What I find weirdest is how incredibly prevalent this „genre“ (?) is? Not only is it popular, it is literally everywhere
It is fascinating to be around such social people. I still remember my great-uncle as a kid. He lived a very simple live as a rural farmer in Germany. He did not have a wife, and he didn‘t have kids, but he had a deep tie to his family and everyone around him. When he passed away during my teens, there were hundreds of people attending his funeral. I was amazed by the impact he must have had on all their lives given they‘ve taken time out of their day to give him a last farewell.
I also notice the generational gap the author of this article highlights. My parents are in their 50s, my brother and I are in our mid 20s.
My parents still have their friends from school, from their apprenticeships and different times of their lives. We can‘t go anywhere in a 100km radius without my dad knowing someone. In school I literally had bus drivers ask me if I am <dad‘s name> son, not because they heard my name, but because we look so much alike.
When looking into my brothers and my life, most of our friends from school left for far away. Things my parents considered normal back in their days, are now considered weird. While my parents still experience an incredibly supportive circle of friends, I would not know who to invite to my hypothetical wedding tomorrow.
Granted, I may be an extreme example. But even when looking more generalized among my peers, most of the friendships we have seem to be significantly more superficial and also fewer than our parents.
These treatments are wonderful and it is great that they exist. But many people fail to understand the difference in terms of pretest probability, etc.
I can absolutely see the heavy psychological impact pending biopsy results may have. People are quick to discount these issues when you raise them as a concern, but only if they never went through this stress themselves
It could be. It could also be the cade that you undergo invasive surgery for something that would have never caused you problems within your life. The problem is that cancer isn‘t cancer. Even if it originates from the same tissue, some tumors behave very different from others.
My heatpump electricty bill is significantly lower as compared to my apartment (Gas furnace), despite both buildings being roughly comparable late 80s construction.
I charge my car at my standard electrcity rate of 32ct/kWh, and I pay now about half for the same usage.
Electricity is expensive, yeah. But electrified stuff is also significantly more efficient than fossil tech
Nowadays, for very energy intenive things like heating or driving a car, fossil fuels still are more prevalent than electric alternatives. Once demand shifts in favor of the electrified alternatives, electricity demand is continuing to raise (although not as steep as the drop in demand for the fossil fuels will be). Particularly in heating, where peak demand is in times with very little solar generation, it seems like this will be challenging.
While the prices of energy storage have come down significantly and are projected to continue to drop, there is still a noteable lack of cost effective long term storage solutions.
Maybe because Europe as a whole has little to no signifcant oil reserves ready for extraction? Very much unlike the US.
> I would think that most people would happily choose lower prices over clean energy and paper straws.
The US does have plenty of cheap energy and yet its industrial output is dwarfed by Chinas, which is increasingly relying on domestically products green tech. Also, people seem to be not very concerned with energy prices. If they were, they would not act as irrational when it comes to topics like heatpumps or electric vehicles.
> that it almost makes you think that politicians are being bought by Chinese companies/government.
Looking at the energy policy of some countries (Germany specifically), it seems vastly more likely that politicans are bought by oil companies.
The shift to renewables started off pretty well in the early 2010s before it came to a grinding halt thanks to some wierd debates around the topic. For the past few years, buildout of solar has been remarkably fast, especially considering the slow pace of other projects. In 2025, 16.4 GW of solar power went live.
The biggest issue that drives prices here is the grid. New high voltages transmission lines have faced intense local oppsition, so transmision between North and South is limited, which is problematic given the focus of the north on (offshore) wind and the south on solar PV. Since Germany is a single electricity price zone, the low to negative electricity prices from wind turbines do not reflect the reality of grid capabilities, resulting in significant redispatch costs.
The solution would be obvious. Split Germany into n electicity price zones (with n>1). However, there is a lot of political opposition, specifically from the conservative CDU/CSU against this.
