I'm not sure if the following has any point, really.
First, my father worked as an industrial mechanic in an amazon distribution hub. But he couldn't touch any of the automation. Amazon would bring in German contractors for months at a time to work on the robots, conveyor belts, automation hardware. They made 2.5-3x my father, had 6 weeks vacation, didn't pay for lodging in the US. To me, Amazon's idea of US jobs were the backbreaking labor 'pickers' and 'sorters'.
Second, half my professional career has been in office/factory configurations. Where the engineering offices are glued onto some factory. We're HEAVILY invested in automation. The factory workers are barebones crew designated by union minimums. We have a team of 2-5 people (really, 2 engineers, 3 technicians) who design, build, program, and maintain automated stations. Ranging from a robotic arm picking different components in the correct amounts and putting them in a box, heavy forklift-like robots moving product around, and robotic arms performing some manufacturing task.
What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
Why haven't we hired like 3 junior people to apprentice with the senior guys? They make machines that make money! The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
Maybe I'm wayyyy off the mark, but investing in "US Manufacturing" by importing automation (whether it's from the EU or Asia or anywhere else) probably won't end well and seems like marketing.
This is basically how the rest of the world feels with US tech giants.
It's not necessarily a bad thing if there's balance to it. Maybe it's OK if Germans are great at industrial automation and Americans are great at writing word processors. But I'm not sure there's a nice balance to it. Especially if you're in a developing country which is good at neither of those things.
You can't trust a quick google search nowadays for anything. I work in Germany. Any engineer making that much money has to be a senior at a higher position with loads of responsibilities (which means the average is nowhere near), plus living in a city that is considered expensive. Also, half that money goes to taxes. (someone has to pay for the universal healthcare afterall)
More precisely, given a salary of 85'000€, about 17'500 (20.5%) goes into income tax and about 16'800 (19.7%) goes into social contributions, though one can reduce the latter by taking a private health insurance*. The remaining 60% (Nettolohn) can be used to purchase things, usually paying 19% of VAT on them (though rent is exempt and food has a lower tax).
So, “half goes away in taxes” is an exaggeration, but I can totally sympathize with the feeling. Especially since the quality of healthcare is declining and the pay-as-you-go pension system is only built to benefit the current generation of pensioners.
* note that, if one is earning less than 77'000€ today or less than 84'150€ in 2027, one is prohibited to switch to a private insurance. One of the most regressive precepts of the German system.
I think you should also mention the ~17k Euro social contributions that your employer pays on top, which could otherwise be part of your salary. Then it is actually pretty much 50%
Correct: if one takes as basis not the Bruttolohn but the total cost for the company, the sum of taxes and mandatory social contribution can very well reach the half of the income. The method of splitting employer-side and employee-side deductions seems just there to hide this fact.
Most taxes are deducted when money is transferred between two parties. The view that one party pays it all (Brutto-Netto and VAT) seems wrong to me.
I anyway doubt that the wages would be at the same standard if there wouldn't be any deductions (from the beginning). Wages in expensive cities are higher because the cost of living must be matched. Similarly salary negotiations account for deductions. Nobody wants a job that doesn't pay the bills.
US also has federal employer-paid payroll taxes the employee usually doesn't see or think about.
For a $110k salary the federal employer paid payroll taxes would be almost $8,500, or ~7.69%. They would also pay some amount to unemployment insurance, but that rate depends a lot state by state.
I realize that's less than the Euro taxes, just wanted to share so everyone is aware of these often forgotten US taxes when compared.
> A US employer also generally provides health insurance and retirement, of which they pay a large piece.
Health insurance yes, retirement… no, not really. They may offer a 401k plan and some might even offer a match, but most companies offer at most a 4% salary match (dollar for dollar, or sometimes 50c per dollar).
So, it’s a vehicle to invest retirement funds with some tax advantages, but it’s not really “providing” it like you would subsidized healthcare.
For a role like that, they'd likely cover a decent chunk of the premium cost. Its not always the full cost though, FWIW. People earning such a wage paying for the rest of their family often still spend hundreds of dollars a month for their premiums, along with also needing to stash a few hundred dollars a month towards healthcare savings whether in an HSA or an FSA.
I do agree though, such a thing should also be considered when thinking about total cost of the compensation. Things definitely start getting a bit fuzzier though. You then also get stuff like HSA matching, 401k matching, etc.
To be fair this is the case in the US, too. Your employer has to pay a bunch of taxes on your behalf.
People think the US has a low tax burden, it does not. Even in "low tax" states like Texas. And even more so when you consider "unofficial" taxes.
My health insurance surely costs my employer ~1500 dollars a month. That's quite a big chunk of paycheck that I don't get to see. But that's how it works in the US. And that's just my employers part. I, of course, have a deductible, copays, premiums and all.
"visible" and "invisble" Brutto. The one is without "contributions from employer", which is a lie anyway since an employer makes a total comp perspective and he for sure includes his "contribution" into that
for some locally produced goods yes, but still the costs adds up in manufacturing because it's not like all the items/ingredients needed to manufacture one particular thing comes from one small region. Also the petroleum products includes gas used to generate energy in some manufacturing facilities and that again adds up-to the cost.
Same in Denmark, and it really boils my piss. DR (Danmarks Radio) is 80% trash. If I was dictator in Denmark I would abolish it on the spot. I won't deny that DR produces things that are not trash or only mildly trash, but I have no interest in it. People who want it can fund it themselves. State financed reality TV is an abomination.
It doesn't seem to be the same then as in Germany. German public broadcast is arguably fine, when compared to private TV and radio broadcasters, many private newspapers and probably all social media platforms.
I don't know how bad it is in Denmark, but keep in mind that journalism that is not subject to profit seeking and independent on whatever billionaire owns the outlet, is not only valuable because you personally consume it, but also because it shapes the public discourse and thus indirectly may have influence on political decisions.
i agree that the private TV is no better, and the public TV has some good stuff. but what confuses me every time is that the law in germany expressly forbids the public funding of printed newspapers because it could be used as a propaganda tool but the same law does allow the funding of radio and TV and internet publications (the last is now really weird of you consider that printed newspapers are now online too)
No the ÖRR are not fine. Making students pay so talkshow millionaires can live luxurious lifestyles is not fine. Forcing people to fincance propagande against their own interests is not fine. Giving completely one sided reporting such a special platform is not fine.
There is no perfect world, and so it isn't perfect, but the separation between financing and content selection is there.
IMO it doesn't need to be perfectly neutral and independent to be valuable for the population and the democracy. I'd love for it to be without the flaws the system has, I just think it is hard to install the perfect system, given the incentives of the involved decision-makers.
That is such a lame demand. Everybody being forced to pay for public broadcast is just the same as for every tax and the mandatory social security. People not reading books pay taxes that go to public libraries. People rich enough to send their children to private schools still have to pay taxes that go to public schools. People very much opposed to nuclear energy have payed taxes that went into nuclear power plants. People much opposed to the closure of the nuclear power plants payed taxes that were used to close down those power plants. That's how the system works, for better or worse.
No, it is specifically totally-not-a-tax because a tax for propaganda would be unconstitutional. Nor would the salaries it pays as well as the money it pumps into further private companies be even remotely acceptable for public institutions.
A horrible regressive tax that should be abolished, as should be the "news" and entertainment it pays for, but it's not very relevant cost for someone one who makes close to 100k.
Not really, there are certain very well researched and written articles which present the facts as they are and letting the audience to use their own judgment and form an opinion in few news outlets. But most of the time every news outlet is just pushing their own political, cultural or doomsday agenda.
The German public broadcasters, especially the Tagesschau, are the worst. Also this is a really good video that explains how crazily the public broadcasters are creating the propaganda in a subtle manner to push their own agenda rather than being neutral. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46MP_G8CKFA)
I watched the first minutes of the video, but the narration is pretty cringe, I couldn't bear it. It didn't say anything about subtle propaganda, seemed to be mostly Schadenfreude.
the key criticism seems to be that they interviewed people on the street that turned out to be either known political activists or their own employees or contractors. in other words instead of asking random people they picked people they knew.
one criticism i didn't get towards the end is that one particular politician would always give the same response to the same question. that confused me because why wouldn't she? why is that poor? doesn't make any sense to me. but that's unrelated to the criticism of the TV reporting.
Check the timestamp from 4:00-5:10 and 5:50-6:30. One would actually think that those were just random people on the street and their opinion, but they were strategically placed insiders.
I think it is important to be (at least a bit) precise in this debate.
I dislike the wording "social contribution", as these are (mandatory) insurances that benefit the insured person in case of sickness, retirement, loss of employment, etc. Discussion about the cost efficiency and fairness of the system are warranted, of course. Anyway, the current generation of retirees benefit greatly from it, so for them at least it was worth paying.
Since you are accounting all those taxes, including the VAT on the citizen's side, companies only pay the Arbeitgeberanteil (you didn't mention) and the taxes on profit?
> I dislike the wording "social contribution", as these are (mandatory) insurances that benefit the insured person in case of sickness, retirement, loss of employment, etc.
They benefit some insured persons. If everyone benefited equally insurance would not be needed as you could just take the money and pay the doctor directly. But even the expected benefit if you average out unpredictable health issues is far from equal as what you pay doesn't depend on your risk factors. That's what makes it a social contribution. And since you are forced to pay it it's a tax.
> Anyway, the current generation of retirees benefit greatly from it, so for them at least it was worth paying.
You mean the last generation of retirees. The current generatin of "retirees" is forced to slave away the remainder of their lives in the super market checkout and other demeaning jobs. Absolutely despicable outcome considering how much money the state sucks up.
>One of the most regressive precepts of the German system.
If you mean the existence of two-tier private/public insurance, yes. The two-tier system was abolished in most of Europe for good reason. Either they abolished substitutive private insurance, restricted it, or transformed private insurers into regulated providers of universal basic coverage, e.g. very recently in the Netherlands.
Government spending as a % of GDP in Germany is exactly 50%. So definitionally half of all money goes to taxes.
Are you counting in VAT on everything OP spends that money on? Are you counting capital gains taxes OP pays when investing that money? Are you counting the taxes paid by the employer for his role (which defacto come out of his pay, just before he gets it)? The property taxes he pays to live?
The employer doesn’t look at the employees salary as the only cost. Employers look at things rationally, using the all-in cost to employ someone (the combined total of all salary and government mandated taxes and benefits contributions). In many European countries this is 2X the persons salary or more.
> Are you counting in VAT on everything OP spends that money on? ...
No, I just assumed he spends all his money on rent, which is VAT-free ;-).
I also didn't account for his Kindergeld and Elterngeld, Rente, Invalidenrente, Witwenrente, Pension and whatever else that person could have. He didn't share all that information.
> Are you counting the taxes paid by the employer for his role (which defacto come out of his pay, just before he gets it)?
You may have to decide whether the payer or the payee pays the taxes, otherwise you are double-counting it.
I hire people remotely throughout Europe. When we budget for a hire we look at the all-in labor expense, not the persons salary. If the German government didn’t charge us before we even pay the employee, we would just pay it all to the employee.
So it’s a tax he pays whether you want to “brand” it that way or not. Who gets the money changes nothing about our budget for the role.
Imagine you want to buy a house. You have a budget for the house. The government takes taxes on the price, which you need to consider in your budget. Does the seller pay the taxes, or do you?
Having worked in another EU country, I can attest that I paid as much as 56% in taxes, so I believe a guy who says that he works in Germany and pays half in taxes. If you have other data, you are welcome to present it.
If you make 90k in Germany, you pay around 36k to mandatory (varying degrees) insurance/pension plus taxes if you're single. About 19.5k of that are actual taxes. If you're married/have children that total can drop to ~30k and will include health insurance for your entire family unit.
I just gave you the actual numbers. The same numbers you will quickly get by using any of the many available net income calculators for Germany[0].
If you have a different idea, feel free to break the 90k down yourself. Don't lazily push the work on other people, asking them to puzzle together where some neglected Wikipedia articles' table of magic numbers actually comes from. Hint: It's a number made up by an interest group called the "German Taxpayers Federation", representing mostly entrepreneurs and wealthy taxpayers. The number being opaque is intentional, because its purpose is to mislead and support their advocacy for tax cuts.
But by all means, don't let me stand in the way of your right to blindly believe whatever someone else wants you to. God forbid we input a five digit number into a calculator.
What will it take? A notarially certified copy of tax returns mailed to your address?
You have to add in all the other taxes as well. For example VAT, gasoline, and property taxes are significant. That's generally what tax freedom day is meant to mean - when an average citizen is done paying all taxes.
Edit: I was curious what the answer might be and couldn't find much. One source calculates the tax burden to be about 53% of income.
The link you provided is the web page of the interest group I mentioned. They will literally try any trick in the book to get that number up, including adding a bunch of things that aren't even taxes, a boatload of things they call "quasi-taxes" with numbers presumably pulled from their ass, and adding expenses your employer incurs only to subtract them again immediately. Anything to get that percentage number up.
But even they don't even call the resulting number "tax burden" - that'd be transparently stupid. They more generally call it a "burden ratio" (Belastungsquote).
Just to give you an idea of how ridiculous their calculations are: If my wages are 90k in Germany, they do their calculations as if I earned ~105k just so they can immediately subtract the entire 15k again and call it a burden (for expenses my employer pays on my behalf). Does this still sound like something you can easily compare one country to the next and draw useful conclusions from? Of course not. In the next country it might come from an interest group with a different goal, a government calculation, or a Fox News writer.
> You have to add in all the other taxes as well. For example VAT, gasoline, and property taxes are significant. That's generally what tax freedom day is meant to mean - when an average citizen is done paying all taxes.
What you're trying to get at - hopefully because the alternative is a nonsense number with no purpose other than being a fun fact supporting a discussion about degrees of individual autonomy in modern societies - is called discretionary income, and it's only meaningful when adjusted for cost of living and compared across similar living situations.
> If my wages are 90k in Germany, they do their calculations as if I earned ~105k just so they can immediately subtract the entire 15k again and call it a burden (for expenses my employer pays on my behalf).
Aren't you talking about social contributions that your employer is forced by law to pay on your behalf? You realize that if this was not in place, those money would go directly to you since your salary is whole sum your employer is paying towards your employment? Doesn't seem you grok it fully from your words.
I am not claiming if its good or bad (dramatic global financial changes will test viability of all these systems rather well in upcoming years, I'd expect many people will be unhappy when their naive views hit reality of numbers). I am outside of such system, in mostly private social system in Switzerland (aka I save for myself, mostly) and wouldn't want it any other way.
If that's the real wage, it should be used when comparing wages internationally. It's however not used as such, because trying to figure out what should and shouldn't be included in that number for each country will result in an even bigger headache. Do we add the average cost of employer-provided health insurance to US wages to keep the number comparable? What about those who self-insure?
In any case, the resulting individual "burden" is meaningless if you don't also quantify individual benefit. As an extreme example, imagine a country in which your income taxes pay for things such as transportation credits usable on gas, public transport and roads, while the neighboring country has mostly private toll roads and low taxes. Another example is health insurance. In Germany it is pretty nearly mandatory with most having some form of insurance, and total spending per citizen is around $9,000. In the US more than 90% are insured and spending is higher, but within the same ballpark.
