Anyway, the absolute key issue seems to be energy costs. If they hadn't skyrocketed, this wouldn't be happening.
A press release on the relevant legislation can be found here (in German): https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/aktuelles/energieprei...
The most important section in this matter reads in English translation as follows:
"From January 2023, industrial customers will receive 70% of their natural gas consumption in 2021 from their suppliers at a guaranteed 7 cents per kilowatt hour. For heat consumption, the price will be capped at 7.5 cents per kilowatt hour, also for 70% of consumption in 2021. For the remaining consumption, industry will pay the regular market price."
See: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Gasversorgung/aktuelle_g... (in German)
Germany had a pretty audacious but absolutely achievable renewables plan 15 years ago but Schroeder & Merkel canned it for cheap Russian Gas and now that the price for that has become apparent there wailing and screaming. It’s just normalizing - if the original plan had been pursued, profits would not have been that great but the cost of adapting would have been staggered too.
Now the bill is due.
Availability of sufficient power reserves not bound to Russia would alleviate many industrial cost issues right now. Costs are up primarily because cheap power is gone.
The chemical industry requiring gas is a separate problem with a similar root cause - supply monoculture. Germany built its first LNG terminal last year, before that it was Russian gas because it was cheap and it was betting on Northstream.
Lack of supply diversity, failure to plan, ideological blinders and good old corruption.
The article is missing the point by failing root cause analysis.
Politico started as a blog and newsletter on the Hill back in the late 2000s/early 2010s where we'd leak gossip, but they had amazing product-market fit and ended up opening an EU office a couple years ago (lots of Hill adjacent people also worked in Parliament and Bundestag via early career Atlanticist programs).
A couple of my own quotes have ended up in Politico
https://www.zeit.de/2023/16/mathias-doepfner-axel-springer-i...
I'm just calling it as I know it having worked closely with people who currently work at Politico or used to work at Politico,
What happens in the future I can't predict, but were there to be any kind of meddling in a HEAVILY AMERICAN newsroom would
1. Be very openly reported on by their competitors
2. See a massive amount of disgruntled ex-employees leaving for Axios (eg. the exodus at Protocol), The Hill, etc.
3. Wokld be talked about openly as a lot of us have worked closely with Politico members.
You'd think that quoting facts would strengthen ones argument, all these tiny and sometimes very specific facts with no context had the opposite effect.
You get that only when you look at a bunch of "unrelated", "small" facts. If there are a lot of facts pointing in one direction, maybe there is something to it.
The other point is: That was not cheery picking. There are no other facts that would point in the opposite direction… More or less everything in Germany is in decline. That's just true. Source: I'm living here since about 40 years.
Though the article interpreted something quite wrong in the very beginning: The decline started quite exactly around 20 years ago. It was caused by the move to ultra-capitalism (the mentioned big social reforms 20 years ago), which made Germany a low wage country, which made the people poor and started an exodus of the well educated parts of society. The reforms made some of the numbers capitalists are interested in look good for some time, but at the expense of maximally "squeezing out" society. Now this short sighted tactic backfires.
By now almost 1/6 of the people here are poor (and 1/4 is at risk of becoming poor):
https://www.malteser.de/armut-in-deutschland.html
Almost nobody can afford children. ("Bio-Germans" are foreseeable dying out therefore, and it doesn't look like this is avoidable any more when you try to play the numbers game. The article showed the relevant statistic. At least we get some migrants; with children. But the "Bio-Germans" hate migrants. Also this may pay off not before one generation; we need to educate the children; but the education system is broken…)
Actually it's getting hard to even afford a living place. Liberal housing markets made space in areas of high population density so expensive "normal" people can't afford it any more. At the same time building new housing is too expensive and nobody invest in that. Which made companies in the building business die out, and even if the state would massively invest in housing right now we don't have the capacity to build that stuff. And even if we would have the firms, they would not find employees…
https://www.mieterbund.de/fileadmin/public/Studien/Studie_-_...
(Fun fact: AFAIK if Germany would build enough housing it would completely miss it's green goals, as building housing creates a lot of CO₂.)
