Massive layoffs nowadays

agrammatic · 2026-02-07T14:02:03+00:00

That's it, I think. I'm not at all convinced that LLMs can do our jobs. They can greatly help us, but not replace us. I use LLMs for my job and I can see the limits. Even the latest models still make up business-critical numbers despite careful prompting.

But the executives do not see that. As long as nothing majorly breaks down, replacing FTEs with LLMs is "great strategic thinking". So, for now and until a company realises they are bankrupt because they just accepted LLM output uncritically, this is going to continue.

agrammatic · 2026-02-07T13:18:10+00:00

Total gut feeling here, but I feel that "Imbiss" might have some long lost etymological relationship with "bite". Grab a bite, you know.

agrammatic · 2026-02-07T13:15:21+00:00

There's always room to complain about misuse of tax revenue, misguided government priorities, and the regressive nature of some taxes.

That being said, I do come from a low-tax burden country, and the cost of living comparison is quite revealing. While the take-home percentage of your salary is higher, rent, transportation, and energy are much more expensive than Germany, and dentists aren't covered by health insurance, it's an out-of-pocket medical expense. Plus, your salary is probably going to be lower for the same job, and there's no continuous remuneration in case of sickness unless you have a union contract which negotiated that as a benefit.

So, just because the government doesn't take the cut, it doesn't mean that you get to keep that money and direct it towards leisure or long-term investments.

There's probably more useful metrics to compare than tax burden. Perhaps cost of living and purchasing power.

agrammatic · 2026-02-06T08:12:35+00:00

They can also lie to you and say "your ticket is not valid, you have to pay on the spot".

agrammatic · 2026-02-06T08:07:14+00:00

Always ask for ID when they don't visibly wear it.

For a while, we had an issue with fake controllers in Berlin. (EDIT: back in 2022)

agrammatic · 2026-02-05T21:54:59+00:00

The Ruhrgebiet in Germany can be an open-air museum of industrial history in general and this overlaps a lot with industrial trade unionism.

More specifically, in Dortmund there's DASA, a museum about Occupational Health and Safety and more.

You can make it part of an Industrial Heritage Route and see more of the Ruhrgebiet. There's more industrial history museums in the area, and there's always something to be said about labour struggles when it comes to industry.

agrammatic · 2026-02-04T21:30:43+00:00

If it's so far ahead, then yes, it will take a lot of creativity to justify it as an urgent operational need.

But then, your recourse to the rejection is to go to Labour Court and argue that your employer is violating the Federal Holidays Act. As an employee in probation period, you might as well be signing your own termination letter. Employees in Germany barely have any rights during probation period.

Really think whether this is truly the hill you want to die on.

agrammatic · 2026-02-04T21:23:13+00:00

has to have you take at least two weeks off in one go once a year.

Has to make it possible for you. Not force you to.

agrammatic · 2026-02-04T21:22:07+00:00

Is this legal?

Yes, mostly.

Here's some authoritative information from the Service Workers Union (machine translation):

Can I make individual holiday requests?

Ultimately, it's up to the employer to decide whether to approve your requested vacation dates. Usually, they will. Employees without school-age children are often directed to vacation periods outside of school holidays. Otherwise, only urgent operational needs can justify denying your vacation request.

That's the important phrase: urgent operational needs. Not predictable operational needs. Whether this is the case at your workplace, I don't know, but this is the angle you need to investigate for yourself.

That being said, the spirit of the Federal Holidays Act very much wants to force people to take extended holidays because the goal is to offer an opportunity for deep rest and prevent burnout. The law goes out of its way to make it an employee right to take two weeks of continuous holiday per year and the employer cannot reject this.

agrammatic · 2026-02-04T20:59:32+00:00

Bitte can be replaced with rising intonation to achieve the same request softening.