What does the raw tax/burden tell you here in an international comparison? Fuck all. It's at best usable as a prompt for a philosophical discussion about autonomy, but often merely used for masturbation or making dishonest arguments designed to go over well in establishments specializing in alcoholic beverages - like those of a certain interest group.
> Do we add the average cost of employer-provided health insurance to US wages to keep the number comparable? What about those who self-insure?
Obviously yes, and obviously no. Just as we don't add the price of groceries or rent to wages unless the employer subsidizes those in which case obviously yes we must.
> What does the raw tax/burden tell you here in an international comparison?
It tells you how expensive it is to live there, relatively speaking. Obviously (as you note) that's only half of the discussion just as an expensive appliance might or might not be worth the premium to any particular individual. But you're wrong to dismiss it out of hand as you do. Just as it's disingenuous to dismiss the benefits of (for example) universal healthcare it is also disingenuous to attempt to derail discussion that focuses directly on total cost or effective tax burden or what have you.
What you are dismissing as a "nonsense number" of an "interest group" I would consider one of the most accurate and easily understood quantifications of total cost.
Imho, parent's point about attempting to quantify costs without balancing them against benefits is valid.
It's meaningless to say "Germans pay X, Americans pay Y" if the two receive completely different benefits in exchange for those rates.
Furthermore, the point that the German system would be paying to individuals if not to the government is somewhat disingenuous. There are a few options.
1. The government doesn't do it, so private options do at some cost
2. There's some government-private hybrid
3. It's not done at all
An example would be parental leave. In the US, it largely doesn't exist to the European extent. Employers don't offer it. You can't buy insurance for it. It just doesn't exist. That's something Germans are getting for existing in the German system.
Yes, as I acknowledged it is only half of the story. Certainly you need more information to make an informed decision about anything. But that doesn't make it meaningless. And generally where people level such dismissals there is conversational context being conveniently ignored (such as happened earlier in this thread).
I'm not sure what point you were trying to make with parental leave as an example. I completely agree with what you wrote but don't see it being at odds with anything said previously.
I think we all know that Germans enjoy substantially more free at point of service public services than those in the US let alone those living in a developing country. Obviously that costs something. Yet when someone brings up the price tag you get a bunch of partisan screeching about how prices are meaningless.
Prices _aren't_ meaningless. The US military (for example) is absurdly expensive. There are lots of things received as a result of that expenditure. Regardless, the relative cost is high and that's not meaningless to point out given that everyone involved in the discussion has at least some conception that there are important differences in the downstream impact.
I can spend that in whichever tax jurisdiction I want and the VAT rate might be whatever depending on what one buys. If you want to go that route you'd then also have to adjust for cost/quality of living to stay intellectually honest, which means you'd then have to come up with some statistical consumer basket. It's a stupid idea to even start down that route in what fits into HN comments.
It's called PPP and yes, it makes Europe look sightly better but it's still behind the US and that's for median household income not tech income.
I've managed staff all over the US and in Europe and have had access to large corporate pay scales across zones. The difference is so significant that CoL is a total rounding error for software developers.
3€ fee on every line item for imports says no you cant'.
Yes the exact cost will differ depending on what you buy but that doesn't remove the cost, it just obscures it - which is the point of having so many different taxes.
You always have to cost/quality of living if you go that route. Because that's literally what taxes are for. Anyway I don't think it's fair to not include VAT. For every euro you want to utilize(modulo some exceptions) you have to pay it.
You however have to admire getting things that wrong in the same paragraph that tells one to not trust what one sees in Google searches. Though I suppose HN comments would show in Google searches... maybe their humor just went over my head.
Just want to add that you also just can't compare the netto value on your bank account. In Germany the state takes responsibility for much more things like education (Kindergarten, School, University), public transport, cultural events ... . They are heavily subsidiced and give value back where you don't have to pay extra.
Other governments including US also pays a lot for these.
> public transport
Which is so famously reliable that Switzerland no longer allows their trains on their tracks to avoid messing up their schedule as well. And of course its run as private companies so execs can pocket large portions of those state subsidies.
> cultural events
No thanks, I don't want my government deciding what culture should be supported.
Germany has a progressive income tax system (Einkommensteuer) based on your taxable income:
Tax-Free Allowance (Grundfreibetrag): The first 12,348 you earn is completely tax-free.
Progressive Zone: Income between 12,349 and 69,878 is taxed at a smoothly increasing marginal rate from 14% to 42%.
Top Tax Rate (Spitzensteuersatz): Income from 69,879 to 277,825 is taxed at a flat 42%.
Wealth Tax (Reichensteuer): Income above 277,825 is taxed at 45%.
On top of income tax, mandatory social security contributions will consume roughly 20% to 21% of your gross salary (capped at specific income ceilings):
Pension Insurance: 9.3%
Public Health Insurance: ~8.2% to 8.75% (depending on your provider's supplemental rate)
Unemployment Insurance: 1.3%
Long-Term Care Insurance: 2.3% to 2.9% (includes a 0.6% surcharge if you are over age 23 and childless)
To see how these deductions interact, here is an estimate for a single individual (Tax Class I) living in Frankfurt, earning a gross salary of €60,000 per year without church tax:
Yeah, but social security insurance isn't the same as taxes. A few years ago I was unemployed for a few month and got money from the insurance. My parents are retired and get their pension. When I go to the doctor the insurance pays for it (in most cases). I am sure, I paid more than I got out, but that is true for all my other insurances as well.
I was unemployed a few years ago, and when I applied to the state for unemployment I was denied because I earned too much. So it is effectively a tax I will never get anything out of it as long as the prior year's Form 1040 shows above a certain level.
That "health care argument" is getting a bit tiring tbh. The US government spends much more than any European country per capita on health care (the US system is simply less efficient), and the chunk of your wage that goes into your health insurance isn't a tax either.
US consumers also have high standards for healthcare.
I interact with a lot of engineers moving from Europe and US and it’s never how US politics portray it. German friends talk about paying for private insurance because the public one is so bad.
How do you define good/bad? People mostly seem to talk about wait time for socialized health care, but where we live in US there's plenty of specialists that you gotta book months ahead of time. When my mom needed a pacemaker it was a 4 month process. My wife's OBGYN is booked a year out - god help you if you miss an appointment. Anyone working in pediatrics look like zombies.
Urgent care clinics have been big in our region. The primary system is obviously overloaded, and 2 of these have popped up in the last 3 years. It's more expensive per visit than our primary physician, but cheaper than an ER visit, which could easily take half a day anyways.
What you’re describing is that in response to a resource being rationed you are able to use money to raise its urgency at your will. That seems like a powerful option to have when your health is on the line (that I acknowledge is not available to everyone).
I don’t have metrics for good/bad. I’m just going off of them telling me it’s bad.
To be clear, that's in the US where we have private health care thus it generally isn't rationed provided you're willing to pay. However what we have is a guild system that in effect tightly constrains the total supply. Depending on the state one of the ways that urgent care commonly gets around this is with ever controversial nurse practitioners. Which is to say that quite a few state legislatures appear to be pushing back against the guild.
To tease apart above for non-US readers, to the best of my understanding.
The US government funds most of the resident slots through which the path to become a doctor runs.
The AMA generally (but not always) lobbies against increasing slots too much, reasoning it would decrease the premium doctors (its members) could charge.
As a result, most of the time the US has too low of a supply of doctors, especially in general, highly-demanded areas (family medicine, internal medicine, psychiatry).
Complaining about the service quality for public health insurance customers in Germany is pretty much the definition of "first world problem" though. FWIW I never switched over to private insurance even though my income would allow it, also once you get above a certain age you can't switch back and that's when the private insurers really start to rip you off ;)
And despite that they are willing to pay, because if you are out of poverty your health is a high priority!
So yes, Americans love consuming healthcare. Is there any category they aren’t a high consumer of? You can’t measure efficiency only looking at the input side.
I think the main reason why high income Germans switch to private health insurance is less about service quality, but because they may actually pay less than public insurance (at least until they get near pension age). Can't talk for US citizens of course.
US health care is screwy, because one of the equitable things it tries to create is equal price regardless of age/sickness.
As a consequence, insurance companies generally try to sign up mixed-pool, younger, healthier (read: employee plans) over older, sicker, opt-in insurance (read: ACA).
There are ways they can and can't legally do that, but it's always the goal. In the same way that retail order flow is targeted by HFTs.
The only reason the private health insurance is usable at all in Germany is because the public one exists. When you're competing with that, you have to actually try.
Private insurance sucks ass in the US, period. It's just bad, which makes sense because all the insurers are completely uncontested. You don't even get to choose your policy, your employer does.
Maybe fully read the comment I'm responding to? The implication is that European countries (and especially Germany) spend an extraordinary amount of tax money on health care and that's why taxes are so high. This is basically wrong from start to finish. You also don't pay half of your wage in taxes in Germany. The chunk that's removed from your gross wage before pay out includes your mandatory employee insurances (health-, pension- and unemployment-insurances), and that's how you end up "losing" about 30% to 45% of your gross salary before pay out (the actual "tax part" is somewhere between 10 and 25% depending on income, marriage status etc...)
The German value seems very suspect. Glassdoor, for the same job role, says €53,000 to €80,000 per year which is probably lower than the truth (Glassdoor overweighs junior roles) but looks much more realistic to me.
The universal healthcare is hard to quantify - because most decent companies include health insurance in the US and the quality of the public healthcare provision in Europe can be quite patchy (i.e. location-dependent)
Remember that you are comparing gross salaries too, and taxes are much higher in Germany so the engineer ends up with much less take-home pay.
That makes it easier to quantify. If I need to work a decent job at a decent company to have good healthcare, then a large number of people don't have good healthcare.
This is not acceptable. Healthcare should be a basic right, and a lot of European countries treat it as such (e.g. in Germany, everyone is insured, no matter their employment status, and its mandatory and equal for everyone regardless of their job).
In theory yes, but they're really running the German healthcare system into the ground. Many doctors leave the country after graduating from University. Doctors cannot freely open a practice, they have to bend over for some central commie committee. And they will only receive a fixed amount of pay per quarter per patient depending on the disease. And of they have "too many" patients, at some point they have to treat them for free (payment is limited).
The whole thing is a scam run by our politicians, who of course are all private insured.
If they choose to cover what you need. My dad had to pay thousands for surgery or he would have gone blind (maybe 15 years ago?). Not sure why they didn't cover it. Probably because you don't die.
I hate to break it to you, healthcare in the US is extremely patchy and location dependent.
I can also tell you working in tech for a very long time, if you aren’t working for a Silicon Valley company you might have health insurance options, but that doesn’t mean they’re any good. Especially if you have a preexisting condition.
> Health insurance companies cannot refuse coverage or charge you more just because you have a “pre-existing condition” — that is, a health problem you had before the date that new health coverage starts.
>Health insurers can no longer charge more or deny coverage to you or your child because of a pre-existing health condition like asthma, diabetes, or cancer, as well as pregnancy.
>They cannot limit benefits for that condition either. Once you have insurance, they can't refuse to cover treatment for your pre-existing condition.
This has been in effect since 2014 due to the Affordable Care Act.
It’s really not a disputed fact at all that engineering jobs in the US pay more than in Europe, but that European jobs have more benefits such as vacation and social security, and US generally has higher cost of living.
I am surprised that this suddenly is a “based on what data?” discussion.
It has always been an apples / oranges comparison.
Former member of the Senior Management for a huge global bank operating in Germany.
1. These averages are an average. Rarely are they paid. I don't know where these numbers are from but the these numbers are for top earners in good paying industries.
There are junior, normal and senior devs, sometimes above is a lead dev. Business maybe has 2-3 leads that govern a head count of dozens, and many working off-shore.
It is called blended average. People who rank in 107k are paid including bonuses. And rarely make any further wage jumps. The dev who is paid 200k fixed in Germany is a myth, not even close to 120k.
Germany hates IT and devs. Business comes first, and anything and everything regarding IT is considered a cost factor, a necessary burden.
2. Freelancers
Freelancers rake in more money due to tax deductions. So a day rate of 800-1000EUR per month is a pay off and freelancers have to take care of the taxes etc.
Companies on the other hand can deduct those "investments" and roughly pay half the price in the end. So, this is the problem with employment: you are a cost factor and you are a liability from the beginning due to worker rights etc.
Germany punishes workers as well as freelancers. But I could not raise payment as I saw fit. Germany means yearly total times 1,25 = total cost for a company ("employers' part of the tax" as sugar coating for taxes above 60%).
100 workers with a yearly raise of 2-5% in payments amount exponentially and are a risk factor especially considering the fact that productivity rarely increases as well as value to the company on average. So ever increased payments over a span of 10-20 years.
That is the problem with the system: socialism favors keeping you poor. Don't steal people and companies their hard earned money, lower taxes, allow for higher payments at will not by "number comparison and increase to all" and let companies workers decide where they spend their bucks.
3. Conclusion
You might wonder how much the guys really perceive on their bank account in the end. It may be lower than you think. Rule of fist: if you do not immediately make the switch to stay in the US you have lots of cuts along the way: company share, taxes.
Before I went to Senior Management I was totally on your page. Now knowing both sides I see the matrix so to say. I am still on your side however business doesn't benefit from all the taxes.
>
Freelancers rake in more money due to tax deductions
<
Until now - the freelancer thingy is heavy under fire ("Scheinselbständigkeit") and its quite to difficult to have only one or two clients; also 1-person-GmbHs are heavy under fire from the public pension scheme.
I know a lot of devs paid 120k€ before socialism over here. Also: The 25% "employers part of the tax" isn't a tax but masking the burgeoning costs of (non-tax...) social security systems - benefit receiver are also the only people getting those regular 2-5% raises tbh. (and ofc. every capitalist earns these too I understand by looking at a bank's business model...)
That is not "fucked up" it is called the solidarity principle. You contribute when you have the capacity to contribute, and society protects you when you happen to need more than you can afford. Netflix is a consumer product, and health insurance is risk pooling. You're treating health insurance as if you're buying healthcare services. You're not. You're buying protection against an uncertain financial risk.
Also you forgot the contribution assessment ceiling at €69,750/year.
However, Germany has a legitimate problem when contribution levels, service quality, and access aren't aligned with what people feel they're paying. That is a different discussion which needs much more nuance and intimate knowledge of the German healthcare system.
The fucked up part is the forced solidarity and high barrier to exit the so called solidarity principle. You need 77,400€ annual salary to switch to private insurance in 2026 and in 2027 it will be increased to 84,150€.
Of course it is forced, it has to be. What's the alternative? Make it voluntary, which immediately will lead to the total cost only being spread across sick people that definitely are going to cost the system money, resulting in an immediate increase in coverage cost, making it unavailable to a large part of the population? Just look at how well removal of the fee for non-coverage under the ACA worked in the US. That's just "let's take health insurance away from poor people" with more steps.