The complete dependence on the car industry becomes a real problem at the same time. It's not only the big car manufacturers. But the largest part of "the Mittelstand" are external suppliers for the car industry… Should this implode (and it looks like that, as China is flooding the car markets, that's a fact) this will have catastrophic results for Germany. We simply don't have anything besides the car stuff. All we've got is already gone. And what's left is leaving because of he astronomical energy prices.
Big players are moving elsewhere, the smaller ones just die. Result: More people becoming poor, which just accelerates the downward spiral.
In regard to modern tech, like IT, Germany is a developing country. We're completely depended on the US and Asia in this area! People are making jokes about "Russian computers"[1] but the sad truth is we couldn't even build such a thing on our own.
In the last decades the education became completely messed up also. They tried to make everybody go to university; which destroyed the previously high class educational system. By now even the firms offering apprenticeship in handicraft trades complain that you can't find people skilled for that as the people coming from school can't properly read, write, or do basic calculus. (Source: I've talked to people offering apprenticeships, not only once, and I've had some contact to the youth.)
At the same time politics try to just close their eyes to most problems: If you listen to the local propaganda "everything is good" or, currently, "It's Putin's fault!". (That's not completely true, of course, there is some critical thinking even in mainstream here and there, but they hide it usually under a really large pile of straight propaganda; and it became quite seldom. This wasn't always like that. Even the state media was much more critical 20 years ago. By now it's obviously just coordinated propaganda. We actually pay over 10 billion Euro for our state propaganda…)
The article was actually refreshing unpolitical. You usually don't see such "pure" recitation of facts in the local (and especially state) media. (I was waiting the whole time while reading when we "get to the meat" and I get informed what we should buy to safe our souls, or who to blame for all the problems, but to my surprise this part never surfaced. The article looked almost like proper journalism from decades ago).
Just naming those facts is actually considered "right wing activism" here in Germany. You will get canceled quite instantly for saying the things the article said if you state such stuff for example as comment in some of the mainstream media outlets. Yes, they cancel for reciting facts. Especially if the recited facts have potential to "irritate people", and you present some proper numbers to make your point.
(Disclaimer: I'm not supporting any political party any more. I was once "leaning to the left". But the lefties are by now the same scammers as every other political movement. All these people in politics just care about redirecting state money into their own pockets. No difference the "color" or "side" of the political movement. Kleptocracy in it's final stage. Peak capitalism. This won't end good… And if there wouldn't be the language barrier I would actually start to consider to move to China. It's getting noticeably worse here and while looking at the current state of affairs it foreseeably won't get better during my lifetime anymore.)
[1] https://www.heise.de/news/MIG-Akinak-Russlands-selbstentworf... (See also the comments!)
Do you know by the way why Germany and software don’t go well together? What do you think?
Sure! But it's a really substantial part. If this branch of "Germany-AG" gets into trouble this will have noticeable consequences.
> Carl Zeiss, for example, is a big company doing state-of-the-art work.
There is always some company which makes good money and is important. The point was about the big picture. And by now even the usual big players, which are "too big to fail" and are strongly supported by the state, start to get nervous. The article cited quite some of the most important players and some of the most influential economy think tanks.
> Do you know by the way why Germany and software don’t go well together? What do you think?
Complicated question. I don't know, to be honest.
It's not like we don't have any SW industry. But it seems not to catch up.
From the global viewpoint Germany has SAP, but else?
I don't think it's because we "can't do software". But it seems we can't do any relevant software.
Two points come to mind:
We don't have a culture of "pure software products". Most SW is in industrial applications. But this SW isn't very visible, and most of the time it is considered just a secondary or even tertiary part of a product. In the eyes of the management it's often still "just a byproduct" or even "pure cost". The car people for example really didn't get it until just lately that SW is now a primary sales argument. They're still trying to catch up. But actually it's quite laughable what they're doing because they still think you can "produce SW as any other car part"… Same goes for a lot of other companies. SW is just a matter of expense. They don't try to innovate here, they preferably would order somewhere some box with the "needed parts" in it and "concentrate on their business".
