> The Bosch plant will make specialist power-management chips and Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) that are designed to carry out a single task, such as triggering a car's automatic braking system.
> It will not however address shortages of products like microcontrollers which have forced auto makers to halt production and are expected by industry leaders and analysts to extend into next year.
Congrats.
Which is why we also need 14 years to build a new, medium sized airport in the capital.
2 runways, 3 terminals, room for expansion for 2 more terminals. Capacity for 27 million passengers per year, going up to 50 million once expanded.
Compared to the absolute largest airports in the world (around 100 million passengers per year), yes, it's "medium". But it would be in the top 10 airports in Europe and still something like top 50 in the world, over time.
Right now it's still only France, but German politicians are talking about adopting a similar strategy.
The French model actually aims to ban flights that have a sub 4h train connection. Meaning the Eastern European nations without high speed rail would have fewer flights affected if this becomes EU policy.
It would cut a lot of flights to neighboring countries, and domestically in Germany.
A railroad investor could look at existing flights and accurately project how many passengers they can expect, since flights would be blocked the second they open their carriage doors.
Quite simply, if you're under 4h train connection you're far enough to justify a flight.
BER is pretty safe on flight numbers.
According to [1] and [2] it wouldn' even make the top 50.
As a German I feel insulted by the whole affair. It's ridiculous how incompetent and corrupt this project was managed.
1: https://gettocenter.com/airports/top-100-airports-in-world 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport
*edit: "completely false" isn't helpful here.
The stereotype of German efficiency is based on centuries old reputation, but not really representative of present day Germans.
https://www.dw.com/en/german-efficiency-the-roots-of-a-stere...
Maybe a better way to express it is:
The stereotype of German efficiency is based on centuries old reputation, but not really representative of present day Germans.
Anecdotally, from working and living in Germany, I've very much noticed that Germans are better with time management, and work shorter hours and get more done compared with my home country (Australia).
I'd be surprised to see contrary evidence, though it's certainly a possibility. But the article you linked does not appear to demonstrate much of substance in terms of present day productivity.
Stereotypes can be damaging, sure, but when discussing certain aspects of a culture they can be true and based on cultural norms. I don't think we should broadly dismiss them when used in the right context, and not in a discriminatory fashion.
- We are not lazy.
- Not everyone in the country does siesta. We just have lunch.
- There is no Sun everywhere. The North is rainier than the UK. And the sky is as much as gray, if not more.
- There is no Mediterranean climate everywhere.
- Catholicism plummeted since Franco's death.
But to respond directly to you, a stereotype typecasting an entire country to lazy is damaging and not particularly useful unless you want to insult someone.
However handwaving away trends in cultures as a stereotype can also result in missing important facets, e.g. Burn out in Japanese work culture.
Are Germans more "efficient"? Idk, let's look at some data and try to nut out whether it checks out.
If it is, would be nice to know what aspects make it so. Though it's usually not simple.
My guess is that because there are all sorts of limits on how much people can work (there are lots of holidays here) so the industries that tend to survive are those that are highly automated, and have high productivity per worker.
My feeling is that productivity-per-worker is essentially a political choice. Low skill, low automation labour is inherently unproductive, but it's also flexible and it doesn't require any strategic direction from the state. High skill high automation jobs are very productive, but they are brittle - if the market moves, all that skill and tooling becomes worthless.
The German (also Japanese) approach isn't all sunshine and rainbows, though. In Germany, for example, a pack of ten paracetamol costs like four euros. That's about a 100x markup from what paracetamol actually costs. This is because in Germany, pharmacies are protected from competition, to preserve the sector. The same is true of taxis, for example.
It's more complex than that. In Spain the "presentismo" (being in-place ,in your office, phisically in your seat) it's taken from the middle manager/boss as a religion. Thus, productiviy is halved even if we work even more than you than average.
And, yes, OFC, this was a big issue because of the Covid and remote work over the internet.
Obviously nothing is universal. But to an American visiting Spain the hours of operation there are striking! I only visited Madrid and Sevilla, but I found that restaurants and many stores were open much later than I was accustomed to (my hometown mostly shuts down around 8pm or 9pm, for example), and the fact that anything was closed around lunch was very odd! It definitely gave a fun "flavor" to my trip that was quite different from, say, Singapore.
