Germans don't have car payments usually. They pay for the car in cash, if they don't have enough, they buy a smaller car :)

[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1065113/umfra....

Just wanted to highlight the different mindset. I am a German living in Canada with my family. The mindset is very different. Based on feeling, 70% of Canadians I know have car debt, whereas I know one person in my German friend circle who took out a loan. It's just not very common to take on debt for cars.

For example, the proportion of financed new cars to all new cars sold is 84% which means almost all new cars are financed.

But that does not say anything how expensive are the cars, how expensive compared to income, how long they are being used or what is the proportion of new cars sold to used cars sold.

In Europe people tend to use the cars for longer after they buy them new and then the cars tend to be used for longer after they are sold used.

Also, in Europe people tend to buy smaller cars. And, historically, we preferred cars that use less fuel which means a lot of older cars are still very viable compared to older US cars.

Too much debt is a bad thing, but so is being excessively debt averse.

I would also say, historically, a dollar now is worth a lot more than a dollar 50 years from now, and your quality of life is probably better, too.

I see lots of people from my parents generation who saved their whole life… and now they have money but nothing to do as their health doesn’t permit the sort of travel (or outdoor activity, or whatever) they wanted while a 20 or 30-something.

I think the financially smart thing is to avoid debt as much as possible.

Also, if you absolutely need to take on debt and decided to buy a car, the financially smart thing to do would be to buy as cheap a car as possible. But that's not what really is happening, isn't it?

The reality is that taking debt changes how you think and make decisions and has far more reaching consequences than just the financial cost of the debt.

This sort of knee-jerk debt avoidance on principle is not smart.

Second, there exists no index fund that can reliably return 5%. Borrowing money to put it in a financial instrument is called leverage and is a quick way to get poor, not rich (and I know a bit about it because I work with financial risk for a pretty large, well known bank).

Third, the act of taking debt changes how people think. I also know something about it because for large part of my life I had a lot of debt. Wonderful things happened to me after I paid it all.

There's a lot of leasing.

Stats would be nice.

https://www.ibisworld.com/germany/industry/car-rental-leasin...

And many other industry publications. Private lease is a very small fraction, but it is growing. Same picture in most of Western Europe, in Eastern Europe it is very variable from one country to another.

And a happy car industry, of course, being able to sell bigger cars.

They do actually :-)

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/...

"In Germany, while customers purchase 50 percent of stock cars through financing, they buy 35 percent via lease-based products and additional services."

I'm usually all for protecting the little guy over the corporate entity, but that sounds like n awful deal for everyone involved except the criminal.

I think most employers would not get away with firing someone in this case.

In the US, political prisoners have been jailed for years without trial. 60 days would be a major respite.

That right can be waived to give the defense time to prepare, and it isn't always enforced for non-citizens detained abroad (e.g. Guantanamo), but I'm unaware of anything similar to the article happening in the US.

In practice, 98% of criminal cases in the federal courts end with a plea bargain.

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158356619/plea-bargains-crim...

(As with other rights, these rights sometimes require active defense by civil rights organizations, nor are they completely absolute.)

If you're found guilty in a trial, you get a 2-4 times longer sentence than the plea deal would have given.

So the theoretical right to a trial remains, but exercising that right is heavily penalized. To me that means the right is for practical purposes no longer exists.

My being able to opt to voluntarily testify doesn't mean the right to remain silent doesn't exist. We'd have no rights by your definition.

Another angle is that plead bargains are necessary to put as many people in jail as we do.

The judicial system would completely break down if it needed to have 50x as many trials.

Yes. I'd argue that's not universally or even mostly a good thing.

The right exists whether or not your state has legislation defining a timeframe, too.

The nuance is the US court system allows additional punishment if a defendant chooses to go to trial. Also, plea bargaining usually involves lots of prosecutor bluffing before they have to show discovery which is the same time they can “throw the book at the defendant” (overload the charges beyond what they can actually prove to a jury).