The Solidaritätsprinzip is named that to distinguish it from the Äquivalenzprinzip (equivalency principle) of private insurance: with private insurance, your cost rate is determined by the services you would like to have covered as well as the assessed risk that you will consume these services as calculated by the insurance carrier's actuaries. In Germany (and other European countries), the public option insurance instead only uses your income to determine your rate: the insured risks are common and paid by everyone together instead of by the individual.
"Solidarity" is a pretty good term for that abstract idea. What would you like to suggest instead?
And yeah, I understand that people that do not buy into the concept of a society pooling together such risk to create a model that works best in the aggregate instead of emphasizing individual choice are going to hate everything about this. If you want to be able to save money in exchange for taking on risk, such a society can't let you easily do that because it'll inevitably lead to a tragedy of the commons; such a society would also likely help you anyway if you made the wrong risk trade-offs and become a burden to the state.
Also, let's be clear: this principle is still very popular in Germany. I haven't lived there in a long time so I was curious and gave it 30 seconds. Admittedly the source here is an insurance carrier, but they found in a survey that while 66% of Germans last year were worried about insurance costs and the financial sustainability of the German healthcare system, 73% support the solidarity principle (https://www.aok.de/pp/gg/update/solidaritaet-gkv/)
Are you in favor of abolishing car insurance as well? It’s the same principle, pool money, pay out when necessary.
It lets everyone, including those less well off, enjoy relatively low insurance premiums and you get personal mobility in return.
I’m well off, part of the reason I’m well off is because I was lucky enough to be born in a place that provided lots of stability and opportunity (schooling, health care, et al), it’s nice to give back. Sure, there’s flaws and waste in places, but I’ve had a family member go through extensive medical treatment because of cancer and I genuinely wish that level of care and options for everyone, so paying my taxes and health insurance premiums it is!
The word „solidarity“ means here that you empathize with other people and contribute to shared prosperity and success. You share the healthcare system with a lot of people who make the country what it is. Some of them earn less, some earn more, and that‘s ok. With your contributions you make sure that those who bake your wonderful bread, run the public transport or clean the streets in your neighborhood are covered. If you would rather prefer American system with its deficiencies, because you are high earner and don‘t like to share, you can always go there. Dubai is also nice for people with some cash and tolerance to human rights violations.
What is really fucked up about Germany, is that exit to private insurance exists in principle, and our Bundesmimose Friedrich Merz have never used statutory one. The existing system has deteriorated only because nobody in the government is using it and has no clue what people now experience daily.
>
What is really fucked up about Germany, is that exit to private insurance exists in principle, and our Bundesmimose Friedrich Merz have never used statutory one. The existing system has deteriorated only because nobody in the government is using it and has no clue what people now experience daily
<
Well, people would not want to pay more, so free solidarity can not work. The net result will be higher taxes, of course. The question is whether these costs are worth it or not, but not the "let people do what they want" as that won't work - see how US billionaires don't really give up their wealth voluntarily. And now, building a foundation is just an excuse to not give the money to the people. It is for their protection of wealth, not for solidarity.
It would be solidarity, if there was not a heavy anti-solidarity side to it. You can import millions into this system that dont pay a dime, do not contribute to it (in fact need subsidys to make a living wage) but also consume the services in equal amounts.
That is not an argument though. He gave a specific example.
You brought up only AfD, without giving any counter-example or refuting his arguments. That's now how a discussion should work.
See it from the other side: the argument IS ENTIRELY IRRELEVANT with regards to AfD or any other party. So, an argument should be made from this point of view as well.
They haven't brought up any argument at all, they simply said that "millions imported into the system do not contribute", which is not an argument or a fact. Just a statement. What is there to discuss? Why are you holding my comment to a different standard, because you don't agree or what?
But just for you I have looked up the facts: 1.1 million Ukrainian refugees, and half of them are employed by now. 1.1 million including children, elderly, and so on, people who aren't able to work. A) its not "millions" B) german overall employment rate is about 45.5 million employed people out of 83.5 million residents. So they are totally in line with the average population.
Then go ahead and present those. That's what we're all here on HN for unless I've a gross misunderstanding. Otherwise your comment is no better than partisan noise.
Then you also can't complain when people whose arguments you dismissed as party politics start voting for parties you don't like en masse. Which is coincidentally what's happening. But I'm sure you'll blame russian interference or some similar lazy excuse instead of doing any introspection.
Please keep your narrow political views to yourself. Just because someone tells and true fact about hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees that didn’t payed a single Euro into the health insurance system keeps on benefiting from it, doesn’t make them an AfD voter. That’s a sentiment shared by people from every political spectrum in Germany from Linke to AfD.
If you like it or not, it is anti-solidarity if you benefit from a system that you have never contributed. That is just free loading and one should be ashamed of it.
I don’t have any problem with disabled children or even adults being taken care of by the society. But that’s not the point. Fully able bodied people that can work and contribute are taking advantage of the system without giving back anything to the system. That’s what’s anti-solidarity
> Fully able bodied people that can work and contribute are taking advantage of the system
Evidence? Earlier you seem to be complaining that refugees are admitted or taken care of in the first place. The former is off topic IMO while the latter is taken for granted. Now you apparently shift to objecting that they refuse to work. Which is it?
That’s not true. There is a limitation where one is charitable without taken advantage of. You cannot expect one to be a life long refugee and keep on sucking resources from the system. They need to start contributing back as soon as possible. Otherwise how sustainable and just do you think the system would be.
Also this thread is the perfect example that one cannot even question the fairness of abusing the system because then they would be labled as immoral or an AfD voter
That isn't what happened here. You spewed unsubstantiated partisan taking points. Now (upon crying foul) you at least make a sensible argument but without any data supporting it. That isn't useful behavior for this website.
As the main reason for my expatriation out fo a similar system I'd happily stay and pay if the service was good and the providence state was not collapsing.
As it stands its just an extraction machine to the boomer benefit and it wont survive by the time i will need it
I agree with you. People would not complain and happily pay a premium for a really good service. But that’s not the case in Germany.
Younger generation would absolutely end up paying even more in the future to sustain the health costs of aging boomers.
Also the pension scheme in Germany for a lack of better word, is a ponzi scheme. Again, younger generation is paying to sustain the boomers and by the time those young people goes into retirement, they would barely get anything out of what they have paid.
That's what universal healthcare fundamentally is; everyone pays for it regardless of whether they use it or not, and regardless of the quality of service they receive in return.
What, did you think universal healthcare meant everything would be free? That's not possible; doctors and nurses don't work for free.
No it’s not. The universal healthcare is everyone contributing to it equally. That’s not the case in Germany. Private health insurance holders doesn’t contribute to it at all and a certain professions like government workers, doctors, etc. have their own health insurance schemes and doesn’t pay into the statutory health insurance.
Even the people that has to pay for the statutory health insurance pays different amounts and also there’s a group of people that benefits from it even without paying a single euro for it. So it’s not universal at all. Only a certain group pays for the majority and takes on the burden
>
certain professions like government workers, doctors, etc. have their own health insurance schemes
<
Completely WRONG:
you are mixing up "job-dedicated" pension schemes like for lawyers or doctors with the healthcare setup - in healthcare, there are only two parties: "public" healthcare ("GKV") and "private" healthcare ("PKV"), these two types are not anyhow related to the job dedicated pension schemes.
Correct is, mostly all politicians, high-earners, docs, lawyers etc. are chosing the "private" insurance version, for (at least until yet) several benefits compared to the ones using the "public" model.
You are allowed to enter the private model above a certain salary, but you are not forced. It may be cheaper for some time, but at least if kids arrive it gets fucking expensive, since in the public model your children are insured for free,while in private mode you have to pay for them.
Also handling private mode insurance is more work.
Sounds really complicated, but at the end of the day as long as everyone has health insurance that's still by definition universal health insurance, right? In particular, having "a group of people that benefits from it even without paying a single euro for it" seems mandatory for it to be truly universal.
It sounds to me like you're envisioning something different from universal healthcare, but it's not clear to me exactly what.
What I want to make it clear is that people outside of Germany/Europe, especially Americans have this idea that everyone in Europe has health care because money appears magically to take care of everyone.
But that’s not the case, it is true that everyone would get health care, but a group of people pays a significant portion to maintain that system (which is turning out to be unsustainable day-by-day) compared to majority of the people that truly benefit from it. For me universal healthcare would be something that everyone contributes equally and everyone benefits equally as well.
> For me universal healthcare would be something that everyone contributes equally and everyone benefits equally as well.
Your version of universal healthcare must not cover much, because equal contributions that everyone can afford is not very much.
Universal healthcare can only work if those with more ability to pay pay more or if you live in some utopia where everyone (including children, disabled people, and those too old to work) has the ability to pay for healthcare.
If you want equal contribution, equal benefit, maybe auto repair is a better model. You might get some limited warranty, then anyone can go to any mechanic to get their car fixed, rates are generally posted and you get a mostly binding estimate before the work starts. This is a nice system, but I don't think anyone would call it universal auto repair.
> Everyone pays for it as a mandatory percentage from their salaries every month as a health insurance fee. .... the higher your salary you end up paying more money to receive the same service
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this sounds exactly how almost all income taxes work.
> 5$ for Netflix and other paying 50$ to watch the same shows with no change in service offering.
Counterpoint -- you pay taxes to get the full benefits that a stable society provides, which includes your ability to make any income at all. The more income you earn, the more benefit you're literally getting.
> you’re young and single, you will be punished
Don't worry, it's impossible to stay young and single forever.
My siblings have covered most of your points, but I think one gets overlooked easily:
> Think of it as one paying 5$ for Netflix and other paying 50$ to watch the same shows with no change in service offering.
This used to be the norm before department stores made fixed price popular. People would haggle, and more wealthy people usually paid more because they couldn't be bothered to haggle as much.
> I would say Germany is a good place if you’re married and have kids. Then you get a lot of subsidies from the government and it’s relatively cheap to raise children in Germany.
The number of newborns in germany last year was lowest since WW2. Seems like most germans don't agree with this assessment.
You have to be optimistic about the future, to have kids. And Germans lately are targeted with propaganda, algorithmic and amplified bad news. Every kind of german-speaking media and social media is full of dread, how the country is in a "freefall", etc. I saw the same in UK pre-brexit.
It’s not just financials. Young people just don’t want to have that responsibility and burden and restriction of freedom that comes with having children.
> The fucked up part is that the higher your salary you end up paying more money to receive the same service as someone paying way less with a lowers salary.
That's basically how all progressive taxation works?
But the funny thing in Germany is that if you are on private health insurance, then you can get an appointment with a specialist like tomorrow or at most within a week.
The months waiting time only applies to statutory health insurance payees and ironically they are the ones most of the time that pays a higher premium
My guess would be that big German companies like to sell and insure their industrial equipment wholesale. For example, if you buy stuff from Siemens, everything in the factory must be as per how the applications engineer described it - which is to mean you have to buy everything from them and set it up exactly as they want - otherwise there goes your insurance/warranty.
This isn't exactly cheap, it's worth it for the big players, but needless to say, I'm not exactly enamored with the practice.
> They probably just used the Germans because they are cheaper.
I think a more pressing question is why businesses all over, but especially in America, are so obsessed with cost-cutting to the exclusion of everything else that they're openly, predictably setting up said business to implode once the wrong people leave.
Like I dunno, being a pink-haired lesbian communist I am, I'm somewhat suspect of my own opinions, but that said, I personally have no problem seeing that investing in your employees is probably a good idea if you want your business to remain sustainable for the long-haul. But nowadays all corporate leadership is fixated on the next handful of quarters at most. The less-skilled only on the next quarter and no further. I don't personally think capitalism and corporations are good ideas in general, but they also seem to be failing quite spectacularly at their own stated advantages at this point which I don't think gets brought up enough.
It’s weird that people are celebrating the end of Europe here every day because they „killed themselves with regulations” but one German company does well and it’s a mass freak out?
Because it's always extremes in the media? One day Germany is on the brink of collapse because so called economic scientists (in Germany we have a group of them working for the government that are colloquially called "sages" https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachverst%C3%A4ndigenrat_zur_B...) predict zero growth. Next week suddenly it's a boom because other so called economic scientists predict a GDP growth of 0.2%
>What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
A lifetime of working in mission critical environments taught me one thing. When people leave, nothing happens. People come and go, and everyone is replaceable, even those who believe the company will fail without them. Most departures barely make a ripple. With today's advances in technology, it's only becoming more likely that none of us will be needed down the road.
> The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
These are shitty job tbh. Friend of a friend worked on designing and testing windscreen wiper motors in Poland. Company did a round of layoffs and there are zero jobs in the country. There is one job in US - nobody will sponsor a visa. He doesn't know the language to work in Asia.
> Amazon would bring in German contractors for months at a time to work on the robots, conveyor belts, automation hardware. They made 2.5-3x my father, had 6 weeks vacation, didn't pay for lodging in the US. To me, Amazon's idea of US jobs were the backbreaking labor 'pickers' and 'sorters'.
Saw a major brewery that operated like this too. Flew in Belgian technicians to do the really valuable work.
The manufacturing is more important than the automation, that’s how Midea was able to buy KUKA.
Being in the loop of using the tools gives you the power.
Best to have both, but if we can keep the toolmaking in Europe and Japan instead of China and move manufacturing back in to the US we are in a much better position.
You must be insane to think that investment is happening in Germany. We have negative real economic growth, by far the worst of all EU countries.
Your contractors made so much not because they are from Germany but because they were freelancers. And if they weren't, they probably had less take-home pay after taxes than your father had, despite the company paying 3 times as much. I'm an engineer with 10 years experience and I make 65k _before_ taxes. Barely over 3k net per month. Many others would be happy to even have a job in the current economic climate. And before you Americans come with "muh free health care": I wait 9 months for an appointment and paid almost 10k last year out of pocket for orthopedic work.
The US government spends $1.4T on education. They already invest more than anyone else. That spending may not be productive but no one can credibly say the US hasn't spent enough money on education.
The US on a PPP-adjusted per capita basis is on the upper end of OECD but 1) not the top in the world, and 2) not even uniquely high among what Americans would call their "peer countries" (Denmark, Germany, Australia, Canada, etc)
And education is unfortunately one of those things with diseconomies of scale. The US has worse wealth disparities, health disparities, nutrition disparities, and greater cultural variation than all of our peers.
The US isn't spending more than everyone else, but you really would expect them to have to do so to reach parity with others.
"Existing investors including Sequoia, Lightspeed, Greenfield, Kindred, Lingotto and Promus Ventures participated alongside new backers Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective."
You move to USA from a 3rd world country, take money from the Americans, Arabs and the Chinese, hire bunch of Israeli, Pakistani, Canadians, Romanians and Russian engineers and and you become an American success story.
You found a robotics company in Germany and you instantly fail the purity test, you are American company if you took too much US money, you are actually Polish if you hired too many Polish engineers etc.
Yeah well HN is predominantly for and by American audiences I think and that already explains a lot of the attitude towards non-USA. A lot of Americans seem to think they are the main character in every story, and even if they are not, they try their best to somehow alter the narrative until they are.
I have traveled the world and the United States is functionally different than every other nation state on the planet.
The primary reason people immigrate to America is so that they can make money or become wealthy in some way. That’s it, there’s no other driver, so in general (not universally) the public doesn’t care whether you get your money from, cause they figure it’s yours now.