Lately France is getting a bit more of the delay too, with shops opening at 10 and closing at 19.
Technically we should be on GMT, not GMT+1. Then we aren't that far from France.
The rule-following in a work setting is all about risk mitigation and rules tend to help with that. Similarly for following established processes. I know this is pretty annoying but at least I'd argue the status of work is transparent and the outcome reliable (even if it may take a long time because too many hypotheticals were considered). The unstructured working style of the US can certainly drive a German a bit crazy at times :)
In a social setting rules are also enforced to ensure that you don't negatively impact the personal enjoyment of others. For example, no mowing your lawn on Sundays so everyone can enjoy a quiet peaceful day. No talking loudly at your table in a restaurant so you don't bother the other diners etc
Compared to the US I find Germans and French to be fairly similar with the difference being that French are more relaxed in attitude but definitely complain even more than Germans haha
You come from a country where trains are ALWAYS VERY LATE, Germany is efficient because the trains are just a little late.
OR
You come from a country where the trains are ALWAYS ON TIME, Germany is inefficient because the trains are just a little late.
What I do think is interesting is that people think German's are efficient. Where does that come from? That's what the article is about.
Social studies have too many variables to strongly conclude exactly why, and I'm not coming out with great sources here (om phone), but it does appear that Germany works far less than Australia, US, Mexico etc.
https://www.instarem.com/blog/are-you-working-more-than-you-...
Some of it is likely wealth. But some of it is definitely cultural attitudes to work.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204770404577082...
I don't know about German but French speakers will often use circulation for traffic because it's a false friend.
Several engineering and electronics companies, led by the German giants Siemens and Bosch, struggled to retain control over the complex fire protection system that included 3,000 fire doors, 65,000 sprinklers, thousands of smoke detectors, a labyrinth of smoke evacuation ducts, and the equivalent of 55 miles of cables.
“Our part, the detection of hot air or smoke ... is functioning,” says Thilo Resenhoeft, a Bosch spokesman. “The responsibility for the dysfunction lies with somebody else.” Siemens spokesman Oliver Santen confirms that the company was originally responsible for building the “automated fire protection facility” and “the control unit for fresh-air circulation.” Testing in 2013 “showed the need for reworking part of the system,” he says. Santen declines to attribute responsibility other than to say that Siemens is “responsible for the reconstruction of the fresh-air circulation system.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-07-23/how-berli...
(The issue was not fixed until 2019. Quite disappointed, we didn't even get a Murder Horse out of it.)
Damned, I am démasqué.
It was originally scheduled to open in 2007
Good foresight by Bosch.
AFAIK we still don't know where it will be built, but there has been some progress... EDIT: They agreed upon where! But they don't know when and holding another forum due to public outcry over the chosen path... sigh.
Meanwhile, Switzerland built the connection ~40 years ago [1]
But this is a special situation, a really small gap between the Swiss highway and the Austrian/German highway, so transit had to go through the villages and clogging up everything at the bottlenecks along the border (or in Höchst, Hard, Bregenz, Lustenau, Hohenems, Feldkirch etc.)
The variant that (at the time) is supposed to be built would be 8.6km.
But hey, if this pans out, Berlin can still be an okay local airport: https://www.businessinsider.com/first-look-new-transport-hub...
In France, some years ago, they closed a plant producing automotive parts, but they kept all the employees, retrained them and started producing solar panel components. It was pretty incredible as at the same time, French companies were just laying off brutally.
However the issue isn't really that they cannot find labour - it is that they cannot find labour at a cost which makes their current business model sustainable. (Mostly an issue in labour intensive, seasonal sectors relying on unskilled labour - agriculture, aquaculture, restaurants...)
Essentially, the gripe is 'If we paid our employees a decent wage, we'd be out of business.'
Sigh.
It's funny how depriving foreigners of their livelihood is so often pitched as being for their own good.
We recruit folks from Romania promising them a decent wage, say $10 and hour, and they are typically naive folks straight out of school. Part of the contract is that they are provided with lodging, food, etc. Then they realise that after getting charged $50 for living in a tent and other "charges" they actually make like $10 a day.