Likely related: People who "built mostly machines until now" don't really know how to build SW. So even if they realized that they need SW to make their products competitive they don't know how to get there.
The other thing is: Nobody here really tries to compete with the leaders on the world market. There is no motivation to do so. Even the state buys everything from US companies.
There is at the same time almost no support for local SW companies.
The only exception I know of is actually gaming. Germany invests some (imho symbolic amounts of) money in local game developers. But there are no (proper) big state financed projects that try to create something in the business and/or mass market related sectors.
There are some projects but all the money gets wasted on feeding the big industry players like Siemens or Telekom—which won't produce anything in the end, like always here when it comes to this kind of projects.
In my opinion Germany could actually do something about the software industry issue. We were able to build high-end machines (at least in the past). Software is "just" a different kind of machine… But as long it's politically not wanted to compete with the US software industry nothing will happen, imho.
Germany could inhabit a quite interesting niche, if they would take it serous: High-quality, actually secure, and privacy oriented software, in the high-price segment. This is an area currently under explored. Everything else from the competition is optimized to be cheap, just about bearable from the quality standpoint, and of course it's very insecure. We can't compete with that. But we could compete with the others doing the opposite. (Biggest problem would be to create a market with demand, as most buyers currently also only look at the price tag. One would need to change that, with really outstanding quality. We have here still some good foundational research, also when it comes to IT and software. So we could try to tackle this from that angle.)
Yeah, but how many middle class families, can these niche super-high end sectors making state of the art optics for the semiconductor industry, feed vs the automotive and industrial sector.
What will happen to Germany's famous manufacturing sector based middle class? Have you seen the job requirements for working at a company like Zeiss? It's MSc and above. All those factory workers can't go get a PhD in optics and physics and switch to designing mirrors and lenses.
It will mean a speedrun of UK's deindustrialization which itself went horribly, with dead cities, homelessness, unemployment and drug abuse. Or it will be like current day France with constant rioting and looting as all those cheap migrant workers Germany invited for their factory work, will be left without jobs.
So the way I see it, the German gov is stuck between a rock and a hard place, needing to use taxpayer money to subsidize a manufacturing industry that depends on cheap labor and cheap energy, to stay in Germany and not off-shore immediately and create mass unemployment.
Then imagine someone saying that's bad because it's important for other people's kids to be able to live in luxury without ever having to work a day in their lives.
Imagine saying that the only way things can be fair is if you steal from others you think have too much to make things 'equal'.
I am saying that in cases where it has nothing to do with working harder and everything with profiting off the work of others, which is invariably the case with multimillionaires, there must be a limit
If you're gonna play games with framing things as "stealing", the everyone whose income is from investment is stealing from the people who work to produce these returns.
So if millionaires are bad for investing and doing good... does that mean "poor" are bad for not investing? Does that mean that the poor people should suffer when investments go bad? And what about stuff that requires billions - IE: Star Link, Tesla, Spaceships, etc? You think a company shouldn't reward people who risked millions?
Your problem is you don't accept that most people won't take the risks - either because they can't or because they won't. Those that do are what have created the world of miracles we live in. From computer to phones to the site we are talking across right now.
Saying that investers are stealing is a bold faced lie because without those investors there wouldn't be anything to "steal". And if employees had to work at a company that wasn't profitable for decades - IE: Tesla wasn't profitable for 17 years - then a majority of companies wouldn't exist.
outlandish inheritance tax punishes those who work hard and take risks - risks that should be rewarded and not punished by greedy people unwilling or unable to take those risks. "the rich" already pay more than their share and it's simple greed to want more More MORE MOAR! of other peoples money simply because they have the balls to take risks.
So you can still leave a pretty large nest egg for your children. And if you really wanted to make sure they would be ok without you, you would have to pay for a good education and taught them the value of hard work. (And used your social network/connections to get them a good first job/seed money to start their own business)
Again: Always time to take money you didn't earn. Greed is an ugly emotion and socialism/marxism/theft is a fail no matter how you try to dress it up.
