Where did you get that opinion? Germany is not doing great but OK in the group of Western countries, and its car industry is both very imporant and in trouble, so it's not an unreasonable opinion that things would be better without that trouble.
Germany has a great layer of "consultants" that fudge the books and make everything look profitable and rosy. It's the land of "Arbeitsgruppen" and "Berater" - folks that ensure things get buried and forgotten.
But there is no investment in the future, no investment in infrastructure and no investment in anything creative, in fact, that's were cuts are made, in the arts and culture.
Once a society can no longer afford the arts, you know there is something going wrong and Germany is going wrong. Perhaps "klagen auf hohem Niveau" (complaining from up on high) but the higher they are, the further they fall.
It's not. It's more like a cancer patient with an Überweisung for their first cancer screening but dragging their feet to go and do it. They know is it bad and will get worse but they're afraid of facing it.
imho there are multiple, starting with the pension and healthcare system which are not sustainable with the current demography trend, which pushed them into going all in with immigration, which fractured whatever was left of german identity (which was arguably already wiped out after ww2 and the cold war). Taxes are going up, retirement age is increasing, pensions are decreasing, public services are getting worse year after year, there is nothing young people can focus on, nothing they can expect to have better than their parents or grand parents, most will never own their place.
The self sabotage of the energy sector certainly didn't help. No long term vision + no clear way to improvement + no sense of appartenance = game over, and this is hitting most of the west at once, it's all about individualism and consumption, you can't build societies on these principles.
You wrote my thoughts. Add one more thing: Germany is federation with insanely complex administration. With many different (outdated) education systems, too many public healthcare insurers. It’s too much of regulation of everything decreasing real efficiency to zero.
Latest example (I am electrical engineer AND electrician): from this year on my buddy heating system specialist can’t help me with photovoltaic system installation on the roof. Last year he was qualified, this year not anymore. He can however install air conditioning unit on the roof this year too. But not the solar panels… Every year some shady lobby group writes some special law crippling last pieces of working system.
There should be some deregulation and centralization institution in Germany with a real short time efficiency increase plan. Otherwise it will stay there as a country of Oktoberfest and Cologne Carnival.
> it's all about individualism and consumption, you can't build societies on these principles
Lots of real problems listed, but such a non-sequitur conclusion. US is built on these principles, China seems to be more individualistic and consumerist than Germany too. If anything, a big problem in Germany is low ambition as the societal norm. A bit of consumerism could actually help with that, as to consume you need to earn, and to earn, you need some ambition.
Tax system and IG Metall salary tables will kill ambition very quickly. The highest salary groups do not guarantee comfy lifestyle for the corresponding areas anymore. Giving away half of salary as mandatory insurance and paying 19% value added tax from the rest is just insulting. Don’t forget the rents in 2026. It’s again new all time high. It does not pay off to work anymore.
Yeah, to me it seems that instead of fighting individualism, Germany needs to make sure that it pays off. Higher taxes for ownership, lower taxes for income from one's work for example.
And it's a complete clown show rewarding moral bankruptcy that ended up fabricating and promoting uneducated degenerates such as Trump, Hegseth, Miller, &co to the highest positions.
These are very different problems from what Germany has though. And it's a recent issue, while individualism is a core tenet of American culture since independence.
I have fond memories of porting Cube, Sauerbraten and AssaultCube to the Mac back in the day. Given what i've seen from Wouter back in the day i am not surprised he is still on it full steam…
great article but the 44 tonne limit is not "physics", it is regulation. if an electric truck would be allowed to weigh 5 tonnes more all these calculations would be different.
The computing cost to mine more bitcoin is hailed as the underlying value by proponents of that notion. It depends on bitcoin holders refusing to sell at a price lower than the cost of mining, which isn't a given. It's also a notion that doesn't account for potential innovations such as quantum computing, which would significantly reduce crypto mining costs.
Hindsight is 20/20. That bitcoin is a store of value has been talked about for a very long time when other blockchains overtook it in terms of functionality. People’s memories are short so I am sure it will be touted as such again in a couple years.
> [The] stretch of track that was renovated last May and inspected on January 7.
The track had been inspected very recently. Maybe the inspection standards are inadequate?
The linked article also shows figures that are quite meaningless without context.
> [The] vast majority [of Spain's high-speed rail budget] went to new infrastructure with only some 16% earmarked for maintenance, renewal and upgrades. That compares with between 34% to 39% spent by France, Germany and Italy,
They simply can't compare those numbers as-is. Of course Spain will be spending less in maintenance as a percentage of the total budget if it's still mainly building new tracks. It's not a useful figure.
> The track had been inspected very recently. Maybe the inspection standards are inadequate?
Spanish officials are very good at deflecting blame and playing politics. Nobody wants to be held accountable for a catastrophe. Also see the 2024 floods in Valencia; a partially preventable tragedy, followed by a whole lot of mud slinging, but zero accountability.
