It absolutely isn‘t

Look up "performative male starter pack".

Yes, i know the memes. But these are the reasons why people around me go back to wired:

- lost many airpods - wired tends to be cheaper than wireless equivalents

It can be very simple

Just because there are defensible reasons around a fashion trend doesn't mean it's not a fashion trend.

> make video calls reliable. As in, you provide a guarantee and pay the customer if the call didn't work.

Microsoft would be ruined, haha. Over the past week, I had about a 30% chance of the call not working and a a 80% chance of the screenshare not working

I entered the workforce during covid, underwent a return to office mandate only to get a new job that is fully WFH.

I am easily twice as productive in my own hive than I am in the office. The office is full of distractions, noise, it is not as ergonomic as my setup at home and i get to waste 90min a day commuting.

In some very specific instances i see value in going to the office, productivity during everyday work is not among them

I know what you mean. I'm not sure why my office doesnt have distractions. We take breaks, but its not like when I was at a fortune 20 company where I'd spend an hour drinking coffee and catching up with people in other departments.

If I had to guess, we are such a small office that its obvious if someone is distracted and I can nudge them back to work.

Saying all of this outloud, you are making me realize I have the office style of a panopticon. At least my workers seem to genuinely like working.

As other comments already point out, chinese coal power plants do not always operate under full load. They also decomission older more polluting ones.

Setting that aside, China has also dramatically pushed the electrification of their transportation sector like no one else. Considering BEVs and other electric modes of transport require less primary energy than fossil fuel equivalents, this checks out.

Mostly because marginal pricing/merit order.

In a vast over simplfication, the most expensive producer that gets to supply sets the overall price. So even if you supply 99% from wind and hydro, the 1% of power that comes from gas sets the price for 100% of the electricity in the market.

When gas gets more expensive, electricity from gas gets more expensive. The more you have to rely on gas (because you don‘t have batteries, not enough solar, etc), the more you pay high prices.

There are different ways to address these issues. Demand side load management, batteries, etc.

Are you just going to ignore that BMW already sells numerous EVs and sold through their entire years worth of production capacity for their Neue Klasse EVs?

I‘ve read this frequently, but I have yet to be convinced. The union presence seems to be more of a correlation than a causation to me.

Larger companies move slower, larger companies also tend to have a stronger union presence than SMBs

I can try convince you. In unionized companies one can’t fire employees from the 53rd birthday. That makes them similar to care home at the end. Young folks come and go and are minority at the end. Dynamics decrease not from the size, but from getting old. Since the salaries are more or less the same the oldtimers have maxed out bonuses. What do young guys get? Basically nothing since the bonus pool must be distributed equally in the company.

I like the concept of the union, but I think that IG Metall is not the good implementation of that. At least not for white collar workers.

> which would make them insanely competitive vs a human or a custom automation (which is easily over 100k€).

But the humanoids are not competing with custom automation.

Judging by some of the footage from BMW and the humanoid manufacturers themselves, they very frequently boil down to pick n place tasks, which is a field where lower to low cost automation solutions have been available for a while. Often times with significantly higher throughput as well.

Its been a while since I was dealing with shopfloor stuff and I am not an expert, but I do not see these humanoids anywhere near as compelling as many people pretend they are

well, I imagine they have to start somewhere

and they will gradually get complicated tasks

actually sounds like a trainee

> Telecom in Germany

Telekom is a profitable enterprise. Yet, telecom infrastructure in Germany is on a remarkably bad level and relatively expensive. Cell coverage is also still bad, especially when travelling via rail or car.

With the exception if the Japanese Rail, all the other examples are different in one crucial detail: they are not natural monopolies.

I don’t think you’re aware of how bad the national railway has been managed in japan, they even went broke in the 80s with trillions in debt and had to split up sell off all their infrastructure and vehicles. That’s the reason why there’s often many non-interconnected competing stations at the same site today.

Compared to the state owned Deutsch bahn or pre competition trenitalia Japanese railways are quiet good.

(There is plenty of examples for good or bad private or state owned railways. It's just not black and white)

Yeah, I have absolutely no clue about japanese rail whatsoever, so I chose to not comment about it.

For Germany though, the rail „privatization“ has been an absolute failure no matter how you try to spin it, unfortunately. But hey, at least we have nice rolling stock!

Yep, compared to other countries, Germany is almost third-world country, when it comes to reliable Internet service, and prices.

Yeah, after all, we need to protect the financial interests of a formerly state-owned monopoly :)

Should be noted that this is just a meme, nothing with real money. Its a joke based on the constant delay of DB trains