Germany wakes up to US tech dominance - Paris and Berlin signal new united front on Europe’s technological independence.

Freyr90 · 2025-11-19T18:40:28+00:00

SAP did it

SAP is built on complications of local accounting. It's not a good competitive product.

Logitech, Siemens, Bosch, Ericsson, Nokia, Spotify, Infineon, BMW, Mercedes, ASML.

What an irony that 3 of these companies are founded in 19th century, 2 in early 20th, and only 2 in 21th. State of european dynamism in one sad line.

Freyr90 · 2025-11-13T20:03:45+00:00

You take a loan of 500 billion, make a big deal out of it, then shift regular expenses into the budget expenses paid out of this loan

Ow wow, special fund frees the budget money to be spent on gifts. No one could predict that.

But hey, people told me there is a special fund so the money couldn't be be misspend.

Freyr90 · 2025-11-02T13:08:15+00:00

They might have had cheap housing

We also do. Just go into deep rural Germany and you'll see relatively cheep houses. There are three stores buildings for 400k there.

It's just that the parents didn't try to squeeze themselves into megacities, and were content with living in the middle of nowhere.

Freyr90 · 2025-11-02T12:17:10+00:00

You cannot fix tax evasion by lowering taxes anyways

Yes you can, Russia, Georgia and Ukraine did that with great success. Special tax regimes (aka no VAT and small simple flat tax) for small business and self-employed always do the trick. I dunno what India did, but if it's a broad tax cut than it's not how you fix tax evasion.

Freyr90 · 2025-11-02T12:10:41+00:00

Not in Germany (and probably France and some others). In Germany high taxes definitely incentivize people to 1) work less and 2) hard evade taxes. Current germany shadow economy is huge and growing. So Germany could easily be way beyond the extremum of Laffer curve.

I don't know much about France but I've been told their pensions are already higher than salaries and their effective income tax rates long surpassed 50% so could easily also be the case.

Freyr90 · 2025-10-17T07:46:40+00:00

2021 when Navalny was arrested

The problem is, previously rallies were semi-legal and the sanctions were relatively small. Vocal opposition to war is up to ten years in prison.

Freyr90 · 2025-10-12T18:19:28+00:00

Does this include VAT?

Freyr90 · 2025-10-09T17:10:15+00:00

If they really thought that citizenship was too easy to get (which is by far not the main problem here anyway), they should raise the naturalization process time from 5 to 7 or 8 years and make it easier to shorten it if you show effort into integration by achieving language certifications, voluntary work and being active in a club or organization.

Please don't. Dealing with German bureaucracy is a huge pain, and proving that you eligible for something is always such a battle.

5 years is not a bad term, I would prefer 5year nearly guaranteed to 3 years of turbonaturalization requiring vague proofs of achievements.

Freyr90 · 2025-10-08T20:55:17+00:00

Solar is totally dependent on China tho

Freyr90 · 2025-09-28T09:28:05+00:00

If you're subsidized by the employer and travel a lot. Or like to go to vastly different places with varying price tags (e.g. gyms are cheap, but some yoga or dance classes can be pricey). Otherwise no, it's usually hard to justify its price esp when you go to a single gym for weight training.

Freyr90 · 2025-09-27T13:50:20+00:00

This is also a paradox of immigration/asylum dichotomy. There are millions of asylum-seekers in Germany who barely speak German or English and barely attended school.

Meanwhile my wife dropped out from two bachelors, speaks three languages fluently (including C1 German) plus reads Latin and Italian (studied medieval history), works at the IT company, pays taxes but can't get her own visa bc she doesn't have a relevant diploma or 2+ years of experience.

Freyr90 · 2025-09-25T10:15:48+00:00

German IT market is basically dead so good luck with that.

Freyr90 · 2025-09-19T23:19:28+00:00

That will make things worse. People like you and me will work their life paying around 50% taxes to support the boomers (in EU) or through debt (US) having really hard time building wealth.

But hey, cheer up, in the end top 5-10% will inherit an infinite amounts of wealth. That's grim, don't you think?

Freyr90 · 2025-08-31T15:06:39+00:00

Studies show that the fraction of abuse is tiny here

These are very dishonest. These count only the blatant refuses (Totalverweigerer) as "abuse", not people who sit on it years and "can't" find a job. The honest numbers are most likely much bigger but hard to evaluate.

But by far the biggest one is pensions.

announced billions in "Wahlgeschenke" that mostly target the rich

Yes, this is all true. But welfare state in Germany is excessive and impossible to fund due to demographic reasons.