Why is that? It’s because it’s the simplest country to start a company and tons of liquid money is here.
You literally only have to have a legal resident of a state create an LLC with somewhere between 10 and $50, and you can start accepting payments for services the same day as incorporating the organization.
The regulations are only on enforcement when they get caught, and fines are usually manageable if you’re profitable, for the major majority of labor activities.
I just don’t think people understand the uniquely anarchic reason America continues to dominate capitalism: “Nobody is practically going to stop you from starting something cause you just move states which have different laws but the money flows fine”
A lot of Europeans are salty about the continent's decline into near irrelevance in terms of leading edge innovation. It's 90% the US and China at this point. But would be great to see that change.
There is a lot of innovation happening in Europe, it is just that Europe is better in small and medium businesses than startups that become unicorns and tech giants. Interestingly that has always been the case, so it isn't even a recent development. For example while Ford is known to have invented the assembly line, in Germany it is the car supply industry that always came up with innovations and the car manufacturers then just put the components together to make full cars (sure, this is a simplified view). So there are some large companies, some of which are known and very successful worldwide, but they are not usually thought of as innovators. Large companies in Europe don't take real risks, so it falls on small companies that do that with limited funding. It's just a shape of the economy that Americans have a hard time to wrap their heads around.
After WWII Europeans decided to build an egalitarian society and focus on wealth creation, peace and cooperation. Pre WWII they were just too much for the world, as the concentration of powers, including clash of ideologies and need of survival, led to ultra competitive environment at a cost of aforementioned values. They were a leading edge once, due to continental race of industrialization. Because of this structure basically 80% of the world was under European rule. They just prefer watching from the backstage now. Let’s pray this continues.
Unfortunately I don't think that it looks promising for US either. "It's 90% the US and China" started to look more and more like the joke about how US and Albania together form the greatest military power and US isn't the US in the joke.
What US has a great entrepreneurial culture but it is extremely inefficient and the Chinese appear to be innovating much faster with much less drama, utilizing the resources much better. Chinese phones for example have much better batteries and some other specs although Apple has upper hand in branding and UX, Chinese are on par or even better in AI and really very few things are more advanced in US.
Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to give 100s of billions of money to a guy to spend on 3D avatars and goggles just because figured out social media? I bet you that if US had better distribution of wealth(not talking about socialism, just greater number of middle class people and even billionaires that are not all commanding 10s of billions) it wouldn't have ben "90% US and China" but %90 US. This %90 US and China combination seems to be tipping more and more in China's favor. More like %50 US %40 China, up from %70 US %20 China from a few years ago?
If anything, US looks more and more like late imperial Europe these days with nationalism, desires to have a king(and desire to get rid of that king), conserve instead of innovate, identity and pedigree over meritocracy, gender control, sex control, control of the politics by wealthy families or individuals, fascist ideals and so on.
IDK why all these replies are assuming OP was insinuating some negative judgement. To me, it's interesting that US investors are apparently interested in this EU firm that is pursuing the US market, despite no shortage of US startups in the same space.
Isn't the big money always American (in startups in the US and Europe)? What example do you have in mind? I don't mean the human-scale money risked by some immigrant, I mean the big money.
The CEO did move to the US “to focus on the fastest growing market”. Usually that means that they start building an engineering org there and embracing a more US working culture.
Feels like eventually this company ends up being based there and no longer an “EU” company.
To be fair, it all depends on the definition you choose. It's often useless to have a general definition. If you try really hard you can claim that Apple is an Irish company or Chinese company. I always buy my MacBooks From Ireland and I can track it arriving from China.
It's actually not just funneling money if the company gives jobs to people in the country as well, paid with the sales of the product sold worldwide. Everyone knows US is where business is done, but it's not like money stays there and never leaves the country. It would make no sense at all if that was the case.
And companies here (in eu) would immediately create a competitor. As long as we both "eat" we're friends.
Americans on HN acting like they have an ownership stake in what their ruling class owns is as much a classic as Europeans coping with having no efficient capital markets.
To be fair many of them do have at least a small ownership stake in what their ruling class owns, since their pensions are invested in the public markets as well as, to a more limited extent, VC and PE through various funds and stakes held by public companies.
Euro pensions are also invested in the American stock exchange... Ownership in global markets is a complicated thing, no doubt the US is both significantly richer, and has a lot more levers to pull. But if things really go down hill (eg. the trans-atlantic relationship breaks down), I doubt the bottom 95% in the US will be better off than the bottom 95% in Europe.
No need to be defensive. It's simply true, and I say that as a European. The money and attitude required for it is just not present in Europe. German money is much more conservative and risk averse. So the funding will have to be from the US. It's perfectly justified to roll one's eyes when these cases are presented as if Europe could produce these companies by itself.
I agree and I am not against taking US money at all. People want to build things and people with money who want to partner with people who want to build things are usually in USA. US has an amazing business and entrepreneurship culture and the capital.
No, not really. That's info the OP could easily Google. The answer to their actual question can only be provided by someone with inside knowledge or access to paywalled trade publications.
I'm not familiar with German law / investing, but if they're public here in the US, they have to disclose amounts to investors. If they're not on the stock market, then yeah, unless German law mandates it, we may never know.
It's a startup, not a public company. I didn't know what you think your assumptions based on the US are bringing to the conversation. Not Posting is Always an Option.
You're misunderstanding: the companies doing the investing, if they're publicly traded companies HAVE to report these sorts of things in their finance reports. This is why when these companies buy out other companies they make announcements about amounts, and if they've sold off anything, this, that and the third.
When I worked for KeyW Corporation I had shares with the company, and every time they did anything they made announcements, like if they acquired someone. I had left the company and during my leave Jacobs Engineering bought out KeyW, sold off some of their own business endeavours and paid off all of KeyW's debt and shifted their focus towards government contracting and less so in oil infrastrcuture (if I remember correctly, Jacobs is a big company). This was all publicly announced.
The startup doesn't need to disclose anything, but if a public company invested in them, they will eventually have to do a quarterly report and disclose it.
Even a non public company has to post some business numbers, depending on the jurisdiction.
And in these business numbers is usually some type of (rough) balance sheet,and on balance sheets you will see your holdings in other companies. (because accounting standards require it)
Just for underlining your "not posting is always an option" ;)
The risk of having primarily foreign, especially American, investors is that the company will leave the EU. Like what we just saw happen with Heart Aerospace [1]. EU needs its own investors.
yes, but valuations are dogshit, which means capital is scarce, runways are too short, products end up so-so, and startups fail before they gain mindshare, not to mention the long enterprise sales cycles
What does "from USA" actually mean? Say I'm a European investor, I've invested my European-earned salary into a company with their HQ in Europe, registered in Delaware. Lets say that money 10x, is that money "from Europe" or "from USA"? Does the paying user-base geolocation matter or what is it that matters to you here, where the business is registered, actually located or something else?
And, secondly maybe more important question: Who cares? As long as the business doesn't host their data in the land of the non-free, aren't affected by the whims of the current Tsar and can't be put offline by the flick of a switch, I don't really mind if the money comes from Australia, South Africa or India.
Money is effectively global these days. A lot of the money in the AI bubble is from all over the place, including Saudi funds and the ubiquitous Softbank.
It matters more where the money goes, in this case into European innovation.
People demanding the perfect isolated national champion that takes no foreign money, no foreign workers, no foreign inputs, and uses no foreign services are going to be disappointed.
Why not? Huge companies like Schlumberger work on a similar model. I mean these are not AI businesses (yet) but commercially the model is the same: develop gear in house and rent it out together with the specialists who operate it.
In practice, what this means is that a relatively immature startup takes on immense technological risk by having to invest in the capex and deploy a solution, all while being at the mercy of their customers to give them enough time and access to get the solution to any reasonable production standard. Usually robotics companies never get to that mark.
I believe theres on the order of 100s of millions in losses across a number of robotics companies that have attempted this in the last 10 years.
Most AI is not subscription but pay-per-use (I guess for an industrial robot that would mean pay per action the robot does), and that is a big part of why everybody piles into AI.
AI as a service is hugely successful, at least on the stockmarket.
It makes more sense for complicated products, and things where any one user's demand is uneven. Industrial "plant" construction equipment is often leased for similar reasons.
Huh? I thought that was their entire selling point. That you can have a factory that needs retooling and instead of having to carefully plan and buy robots yourself, you can hire these guys instead.
I'm not sure a robotic bricklayer is going to open up construction to anyone who doesn't otherwise have expertise in the area. You still need design/engineering/permitting etc. The robot just replaces the grunt work.
Depending on the task, a human doing it may be highly discouraged by H&S regulations, or the insurer.
Even on individual small building sites in France I'm now seeing mini-diggers instead of human shoveling, everywhere, or tile elevators (for a 3 man roofing team!) instead of the stereotypical exploited immigrant manual labourer. These are justified by insurers quoting such a high price for covering the expected accident and long term health costs of human shoveling or tile carrying to roofs that buying the machines is cheaper.
Mini diggers are cheap to rent for a few days on a job and you can shift absolutely tons more in a single day than a labourer can do in a whole week.
If a roofing company can complete three jobs in a month compared to one job without a goods lift then renting one for each job makes economic sense, especially if it's physically easier too.
I agree, should have mentioned that it must help productivity too. I was just surprised to see it on even the smallest building sites, like a 2 story house, where I thought the bother wouldn't be worth it.
If you can get him in time, plus are willing to risk unknown quality of his work. Reliable professionals tend to be booked long in advance, at least where I live.
I don't know enough about airline finance to understand if this is a simplification or not. Are engine users really billed by the kilonewton-hour or by something simpler like a service hour? It seems like kN-h would be a hard thing to meter to everyone's satisfaction and some simpler proxy would do just as well.
"Under TotalCare, an airline pays Rolls-Royce a fixed rate per engine flying hour." [0] Not quite kN-h indeed. But the idea is similar (and more simple to implement, I suppose): you don't really own the engine, you pay for what you use.
I wouldn't consider that to be not owning the engine. It seems to me that the airline does own the plane and the engines on it, and this is more of a usage-based support/maintenance/repair subscription service provided by the engine manufacturer. If you suddenly didn't want it for some reason, I don't think RR could or would force you to take off the engines and ship it back to them. They just wouldn't provide you with the support and service that you stopped paying for.
In the end the result is pretty similar as these engines are useless without regular maintenance and the engine manufacturer likely does not give the knowledge away to do it without them.
As far as I know they sell the engines at a loss or breakeven but make money on the service later.
I'm not sure if I would consider tech demos like this state of the art. They look impressive and they do show promise but there's a huge gap between an impressive demo and a usable product. This goes for Google Gemini as well.
The link looks great, but was hoping for more research-oriented details. This honestly looks more like an advertisement, which doesn't tell me much about how progress is going.
Two aspects: industry & research (worked in both).
Research is using a lot of VLM (or whatever Jim Fan decided to call them this year) when it comes to manipulation (robot arm). For navigation it is still a little mixed bag, best to see self driving advancement for that. On the control side (cool jumping humanoid) it's a mixture of RL/IL and traditional control(MPC) and running a slow ass VLM/LLM is not an option.
SOTA is hard to say in the sense that there's just so much variation to the task you want to measure. This can be considered SOTA in one aspect https://youtu.be/3aQWvdCac9o As it's an robot that can lift a heavy unknown object without information about it, RL trained in simulation, but at the same time trained eye will see that the task is made simple by fridge being put on a pallet making the bottom of it exposed for grabbing. On the other hand you have PI (Chelsea Finn / Sergey Levine) https://youtu.be/cRZNwgvcWUg that can do nothing of the thing above but can cook food and fold shirts. Deformable objects and tools interaction is hard so their demo is more focused on understanding and interacting with the world compared to the fine motion like the Boston dynamics one. The latter is also teleoperated, and teleoperation tend to look good but have pretty sad deployment success %
Industry is... Depends on startup vs established. VLA/LLM is flashy but really even 95% success rate is not enough for factory/logistics automation if the failure is unrecoverable, and VLM/LLM is far, faaaaaaaaaaaar from that success rate. In controlled settings traditional pipeline of detection + motion planning often outperform VLM/LLM hybrid models by a mile. Established ones have run humanleess logistic centers for many years now and they're seldom VLA stuff, although there is an interest in using it for the 5% failure cases. But they're not interested in SOTA.
Even if VLA reaches 100% success rate it still isn't viable. No factory operator wants a cloud hosted model in the critical path. And nobody is (yet) building a server rack that can be air gapped in the factory to run VLA, and these models don't run on a Mac Mini. Probably an opportunity for something like Oxide to pick up, but they have more profitable segments to go after.
Microsoft owned Bungie when they named their assistant Cortana.
Microsoft acquired Bungie in 2000 and released the Cortana assistant in 2014. It wasn't a stolen name. It was purchased and part of their portfolio for over a decade.
A couple decades ago, in Brazil, the parking lot used next to a popular Microsoft training center was called South Park. The contact e-mail was "cartman@southpark.com.br".
The comments here are just another reminder of how US-centric HN has become. Whenever there's positive news from Germany or elsewhere in Europe, people are quick to dismiss it. But the moment there's negative news, everyone jumps on the bandwagon to bash it.
There was an interesting study showing that while social mobility is generally greater in Europe than in the US, the European tendency to underestimate vs American to overestimate it, results in broad agreement that social mobility is in fact greater in the US.
Poking holes in every new idea is a pan-European pastime - it's how people in this region of the world managed to survive despite exhausting its resources.
Good thing then that the chancellor cannot just introduce laws in Germany then. One of the perks of having actual democratic institutions that aren’t just for show.
In Germany chancellor is a character who holds a parliamentary majority, and they creativity can and do introduce laws against the will of the majority of German voters.
You seem to have the mistaken belief that democracy is the rule of the majority, which it is not. It is much rather the rule of the compromise, so whether the majority of the population does or does not want something is less relevant than wether a) that majority can organise a parliamentary majority too, and b) whether that popular desire is reconcilable with the law.
Besides, Germany is a representative democracy. There is no unified “will of the people” that isn’t manifested in the existing constitution of the parliament already. And if that’s what you’re hinting at: No matter how often AfD may claim to represent the will of the people, they decidedly do not do so; not even in Saxony-Anhalt.
It's funny how CDU and SPD always find a way to do something against the will of the citizens and find a good explanation. Whether their rule was good or bad is not subjective, average German lives much worse than in before Merkel era, and things are not improving.
You may point to the AfD, but they are just a boogeyman. They don't rule anywhere in Germany, and yet, the government use the scaremongering against the AfD to cover own wrongdoings. At this point, it's like Big Brother blaming the East Asian Empire (or was it Oceania?) and Goldberg for his own faults.
1984 should have been a warning, but Germany (and the EU in general) is using it more and more as an instruction manual.
Rarely the chancellor’s party holds the absolute majority so it’s not as simple as in countries with a the-winner-takes-it-all system.
Mostly there are coalitions that prevent too bad laws.
Sometimes that can also block good ones. Thanks FDP. I hope you are gone for good from any government for being one of the true ideology driven parties in Germany.