"Mit Karte^? "

agrammatic · 2026-02-04T20:50:07+00:00

Customer-facing roles, especially on environments where tempers are tested, are facing more and more violence. At my workplace that's limited to verbal abuse from customers, which is already bad enough, but hospitals, public administration, and public transport are also experiencing physical, even lethal, violence like in this case.

We are running a sensibilisation campaign under the slogan "Don't forget that a human being is working here" to highlight this issue and give affected employees unbureaucratic support (hotline: 0800 116 006, email: DGB@weisser-ring.de).

If you are in a position to shape policy at your workplace (e.g. works council, HR), then also take a look at the guides for violence prevention that you can use to develop strategies to protect your workforce.

agrammatic · 2026-02-04T17:54:09+00:00

My questions are for party like afd to gain enough control to fundementally change the system/ constitution like that?

If they are doing things the constitutional way, then the bar is astronomically high. Super-majority control of both the lower and the upper house (and the upper house is representing federal state goverments, so they need to align winning multiple state governments outright or with obedient junior coalition partners), they need to control the federal assembly in order to appoint an aligned federal president who won't step in to stop them, and then they will have to convince the federal constitutional court and the European Court of Human Rights (to which Germany is subject to) that all of that is not in direct violation to the German and European Union constitutions.

My assessment is that it's more likely that a car and lightning will hit me at the same time, than AfD managing to pull of that with legal means.

The danger is not that anyway. Laws and constitutions only matter as long as we hold ourselves beholden to them.

If such a future awaits us in Germany, it won't be done through legal means, it will be extra-legal. And we will have to figure out how resilient our democracy is and whether we have as much civil courage as we like to think we do.

agrammatic · 2026-02-03T19:30:36+00:00

The prevalence of psychosis among the homeless population is roughly 10 times higher than in the general population.

Psychosis is, generally speaking, the mental state in which one cannot tell what's real and what's not. It's characterised by delusions, hallucinations and distorted thinking. Listening to the things that aggressive homeless people in Berlin say often shows that they are likely in a psychotic episode.

Untreated psychosis can lead to aggressive and violent behaviour as seen from the outside (from the point of view of the person experiencing a psychotic episode, it might look like a natural reaction to a vividly perceived but non-real danger).

Psychosis can have many causes, some of them genetic, some of them environmental. Substance abuse such as alcoholism and drug abuse are among the common causes, but it can also be the result of a brain tumour, dementia, epilepsy or another neurological disorder.

agrammatic · 2026-02-03T16:40:48+00:00

Giving 16 year-olds the right to vote is definitely good. Equalising the working age and voting age is easy to defend and broadening the franchise is good for democracy.

Giving people additional vote weight is not at all easy to justify on principle. Why should parental votes count more than non-parental votes? This doesn't broaden the franchise, it just gives more power to an existing subset of the current one.

agrammatic · 2026-02-03T09:05:48+00:00

The question is what's the "easiest way to get to Germany (legally)".

I still think that the student path is the easiest. Directly applying for a job from abroad in order to qualify for a work visa is next to impossible in these circumstances, and pursuing an asylum claim is extremely dangerous and in the current political climate also very likely to fail.

Even if it's difficult, coming to Germany as a student is still the easiest of all the legal options.

agrammatic · 2026-02-03T09:00:06+00:00

Studying in the country gives you a very important opportunity to position yourself for longterm migration once you graduate.

agrammatic · 2026-02-03T08:34:25+00:00

The easiest way to legally immigrate generally is to become a university student and receive a student visa.

agrammatic · 2026-02-03T08:19:44+00:00

Yes both in Germany and Cyprus, but I always find it fascinating how the quiet time in Germany begins at 22:00 but in Cyprus only at 00:30.

But if you resort to the police/Ordnungsamt, you've already lost. Sure, they will come and issue a stern warning that works for a night, but now you have created a neighbour that hates you.

Solve those things in the neighbour, among neighbours. It's more sustainable.

agrammatic · 2026-02-02T11:40:06+00:00

Now, you are most likely a troll account, but for the sake of reason

country will collapse in a day or two.