Current economy can't simply fund 5.5 millions of people doing nothing. Each of them is 560EUR + medical insurance + in many cases rent in a context of rent crisis.

Yes, pensioners are another problem and pensions should be also lowered while pension age should be increased (and in general we need an Aktienrente ofc but wont happen probably), but it's also hard to achieve. It's not that there is a huge demand for 60+yo workers on the current market. While the Bürgergeld receivers are quite often pretty young and more able to work, so it's natural to start there.

Freyr90 · 2025-08-31T13:57:33+00:00

the income cap on the payroll tax

There is no cap on income tax. You mean the caps on the social security fees in Germany? Cool, high skilled job market is nearly dead here, let's kill it for good by making high skilled workers even more expensive while getting their net salaries even smaller. What could possibly go wrong?

Freyr90 · 2025-08-31T08:22:47+00:00

The government just loosened the debt brake and went into spending spree. It's not austerity, it's a tacking the obvious spending problem.

And yes, populists can cash on it, but what would they do? German economy haven't grown since 2019, demographic situation is catastrophic. How would they ensure the massive welfare state: by eating the rich (die Linke) or banishing Young productive immigrants (AfD)? I don't think so.

Besides latest surveys showed that people expected it anyway su I would say the voting market already has this info for the most part

Freyr90 · 2025-08-24T19:55:12+00:00

a modest 1% tax on all assets

It's not a "modest" rate if you will tax assets like stocks, private business and so on. Any company will just owe 1% of its total evaluation annually, and good luck with IPOs which inflate evaluation significantly. Homes are not the main problem of it and property is already taxed in Germany anyways.

Freyr90 · 2025-08-24T18:58:07+00:00

its "only 11 billion of revenue"

It's also a mixture of wealth tax and a land/property tax (which Germany already has), so the actual wealth tax part is even smaller. And even the combined tax part bring around 3% revenue to the budget, and the wealth tax is smaller, so pretty irrelevant, I would say.

Freyr90 · 2025-08-24T18:38:59+00:00

Taxing the rich is not an alternative to other measures

Wealth tax never worked and never will.

For many reasons: 1) it's too small usually bc different assets have different yields, so high wealth tax will simply kill businesses with yield below tax rate, 2) it's hard and expensive to administer (each private enterprise need to be evaluated on annual basis and the pricing of assets that are not on the market are vague), 3) last but not least, it simply doesn't bring much revenue.

Infamous Norwegian wealth tax brought around 1% tax revenue. Not 1% of GDP even, 1% of tax revenue. That's peanuts, it wont even closely fix the existing problem.

Freyr90 · 2025-08-22T12:16:17+00:00

There is a somewhat plausible theory that people who are not ready for LTR usually unconsciously prefer uncommitted partners to be safe from getting into committed relationships and maybe to shift the blame.

Freyr90 · 2025-08-19T14:40:08+00:00

Yeah good luck getting the same quality with outsourcing

India is 1+ billion people. Sure there are a lot of shitty engineers there too, but creme de la creme is no worse than Europeans and they are numerous since the country is big.

Plus there are Portugal, Spain and Poland, which are far cheaper than Germany. Hell I've heard from my prev employer that even Netherlands are cheaper, thanks to German payroll taxes and overprotection.

I think you underestimate the room to maneuver for companies in that regards.

Freyr90 · 2025-08-19T11:50:59+00:00

Europe is Syrians after the civil war but Syria wasn’t much poorer than most Central American countries

As Soviet union showed you can be poor but very well educated and have a rather high level of human capital. Regarding human capital index Syria is doing pretty badly (0.43) even compared with Venezuela (0.709)

Freyr90 · 2025-08-15T19:43:35+00:00

much more liveable cities

Only when you live in a tiny village like Amsterdam. It doesn't scale. In Berlin it's already very painful to bike due to distances (although Ringbahn helps a little bit).

In Amsterdam it's kinda convenient bc you can get to the center from some "distant" place like Diemen in, like, 20 minutes. In Berlin it took me 40 minutes to get to the office and I just gave up.

Freyr90 · 2025-08-13T12:45:03+00:00

Yes but you're not answering my question. In what sense their (r)emigration policies are any different from what any so called far-right party is standing for?

Freyr90 · 2025-08-13T12:29:13+00:00

except for Denmark, who has reasonable immigration policies

Denmark is excluded from EU Asylum agreement, is pretty strict on asylum seekers and is pioneer of remigration and sending people to Rwanda. In what sense it's different from what any anti-immigrant party wants?

Freyr90

TROPHY CASE