What was that US robotics startup that got tons of press like a decade ago for their "human safe" cobot you were supposed to be able to program by just dragging its arm through the motions? It had a goofy LCD face, I want to say the co. was called US Robotics or something but changed their name, all I’m finding is the modem company though.
> What was that US robotics startup ... "human safe" cobot you were supposed to be able to program by just dragging its arm through the motions?
You're probably thinking of Rethink Robotics in Boston.
Its first model was the two-arm "Baxter", very popular at universities and research labs. The second model was the single-armed Sawyer, much more capable, with built-in vision, which sold several thousand units to small manufacturers.
Rethink Robotics was co-founded by Rodney Brooks. The robots were originally built in the Boston location, and later by a contract manufacturer in New Hampshire. In 2018, the company was unable to find a buyer and shut down operations. The brand and the remaining inventory was purchased by a German distributor, but eventually the robots were sunset, afaik.
> Sequoia, Lightspeed, Greenfield, Kindred, Lingotto and Promus Ventures participated alongside new backers Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective.
Nothing about Europe's policy has been realistic for decades now. The whole of Europe is a vassal of the US and exists at the mercy of the Americans. If they withdraw support Europe is no longer viable.
If Europe was not a vassal of the US why do we refuse to stand on our own legs? Why is almost every decision of ours predicated on US participation? Europe will give guarantees to Ukraine but only if USA puts boots on the ground. Europe will secure the Hormuz straight but only once USA has secured it. It's pathetic and embarrassing.
Europe shut down more than 20 Diesel refineries in the past 20 years and then we cry that Diesel is too expensive and blame the Americans. Pathetic.
Our industrial and energy policy is that we will become completely dependent on the Middle East, US, Russia and China so we have absolutely no autonomy and no viability. Embarrassing. Pathetic. Shameful.
Europe destroyed domestic energy production and oil and gas extraction in order to make itself entirely dependent first on Russia, then on the Middle East for energy. It was not the Jews or the Americans that forced us to do that. It was our politicians that we elected that did that. And for what? How does it benefit us? Now everyone is crying about insane fossil fuel prices after our policy for more than a decade was to make fossil fuel non-viable. Pathetic.
> It was not the Jews or the Americans that forced us to do that.
The americans kind of forced you off the russian gas though
> Now everyone is crying about insane fossil fuel prices after our policy for more than a decade was to make fossil fuel non-viable. Pathetic.
I think its not only fossil fuel. Germany's decision to shut down nuclear power plants (while also trying to get to net zero C02 emissions) is outright suicidal imo.
If Europe did not stop issuing licences and if we did not ban exploration, then we could probably be extracting close to double the amount of crude domestically compared to what we are currently extracting. If we did not ban fracking we could also be extracting significantly more Gas domestically. If Germany did not switch from nuclear to gas then we would also have lower demand in fossil fuels. If we went for the only viable green energy source we have, which is Nuclear we could have also significantly reduced our dependence on fossil fuels.
Instead, we went in for the Green energy scam which has not made our energy cheaper or more reliable and has not significantly reduced fossil fuel dependence and has made us totally dependent on the foreign suppliers and manufacturers. We don't even want to produce the windmills and solar panels domestically.
All of this is insane, and if the US stops underwriting our security we cannot survive. Yes sure, the European economy is better than Russia's economy, but most people in Europe has no interest in fighting in a defensive war, so if Russia with the backing of China actually does challenge us we are likely done for. Russia's money also stretches much further than ours, and they don't have to worry about their approval ratings if they mobilize their military because they are not a democracy. No German government will remain in power if they mobilize.
And let's not forget that our Nuclear umbrella providers, France and the UK, both seems on the brink of internal collapse with repeated riots and high levels of disaffection by the vast swathes of their imported populations that feel absolutely no sense of belonging with the host population and countries, and high levels of resentment and disgruntlement of the native populations with the utter failure of centre-left governance.
I really don't understand how anyone seriously believes that if the US withdraws support for Europe that France and the UK will actually go to war to defend any other European country, never mind themselves. They are much more likely to just immediately collapse internally.
All of this is deeply shameful, and it was us Europeans that chose this vassalage. We have to start choosing better. We can be the dominant power in the world. We can be the hegemony, a much better one than the US, if we get serious and choose it.
Most of the actual policy that was in place under Merkel was center-left, and her non-fiscal policy choices mostly went in a centre left or left wing direction, and the centre-right fiscal policy choices under Merkel really would likely not have been implemented if it was not for the radical left policy choices that was made.
Stopping border enforcement, decommissioning nuclear power and the heavy swing towards renewable energy are some of the most far left radical policy that has ever been tried, and it all came from Merkel, and they all failed spectacularly, and have significantly damaged Europe and Germany.
If it was not for these failed far-left policy choices many of her centre-right fiscal policy choices would have never been made either. And it's not clear that a centre-left government would have had the option to make other fiscal policy choices.
So I entirely reject the premise that Merkel's era was centre-right.
> then we could probably be extracting close to double the amount of crude domestically compared to what we are currently extracting
So doubling... roughly nothing? Europe is importing almost all its oil and gas, right?
> If we went for the only viable green energy source we have, which is Nuclear
Well I do agree that it was unfortunate that Germany (and others) actively avoided nuclear power. Though it's nice that renewables are improving, too.
> if Russia with the backing of China actually does challenge us we are likely done for
Really? Russia has been fighting Ukraine for years. You're saying that Russia can easily beat a much larger part of Europe? How?
> France and the UK, both seems on the brink of internal collapse with repeated riots
Times are hard. Germany does not look that good with AfD, if you ask me.
> high levels of disaffection by the vast swathes of their imported populations that feel absolutely no sense of belonging with the host population and countries, and high levels of resentment and disgruntlement of the native populations with the utter failure of centre-left governance.
Not sure where you're going, this sounds racist.
> if the US withdraws support for Europe that France and the UK will actually go to war to defend any other European country
When did the US last go to war to defend any European country again?
What's your suggestion here? It's not like you can go back to fossil fuels.
Not to mention by 2030 it's completely game over for ICE cars and fossil fuel plants except gas for peaker plants and even gas heating is becoming financially unviable today. All the old EEG subsidies will start to run out in 2030 and even the remaining subsidized PV plants will be cheaper than fossil fuels.
If Europe did not shut down domestic energy production and oil and gas extraction in order to buy oil and gas from Russia then oil and gas would be a lot cheaper today.
Blaming the Americans for what we did to ourselves is insane and rooted in deep ignorance of what actually happened in Europe in the past two decades.
But yet again this just shows how totally dependent we in Europe are on Americans for everything. Pathetic.
It's good to compare Europe's energy policy with China, since both are nations that are relatively resource poor, although Europe has far more energy resources than China.
Europe has a faith based energy policy, sort of the opposite of "if you build it, they will come". With respect to fossil fuels, Europe has adopted the point of view that "if we destroy it, we won't need it".
Now contrast with China. China is expanding use of coal(1), they have signed long term contracts with Iran and Russia for oil and natural gas, they are building more pipelines(2), they are increasing their own oil exploration to further exploit any fossil fuel resources they have domestically (3), and they are expanding domestic refining capacity (4).
Plus, they have accumulated a massive 1.5 billion barrel strategic reserve of oil. All while also expanding investments in nuclear and renewables. It's not like if you build a refinery, then that prevents you from building a nuclear power plant also. You can do both! You can make energy cheap and abundant.
That is why China is awash in low cost energy to fuel domestic industry (5) while Europe is energy starved. One is led by strategic thinking rooted in reality while the other is led by a policy of wishful thinking and then scolding when things go sideways.
The problem for Europe is that blaming another country is not going to solve their diesel problem.
So you have a choice:
1. Blame America
2.
a) Take responsibility for not exploiting Europe's own existing gas and oil resource sufficiently. Increase exploitation of natural resources within the EU to reduce reliance on external resources.
b) Take responsibility for shutting down 1/3 of Europe's diesel refining capacity, and take steps to restore that refining capacity.
c) Take responsibility for losing access to oil and gas from Russia, and take steps to restore access.
d) Take responsibility for backing Israel and the US and start cutting independent deals with Iran and Yemen to restore more access Persian gulf resources.
The advantage of 2 is that you can still blame America if you want, as a treat. But you will also be taking steps to free yourself from America.
A resentful slave is still a slave, and right now Europe is America's slave, dependent on the US for energy, food, and weapons. Nursing resentments about America is nothing more than psychological venting.
> Our industrial and energy policy is that we will become completely dependent on the Middle East, US, Russia and China so we have absolutely no autonomy and no viability. Embarrassing. Pathetic. Shameful.
Germany shutting down nuclear and coal powered plants was their own decision.
I kind of agree with your evaluation, but confusingly it seems like they want it like that (?)
I remember few years ago couple of German fintech startups reached more than 1B$ valuation. Had it been the case in US, those startups would have gone IPOs and started expanding worldwide.
However, raising capital in Europe/Germany is so hard. Still majority of the Germans don’t invest their money and just let it depreciate in their savings accounts. Because of that most startups are funded by US venture capitalists. Hope this one would be able to sustain the valuation
> Still majority of the Germans don’t invest their money and just let it depreciate in their savings accounts
Do you have a source on this? I live in Germany and most people I know either invest into stocks (safe, boring ones), invest into a house/apartment/land or similar, or are too broke to even save anything at all (most people).
You must be interacting with young people because they have started investing after Covid with neobrokers. But the real wealth is with boomer generation and they just let it rot in savings accounts. Maybe things would change once the wealth transfer from boomers to millennials happens
I understand why humans get fixated on the nominal threshold of a large, round number like $1B.
But the thing about private market valuations is that you can't know if investors are right ex ante, so it's helpful to discount.
A $1B valuation sort of just means you now effectively "owe it" to shareholders, and you're now 100% incentivized to deliver that to them in some form, instead of being fully incentivized to deliver on your true vision to your customer.
When done well, private diligence can help uncover blind spots and fund company growth in key areas at the service of that true vision.
When done poorly because of FOMO over AI, robotics, or the latest hype, it can turn into preemptive enshittification.
Coming right up: Belgian Hybrid shower curtain and defense startup Aperture Science raises 780M Euros, while biotech unicorn Umbrella in on the verge of coming out of stealth and releasing a vaccine for cancer.
I just found out about them. To me it seems their core product is "boring" industrial robots with some AI fluff on top, which imho is smart because you can capaitalize on the hype without having it be pivotal to their entire business model. What I find interesting is the robot-as-a-service model.
I assume you got a spouse or parent do all the laundry for you? I’m not sure you realize how spoiled you sound.
Seriously a laundry folding robot excites me much more than a CLI that can generate code. I enjoy generating code myself! I don’t enjoy laundry. Total killer app.
At the risk of making yet another wrong assumption, that sounds like you don’t have a family?
Fwiw laundry takes a pretty significant chunk out of my weekend. I wouldn't spend “thousands of dollars” to reduce it but at around the price of a new phone I’m totally in the market.
There are four of us. It takes me 5 minutes to gather everything up and put it in the washing machine, 3 minutes to transfer it to the dryer when it's done, and ten minutes to separate it out and drop it in the right drawers when dry. That happens 3-4 times a week. Say 60-80 minutes total per week.
I have found that in order to reduce laundry times to something like this, you have to very deliberately make very specific tradeoffs in the types of clothes you wear and purchase. It is perfectly possible to have a wardrobe that is very low-maintenance (such as by opting for synthetics or synthetic blends for all your clothing), but more likely you have some special cases such as wool, linen, and cotton (which may require air drying and/or ironing or steaming), clothing with small stains that require spot cleaning with stain remover, delicates that need to be hand-washed, whites that need to go in their own load with bleach, or other specific cases.
True. We very much value time over owning things that require that much maintenance. If your preference is the other way round I could see it taking up much more time (and you getting, presumably, more joy from your clothes. Most of the joy I get from clothes is from t-shirt designs. YMMV.)
Definitely not.
I have laundry that I hang. Everything else goes unfolded into sorted bins.
Of course it drives my wife crazy, and if she takes my laundry out of the dryer, she folds it. What drives her more crazy is that I proceed to just dump it in the bins.
If it would work, it would be mildly useful. Actually, if it would work, that would be more exciting by itself than it would be useful.
But it doesn’t, really.
They campaign for traditional values and opposes same-sex marriage, immigrants, and political elites, yet their leader Alice Weidel is a former investment banker who lives in Switzerland and is in a relationship with a woman.
How is that not a scam?
True. But, had they succeeded at conquering the world, they might have given their supporters the status of supreme human beings, at least on paper. It's good it didn't work out that time, but, it seems, some people want to try a variation of it again to see if it sticks.
No, we're quite happy doing that. However on behalf of the German people I wish to thank everyone involved for the thoughtful suggestions and intelligent way to approach a possibly interesting topic. I can tell your hearts and minds are in the right place.
I don't think it is a uniquely German thing to trust the old institutions - which I think is what allowed Wirecard to do wire fraud. I'd say all of Western Europe is rather naive to Kremlin's shenanigans.
I'm not sure if the following has any point, really.
First, my father worked as an industrial mechanic in an amazon distribution hub. But he couldn't touch any of the automation. Amazon would bring in German contractors for months at a time to work on the robots, conveyor belts, automation hardware. They made 2.5-3x my father, had 6 weeks vacation, didn't pay for lodging in the US. To me, Amazon's idea of US jobs were the backbreaking labor 'pickers' and 'sorters'.
Second, half my professional career has been in office/factory configurations. Where the engineering offices are glued onto some factory. We're HEAVILY invested in automation. The factory workers are barebones crew designated by union minimums. We have a team of 2-5 people (really, 2 engineers, 3 technicians) who design, build, program, and maintain automated stations. Ranging from a robotic arm picking different components in the correct amounts and putting them in a box, heavy forklift-like robots moving product around, and robotic arms performing some manufacturing task.
What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
Why haven't we hired like 3 junior people to apprentice with the senior guys? They make machines that make money! The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
Maybe I'm wayyyy off the mark, but investing in "US Manufacturing" by importing automation (whether it's from the EU or Asia or anywhere else) probably won't end well and seems like marketing.
This is basically how the rest of the world feels with US tech giants.
It's not necessarily a bad thing if there's balance to it. Maybe it's OK if Germans are great at industrial automation and Americans are great at writing word processors. But I'm not sure there's a nice balance to it. Especially if you're in a developing country which is good at neither of those things.
China seems to be good at all of the above.
China is good at all the above and subsidizes all of the above.
Engineering salaries in the EU are far lower than in the US though.
They probably just used the Germans because they are cheaper.
Based on what data? A quick google search says the average automation engineer in Germany makes 90k euro to $107k in the US.
And the German has universal healthcare, clocks out at 5 and can’t be bothered, and gets real vacation time.
https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/automation-engineer/
You can't trust a quick google search nowadays for anything. I work in Germany. Any engineer making that much money has to be a senior at a higher position with loads of responsibilities (which means the average is nowhere near), plus living in a city that is considered expensive. Also, half that money goes to taxes. (someone has to pay for the universal healthcare afterall)
> half that money goes to taxes
That is a misguided simplification. Please correct this, before anyone starts to believe it for real.