It’s also worth mentioning that the speedy trial can sometimes come with strings attached (as Georgia’s statute which has been recently discussed ad nauseum in the cases of 2 of the 19 2020-electoral-college-RICO defendants)

In this case overthrowing is actual a protest that went out of control because of lax security. A real overthrow attempt would need to involve heavy weapons. Protesters didn't even have butter knives.

Only for some of the people involved. However, there were certainly people there attempting an actual overthrow[1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/14/oath-keepers...

There have been a few defendants who have successfully challenged the speed of the trial and courts have let them off. It’s far more likely that the DOJ attorneys are simply overwhelmed with the prosecution than they are purposefully persecuting the arrested.

> According to the George Washington Program on Extremism, the FBI has arrested 940 people in connection to January 6. Of those, 43 were convicted, 481 pleaded guilty, and 382 are still waiting for trial. Most of the people waiting are out on bail. [1]

It so happens that the defendants all committed crimes on the same day, causing a backlog. It also happens that DC is a strange jurisdiction that requires coordination between federal officers of different departments (Capitol Police, Parks Police, Secret Service, etc) in a town that must get all funding passed through Congress, which is functionally broken most of the year.

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/170991/cpac-january-6-riot-p...

Pretrial detention can often happen for years, it's one of the issues that makes guilty pleas so insidious. Even if you are innocent, wanting to get your day in court can require you to spend months in jail, so a guilty plea can actually be the more economical outcome.

It's worth noting that one of the examples was someone changing his lawyer repeatedly. I don't believe the right to a speedy trial is violated if you're the one that causes your own delay.

It's not a German law but a state law. Some states only allow 4 days, Berlin only 2 days: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unterbindungsgewahrsam

Of course it's Baravia which allows the (by far) longest detention with two months.

I'll report it here, verbatim, as i still have it open in another tab:

-----

Are you talking about US citizens?

I'm unaware of that in any recent decades, and I assume you're talking about recent history.

More complicated cases take longer to prepare for trial, but can you point to a single example of a US citizen jailed for political purposes where their trial has clearly been delayed for political reasons?

-----

and here is what i wanted to reply:

> I'm unaware of that in any recent decades

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuAAPsiD768 - " The secret US prisons you've never heard of before | Will Potter"

Do Americans have to authorize all their recurring payments every month again and again? I certainly never paid such bills "one by one"; I set up a regular monthly payment and it would be done automatically on the Nth day of a month.

https://ir.lendingclub.com/news/news-details/2023/60-of-Amer...

can't americans bind the utilities to their checking account? i (european) can do that. the bills are paid automatically from my balance (the same where i receive my salary). the web portal from my bank can lists all the entities allowed to pay bills from my balance, and i can revoke any of them unilaterally (in that case i'd have to go back to pay the bills one by one, manually).

All my bills go to credit cards and I even get 2% cash back on them all that way too.

I guess you will run into your credit limit that way eventually too if you are behind on payments for it.

The share of part-time employment in Germany was 7.4% of all employment contracts in 2021. Nothing significant changed since then. https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/Arbeitsmarkt/Qualit...

https://doku.iab.de/arbeitsmarktdaten/Befristungen_bei_Neuei...

I already cited the share of term limited contracts above.

It’s not surprising that term limited contracts are a significant chunk of the Job offerings, even if they are a small share of the total contracts - a job posting that must be renewed annually will appear every year for the same position, while an unlimited contract only opens up when a replacement must be found or a new position is created. Another cause is that a lot of companies use a limited contract as a trial period and later convert to an unlimited contract at renewal time.

It is absolutely true that some sectors suffer from having a huge chunk of limited contracts (academia for example) and that there’s abuse (auxiliary teachers only being employed during the term and made redundant during vacations), but generalizing this to the entire German job market is neither warranted nor helpful.

I don’t remember paying a single bill manually for the past 3 years at least. Credit card is paid in full at the end of the month as well automatically.

I'm not sure about Germany specifically, but in the US the vast majority of people live paycheck-to-paycheck regardless of income bracket. Most are 2 weeks away from starting to have failing bill payments.

This would pretty clearly be an involuntary absence - these folks are not even accused of committing a crime.

