What's your point? That if your boss would have 10x the number of candidates your wages and negotiation power wouldn't tank?
That's made up word. It's actually competition and everyone has right to compete. If you don't want wages go below some level simply set the minimum wage to that level.
What's next? Are we going to start issuing licenses for using JavaScript because the tech sector slowed and it's easy to learn a JS framework to compete for the available jobs?
> It's actually competition and everyone has right to compete.
Ah yes, the "free market" argument again.
You see, when you can't afford a house anymore because the central bank and government fucked you over and your wages are stagnating thanks to unfair competition from migrant workers, then there's nothing we can do about it it's just the "free market supply and demand".
But when workers' wages start getting too high for employers' linking as he can only get a platinum trim yacht instead of the diamond one, then it's no longer the hand of the free market working in the workers' favor but it's now called a "labor shortage" so all unions must be defanged and immigration barriers must be removed to ease the so called "labor shortage".
> the compensation becomes high for no good reason
Not for no good reason - supply and demand. Literally the most important corner stone of any capitalistic system. The rest of your paragraph is based on your forced assumption of "no reason".
> Maybe you make more money by not letting a Syrian immigrant to cook food and compete with you but you also pay more to have your apartment painted because they didn't let some other Syrian immigrant compete in the painting business.
I'd say you're undervaluing apartment painting. Which is obvious since you're advocating having to fly in people from a destroyed country to do it.
In other words: Low paying jobs wouldn't sit around for long going undone. The market would adjust. Either they're jobs that shouldn't exist in the first place and need to vanish, or they are underpaid and the market would adjust by paying them better.
Try envisioning a world where a person who does a hard shitty job gets paid the same as a highly trained person sitting in front of a PC all day. Cleaning toilets is essential for our society to function and should be a respectable profession. It might not take a lot of education, but it's a hard job none the less The only reason hard jobs like this are not paid what they're worth, is trickery like immigration.
The number might become higher but if the economic output stays the same relative to the population the compensation doesn't become higher.
What would increase the output of the society? Employed people or unemployed people? It's employed people, so as long as the newcomers are employed and produce more than they consume everyone will be better off.
Forget the numbers, those are just for bookkeeping. You are not going to be better off if you you are compensated better due to staff shortages and then pay more due to staff shortages.
> The number might become higher but if the economic output stays the same relative to the population the compensation doesn't become higher.
You're using the word compensation ambiguously. Your sentence is thus nonsense as I cannot parse what you meant. Was that your point?
> You are not going to be better off if you you are compensated better due to staff shortages and then pay more due to staff shortages.
Are you saying that keeping payment low is good for people because it also keeps inflation low? I'm sure everyone will agree and take a pay cut any moment now :)
"Output" is vague and not an agreed upon ultimate goal. Slave colonies have lots of "output".
"Everything becomes more expensive" is vague and unsupported enough to be noise.
"Immigrants create prosperity" is dime store propaganda and noise. It isn't necessarily true nor false. Your presentation of it is negatively persuasive, howerever.
Your statement about "people who want to participate should have the right even if it hurts others" is simply a zero borders argument to permanently bottom out most wages. It isn't a pro technology argument. Couching its opposition as an anti-tech argument is bizarre mental gymnastics that isn't cogent.
"People are scared of change" is a generalized a bullying tactic meant to insult people in case none of your other arguments hit the mark.
Your argument that labor "competition" can't be limited by borders, lest society becomes uncompetitive and catastrophic, isn't born out by the evidence in any productive nation to include Germany. It's also a statement that is embarassed by your thesaurus abuse of alarmist adjectives. Which in turn belie any confidence that your arguments are persuasive.
I think, If you are looking for meaning you should stop picking words individually, claiming stuff about those words and analyse the whole text instead.
I won't call you racist (although your sibling earned a flag), but you have to understand that _right now_ you're wrong. Maybe in 3 years there will be a huge economic downturn, but if Germany missed a year of immigration, they would have had a lot of worker shortage this year. Which is imho crazy, because their energy usage grew way less than their GDP last year, which is like, impossible for any country but Germany and Japan.
You missed elaborating on why you believe me to be wrong.
> because their energy usage grew way less than their GDP last year
Their main energy pipeline got blown up by an unknown assailant last year. They sanctioned Russia and thus stopped importing their energy and switched to US liquified gas for industrial use that's being shipped by ships and thus 2x more expensive. The US slapped another 2x on the price, just because they could.