More precisely, given a salary of 85'000€, about 17'500 (20.5%) goes into income tax and about 16'800 (19.7%) goes into social contributions, though one can reduce the latter by taking a private health insurance*. The remaining 60% (Nettolohn) can be used to purchase things, usually paying 19% of VAT on them (though rent is exempt and food has a lower tax).
So, “half goes away in taxes” is an exaggeration, but I can totally sympathize with the feeling. Especially since the quality of healthcare is declining and the pay-as-you-go pension system is only built to benefit the current generation of pensioners.
* note that, if one is earning less than 77'000€ today or less than 84'150€ in 2027, one is prohibited to switch to a private insurance. One of the most regressive precepts of the German system.
I think you should also mention the ~17k Euro social contributions that your employer pays on top, which could otherwise be part of your salary. Then it is actually pretty much 50%
Correct: if one takes as basis not the Bruttolohn but the total cost for the company, the sum of taxes and mandatory social contribution can very well reach the half of the income. The method of splitting employer-side and employee-side deductions seems just there to hide this fact.
Most taxes are deducted when money is transferred between two parties. The view that one party pays it all (Brutto-Netto and VAT) seems wrong to me.
I anyway doubt that the wages would be at the same standard if there wouldn't be any deductions (from the beginning). Wages in expensive cities are higher because the cost of living must be matched. Similarly salary negotiations account for deductions. Nobody wants a job that doesn't pay the bills.
US also has federal employer-paid payroll taxes the employee usually doesn't see or think about.
For a $110k salary the federal employer paid payroll taxes would be almost $8,500, or ~7.69%. They would also pay some amount to unemployment insurance, but that rate depends a lot state by state.
I realize that's less than the Euro taxes, just wanted to share so everyone is aware of these often forgotten US taxes when compared.
A US employer also generally provides health insurance and retirement, of which they pay a large piece.
> A US employer also generally provides health insurance and retirement, of which they pay a large piece.
Health insurance yes, retirement… no, not really. They may offer a 401k plan and some might even offer a match, but most companies offer at most a 4% salary match (dollar for dollar, or sometimes 50c per dollar).
So, it’s a vehicle to invest retirement funds with some tax advantages, but it’s not really “providing” it like you would subsidized healthcare.
For a role like that, they'd likely cover a decent chunk of the premium cost. Its not always the full cost though, FWIW. People earning such a wage paying for the rest of their family often still spend hundreds of dollars a month for their premiums, along with also needing to stash a few hundred dollars a month towards healthcare savings whether in an HSA or an FSA.
I do agree though, such a thing should also be considered when thinking about total cost of the compensation. Things definitely start getting a bit fuzzier though. You then also get stuff like HSA matching, 401k matching, etc.
US employer health care is typically ~65% employer paid, 35% employee paid. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs2.t04.htm
To be fair this is the case in the US, too. Your employer has to pay a bunch of taxes on your behalf.
People think the US has a low tax burden, it does not. Even in "low tax" states like Texas. And even more so when you consider "unofficial" taxes.
My health insurance surely costs my employer ~1500 dollars a month. That's quite a big chunk of paycheck that I don't get to see. But that's how it works in the US. And that's just my employers part. I, of course, have a deductible, copays, premiums and all.
> Even in "low tax" states like Texas. And even more so when you consider "unofficial" taxes.
"Low tax" states just shift their tax base from income to something else - usually property or energy.
There are two terms in German salary:
"visible" and "invisble" Brutto. The one is without "contributions from employer", which is a lie anyway since an employer makes a total comp perspective and he for sure includes his "contribution" into that
Don’t forget the mandatory radio broadcast fee every household has to pay even if you don’t read or watch any of those propaganda channels
And if we are comparing USA vs Germany, taxes to gas (car fuel) which is much more expensive in the EU, because of taxes.
[flagged]
Unfortunately, the price of almost every consumer good is decided based on the price of petrol/diesel even when one doesn't even own a car.
[flagged]
for some locally produced goods yes, but still the costs adds up in manufacturing because it's not like all the items/ingredients needed to manufacture one particular thing comes from one small region. Also the petroleum products includes gas used to generate energy in some manufacturing facilities and that again adds up-to the cost.
Same in Denmark, and it really boils my piss. DR (Danmarks Radio) is 80% trash. If I was dictator in Denmark I would abolish it on the spot. I won't deny that DR produces things that are not trash or only mildly trash, but I have no interest in it. People who want it can fund it themselves. State financed reality TV is an abomination.
It doesn't seem to be the same then as in Germany. German public broadcast is arguably fine, when compared to private TV and radio broadcasters, many private newspapers and probably all social media platforms.
I don't know how bad it is in Denmark, but keep in mind that journalism that is not subject to profit seeking and independent on whatever billionaire owns the outlet, is not only valuable because you personally consume it, but also because it shapes the public discourse and thus indirectly may have influence on political decisions.
i agree that the private TV is no better, and the public TV has some good stuff. but what confuses me every time is that the law in germany expressly forbids the public funding of printed newspapers because it could be used as a propaganda tool but the same law does allow the funding of radio and TV and internet publications (the last is now really weird of you consider that printed newspapers are now online too)
No the ÖRR are not fine. Making students pay so talkshow millionaires can live luxurious lifestyles is not fine. Forcing people to fincance propagande against their own interests is not fine. Giving completely one sided reporting such a special platform is not fine.
But a state financed news outlet is no better, because it invariably ends up being government propaganda, since that's the hand that feeds it.
There is no perfect world, and so it isn't perfect, but the separation between financing and content selection is there.
IMO it doesn't need to be perfectly neutral and independent to be valuable for the population and the democracy. I'd love for it to be without the flaws the system has, I just think it is hard to install the perfect system, given the incentives of the involved decision-makers.
So then you can choose to pay for it but don't force those of us who vehemently disagree to pay as well.
That is such a lame demand. Everybody being forced to pay for public broadcast is just the same as for every tax and the mandatory social security. People not reading books pay taxes that go to public libraries. People rich enough to send their children to private schools still have to pay taxes that go to public schools. People very much opposed to nuclear energy have payed taxes that went into nuclear power plants. People much opposed to the closure of the nuclear power plants payed taxes that were used to close down those power plants. That's how the system works, for better or worse.
No, it is specifically totally-not-a-tax because a tax for propaganda would be unconstitutional. Nor would the salaries it pays as well as the money it pumps into further private companies be even remotely acceptable for public institutions.
[flagged]
I mean, AfD doesn't seem to be overly fond of Jews or immigrants...
You must be living in a parallel universe because in the current one we're living in there has never been a AfD rally/protest for pro-palestine ever.
A horrible regressive tax that should be abolished, as should be the "news" and entertainment it pays for, but it's not very relevant cost for someone one who makes close to 100k.
Is there any news source you wouldn't call propaganda?
Yes, one I could choose to not financially support when its clearly acting against my interests.
Not really, there are certain very well researched and written articles which present the facts as they are and letting the audience to use their own judgment and form an opinion in few news outlets. But most of the time every news outlet is just pushing their own political, cultural or doomsday agenda.
The German public broadcasters, especially the Tagesschau, are the worst. Also this is a really good video that explains how crazily the public broadcasters are creating the propaganda in a subtle manner to push their own agenda rather than being neutral. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46MP_G8CKFA)
I watched the first minutes of the video, but the narration is pretty cringe, I couldn't bear it. It didn't say anything about subtle propaganda, seemed to be mostly Schadenfreude.
the key criticism seems to be that they interviewed people on the street that turned out to be either known political activists or their own employees or contractors. in other words instead of asking random people they picked people they knew.
one criticism i didn't get towards the end is that one particular politician would always give the same response to the same question. that confused me because why wouldn't she? why is that poor? doesn't make any sense to me. but that's unrelated to the criticism of the TV reporting.
Check the timestamp from 4:00-5:10 and 5:50-6:30. One would actually think that those were just random people on the street and their opinion, but they were strategically placed insiders.
The solution to this is making sure to watch news from opposing viewpoints, not avoiding news though.
Thank you.
I think it is important to be (at least a bit) precise in this debate.
I dislike the wording "social contribution", as these are (mandatory) insurances that benefit the insured person in case of sickness, retirement, loss of employment, etc. Discussion about the cost efficiency and fairness of the system are warranted, of course. Anyway, the current generation of retirees benefit greatly from it, so for them at least it was worth paying.
Since you are accounting all those taxes, including the VAT on the citizen's side, companies only pay the Arbeitgeberanteil (you didn't mention) and the taxes on profit?
> I dislike the wording "social contribution", as these are (mandatory) insurances that benefit the insured person in case of sickness, retirement, loss of employment, etc.
They benefit some insured persons. If everyone benefited equally insurance would not be needed as you could just take the money and pay the doctor directly. But even the expected benefit if you average out unpredictable health issues is far from equal as what you pay doesn't depend on your risk factors. That's what makes it a social contribution. And since you are forced to pay it it's a tax.
> Anyway, the current generation of retirees benefit greatly from it, so for them at least it was worth paying.
You mean the last generation of retirees. The current generatin of "retirees" is forced to slave away the remainder of their lives in the super market checkout and other demeaning jobs. Absolutely despicable outcome considering how much money the state sucks up.
>One of the most regressive precepts of the German system.
If you mean the existence of two-tier private/public insurance, yes. The two-tier system was abolished in most of Europe for good reason. Either they abolished substitutive private insurance, restricted it, or transformed private insurers into regulated providers of universal basic coverage, e.g. very recently in the Netherlands.
[flagged]
Sorry, you’re the one who is misguided here.
Government spending as a % of GDP in Germany is exactly 50%. So definitionally half of all money goes to taxes.
Are you counting in VAT on everything OP spends that money on? Are you counting capital gains taxes OP pays when investing that money? Are you counting the taxes paid by the employer for his role (which defacto come out of his pay, just before he gets it)? The property taxes he pays to live?
The employer doesn’t look at the employees salary as the only cost. Employers look at things rationally, using the all-in cost to employ someone (the combined total of all salary and government mandated taxes and benefits contributions). In many European countries this is 2X the persons salary or more.
> Are you counting in VAT on everything OP spends that money on? ...
No, I just assumed he spends all his money on rent, which is VAT-free ;-). I also didn't account for his Kindergeld and Elterngeld, Rente, Invalidenrente, Witwenrente, Pension and whatever else that person could have. He didn't share all that information.
> Are you counting the taxes paid by the employer for his role (which defacto come out of his pay, just before he gets it)?
You may have to decide whether the payer or the payee pays the taxes, otherwise you are double-counting it.
I hire people remotely throughout Europe. When we budget for a hire we look at the all-in labor expense, not the persons salary. If the German government didn’t charge us before we even pay the employee, we would just pay it all to the employee.
So it’s a tax he pays whether you want to “brand” it that way or not. Who gets the money changes nothing about our budget for the role.
Imagine you want to buy a house. You have a budget for the house. The government takes taxes on the price, which you need to consider in your budget. Does the seller pay the taxes, or do you?
Having worked in another EU country, I can attest that I paid as much as 56% in taxes, so I believe a guy who says that he works in Germany and pays half in taxes. If you have other data, you are welcome to present it.
If you make 90k in Germany, you pay around 36k to mandatory (varying degrees) insurance/pension plus taxes if you're single. About 19.5k of that are actual taxes. If you're married/have children that total can drop to ~30k and will include health insurance for your entire family unit.
If these people are to be believed, tax freedom day (the day you stop paying taxes and start paying yourself) in Germany is July 11 so just over 50%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Freedom_Day
I just gave you the actual numbers. The same numbers you will quickly get by using any of the many available net income calculators for Germany[0].
If you have a different idea, feel free to break the 90k down yourself. Don't lazily push the work on other people, asking them to puzzle together where some neglected Wikipedia articles' table of magic numbers actually comes from. Hint: It's a number made up by an interest group called the "German Taxpayers Federation", representing mostly entrepreneurs and wealthy taxpayers. The number being opaque is intentional, because its purpose is to mislead and support their advocacy for tax cuts.
But by all means, don't let me stand in the way of your right to blindly believe whatever someone else wants you to. God forbid we input a five digit number into a calculator.
What will it take? A notarially certified copy of tax returns mailed to your address?
[0] First Google result: https://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gross_net_calcu...
You have to add in all the other taxes as well. For example VAT, gasoline, and property taxes are significant. That's generally what tax freedom day is meant to mean - when an average citizen is done paying all taxes.
Edit: I was curious what the answer might be and couldn't find much. One source calculates the tax burden to be about 53% of income.
https://www.steuerzahler.de/belastungs-check/?L=0
> https://www.steuerzahler.de/belastungs-check/?L=0
The link you provided is the web page of the interest group I mentioned. They will literally try any trick in the book to get that number up, including adding a bunch of things that aren't even taxes, a boatload of things they call "quasi-taxes" with numbers presumably pulled from their ass, and adding expenses your employer incurs only to subtract them again immediately. Anything to get that percentage number up.
But even they don't even call the resulting number "tax burden" - that'd be transparently stupid. They more generally call it a "burden ratio" (Belastungsquote).
Just to give you an idea of how ridiculous their calculations are: If my wages are 90k in Germany, they do their calculations as if I earned ~105k just so they can immediately subtract the entire 15k again and call it a burden (for expenses my employer pays on my behalf). Does this still sound like something you can easily compare one country to the next and draw useful conclusions from? Of course not. In the next country it might come from an interest group with a different goal, a government calculation, or a Fox News writer.
> You have to add in all the other taxes as well. For example VAT, gasoline, and property taxes are significant. That's generally what tax freedom day is meant to mean - when an average citizen is done paying all taxes.
What you're trying to get at - hopefully because the alternative is a nonsense number with no purpose other than being a fun fact supporting a discussion about degrees of individual autonomy in modern societies - is called discretionary income, and it's only meaningful when adjusted for cost of living and compared across similar living situations.
> If my wages are 90k in Germany, they do their calculations as if I earned ~105k just so they can immediately subtract the entire 15k again and call it a burden (for expenses my employer pays on my behalf).
Aren't you talking about social contributions that your employer is forced by law to pay on your behalf? You realize that if this was not in place, those money would go directly to you since your salary is whole sum your employer is paying towards your employment? Doesn't seem you grok it fully from your words.
I am not claiming if its good or bad (dramatic global financial changes will test viability of all these systems rather well in upcoming years, I'd expect many people will be unhappy when their naive views hit reality of numbers). I am outside of such system, in mostly private social system in Switzerland (aka I save for myself, mostly) and wouldn't want it any other way.
If that's the real wage, it should be used when comparing wages internationally. It's however not used as such, because trying to figure out what should and shouldn't be included in that number for each country will result in an even bigger headache. Do we add the average cost of employer-provided health insurance to US wages to keep the number comparable? What about those who self-insure?
In any case, the resulting individual "burden" is meaningless if you don't also quantify individual benefit. As an extreme example, imagine a country in which your income taxes pay for things such as transportation credits usable on gas, public transport and roads, while the neighboring country has mostly private toll roads and low taxes. Another example is health insurance. In Germany it is pretty nearly mandatory with most having some form of insurance, and total spending per citizen is around $9,000. In the US more than 90% are insured and spending is higher, but within the same ballpark.