The sceme basically provided a steady supply of serfs to pick fruit, and noone in britain would sign up for this.
Other cases are less egrigeous, but even in skilled work, the employee may realise the opportunity is not great, but depends on the job for visa and so decide to put up with it untill they can get permanent right to stay. Its not a terrible deal, but it wouldnt work for 'natives'
I have skin in this game because I'm married to a former migrant worker who started off over here working in restaurants and coffee shops, and have a niece who's currently here in the UK as a student. She completes her studies this summer and is taking up her 2 year work visa for graduates.
They all know that once they are inside the borders, its harder for the authorities to deport them.
Its basically the price to pay for a shot at first world lifestyle.
The last thing most of them want is a crackdown.
Deportation doesn't come into this, that's only relevant once you've broken the law or overstayed your visa.
The game is about meeting criteria for a visa route, and doing seasonal work does not help in any way. Having a UK degree enables you to get a job here easier, but thats about it.
In UK, if you are switching from a short-term to long-term visa you have to leave the country and apply for a visa again from outside the country.
Even if you are applying from inside the country, the home office does not hesitate to reject applications for the tiniest reasons. Once that happens, some people might go to court if they have the money and ground to dispute the decision, if your lot in your home country is really bad you might stay illegally, but for the vast majority neither option is worth it and they move on.
Whether you are pro or against immigration, it's unclear why unscurpulous employer should be the ones to benefit from this arrangement
Yes, that is precisely the route.
The billions (like moi) in the third world have realised that the longer they violate the immigration laws, the better their chances of having some activist argue their right to stay.
Their is no other law/regulation that I know of where the longer you violate the law, the more rights your have.
Which is exactly why the boat arrivals to Australia dried up once the processing was moved outside the jurisdiction of Australian law.
They were on to us.
I suggest you research “adverse possession”, and “easement by prescription”; if you view nation-states and their territory as analogous to persons and their real property, they are quite similar concepts to what you seem to view as unique.
I imagine that backfired since those are, you know, educated, motivated and the vast majority speak English, so at least a bunch of them figured out how to contact authorities.
I wouldn't be surprised if recent batches are from less educated segments.
For instance, with wages being as they are, many unemployed people would get less payout working full time in the agricultural sector than they would just sitting at home receiving unemployment benefits (at slightly less than 2/3 of their former wage).
The result being, of course, that whatever labour does show up tends to be less than fully motivated, adding to the employers' woes and reluctance to hire them in the first place.
I don't mind migrant labour at all; what I do mind is the idea that when the labour pool shrinks drastically, employers still try to avoid the obvious solution to attract labour - by increasing wages, if only temporarily.
These are extraordinary times (one can but hope), and extraordinary short-term measures to counter that doesn't seem unreasonable.
I think it’s just a question of leadership
The Internet says Jeff Bezos has a bit more than 10%.
Hence companies which are either not publicly traded (like Bosch) or is majority owned by someone or other (like Amazon) is much more likely to be able to make long term decisions - as they are not always geared towards getting the most impressive earnings during the current quarter to satisfy stockholders.
It probably come down to the decision of one guy at Bosch who ultimately made the decision to go ahead with this, and this sounds like it was the democratic decision of an entire population of a country - who mostly don’t care what Bosch is up to.
I'd call it luck.
I doubt that in the planning stages they could anticipate the auto industry order-then-Pandemic-cancel-then-order-again wave that messed up the logistics of the semiconductor industry.
And chip being important to cars has been known for a long time with stories going back to 2013 within the industry. So you can at least infer that Bosch knew this for a long time. This is their second Fab and it was planned in 2017 and confirmed in 2018.
It is like TSMC, all of a sudden everyone talks about it. But in pre-2015 hardly anyone knew them or heard of it. Those that heard of it only thought they Fab chips for Nidia. It was Apple that bring them to the forefront.
Sometimes I just think mainstream media is such an unreliable source of information I am wondering if there are any point reading them at all other than to gather the flow of current society sentiment.