I'm defending the fact that people always want what others have. Most people don't give a shit about poor people they just hate rich people. Because they "didn't earn it".
My position is real simple: Taxation is theft and greedy people always want to take from successful people.
Hard pill to swallow but the rich already pay their fair share in most circumstances - IE: the vast majority of taxes is paid by the "rich" in the US for example... but it's never enough. There's never enough of other peoples money to spend to help "the poor".
It starts with "greed is wanting that which you didn't earn". No, that is not what greed is by any stretch of imagination.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/greed
"a very strong wish to continuously get more of something, especially food or money"
It is, by definition, the rich who are greedy. Those who want to limit generational wealth are fighting greed
Like Paul birch said [1]:
> Why do people react this way? Why do they hide? Why are they unable to face the truth? Because the truth would be painful. Not only would they be forced to re-evaluate their whole outlook on life, in a costly paradigm shift that any rational person will wish to avoid; *they would also have to accept that their customary behaviour and cherished beliefs have been wrong; not merely mistaken, but ethically and morally inexcusable.* They would have to admit, to themselves even more than to the world, that they have given aid and comfort to thugs and thieves and murderers, that they have aided and abetted banditry and oppression and fraud, that they are themselves thieves and plunderers and oppressors — in short *that they are evil.*
[1]https://mindstalk.net/paulbirch/Emotional%20Capital%20Blocks...
It is infact you, the person you are agreeing with, and Paul Birch who have spent their whole lives supporting theft, grift and coercion.
because they aren't evil. The vast majority of people are good and follow the rules as set forth (unless you follow the rule that all people break the laws so it's not like poor people are more "pure" in any sense".
Capitalists aren't evil because they do stuff that makes money any more than poor people are evil because they aren't smart enough, don't work hard enough, aren't lucky enough to have skill, etc.
Musk and Bezo's aren't "Evil" unless in your world view evil means "successful". And that's a shit world view.
or let me spin it this way...
You're absolutely correct, but for people who have spent their whole lives being victims, being jealous and not being willing to work hard enough doing stuff that's valuable to society, it's difficult for them to see themselves as the cause of their failure.
All of those are problems related to lacking education, which is related to poor living conditions in the lower social classes.
By distributing wealth more equally, you improve the world your children are going to live in, and by extension their own lives.
"But rich people don't get paid for being rich, they get paid to take risks! To invest!"
There are two definitions of investment running around. One definition has a moral component: you sacrifice consumption today in order to build factories or take risks, thereby enabling greater consumption tomorrow, improving the world and taking a cut of the improvement. That's fine. Great, even! There's a second definition that is amoral, though: anything that you put capital into that provides a return is an investment. This second definition is just fine with "create a problem, sell the cure" and indeed encourages a lot of it. If you look at economic sectors, the ones that are doing really well (health care, housing, education) seem to have this as a high level strategy. Underproduce doctors, price goes up. Fuck up the zoning, price goes up. Pump more debt, price goes up. Merge up the competitors, price goes up. This is deeply unfortunate. Capitalism gets most of its legitimacy from the idea of competition as a check on power, but it seems that most of the money is made by figuring out how not to compete. They teach the Prisoner's Dilemma on the very first day of business school with this very lesson in mind. Don't play the game, play the meta-game! Don't build a product, build a moat! This is highly problematic.
When the economy expands by multiples but most people see their pie slice not only failing to keep pace in relative turns but failing to grow in absolute terms, that's a problem, a failed promise.
What's the answer? The right will hop up and down shrieking "Stalin!" "Mao!" any time you talk about taxing assets, but no, 100 million people will not starve to death if capital gains income gets taxed as regular income, or if we meet in the middle with work hours so that people are allowed to raise their own kids again, or any of a dozen other progressive policies. They tried to coup the last Roosevelt and they'll try to coup the next one, but the prospertiy gospel's own failed promises will be its undoing. We've fixed this before and we'll fix it again.
[rolls dice - dice gives a 6]
unbelievable ... not 3, not 15, but 6 - that's remarkably close to 8!
you're some smart dice, aren't you!