What does the raw tax/burden tell you here in an international comparison? Fuck all. It's at best usable as a prompt for a philosophical discussion about autonomy, but often merely used for masturbation or making dishonest arguments designed to go over well in establishments specializing in alcoholic beverages - like those of a certain interest group.
> Do we add the average cost of employer-provided health insurance to US wages to keep the number comparable? What about those who self-insure?
Obviously yes, and obviously no. Just as we don't add the price of groceries or rent to wages unless the employer subsidizes those in which case obviously yes we must.
> What does the raw tax/burden tell you here in an international comparison?
It tells you how expensive it is to live there, relatively speaking. Obviously (as you note) that's only half of the discussion just as an expensive appliance might or might not be worth the premium to any particular individual. But you're wrong to dismiss it out of hand as you do. Just as it's disingenuous to dismiss the benefits of (for example) universal healthcare it is also disingenuous to attempt to derail discussion that focuses directly on total cost or effective tax burden or what have you.
What you are dismissing as a "nonsense number" of an "interest group" I would consider one of the most accurate and easily understood quantifications of total cost.
Imho, parent's point about attempting to quantify costs without balancing them against benefits is valid.
It's meaningless to say "Germans pay X, Americans pay Y" if the two receive completely different benefits in exchange for those rates.
Furthermore, the point that the German system would be paying to individuals if not to the government is somewhat disingenuous. There are a few options.
An example would be parental leave. In the US, it largely doesn't exist to the European extent. Employers don't offer it. You can't buy insurance for it. It just doesn't exist. That's something Germans are getting for existing in the German system.Yes, as I acknowledged it is only half of the story. Certainly you need more information to make an informed decision about anything. But that doesn't make it meaningless. And generally where people level such dismissals there is conversational context being conveniently ignored (such as happened earlier in this thread).
I'm not sure what point you were trying to make with parental leave as an example. I completely agree with what you wrote but don't see it being at odds with anything said previously.
I think we all know that Germans enjoy substantially more free at point of service public services than those in the US let alone those living in a developing country. Obviously that costs something. Yet when someone brings up the price tag you get a bunch of partisan screeching about how prices are meaningless.
Prices _aren't_ meaningless. The US military (for example) is absurdly expensive. There are lots of things received as a result of that expenditure. Regardless, the relative cost is high and that's not meaningless to point out given that everyone involved in the discussion has at least some conception that there are important differences in the downstream impact.
Don't forget VAT
I can spend that in whichever tax jurisdiction I want and the VAT rate might be whatever depending on what one buys. If you want to go that route you'd then also have to adjust for cost/quality of living to stay intellectually honest, which means you'd then have to come up with some statistical consumer basket. It's a stupid idea to even start down that route in what fits into HN comments.
It's called PPP and yes, it makes Europe look sightly better but it's still behind the US and that's for median household income not tech income.
I've managed staff all over the US and in Europe and have had access to large corporate pay scales across zones. The difference is so significant that CoL is a total rounding error for software developers.
Do you pay VAT on almost anything? It affects how much your actual disposable income is and thus literally how much you can purchase.
Nobody said its going to be trivial to calculate, reality doesn't care about that.
3€ fee on every line item for imports says no you cant'.
Yes the exact cost will differ depending on what you buy but that doesn't remove the cost, it just obscures it - which is the point of having so many different taxes.
You always have to cost/quality of living if you go that route. Because that's literally what taxes are for. Anyway I don't think it's fair to not include VAT. For every euro you want to utilize(modulo some exceptions) you have to pay it.
Don't forget that rent is VAT-free
You however have to admire getting things that wrong in the same paragraph that tells one to not trust what one sees in Google searches. Though I suppose HN comments would show in Google searches... maybe their humor just went over my head.
Just want to add that you also just can't compare the netto value on your bank account. In Germany the state takes responsibility for much more things like education (Kindergarten, School, University), public transport, cultural events ... . They are heavily subsidiced and give value back where you don't have to pay extra.
> education (Kindergarten, School, University)
Other governments including US also pays a lot for these.
> public transport
Which is so famously reliable that Switzerland no longer allows their trains on their tracks to avoid messing up their schedule as well. And of course its run as private companies so execs can pocket large portions of those state subsidies.
> cultural events
No thanks, I don't want my government deciding what culture should be supported.
It is more than real if you include all taxes.
Not for me. But feel free to show your calculations.
49% of that money goes to taxes
Germany has a progressive income tax system (Einkommensteuer) based on your taxable income:
Tax-Free Allowance (Grundfreibetrag): The first 12,348 you earn is completely tax-free.
Progressive Zone: Income between 12,349 and 69,878 is taxed at a smoothly increasing marginal rate from 14% to 42%.
Top Tax Rate (Spitzensteuersatz): Income from 69,879 to 277,825 is taxed at a flat 42%.
Wealth Tax (Reichensteuer): Income above 277,825 is taxed at 45%.
On top of income tax, mandatory social security contributions will consume roughly 20% to 21% of your gross salary (capped at specific income ceilings):
Pension Insurance: 9.3%
Public Health Insurance: ~8.2% to 8.75% (depending on your provider's supplemental rate)
Unemployment Insurance: 1.3%
Long-Term Care Insurance: 2.3% to 2.9% (includes a 0.6% surcharge if you are over age 23 and childless)
To see how these deductions interact, here is an estimate for a single individual (Tax Class I) living in Frankfurt, earning a gross salary of €60,000 per year without church tax:
Category Annual Amount Percentage of Gross
Gross Salary 60,000 100%
Pension Insurance (9.3%) -5,580 9.3%
Health Insurance (~8.75%) -5,250 8.8%
Unemployment Insurance (1.3%) -780 1.3%
Long-Term Care Insurance -1,440 2.4%
Income Tax -8,786 14.6%
Net Take-Home Pay 38,164 ~63.6%
Yeah, but social security insurance isn't the same as taxes. A few years ago I was unemployed for a few month and got money from the insurance. My parents are retired and get their pension. When I go to the doctor the insurance pays for it (in most cases). I am sure, I paid more than I got out, but that is true for all my other insurances as well.
I was unemployed a few years ago, and when I applied to the state for unemployment I was denied because I earned too much. So it is effectively a tax I will never get anything out of it as long as the prior year's Form 1040 shows above a certain level.
Interesting.
> So it is effectively a tax
If you desperately want to call it a tax, go ahead.
That "health care argument" is getting a bit tiring tbh. The US government spends much more than any European country per capita on health care (the US system is simply less efficient), and the chunk of your wage that goes into your health insurance isn't a tax either.
US consumers also have high standards for healthcare.
I interact with a lot of engineers moving from Europe and US and it’s never how US politics portray it. German friends talk about paying for private insurance because the public one is so bad.
How do you define good/bad? People mostly seem to talk about wait time for socialized health care, but where we live in US there's plenty of specialists that you gotta book months ahead of time. When my mom needed a pacemaker it was a 4 month process. My wife's OBGYN is booked a year out - god help you if you miss an appointment. Anyone working in pediatrics look like zombies.
Urgent care clinics have been big in our region. The primary system is obviously overloaded, and 2 of these have popped up in the last 3 years. It's more expensive per visit than our primary physician, but cheaper than an ER visit, which could easily take half a day anyways.
What you’re describing is that in response to a resource being rationed you are able to use money to raise its urgency at your will. That seems like a powerful option to have when your health is on the line (that I acknowledge is not available to everyone).
I don’t have metrics for good/bad. I’m just going off of them telling me it’s bad.
To be clear, that's in the US where we have private health care thus it generally isn't rationed provided you're willing to pay. However what we have is a guild system that in effect tightly constrains the total supply. Depending on the state one of the ways that urgent care commonly gets around this is with ever controversial nurse practitioners. Which is to say that quite a few state legislatures appear to be pushing back against the guild.
To tease apart above for non-US readers, to the best of my understanding.
The US government funds most of the resident slots through which the path to become a doctor runs.
The AMA generally (but not always) lobbies against increasing slots too much, reasoning it would decrease the premium doctors (its members) could charge.
As a result, most of the time the US has too low of a supply of doctors, especially in general, highly-demanded areas (family medicine, internal medicine, psychiatry).
Yes. And I think it’s good you have more options including options with less credentials.
Complaining about the service quality for public health insurance customers in Germany is pretty much the definition of "first world problem" though. FWIW I never switched over to private insurance even though my income would allow it, also once you get above a certain age you can't switch back and that's when the private insurers really start to rip you off ;)
And despite that they are willing to pay, because if you are out of poverty your health is a high priority!
So yes, Americans love consuming healthcare. Is there any category they aren’t a high consumer of? You can’t measure efficiency only looking at the input side.
I think the main reason why high income Germans switch to private health insurance is less about service quality, but because they may actually pay less than public insurance (at least until they get near pension age). Can't talk for US citizens of course.
US health care is screwy, because one of the equitable things it tries to create is equal price regardless of age/sickness.
As a consequence, insurance companies generally try to sign up mixed-pool, younger, healthier (read: employee plans) over older, sicker, opt-in insurance (read: ACA).
There are ways they can and can't legally do that, but it's always the goal. In the same way that retail order flow is targeted by HFTs.
The only reason the private health insurance is usable at all in Germany is because the public one exists. When you're competing with that, you have to actually try.
Private insurance sucks ass in the US, period. It's just bad, which makes sense because all the insurers are completely uncontested. You don't even get to choose your policy, your employer does.
Who is making this 'health care argument' you are responding to?
Maybe fully read the comment I'm responding to? The implication is that European countries (and especially Germany) spend an extraordinary amount of tax money on health care and that's why taxes are so high. This is basically wrong from start to finish. You also don't pay half of your wage in taxes in Germany. The chunk that's removed from your gross wage before pay out includes your mandatory employee insurances (health-, pension- and unemployment-insurances), and that's how you end up "losing" about 30% to 45% of your gross salary before pay out (the actual "tax part" is somewhere between 10 and 25% depending on income, marriage status etc...)
Median automation engineer in Germany made 78 840 € in 2025, according to government statistics
https://web.arbeitsagentur.de/entgeltatlas/beruf/59351
Now do per working hour, including benefits.
Per working hour would be €157,680.
German Ex-Automation engineer here - was more like 120€ - don't forget they usually sub-contract that out..
> €157,680
outside germany the `,` reads as thousands-separator. may I offer you a `.` in exchange?
also that's gross, not net (Brutto/Netto) which is _painfully_ lower.
I think the joke is that they only work half an hour a year...
I meant it as a thousands separator.
Net is usually a little more than half of gross if your salary is high.
The German value seems very suspect. Glassdoor, for the same job role, says €53,000 to €80,000 per year which is probably lower than the truth (Glassdoor overweighs junior roles) but looks much more realistic to me.
The vacation time is genuinely better, yeah.
The universal healthcare is hard to quantify - because most decent companies include health insurance in the US and the quality of the public healthcare provision in Europe can be quite patchy (i.e. location-dependent)
Remember that you are comparing gross salaries too, and taxes are much higher in Germany so the engineer ends up with much less take-home pay.
That makes it easier to quantify. If I need to work a decent job at a decent company to have good healthcare, then a large number of people don't have good healthcare.
This is not acceptable. Healthcare should be a basic right, and a lot of European countries treat it as such (e.g. in Germany, everyone is insured, no matter their employment status, and its mandatory and equal for everyone regardless of their job).
People also can't be fired for being sick.
In theory yes, but they're really running the German healthcare system into the ground. Many doctors leave the country after graduating from University. Doctors cannot freely open a practice, they have to bend over for some central commie committee. And they will only receive a fixed amount of pay per quarter per patient depending on the disease. And of they have "too many" patients, at some point they have to treat them for free (payment is limited).
The whole thing is a scam run by our politicians, who of course are all private insured.
Yes, I agree fully. And yet I can go to a doctor and get meds and I will pay no more than 15 bucks on a really bad day for some meds.
If they choose to cover what you need. My dad had to pay thousands for surgery or he would have gone blind (maybe 15 years ago?). Not sure why they didn't cover it. Probably because you don't die.
Exactly!
I hate to break it to you, healthcare in the US is extremely patchy and location dependent.
I can also tell you working in tech for a very long time, if you aren’t working for a Silicon Valley company you might have health insurance options, but that doesn’t mean they’re any good. Especially if you have a preexisting condition.
>Especially if you have a preexisting condition.
What does this mean?
https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/pre-existing-conditions/
https://www.hhs.gov/healthcare/about-the-aca/pre-existing-co...
> Health insurance companies cannot refuse coverage or charge you more just because you have a “pre-existing condition” — that is, a health problem you had before the date that new health coverage starts.
>Health insurers can no longer charge more or deny coverage to you or your child because of a pre-existing health condition like asthma, diabetes, or cancer, as well as pregnancy.
>They cannot limit benefits for that condition either. Once you have insurance, they can't refuse to cover treatment for your pre-existing condition.
This has been in effect since 2014 due to the Affordable Care Act.
> working for a Silicon Valley company you might have health insurance options, but that doesn’t mean they’re any good
I'd love to hear about people working in 'tech' who don't have decent health insurance options. If that's you, where do you work and what do you do?
> preexisting condition
Not with ACA compliant plans
It’s really not a disputed fact at all that engineering jobs in the US pay more than in Europe, but that European jobs have more benefits such as vacation and social security, and US generally has higher cost of living.
I am surprised that this suddenly is a “based on what data?” discussion.
It has always been an apples / oranges comparison.
You're surprised that people want evidence instead of blindly trusting (supposedly) common knowledge?
If it's true it should be trivial to provide said evidence.
https://www.secondtalent.com/resources/countries-with-highes...
(based on stack overflow 2025 survey)
US median developer compensation is $155k vs $80k-85k in Germany; 85% of US earn > $100k vs 27% in Germany.
Former member of the Senior Management for a huge global bank operating in Germany.
1. These averages are an average. Rarely are they paid. I don't know where these numbers are from but the these numbers are for top earners in good paying industries.
There are junior, normal and senior devs, sometimes above is a lead dev. Business maybe has 2-3 leads that govern a head count of dozens, and many working off-shore.
It is called blended average. People who rank in 107k are paid including bonuses. And rarely make any further wage jumps. The dev who is paid 200k fixed in Germany is a myth, not even close to 120k.
Germany hates IT and devs. Business comes first, and anything and everything regarding IT is considered a cost factor, a necessary burden.
2. Freelancers
Freelancers rake in more money due to tax deductions. So a day rate of 800-1000EUR per month is a pay off and freelancers have to take care of the taxes etc.
Companies on the other hand can deduct those "investments" and roughly pay half the price in the end. So, this is the problem with employment: you are a cost factor and you are a liability from the beginning due to worker rights etc.
Germany punishes workers as well as freelancers. But I could not raise payment as I saw fit. Germany means yearly total times 1,25 = total cost for a company ("employers' part of the tax" as sugar coating for taxes above 60%).
100 workers with a yearly raise of 2-5% in payments amount exponentially and are a risk factor especially considering the fact that productivity rarely increases as well as value to the company on average. So ever increased payments over a span of 10-20 years.