Even if Germany wouldn't have a minimum wage it wouldn't change the fact that German people won't work for the conditions you outlined. So for Germans this won't change anything anyways. Either the companies lower profits, raise prices or go bust. This way, the companies you're referring to got a few more years until the Syrians become more savvy.
George borjas is an academic that studies this if people are curious. I think the world will come to see economic migration as a sin in the future. It’s a great idea for a generation or two, but then how long?
Well, 90% of the people in my office are immigrants. Pretty productive. Obviously however software engineering has been a very immigrant-heavy industry in Europe for a long time. There's just not enough German software engineers to work the huge capital that it has.
When looking at more common jobs, it's quite hard to find a German when you pass by any construction site. In fact, I can speak to a good amount of the workers in my native language.
>software engineering has been a very immigrant-heavy industry in Europe for a long time
For those unaware, this is commonplace for various industries in the US. The H1B Visa program is a grind-house for companies like FAANG, and I imagine the EU and other European nations have taken note to utilize the same policy.
Than goodness for that. It's a lotto on the stateside for certain which is incredibly tone deaf, but not surprising considering how the rest of our labor force is exploited at nearly every turn.
>> I immigrated from my country => I'm an immigrant.
That's not really the case within the EU at least it's not black and white. You have the same rights as the "native" population. What makes you an immigrat? People in the U.S don't say they immigrate when they move from one state to another...they just move and I think that's the case with the EU as well.
* I didn't speak the language when I moved here. I do now, but I still have a heavy accent that immediately tells everyone I wasn't born here.
* People still casually discriminate against me. I apply with a (fake) German name to apartments. Obviously I use my real name when I meet them and sign the documents, but it has helped me get the foot in the door many times before.
* I did go to school in Germany, and those are the the only Germans I'm friends with. I've made friends with other immigrants, but German society is much harder to break into.
* I can't vote in elections (which is fair, to be clear).
* While I understand German culture now, I don't understand it like a German does. It's kind of hard to quantify the impact of this but while I can understand what's expected of me and why people act in certain ways, it still feels like doing a dance rather than a mutual shared understanding.
All that said.. I feel pretty at place here. Living somewhere for a long time tends to do that. But you still never get over the feeling that you're some guy living in a place, rather than being of that place. It's more of a 50/50.. sometimes you feel as if you've always been there, and sometimes as if you just came that day.
The discrimination is a different issue and depends by many factors.
It's true that you can't vote in national elections but you can vote on local elections[0].
Usually you need just 5 years(on most EU countries)to get the citizenship to able to have this remaining right vote on national elections.
Now my question to you is: are you still an immigrant after you get the citizenship? What's different?
[0] "Every citizen of the Union has the right to vote and to stand as a candidate at municipal elections in the EU country in which he or she resides under the same conditions as nationals of that country."
To me it seems that you are putting yourself in a box. If you legally have the same rights you are no longer an immigrant. You are "one of them".
Based on your rationale you can end-up with race discrimination and nazi stuff. (e.g even if you are born in the same country your parents were immigrants so you are still a kind of non-native and so on).
The cultural issue goes both ways. The wave of immigration may make the natives feel discriminated as well. That doesn't make them "immigrants".
> If you legally have the same rights you are no longer an immigrant. You are "one of them".
Almost the same rights but not quite. You are also confining this issue to a purely legal standpoint -- my ability to travel the EU freely does not mean that I am Italian, for example.
edit: after rereading your comment, perhaps this passage refers to after I hypothetically take my citizenship. To answer that, I would consider myself then both German and an immigrant.
The point is, I do not identify as German, and Germans do not think I am German. I am influenced by German culture of course, having lived here long enough, but I am not strongly enough influenced to call myself German. I have younger siblings who are born here and have no memories of our family's homeland. I think of them as German, since they are in every way so -- they speak German, have German mannerisms and ideas, and do not understand a single bit of the culture of where I was born. They do not have German citizenship, but that doesn't matter at all since it's just who they are.
I think in the end it's about who you want to be. You could become german by thinking like a german, eating like a german but speaking like a german but that may require considerable effort. What means to be german also changes as more immigrants are arriving.
That aside my point is that it's wrong to put an immigrant on a visa to Germany on equal footing with an EU citizen. The former "may be deported" at any time for various reasons while the later has *all the rights german people have.
Discrimination happens even between different regions, the most common being in the U.S(i.e souther accents). There is also race discrimination even for "native" people. That doesn't make all the black, yellow people immigrants from Africa, Asia etc.
