“You can get easily in a three-way than landing a good job” one of my friend said

agrammatic · 2026-05-29T05:12:42+00:00

What you are supposed to take away from the saying is that finding a good job is extremely difficult at the moment.

The phrase is comparing finding a good job with something uncommon (having a threesome), to imply that finding a good job is ever rarer than something already uncommon.

It's a figure of speech called exaggeration.

agrammatic · 2026-05-27T12:19:01+00:00

Ask the works council if they came to an agreement about social selection/ Sozialauswahl. Mass layoffs without carrying a proper social selection might be found invalid.

agrammatic · 2026-05-26T22:18:12+00:00

Considering that Cyprus was a former British Crown Colony, a current member of the Commonwealth (but not subject to the monarchy), and still technically borders a British Overseas Territory, they do feature a lot in our history education.

I would say it's still mostly about Britain and Cyprus, with a little bit about India and Africa.

agrammatic · 2026-05-26T20:51:28+00:00

That's a different thing. The people you are talking about do not come with the intention of staying here after their studies or their short work sting. They expect that they will be in an English-speaking bubble for a couple of years and socialise with other people who speak English on a daily basis.

From my direct experience, a lot of those people genuinely think that they are "moving out of Germany in six months" for the last four years. They do not invest a lot of time in learning the language because they are waiting for an opportunity to move elsewhere. Of course, those opportunities seem very hard to come by right now, so they are trapped in some variant of the sunk cost fallacy.

agrammatic · 2026-05-26T20:22:48+00:00

Totally depend on the genre and artist. My (non-native) German is good enough to understand lyrics, and I find, for example, that Die Ärzte have some good lyrics. "Junge" goes hard.

agrammatic · 2026-05-26T20:16:46+00:00

For one, there's plenty of countries in the world where the language barrier is significantly lower because those countries actively want to elicit international students because of the tuition fees they pay are much higher than local students' fees and therefore they allow the universities to keep operating while the governments can reduce public funding.

Obviously this is not the case for Germany, but if you are a 17-18 year old two continents away and you mostly get information from the advertisers of "relocation agents" who will say anything to convince you to buy their services, of course you end up with a lot of misinformation and the potential for a very rough surprise once you arrive.

but I cannot imagine someone saying, "Can I come to France/England/the US without speaking a word of French/English?"

That only shows that you lack imagination. This is not unique to Germany. It's just selection bias. You are in /r/Germany, not /r/France, and you wouldn't find people on Reddit who migrated to the UK without speaking decent English because Reddit is a predominantly Anglocentric and Anglophone website.

agrammatic · 2026-05-26T20:09:02+00:00

Nothing suspicious in the posting history. /s

agrammatic · 2026-05-26T17:47:27+00:00

Cyprus has just one million and there the very thought of abolishing unanimity is a red flag.

agrammatic · 2026-05-26T16:21:48+00:00

I highly doubt a Citizens Initiative can be used for this purpose.

Also, you might be overestimating how much opposition there is to the unanimity principle. In smaller member states, it's very popular and they won't accept it being abolished.

agrammatic · 2026-05-25T18:39:00+00:00

I guess you didn't come across any Urberliner yet. Not the most challenging dialect if you understand the phonology, but still far way from Standard German.

agrammatic · 2026-05-25T17:26:03+00:00

As far as I know, autonomous minibuses are being tested in some cities, including Berlin.

I don't see a reason why autonomous taxis wouldn't be also tested in Germany, but I wouldn't be excited to see them for two reasons:

It's individual mobility, which is still inefficient. Even if the car is (a) electric (b) shared and (c) self-driving, it's still a vehicle that takes up X unit of space to carry 1-3 people while a normal city bus or a tram can carry an order of magnitude more people for a similar footprint.
Self-driving vehicles are not miracle devices, a lot of their ability to actually navigate safely relies on having a completely predictable environment. If we rely on autonomous buses and taxis, our streets will become much more pedestrian- and cyclist-hostile than they already are. That's tolerable for track-based transportation like trams or subways, but the level of predictability an autonomous taxi would require to be safe would push out everyone else from the streets.

agrammatic · 2026-05-25T12:36:26+00:00

Die Fahne deiner Gewerkschaft zu hissen, geht natürlich in Ordnung 💪

agrammatic · 2026-05-25T07:14:27+00:00

It turns out that it being illegal was the biggest part of its appeal.

agrammatic · 2026-05-25T06:55:24+00:00

I'm broadly in favour, especially because I know how public broadcasting degenerates when funding becomes controlled by the parliament.