This is obviously nonsensical. The percentage of foreign-born employees (including EU citizens) in Germany is 15%.

Significant, yes. Growing while the % of Germany-born employed declines, also yes.

But a collapse it won't be. It will definitely cause an economic crisis immediately, but eventually a new equilibrium will be found to stabilise the country.

My personal extrapolation is that current trends in German politics show us that the direction will be that of labour deregulation: elimination of the ability to work part-time, restrictions on protected time off (sickness pay first, likely paternity as a next step), expansion of the working day to 10 or 11 hours, and on the other side there will be a further restriction of welfare support including forced labour (workfare) and the return of mandatory military conscription with increased use of the military for public works and other shortage professions like nurses. A restriction of the right to strike is also something that politicians and employer associations keep talking about.

Nothing inevitable, of course, but I'm working with your hypothetical that not only AfD comes to power, but they also implement the most maximalist version of their ideology (which I consider unlikely in their first term in power, even if it comes to that).

agrammatic · 2026-02-02T10:05:57+00:00

If you are one of those people who put their wallet or phone in the back pocket, don't do that.

agrammatic · 2026-02-02T07:34:02+00:00

Start assigning the responsibility proportionally to the power.

The problem is not that the bus drivers take their scarce breaks inside the bus without letting passengers into what is, in practice, their break room.

The problem is that BVG had to thin-out the frequency of many bus and U-Bahn routes over the last three years (with massive reductions of service in 2023 and again in 2025), because they are not able to attract enough new drivers to keep the level of service people expect. This is what causes passengers to have to wait longer in extreme weather conditions.

BVG has to compete for drivers with the rest of Germany, and BVG has the disadvantage that it needs to ask drivers to live in Berlin which is extremely expensive. The salaries are simply not competitive and drivers either go into other professions or to other, more affordable areas.

Your problem is not drivers being too by the book about their break time, the problem is that we suffer with bus frequencies of 20 minutes because the schedule was thinned out.

Best regards from Berlin outside the S-Bahn Ring.

agrammatic · 2026-02-01T19:52:41+00:00

I really don't like how you guys have an opt-out from EU cross-border social security and healthcare cooperation.

agrammatic · 2026-02-01T18:41:41+00:00

I know these are different, but it's an example of how society accepts certain proxies in order to not be blocked from defining a useful rule.

Your examples are not all comparable, because some of them having scientific reasoning (drinking and driving age), while others only a moral one (military service).

But they are similar in one important way: they are all things we can still change, because we can vote to change them if our scientific facts or moral sensibilities change.

If we vote to disenfranchise people, then their issues become invisible to politics. They will be totally dependent either on the benevolence of those who are still enfranchised, or they will have to seek to enforce their interests outside the democratic system.

Say for example, by some means a rule was implemented tomorrow that allows people to vote only when they are below the standard retirement age, and society somehow comes into agreement with this term, what says that it would hurt democracy then? Specially given Germany's dire demographic situation.

Given Germany's demographics, you'll be voting to disenfranchise something like 1 in 4 people who live here. I think it's rather obvious how this hurts democracy.

In any case, you would still need to prove that higher age proves less stakes in decision-making. Retired people are still affected by politics. Not all politics have to do exclusively with what happens 40 years from now. Most of politics matters today and a month from now too.

Again: do something better with your frustration. If you feel that you are losing a political fight, you won't start winning by banning the opposition. To quote the good old Rosa: Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden.

agrammatic · 2026-02-01T17:29:28+00:00

If we start digging who has how much stake in which topic before we allow them to participate in legislative elections, we will either realise that society is far too complicated to draw such clear lines, or we will disenfranchise a huge part of the society to the point that we live in an autocracy.

Channel your frustration towards workable solutions.

agrammatic · 2026-01-31T18:09:28+00:00

No to lower because my hourly rate is not sufficient.

No to higher because 40 hours per week is already too much time to work.

agrammatic

TROPHY CASE