Left more than a decade ago so Germany feels like home now. Adjusting took a couple years, German culture was difficult to understand. Doing very well now, thank you for the comment.
It is in Berlin, my last software job didn’t have any German developers. That’s how it is in startups. Of course, it’s going to be the opposite in a small town.
All engineers in my company are immigrants, and the official work language is english. Located in Hamburg, serving nearly exclusively German customers.
Contrary to the parent comment and what you will read here: Not very. This won't change for a long time. Syrians from 2015 earn a lot less than the median and more than 70% rely on welfare that pays out more than they earn [1]. Up to 90% of Ukranians rely on welfare [2], costing the German Government half a billion dollars in in welfare checks alone. Marrocans are three times as likely to rely on welfare / to be jobless than Germans [3]. There are three times as many jobless people with a history of migration than Germans [4].
This is not a political agenda. These are just facts.
I saw an article recently that claimed Germany was going to surpass Japan as the third largest economy, aided partially by new arrivals. So I infer they’re pretty productive! Will try to find you a link.
Less than 50% are employed 5 years after arrival, in a country with 5.7% unemployment.
I imagine adults who don't speak the language, require financial assistance, etc, will be a net drain from a tax perspective on a society, esp. when you factor in the high CoL. Its hard enough for the average naturalized citizen to be a net positive from a tax perspective, let alone someone from an entirely different world. An inconvenient/unpopular, but obvious truth.
That data is about refugees. You are conflating new arrivals with refugees, which is not accurate. Some people might think it is even in bad faith.
What about all the other immigrants from EU or abroad whose higher education was not paid by Germany and they immigrate to Germany? Surely that is a positive. Germany is benefiting from paid-by-somebody-else qualified applicants.
> Highly educated immigrants who speak the language
The latter isn't really a requirement, at least when working in tech. I barely speak any German at all in my job, and I'm a German dude working at a German company. All companies I worked for since 2010 had English as "company language", and immigrants were in the majority (mostly from other European countries, but also US and Canada).
And it is 100% Germany's fault. Many of these people could be gainfully employed if not for Germany's beurocracy. I was abroad recently, in South Eastern Europe, and was amazed to see that in some countries there are people working who have no command of the local language, and no command of English either, and communicated in single words and with hand gestures, and they probably did not have valid work permits either. But they were working, gainfully employed and doing their job well enough. The same job (in a bakery) would require a three year trade education in Germany.
I can only agree here, because I saw it with my own eyes. If not for a group of dedicated volunteers in my town, most of the Syrian refugees would just be lost causes. The group organized transportation to job applications (it's in the sticks, no public transport, etc.), helped with paperwork, organized medical care, etc. The responsible authorities are understaffed for the problem and when staffed, you have a chance that the person in charge is actually working against the refugees. Without someone being able to read and understand the local statutes, you'd be lost.
Also your degree gets mostly not accepted for trivial reasons.
I know many engineers etc. working as taxi drivers or dish washers because their (excellent!) degree gets not accepted in DE.
At the same time industry is whining about "fachkräftemangel" - this could be a solved problem tomorrow if politics did not try to block immigrants wherever possible.
Because they're working but not in a way that is recognized by the government data which only recognizes formal labor for a proper employer.
I would go so far as to say that the employment rate is effectively always 95%+ for every population and that the only question is whether people are working in the formal economy, in school, informally working, caring, or doing any number of other activities that make up our human society.
Germany has an ever growing pile of problems to solve though. Corruption, lobbyism, undemocratic measures, horrendous education sector, overworked employees in the most critical institutions and jobs (teachers, medical personell, doctors, firefighters, etc.), bad integration policies, failing infrastructure and politicians, who do all they can to make sure it keeps failing, and probably many more.
Gemany might not be the worst place. But it definitely has lost a lot of appeal due to all those issues.
The whole Europe should welcome more immigrants to have strong economy and manufacturing base like China. Europe has space for another 500 million population.
Looking at how Germany's population after WW2 peaked three times already (in the early 70s, at the turn of the century, at the end of the pandemic), the environment there doesn't support having a growing population.
Moreover, the usual source countries have a below-replacement fertility rate, so the number of prospective immigrants is dwindling.
I don't see how this could be sustainable in the long run.
No one believes the "doctors and engineers" line anymore. That mantra began dying after the 2015-2016 Cologne mass attacks on women, and every new incident since then has reduced its viability. The current pro-Hamas demonstrations throughout Europe are just the latest in a long line of such.