So while inspection standards might be inadequate, I would take anything a senior official says with a pound of salt.
But he is correct. If you have a large enough budget for new construction it can make any maintenance expenditure look tiny. The right figures to compare are normalized by length and age of track, not percentages of the total budget.
English is unusual in that we have both Germanic "weld" and Latinate "solder" and they've acquired different meanings. Spanish (and other Romance languages) use the term "solder" (soldado) for both.
As an aside: Chinese also uses the same term for both (焊接), and the standard English translation is "welding". This can lead to some confusion when Chinese manufacturers start talking about e.g. "surface-mount welding". :)
Interesting. In dutch we use 'solderen' vs 'lassen', in German they use 'schweizen' and 'loten'.
English has a third term like that as well called 'brazing', then there is silver solder (a high temperature version of soldering), in dutch we'd call that 'hardsolderen', whereas what the English call brazing we call oxy-acetyleen lassen (which is more of a process name by virtue of naming the ingredients).
Soldadura autogeno and Soldadura en el arco (sp?) are what I think the modifiers used in Spanish to indicate brazing and (arc) welding.
Ah yes, you are right! I was going by ear, rather than by the written version, in fact I can't recall seeing it written. German is a language that I will happily use but don't ask me to write a letter in it, you'll probably need exponential notation to represent the number of errors.
> Spain spent an average of about 1.5 billion euros ($1.76 billion) a year from 2018 to 2022 on its high-speed network, more than any other country. However, the vast majority went to new infrastructure with only some 16% earmarked for maintenance, renewal and upgrades. That compares with between 34% to 39% spent by France, Germany and Italy, whose networks are far less extensive, according to the Commission data.
Conflating the maintenance budget with the money invested in new infrastructure in this way is not very useful IMHO. How much inspection/maintenance money was spent per km of (high-speed and overall) railway track would be much more informative...
We've gone so over the top on weather fearcasting. Just look out the window if you want to know what the weather is. Save the "the world is ending" messages for truly life-threatening, property-damaging weather (and no, temperature alone doesn't qualify---it's easy to know it's cold or hot by just stepping outside).
Timely. I’m about to turn off severe weather alerts from my local city because they insist on spamming - multiple times per day - cold weather alerts.
And they start at pretty ridiculous temperatures in the double digits. The only way those would be dangerous to you is if you were homeless and lacked any form of winter clothing, at which point you either already know or are too far mentally gone for a text alert to help you.
hahaha we could also track if you typed too fast! ... actually, this is an actual idea, if you use AI to generate the code ... hmmm; that would then be a fun project vs a cloud cost saving one
good explanation and i also wondered why many of the CGI effects today are so unbelievably bad - and worse than decades ago.
it still doesn't explain why it is done:
• why do directors and producers sign off effects that are just eye-bleeding bad?
• using a realtime engine to develop the effects, doesn't preclude using some real render-pass at the end to get a nice result instead of "game level graphics". a final render-pass can't be that expensive that ruining the movie is preferred? if 20 years ago a render-farm could do it, it cannot cost millions today, can it?
The reason is it's a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to work with, and in general enables things to be done that would otherwise be cost prohibitive.
(And AFAIK they do usually do a non-realtime run, but a high-end render going for maximum photorealism also requires a whole different pipeline for modelling and rendering, which would essentially blow the budget even more so)
- There's an order of magnitude more CGI in films than a decade ago, so even though the budget and tech is better, its spread way thinner
- With CGI it's easier to slip into excess, and too much stuff on the screen is just visual noise
- Practical effects/complex CGI require months of planning, as it must work or you blow the budget/miss the deadline - now you don't need to plan ahead so much, leading to sloppy writing/directing, as the attitude is that 'we can rework it'
- Movies used to have 1-2 epic scenes they spent most of the runtime building up to. Nowadays, each scene feels less memorable, because there's a lot more of it, and have less buildup
- 3D people don't have the skillsets for nailing a particular look. The person who's best at making gothic castle ruins, is probably not a 3D expert, this also goes the other way
I feel like there's some strong rose tinted glasses effect happening here. Early 2000s were especially full of absolutely dreadful CGI and VFX in almost every film that used them unless you were Pixar, Dreamworks, or Lucasfilms. I can give you almost countless examples of this.
The only thing that changed is that now it's easier than ever to make something on a cheap budget, but this absolutely used to happen 20-30 years ago too, horror CGI was the standard not an exception.
> • why do directors and producers sign off effects that are just eye-bleeding bad?
It's a bit cheaper.
> • using a realtime engine to develop the effects, doesn't preclude using some real render-pass at the end to get a nice result instead of "game level graphics".
It's probably a bit expensive in terms of effort or processing-wise.
In both cases you aren't ruining a movie. You're just making it more mediocre. People rarely leave cinema because CGI is mediocre.
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