Note that this is different from ending employment: If you are in jail, only an extended length of absence (usually 2 years) or a work-related crime is reason for dismissal. If you are in jail for 23 months you'll keep your job usually, you are just not getting paid.

> Der zur Dienstleistung Verpflichtete wird des Anspruchs auf die Vergütung nicht dadurch verlustig, dass er für eine verhältnismäßig nicht erhebliche Zeit durch einen in seiner Person liegenden Grund ohne sein Verschulden an der Dienstleistung verhindert wird.

The key terms here are “verhältnismäßig nicht erhebliche Zeit” and “ohne Verschulden”. That means that if you’re absent a relatively short time (usually compared to the duration of the employment and the notice period) and without being at fault for the absence, you get paid.

There’s a lot of interpretation here: for example if your bus is late, you’re responsible (you could have taken an earlier bus), if there’s an announced strike, you’re still at fault - you knew before etc. The cause must also lie in your person specifically - if you’re stuck in traffic with hundreds of other employees due to an accident, the paragraph does not apply. If you’re missing out on work because you were involved in that accident, it does.

But being imprisoned without having committed a crime is very unlikely to be considered a fault of the employer.

Your work contract or collective bargaining agreement may modify or specify where this paragraph is applicable. No legal advice, not a lawyer,…

I would (without being a lawyer and without having a case to cite) suspect that in those cases it would be considered to be the fault of the employee. In many, if not all cases, they had prior arrests, indictments and some were even found guilty, yet announced further blockades. I guess to a judge, that should make it their fault.

> Your work contract or collective bargaining agreement may modify or specify where this paragraph is applicable.

That might very well be the case, since actually many protesters are being employed as protesters: https://www.stern.de/gesellschaft/letzte-generation--so-viel...

The jail time is even more problematic given that the acts that the imprisoned may commit in the future are not punishable by prison time in practically all cases.

(As a side note: I would also be extraordinarily careful citing an article in the Stern, which cites allegations that the Welt published, without having at least a second source that confirms it)

Road blockades are very often judged to be coercion, "Nötigung", a crime according to §240 StGB. Repeat offenders in this matter have been sentenced to some jail time: https://www.merkur.de/deutschland/kleber-aktivisten-letzte-g...

Further sources for your side note: https://www.merkur.de/welt/verdienst-klima-krise-kleber-geha... https://www.businessinsider.de/wirtschaft/letzte-generation-... https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/letzte-generation-akt... https://www.magdeburger-news.de/?c=20221228093058

Oh, and the best source, their own wiki: https://wiki.letztegeneration.org/de/%C3%B6ffentlich/allgeme...

Probably none of those kids have a Job, so no worries.

I wish I was kidding.

I had to switch my google results to German and search for "anti-akw-strom adapter" (AKW - atomkraftwerke).

http://www.nucleostop.de/

How does this work in the US?

Personally, I have everything automated. Including one incredibly dumb thing: I have to pay my homeowners' association dues (I live in a small condo building, so we have shared expenses) by check, so I have my bank mail a check to their bank. It's incredibly dumb that I can't easily set up an automated electronic bank transfer, but at least I can automate mailing a paper check.

US government agencies can also be annoying about this. For example, the city/county of San Francisco does not offer a way to automatically pay property taxes, which are billed twice a year. (My mortgage lender pays mine for me via an escrow account that gets funded along with my automatic monthly mortgage payment.)

But a lot of people in the US are un- or under-banked, and don't always have access to automation, if the people/orgs they have to pay support any kind of automation at all. Many landlords (especially those who cater to lower-income folks) will only accept cash or check. Many people who have to pay them don't have an online bill-pay system. And even many who could automate things, don't, because their finances are precarious enough that they will sometimes choose to skip a credit card payment, or pay their rent late, etc., and they'll make these decisions month-to-month.

If many people in the US were in jail for two months, after the first month (of not working, thus not getting paid) they wouldn't have enough money in their bank account to cover all their monthly bills. An unfortunate amount of people here live paycheck-to-paycheck.

Also consider that there's a lot of overlap between people who have unstable finances and people who are more likely to get caught up in the justice system, regardless of their innocence or guilt.