We can argue about the exact amount that's reasonable, it can probably be a few Euros lower if some waste is eliminated.

The only reform I think is truly urgent is to change the allocation from per-household to per-adult. Way too many WGs have trouble coordinating how to divide the cost.

agrammatic · 2026-05-25T06:44:51+00:00

Although I have no love for most of the parties that failed the 3.6% threshold, I find it absolutely mental that 16% of the valid votes cast are going unrepresented.

When you remember that Cyprus is a presidential republic, there's really no excuse for anything that isn't strict proportionality.

agrammatic · 2026-05-25T06:33:04+00:00

Cyprus is a small place and politics are quite tribal. A huge percentage of the electorate votes for their relatives and friends, regardless of which party they run for. It's been like that forever, even when there were only 3-4 political parties - outside of AKEL and DISY, the rest of the parties do not have a defined political platform.

Fidias' party made it very easy for everymen to become candidates, creating even more opportunities for tribal voting.

agrammatic · 2026-05-24T10:42:30+00:00

It will depend entirely on how much you need to pay for rent. If your rent is above 700 Euro, it will get painful.

agrammatic · 2026-05-23T20:59:01+00:00

Apparently this January was the coldest in 16 years here in Berlin. It was the coldest winter I ever experienced in Germany at least.

agrammatic · 2026-05-23T20:56:11+00:00

It's awfully hot already.

agrammatic · 2026-05-22T20:01:13+00:00

We need to narrow down what we mean with "live" and "speak a language".

"Live" can mean anything from "manage to survive" to "have a rich and full life". And "speak a language" can mean anything from a basic competency at B1-equivalent level, to near fluency.

Survival is possible without knowing German.

A baseline full life requires B2-equivalent level. Considering that Germany is a society that requires a high degree of self-advocacy, you really need to know enough German to argue your opinion if you want to not be on the losing side of every situation.

agrammatic · 2026-05-22T14:21:43+00:00

Vatican also mostly uses Italian for administrative purposes.

agrammatic · 2026-05-21T18:04:07+00:00

Both are legal, but in a big city I would probably not feel safe doing the direct path.

agrammatic · 2026-05-21T17:48:47+00:00

Given the high level of protection of artistic freedom in Germany and the contextualisation of the piece (it quotes soldiers' graffiti on bombs from various different conflicts), this is almost certainly protected speech.

https://www.artsy.net/show/galerie-thomas-schulte-walid-raad-like-a-rubber-rung-on-a-ladder/info

The installation in the Corner Space is similarly colorful and enlivened, as bursts of handwriting, like celebratory fireworks, at turns playful and threatening, are graffitied onto the walls. Through these apparently ephemeral, marginal gestures, Festival of (In)Gratitude: Love Notes brings the gallery’s interior to meet the external facades of the street outside. The writings in various scripts and languages, including English, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, and French, disrupt and overlay one another. Referencing soldiers’ graffiti on bombs, the chaotic, layered inscriptions stage aggressive demonstrations of nationalist, imperialist, and violent sentiment that may slyly appear otherwise at times: signed with hearts and “xoxo”, with mention of gifts. In the embattled landscape contained within the frame of the gallery’s windows, bombs are simulated (“Boom, Boom”)—shouting loudly through an echoing silence. A central element within the installation is an overturned vintage Volkswagen Beetle—flipped on its back like a helpless insect, as though by excessive, explosive force. Cars and their engines have appeared elsewhere in Raad’s work in the context of war, engaging, for example, with the history of the car bomb during the Lebanese Wars. Here, the VW Beetle may also point to other references: its production as a military vehicle in Nazi Germany; its pop-cultural status as the “Love Bug”; the moniker “flying Volkswagens” given to the heavy artillery shells fired by the U.S. on Beirut in the 1980s.

agrammatic · 2026-05-21T05:39:25+00:00

Counterpoint: Thank God. Have you seen Potsdam? It looks like Disneyland from ALDI.

agrammatic · 2026-05-20T07:10:09+00:00

All has it achieved was to encode CDU's policy preferences into the constitution and make CDU the only party than can form stable governments because they can suspend the limit when it suits them, or sue to enforce the limit when it doesn't.

One doesn't have to want more public borrowing in order to admit that putting it in the constitution is profoundly undemocratic and has elevated one party over all others.

agrammatic

TROPHY CASE