So yeah, Germany is struggling with relatively expensive electrcity prices, complaining about it, but refusing to implement a borderline free solution for it.
When the government says that the market should do something, people complain about government interference. When the government lets the market do something, but sets the right incentives, people are complaining about it again.
Co2 taxation is effectively internalizing the cost of co2 pollution. The price goes up the more we pollute, because we have less budget until we cannot reach our goals anymore.
Developing nations skip the fossil fuel stage entirely because Solar in particular and at a ceratain point wind is just cheaper than buying Oil and natural gas. Chinese EVs are also increasingly popular in emerging markets, not because they are more environmentally friendly, but because they are more cost effective to operate.
Wether or not it is because of environmental concerns or not, the world is moving towards cleaner technology, specifically it is also more efficient.
Considering that we in Europe have a remarkable absence of easily accessible fossil fuels, Europe should be continuing to push towards renewable technologies
Haha. May I introduce you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_Reform_Movement
German precision was not only about engineering, it has always also been about having a precisely defined bureaucratic process for everything.
Also, people never explicitly say they do want more bureaucracy. More often, the bureaucracy is more often a result of what people don't want to. They may want more roads, but they don't want them near *their* home, thus they fight for something to prevent construction there. They may want this subsidy, but they most certainly do not want person X to get it as well.
GDP also ignores volunteer work and other non market transactions, completely dismisses externalities for health and the environment, and also has no indication of the distribution of said wealth.
Then there is the fact that housing is a fundamental human need whereas AI, as frequently demonstrated, isn‘t even a want by many people.
I am not saying that AI cannot demonstrate todays value 20 years into the future. But there is zero reason to believe the short to medium term payoffs on AI investment will be proportional to the investment we‘ve seen over the past few years
I really struggle to understand why the hell this is always only applied to european governments? The idea to take 1984 as a book of requirements seems to extend *far* beyond europe.
The main problem I see (beyond my i4 just being significantly nicer to drive) is replacement parts. The chinese EV companies are replacement parts and a qualified repair network. Replacement part availability is rather bad across the board, which has a number of cascade effects, but primarily higher insurance premiums. To add, there is also the fact that it looks like the EV market in china will consolidate not too far in the future, most likely compromising long term maintainability.
When it comes to more commodity tech, batteries immediately come to mind. Chins has spent years funding battery research and they are now the biggest supplier for LiIon batteries of basically all kinds. Solar panels seem like another example.
However, batteries as a commodity are a good example where china is leading as volume and R&D leader
Basically, the most common pattern with „commodity“ tech seems to be like this.
Western companies go ahead and expend a lot of R&D to establish a new market or validate a market need. Chinese companies go ahead and flood the market with slighly worse but significantly cheaper versions of said product (often forcing the „inventor“ company to take a significant margin hit, reducing new R&D budgets). Chinese companies them spend R&D on iterating on new features of the product (which they also can, because they saved a lot of R&D on the first product iteration).
„Western“ companies mostly created the situation for themselves. They basically consolidated all their manufacturing in China. China has also invested tremendous amounts into education and qualification. So China effectively turned from „the workbench of the world“ into a country where companies have extensive knowledge in product design, development, testing and manufacturing - as well as a mostly local supply chain.
I was only wearing a simple mask and was otherwise unprotected.
Since this event, I have developed an excruciating health anxiety/health OCD disorder that focuses around this event. Realistically I do know that while my risk is non zero, it is exceedingly low. But this non zero chance is what is so evil about OCD and this topic. It is debilitating.
At this point, I know way more about asbestos and related diseases than anyone outside the medical and construction industry should know.
Hello HN,I am an outside observer to the all discussions concerning cancer. I am not a professional in the field, nor am I affected (luckily). But given the relevance of the issue, I am interested in what the future may look like in the field (say, next 20 to 30 years).In media reporting, there is often a lot of enthusiasm regarding immunotherapy, especially with the mRNA vaccines that gained a...
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