The Mittelstand is certainly not rushing to hire them.
Germany is lacking workers in all types of jobs, from least to most skilled. It's reliant on every type of immigration to fill those positions.
Sure, Germany doesn't particularly need criminal immigrants, but the criminality of immigrants is wildly blown out of proportion by racists, to put it bluntly.
This is corroborated by every statistic on crime. The country has been getting safer ever year for decades. It is also corroborated by looking a little bit into which violent crime specifically becomes highly publicized. There is a lot of attention on (violent) crimes of immigrants, while even gruesome murders of e.g. foreign exchange students by locals don't ever make it further than local news.
I'm German living in Germany, and the "problems" of immigration are a total pseudo-issue. It's 95% bullshit. I've never seen any such problem with my own eyes, yet it's one of the most publicized and discussed topics in this country. It's just strange, and I can't explain it any other way than by racism.
> Sure, Germany doesn't particularly need criminal immigrants, but the criminality of immigrants is wildly blown out of proportion by racists, to put it bluntly.
Thanks. Had a good laugh at that line. :)
I remember that there was an analysis on the criminality of the Syrian refugees during the first wave. The police found that, no surprise, having more people increases the number of total criminal offences, but looking at the data in relative terms it was found that proportionally, Syrians are equally criminal as Germans.
Cologne attacks represent such a tiny fraction of immigrants. It’s like saying that 100% of Norwegian terrorist acts has been carried out by white men, and, therefore, Norwegian white men are all terrorists. Complety stupid.
The muslim generation (of which you can count the majority of immigrants to) is immensely more likely to be socially conservative, be it negative opinions on women's freedom or the acceptance of queer people and the jewish.
Why you think they would change their opinions just because they migrate to western countries is beyond me.
So, should one screen immigrants and only allow queer flag waving liberal progressives from SF in, or what is exactly your point? Many Germans would also not qualify if those were the requirements.
Isn't all of this stuff verging on thought policing?
> No one believes the "doctors and engineers" line anymore.
I always found that line to be rather interesting. German is a very difficult language and hard to master. To go about everyday life as an immigrant, you'll either need to live in a big city or somehow magically master German. Also, large parts of Germany are increasingly known for not being exacyl welcoming for people of non-german descent.
The notion that all people want to come here and highly specialized immigrants will come rushing through the door is kind of arrogant and typically ignorant. Germany is reliant of net-immigration over the coming decades if the economy wants any hope of workforce availability.
> That mantra began dying after the 2015-2016 Cologne mass attacks on women, and every new incident since then has reduced its viability. The current pro-Hamas demonstrations throughout Europe are just the latest in a long line of such.
negativity bias and media coverage are fascinating things. Not to take a way from the severity of the silvester attack, none of the issue you just mentioned is in any way representative of the average immigrant or refugee population. Even the "hamas demos" that received extreme media covereage were fairly small and peaceful on most occasions (also worth mentioning that demonstrating for piece in Gaza is not equal to demonstrating for Hamas, although there were instances).
> The Mittelstand is certainly not rushing to hire them.
That generalized and somewhat racist rant is missing one key factor: they have to and they want to. Birthrates have been in continuous decline since the 70s and now boomers are also about to completely enter their pensions. The dependency ratio for the coming decade(s) is looking bleak. Also, as a result of declining births, you people entering the workforce is very much down. if you want to survive as company, you'll need workers. If you want workers, there is a high chance you'll also have to hire immigrants and refugees. Most companies want this, the remaining hurdle isn't racism or the unwillingness to hire them, it's as always the German bureaucracy
Is it possible to instill the thing one learns about German culture into the immigrants, or at least, their children? I'd say yes. Are they up to the task? There aren't many countries that have the courage to indoctrinate their cultural values into their own children, let alone the immigrants.
I think that would qualify as ethnic cleansing to some extent, and don't think it would be moral. At the very least countries should be very upfront about their intentions if that is their plan. Imagine if you had to emigrate to China and was forcefully interned in a re-education camp...
Looking at the US, it does just fine integrating different cultures from all over the world. All the problem ethnicities in Europe are gainfully employed model citizens in the US. One should maybe ask what is going wrong in Europe before resorting to extreme measures.
Oh, wow. No, I wasn't referring to ethnic cleansing.
In the US, for example, Hollywood does an excellent job of instilling national pride. Three types of people come to the US:
- Those that are rich and / or well-educated.
- Those that desperately want to be in the US to come illegally.
- Refugees
The wealthy / well-educated are too busy trying to climb whatever ladder they've chosen.
