Germany’s economy has been heavily dependent on specific sectors, particularly the automotive and machinery industries. These sectors are so vital that any decline in their performance could have significant ripple effects across the economy. However, the global market is increasingly shifting towards electric vehicles (EVs) with advanced software interfaces. Companies like Tesla and Chinese manufacturers have taken the lead in this space, while German carmakers have struggled to adapt to the EV and software revolution.
Germany also has been facing two big challenges that have seen limited action: rising energy costs and slowing exports to China, both of which have started around 2020. The decision to rely heavily on Russian energy to sustain its industrial economy has proven to be a bad idea. The influx of low- or unskilled labor into a social welfare system, coupled with the challenges of cultural integration (German culture isn't the sexiest of things), has also turned out to be a bad idea.
Bonus issue: Germany’s taxes are high, particularly for individuals and workers. Some of the highest in the world. This gives consumers less $ to consume with.
>The decision to rely heavily on Russian energy to sustain its industrial economy has proven to be a bad idea.
The decision to rely heavily on American military hegemony has proven to be a far worse idea than piping gas from Russia. Without military sovereignty, they don't get to choose their economic partners. Without the ability to choose their economic partners, they have to accept dictates about their economic relationships. Because of that they have to suffer.
The same thing happened with Huawei - America decided that Europe needed to decouple from them so decouple they did.
As for the moral argument - what Russia is doing in Ukraine is awful, but what Israel is doing in Gaza (with Germany's blessing) is SO much worse. Germany follows America's dictates on both, so their economic relationship to the genociders is still maintained even though it has very little impact on the health of the Germany economy.
Now Trump is in charge, Europe is being told that it still has to fall in line, but it needs to jack up its own military spending as well - America has shifted focus East and isn't all that interested in defending Europe any more (if it ever was).
Are you suggesting that Germany is not "free" to choose to have economic relationships with e.g. Russia because of United States military reasons? Do you think the US military is the primary reason Germany (the people, the government) is reluctant to trade with Russia?
>Are you suggesting that Germany is not "free" to choose to have economic relationships with e.g. Russia because of United States military reasons?
Yes. America deeply disapproves of Germany having economic relations with Russia and it puts political pressure on Germany to sever those relationships.
It also puts heavy pressure on Germany to maintain good relations with Israel in spite of the racially-motivated genocide (which is a bit awkward morally speaking given Germany's history...).
It's plausible that blowing up the pipeline was supposed to reduce the risk of that relationship being rekindled - it was probably seen by America as a risk that all that was required to stop the Germany economy from screaming was to turn on one switch.
>Do you think the US military is the primary reason Germany (the people, the government) is reluctant to trade with Russia?
I think the reason that Germans are, on average, reluctant to trade with Russia but less reluctant to trade with Israel is mostly about the propaganda they consume which is, yes, indirectly driven by US hegemony.
Non-mainstream parties (i.e. those that America doesn't have its claws into) have a lot of wacky ideas about tossing out immigrants and turning on the gas taps to Russia again. There is a significant risk of them winning.
Just think about it. A German Russian partnership would become a major rival to American Hegemony. German know-how and Russian resources. Can you imagine what a force they would become? From Americas point of view it must not happen. It has nothing to do with Putin in particular, its Russia period. It has everything to do with threats from potential rivals to American power. Nixon and Kissinger thought a China Russia alliance was a threat so did their best to keep them apart. Jake Sullivan, Anthony Blinken, and Brett McGurk are the unholy triumvirate you want to look into for US Foreign Policy decisions in recent years. They obviously thought pushing Russia and China closer together was a good idea for maintaining America's world hegemony. Pax Americana.
As long as American bases remain on German soil, you bet your boots on the ground Germany is beholden to Americas hegemonic wishes.
Great approach!
For the past 2 years I keep experimenting with different ways to track day to day productivity. It has helped me tremendously in assessing how I should feel at the end of the day about my work day and the amount of time I put towards work. (I tend to overwork myself significantly). It is of course a lot harder to apply this approach to individual productivity tracking across my teams. But I do now believe, based on self experiments and within smaller teams, that there is generally a lack of visibility of knowledge worker productivity. Especially within larger companies. WFH and hybrid makes this more crucial to have for both management and self assessments on the IC level.
Excellent and to the point. I see this apply to many technology SMB companies as well. We once compiled a few actionable recommendations for smaller companies that host on AWS and that post ended up being our most popular article https://www.templarbit.com/blog/2018/11/21/security-recommen...
Can second this. I travel to Tokyo often and have purchased Kit Kat to bring back home. Mostly tourists buy these, none of my local japanese friends do
Companies of all sizes are incredibly vulnerable inside the application layer. Nearly half of all breaches originate on a website or web application and lead to devastating, often headline generating losses of customer data or other malicious activity. We at Templarbit are building the solution to this with the first intelligent security platform that integrates tightly with the application it is protecting, helping businesses defend themselves from breaches and provide them with real time insights into the state of their security posture. Our team has previously worked on increasing the application layer security of the pentagon and large fortune 5 enterprises.
Open roles:
- Senior Software Engineer (Fullstack)
- Senior Software Engineer (Frontend)
Tech Stack: Ruby on Rails, React, Go, Python, Node
Only apply if you like hard problems in high stake environments. Send an email with your resume as PDF and the subject line "Engineering @ Templarbit" to hello+hn@templarbit.com
Germany also has been facing two big challenges that have seen limited action: rising energy costs and slowing exports to China, both of which have started around 2020. The decision to rely heavily on Russian energy to sustain its industrial economy has proven to be a bad idea. The influx of low- or unskilled labor into a social welfare system, coupled with the challenges of cultural integration (German culture isn't the sexiest of things), has also turned out to be a bad idea.
Bonus issue: Germany’s taxes are high, particularly for individuals and workers. Some of the highest in the world. This gives consumers less $ to consume with.