Bingo. I forget the name for this law/effect, but at some point everyone runs across a story in the mainstream news about which you happen to be more knowledgeable than the author/reporter/"expert guest" and the veil is lifted for a moment and you think "wow they really don't have any idea what they're talking about!" But then they go on to trust the opinion of these same outlets on economics or foreign policy, etc.
> other than to gather the flow of current society sentiment.
Even this I wouldn't trust. Perhaps if you treat it loosely as "the zeitgeist of manufactured consent" or "what They want you to think is the current society sentiment"
I don't know if the media I consume is "mainstream media" but I haven't seen anyone blame TSMC.
AMD also had a fab until around 2008 in Dresden.
Zhou Enlai: "I believe it is too early to tell."
(This quote, while authentic, is too good to be true - the quote harks from 1972, and in context it is evident they are discussing the 1968 student unrest, not the 1789 revolution. Still...)
It isn't always impossible to make good general predictions. For example, some papal encyclicals have predicted with spot on accuracy the general character of how things will develop long before they did if certain things aren't sorted out. These sorts of predictions, in part, benefit from concerning the unfolding of philosophical (and theological) beliefs, beliefs which contains within themselves their own logical entailments. So these encyclicals weren't predicting particularities like "what will be the stock price of Amazon in 2030" or "who will win the presidency in 2030 and will this president like ham", but rather the general prevailing conditions, attitudes, etc. characterizing future generations and the resulting social order, for example.
2) Other countries build chip foundries to capitalize on the uncertainty
3) The risk of China provoking world war by reclaiming control over Taiwan reduces to an acceptable level, and they take over
4) No one cares because the supply of iPhones and Alexas is not disrupted
My guess is that they see this sort of diversification from reliance on China as inevitable. They resist it of course (see 5G equipment in Europe) but their investments throughout the rest of the world paint a picture of supporting developing nations economically to the point that as they grow & prosper, they grow into client states of China.
This actually presents a bit of peril though. China is not going to be thrilled that its industrial influence is on the decline, and the question is "How will they respond?"
We already know part of the response: We can see it play out in the contentious situation regarding adoption of 5G equipment in Europe. There is also the fact that China is investing enormous sums of money in foreign ventures and areas of the developing world, e.g., parts of Africa. These areas may effectively become client states to China.
It is, in some ways, a very interesting response to the failed methods employed by the Soviet Union. There, client states were obtained & held largely through military means. That was done either with the threat of force to client states to keep in line, or military support for regimes or regime change, for example North Vietnam.
Especially having some experience with those endeavors, China has moved on to non-military methods-- economic development. That is probably preferable to the threat massive global conflict, or even just lots of smaller ones, but if you worry about China expanding their values throughout the world, in being more effective it is also more worrying.
Probably about the best thing we can do is the path we have started on: diversification from reliance on China, and our own support in equal or greater measures of the developing world.
I should be clear though: when I talk of expanding China's values as a negative, I always mean that in the political sense of the repressive Chinese government, not the people themselves.
In contrast to smaller nations, the EU as a whole is too large to ignore even if we aren't following the line of the cold war superpowers. We can do our own thing and cooperate where it suits us.
On another note, your example of Vietnam is pretty ridiculous, as the situation was the other way around - the US invaded and committed genocide in what was originally a one-sided civil war, in the name of "holding the red wave".
Vietnam wasn't a shining example of human rights, but US policy in this case was abysmal and led to the death of millions of people. And the fact that the US stil does not not accept that they committed a genocide speaks volumes about the moral integrity defenders of the Trans-Atlantic alliance like to bring up.
Well just for your information, they are not. The so called chip shortage is because a Renesas factory which produces microcontrollers burned down. To put this into perspective is like Intel using one of his fabs: you have the motherboard but no processor. Usually changing a component is no big deal but in this case is like a complete redesign.
So i do not see any link here between Bosch and TSMC.( except that they both make "chips").
Also, at that time it was obvious that power electronics was going to be in high demand, especially of SiC type.
And in terms of the fragility of the world's industrial and economic engines, perhaps this is a realization that globalization has gone too far and the pendulum needs to swing more towards slightly higher self-sufficiency. Not even for some philosophy of anti-globalism, but merely because things are too brittle as they are now.
[1]https://www.reuters.com/article/bosch-factory/robert-bosch-t...