The illegal migrants are too busy working to make ends meet. They don't get much for free - their kids get to go to school, which they're very thankful for.
The above two categories of people came here by choice and want to become American. They aren't a drain on the system, and will add to its wealth.
The US is able to control the inflow of refugees much more than Europe can. The US also has a lot of space to let different cultures and even ethnicities realize their own American dream.
What is „courage“ in indoctrinating people? It’s actually dumb. Diversity of thoughts and values is where societal progress comes from, when outdated stuff gets questioned.
The important part is preventing one culture to overwhelm everything else of course, this is where many fail. Diversity must not bow to anything that wants to enforce beliefs into everyone, no matter if religions (domestic or imported) or politics or whatever.
Diversity itself is a core value in itself, however.
Unifying values that the diverse groups agree are common among each other - values that they're willing to defend against some foreign aggressor, and indoctrinate into new immigrants.
What does it mean to be British? or French? or German? What is the European dream? Is it attainable? Defendable? Teachable? It's gotta be more than the language.
Stagnant cultures rot. Think how much culture has changed, even in the last 10 years.
Plenty of research shows that if you put people in safe places with opportunity, they of course respond very well. They also embrace very attractive concepts like freedom, human rights, fairness, etc.
> Any wing will agree that Germany's energy policy has been bad.
Very true.
> They shut down their nuclear production and replaced it with lignite.
Not really true and often a bad faith argument. While it is true that some of the output has been replaced with coal, it's a) not everything; having the coal power on unscheduled has been deemed unnecessary (with the benefit of hindsight). b) ignoring the fact that the scheduled shutdown of coal has been rescheduled to be earlier, resulting in net-savings over the original plan (which was admittedly still a massive policy failure).
This is simply false.
It's trivial to see from the statistics(https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...) that the phaseout of nuclear energy was matched by an increase in renewables, whilst lignite and coal production has remained static.
Come on, think. The addition of solar allowed Germany to phase out something. They chose to phase out nuclear rather than the dirtiest form of coal. Do you think that was the wise choice?
The energy policy is catastrophic, there is nothing right wing there. The wind power revolution will not happen, at least not nearly as fast or cheap as the government is planning.
I am continually astounded by the absolute obsession of YCN with German nuclear power stations, or the lack of them. Not a single thread about Germany fails to attract some comment about energy policy, no matter how tenuous the connection.
If this was replicated then every German citizen would spend several hours every day discussing it. In reality I can't recall ever having a face to face conversation about it.
So, nuclear? Isn't faster nor cheaper. Coal? A no-go due to polution. Gas? To expensive for electricity in the current, read since at least for the last ten years, market. Leaves hydro, oil, wind and solar.
But yeah, Germany financed and caused Russias war with Ukraine by impoeting gas from Putin, I know.
Shutting down the three last nuclear reactors in the middle of an energy crisis was probably one of the most moronic things in world politics during the last 5000 years.
The decision to shut the down was met years before said crisis. Run times were extended as much as possible (safety, maintennace, fuel).
Edit: I didn't know that we have reliable information geo politics dating back to almost 3000 BC. Regardless, the last decade has plenty examples of worse decisions than Germany buying gas from Russia.
agree on the stupid decision. but more important: the way forward.
- building up new nuclear reactors takes _many_ years and is still quite expensive, so its not a short-term solution. long term due to climate change the cooling might be a problem (like france already has issues in the summer when rivers run dry and they had to throttle nuclear reactors)
- fossils must be phased out, not an option
- hydrogen is at best a storage option for surplus energy (like solar), but highly inefficient to begin with
- renewables are already cheaper than everything else and prices are dropping still [1]
so either people want to believe climate crisis doesn't exist and want to double down on fossils, or believe nuclear will solve it but it can't right now, or hope that some miracle happens somehow and energy/climate will be a solved problem somehow.
I'd prefer to focus on the here and now, which means renewables, plus some storage in any form, instead of beating dead horses over and over again.
It's the single worst decision ever made in the history of mankind? Replacing some power stations of one type with some renewables of another type, without any disruption to the functioning power grid?
World War 1. World War 2. China's Great Leap Forward. Stalin's Five Year Plan. The Vietnam war. All worse than changing the mix of the European energy grid by a few %?
I just don't get it. Please, please, someone explain this to me, why people say things like this. Is there some right wing website going endlessly on about how Germany is a doomed failed state, as some kind of way to relive glory days of the Allied victory?