That is the problem with the system: socialism favors keeping you poor. Don't steal people and companies their hard earned money, lower taxes, allow for higher payments at will not by "number comparison and increase to all" and let companies workers decide where they spend their bucks.
3. Conclusion You might wonder how much the guys really perceive on their bank account in the end. It may be lower than you think. Rule of fist: if you do not immediately make the switch to stay in the US you have lots of cuts along the way: company share, taxes.
Before I went to Senior Management I was totally on your page. Now knowing both sides I see the matrix so to say. I am still on your side however business doesn't benefit from all the taxes.
> Freelancers rake in more money due to tax deductions <
Until now - the freelancer thingy is heavy under fire ("Scheinselbständigkeit") and its quite to difficult to have only one or two clients; also 1-person-GmbHs are heavy under fire from the public pension scheme.
I know a lot of devs paid 120k€ before socialism over here. Also: The 25% "employers part of the tax" isn't a tax but masking the burgeoning costs of (non-tax...) social security systems - benefit receiver are also the only people getting those regular 2-5% raises tbh. (and ofc. every capitalist earns these too I understand by looking at a bank's business model...)
Maybe the engineer makes 90K, but there are still thousands in social contributions. Can be up to 15K.
[flagged]
That is not "fucked up" it is called the solidarity principle. You contribute when you have the capacity to contribute, and society protects you when you happen to need more than you can afford. Netflix is a consumer product, and health insurance is risk pooling. You're treating health insurance as if you're buying healthcare services. You're not. You're buying protection against an uncertain financial risk.
Also you forgot the contribution assessment ceiling at €69,750/year.
However, Germany has a legitimate problem when contribution levels, service quality, and access aren't aligned with what people feel they're paying. That is a different discussion which needs much more nuance and intimate knowledge of the German healthcare system.
The fucked up part is the forced solidarity and high barrier to exit the so called solidarity principle. You need 77,400€ annual salary to switch to private insurance in 2026 and in 2027 it will be increased to 84,150€.
> The fucked up part is the forced solidarity
Of course it is forced, it has to be. What's the alternative? Make it voluntary, which immediately will lead to the total cost only being spread across sick people that definitely are going to cost the system money, resulting in an immediate increase in coverage cost, making it unavailable to a large part of the population? Just look at how well removal of the fee for non-coverage under the ACA worked in the US. That's just "let's take health insurance away from poor people" with more steps.
Not op, but it’s solidarity if money is freely given, let’s call it something else when money is taken without consent.
The Solidaritätsprinzip is named that to distinguish it from the Äquivalenzprinzip (equivalency principle) of private insurance: with private insurance, your cost rate is determined by the services you would like to have covered as well as the assessed risk that you will consume these services as calculated by the insurance carrier's actuaries. In Germany (and other European countries), the public option insurance instead only uses your income to determine your rate: the insured risks are common and paid by everyone together instead of by the individual.
"Solidarity" is a pretty good term for that abstract idea. What would you like to suggest instead?
And yeah, I understand that people that do not buy into the concept of a society pooling together such risk to create a model that works best in the aggregate instead of emphasizing individual choice are going to hate everything about this. If you want to be able to save money in exchange for taking on risk, such a society can't let you easily do that because it'll inevitably lead to a tragedy of the commons; such a society would also likely help you anyway if you made the wrong risk trade-offs and become a burden to the state.
Also, let's be clear: this principle is still very popular in Germany. I haven't lived there in a long time so I was curious and gave it 30 seconds. Admittedly the source here is an insurance carrier, but they found in a survey that while 66% of Germans last year were worried about insurance costs and the financial sustainability of the German healthcare system, 73% support the solidarity principle (https://www.aok.de/pp/gg/update/solidaritaet-gkv/)
Why not call it taxes?
And there certainly is consent, given voters can choose to elect people who will change the system, or not.
Tyranny of the masses is a very strange notion of consent.
Are you in favor of abolishing car insurance as well? It’s the same principle, pool money, pay out when necessary.
It lets everyone, including those less well off, enjoy relatively low insurance premiums and you get personal mobility in return.
I’m well off, part of the reason I’m well off is because I was lucky enough to be born in a place that provided lots of stability and opportunity (schooling, health care, et al), it’s nice to give back. Sure, there’s flaws and waste in places, but I’ve had a family member go through extensive medical treatment because of cancer and I genuinely wish that level of care and options for everyone, so paying my taxes and health insurance premiums it is!
The word „solidarity“ means here that you empathize with other people and contribute to shared prosperity and success. You share the healthcare system with a lot of people who make the country what it is. Some of them earn less, some earn more, and that‘s ok. With your contributions you make sure that those who bake your wonderful bread, run the public transport or clean the streets in your neighborhood are covered. If you would rather prefer American system with its deficiencies, because you are high earner and don‘t like to share, you can always go there. Dubai is also nice for people with some cash and tolerance to human rights violations.
What is really fucked up about Germany, is that exit to private insurance exists in principle, and our Bundesmimose Friedrich Merz have never used statutory one. The existing system has deteriorated only because nobody in the government is using it and has no clue what people now experience daily.
> What is really fucked up about Germany, is that exit to private insurance exists in principle, and our Bundesmimose Friedrich Merz have never used statutory one. The existing system has deteriorated only because nobody in the government is using it and has no clue what people now experience daily <
its designed that way, no worries.
Well, people would not want to pay more, so free solidarity can not work. The net result will be higher taxes, of course. The question is whether these costs are worth it or not, but not the "let people do what they want" as that won't work - see how US billionaires don't really give up their wealth voluntarily. And now, building a foundation is just an excuse to not give the money to the people. It is for their protection of wealth, not for solidarity.
It would be solidarity, if there was not a heavy anti-solidarity side to it. You can import millions into this system that dont pay a dime, do not contribute to it (in fact need subsidys to make a living wage) but also consume the services in equal amounts.
That is not anti solidarity, I know Afternative für Deutschland voters like to frame it this way but it's not.
That is not an argument though. He gave a specific example.
You brought up only AfD, without giving any counter-example or refuting his arguments. That's now how a discussion should work.
See it from the other side: the argument IS ENTIRELY IRRELEVANT with regards to AfD or any other party. So, an argument should be made from this point of view as well.
They haven't brought up any argument at all, they simply said that "millions imported into the system do not contribute", which is not an argument or a fact. Just a statement. What is there to discuss? Why are you holding my comment to a different standard, because you don't agree or what?
But just for you I have looked up the facts: 1.1 million Ukrainian refugees, and half of them are employed by now. 1.1 million including children, elderly, and so on, people who aren't able to work. A) its not "millions" B) german overall employment rate is about 45.5 million employed people out of 83.5 million residents. So they are totally in line with the average population.
noone was complaining about Ukrainian refugees, you missed the other area where refugees come but never contribute back to society except crime
> or a fact. <
Obviously, you are not a local! Statistics all around, from Gov to private orgs, tell quite the opposite.
Then go ahead and present those. That's what we're all here on HN for unless I've a gross misunderstanding. Otherwise your comment is no better than partisan noise.
You can’t remove party politics from a discussion of national healthcare. It is absolutely relevant.
Then you also can't complain when people whose arguments you dismissed as party politics start voting for parties you don't like en masse. Which is coincidentally what's happening. But I'm sure you'll blame russian interference or some similar lazy excuse instead of doing any introspection.
Please keep your narrow political views to yourself. Just because someone tells and true fact about hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees that didn’t payed a single Euro into the health insurance system keeps on benefiting from it, doesn’t make them an AfD voter. That’s a sentiment shared by people from every political spectrum in Germany from Linke to AfD.
If you like it or not, it is anti-solidarity if you benefit from a system that you have never contributed. That is just free loading and one should be ashamed of it.
The act of giving involves someone who receives, that doesn't make it anti-giving.
> it is anti-solidarity if you benefit from a system that you have never contributed
What's your stance on disabled children who can never sustain themselves?
I don’t have any problem with disabled children or even adults being taken care of by the society. But that’s not the point. Fully able bodied people that can work and contribute are taking advantage of the system without giving back anything to the system. That’s what’s anti-solidarity
> Fully able bodied people that can work and contribute are taking advantage of the system
Evidence? Earlier you seem to be complaining that refugees are admitted or taken care of in the first place. The former is off topic IMO while the latter is taken for granted. Now you apparently shift to objecting that they refuse to work. Which is it?
The act of giving involves a choice. If you don't have a choice its not you giving but someone else taking.
Aren't Ukrainians actually large net contributors?
They are and thus welcome
"Should be ashamed" linked to refugees.
This is a clear comment showing that your moral compass is quite broken.
That’s not true. There is a limitation where one is charitable without taken advantage of. You cannot expect one to be a life long refugee and keep on sucking resources from the system. They need to start contributing back as soon as possible. Otherwise how sustainable and just do you think the system would be.
Also this thread is the perfect example that one cannot even question the fairness of abusing the system because then they would be labled as immoral or an AfD voter
That isn't what happened here. You spewed unsubstantiated partisan taking points. Now (upon crying foul) you at least make a sensible argument but without any data supporting it. That isn't useful behavior for this website.
Welcome to HN :-))
[flagged]
As the main reason for my expatriation out fo a similar system I'd happily stay and pay if the service was good and the providence state was not collapsing.
As it stands its just an extraction machine to the boomer benefit and it wont survive by the time i will need it
I agree with you. People would not complain and happily pay a premium for a really good service. But that’s not the case in Germany.
Younger generation would absolutely end up paying even more in the future to sustain the health costs of aging boomers.
Also the pension scheme in Germany for a lack of better word, is a ponzi scheme. Again, younger generation is paying to sustain the boomers and by the time those young people goes into retirement, they would barely get anything out of what they have paid.
That's what universal healthcare fundamentally is; everyone pays for it regardless of whether they use it or not, and regardless of the quality of service they receive in return.
What, did you think universal healthcare meant everything would be free? That's not possible; doctors and nurses don't work for free.
No it’s not. The universal healthcare is everyone contributing to it equally. That’s not the case in Germany. Private health insurance holders doesn’t contribute to it at all and a certain professions like government workers, doctors, etc. have their own health insurance schemes and doesn’t pay into the statutory health insurance.
Even the people that has to pay for the statutory health insurance pays different amounts and also there’s a group of people that benefits from it even without paying a single euro for it. So it’s not universal at all. Only a certain group pays for the majority and takes on the burden
> certain professions like government workers, doctors, etc. have their own health insurance schemes <
Completely WRONG: you are mixing up "job-dedicated" pension schemes like for lawyers or doctors with the healthcare setup - in healthcare, there are only two parties: "public" healthcare ("GKV") and "private" healthcare ("PKV"), these two types are not anyhow related to the job dedicated pension schemes.
Correct is, mostly all politicians, high-earners, docs, lawyers etc. are chosing the "private" insurance version, for (at least until yet) several benefits compared to the ones using the "public" model.
You are allowed to enter the private model above a certain salary, but you are not forced. It may be cheaper for some time, but at least if kids arrive it gets fucking expensive, since in the public model your children are insured for free,while in private mode you have to pay for them.
Also handling private mode insurance is more work.
Sounds really complicated, but at the end of the day as long as everyone has health insurance that's still by definition universal health insurance, right? In particular, having "a group of people that benefits from it even without paying a single euro for it" seems mandatory for it to be truly universal.
It sounds to me like you're envisioning something different from universal healthcare, but it's not clear to me exactly what.
What I want to make it clear is that people outside of Germany/Europe, especially Americans have this idea that everyone in Europe has health care because money appears magically to take care of everyone.
But that’s not the case, it is true that everyone would get health care, but a group of people pays a significant portion to maintain that system (which is turning out to be unsustainable day-by-day) compared to majority of the people that truly benefit from it. For me universal healthcare would be something that everyone contributes equally and everyone benefits equally as well.
> For me universal healthcare would be something that everyone contributes equally and everyone benefits equally as well.
Your version of universal healthcare must not cover much, because equal contributions that everyone can afford is not very much.
Universal healthcare can only work if those with more ability to pay pay more or if you live in some utopia where everyone (including children, disabled people, and those too old to work) has the ability to pay for healthcare.
If you want equal contribution, equal benefit, maybe auto repair is a better model. You might get some limited warranty, then anyone can go to any mechanic to get their car fixed, rates are generally posted and you get a mostly binding estimate before the work starts. This is a nice system, but I don't think anyone would call it universal auto repair.
You can’t opt out from it
This is the part that makes it universal.
> Everyone pays for it as a mandatory percentage from their salaries every month as a health insurance fee. .... the higher your salary you end up paying more money to receive the same service
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this sounds exactly how almost all income taxes work.
> 5$ for Netflix and other paying 50$ to watch the same shows with no change in service offering.
Counterpoint -- you pay taxes to get the full benefits that a stable society provides, which includes your ability to make any income at all. The more income you earn, the more benefit you're literally getting.
> you’re young and single, you will be punished
Don't worry, it's impossible to stay young and single forever.
My siblings have covered most of your points, but I think one gets overlooked easily:
> Think of it as one paying 5$ for Netflix and other paying 50$ to watch the same shows with no change in service offering.
This used to be the norm before department stores made fixed price popular. People would haggle, and more wealthy people usually paid more because they couldn't be bothered to haggle as much.
> I would say Germany is a good place if you’re married and have kids. Then you get a lot of subsidies from the government and it’s relatively cheap to raise children in Germany.
The number of newborns in germany last year was lowest since WW2. Seems like most germans don't agree with this assessment.
You have to be optimistic about the future, to have kids. And Germans lately are targeted with propaganda, algorithmic and amplified bad news. Every kind of german-speaking media and social media is full of dread, how the country is in a "freefall", etc. I saw the same in UK pre-brexit.
It’s not just financials. Young people just don’t want to have that responsibility and burden and restriction of freedom that comes with having children.
Because cheap healthcare only is not a parameter for having kids (-:
> The fucked up part is that the higher your salary you end up paying more money to receive the same service as someone paying way less with a lowers salary.
That's basically how all progressive taxation works?
I hate to break it to you, but you have to wait for a specialist in US as well. Months is also a quite typical wait time.
And even if you're on a princely healthcare plan - you're still out several thousand dollars for an ER visit.
But the funny thing in Germany is that if you are on private health insurance, then you can get an appointment with a specialist like tomorrow or at most within a week.
The months waiting time only applies to statutory health insurance payees and ironically they are the ones most of the time that pays a higher premium
My guess would be that big German companies like to sell and insure their industrial equipment wholesale. For example, if you buy stuff from Siemens, everything in the factory must be as per how the applications engineer described it - which is to mean you have to buy everything from them and set it up exactly as they want - otherwise there goes your insurance/warranty.
This isn't exactly cheap, it's worth it for the big players, but needless to say, I'm not exactly enamored with the practice.
Globe-trotting contractors are probably well-paid specialists. GP is probably not commenting on the German labor market.
> They probably just used the Germans because they are cheaper.
German engineering salaries are definitely not cheaper. If you want cheaper then hire people from Poland, Romania or even Spain, Portugal.
They were probably thinking of German *software* engineer salaries which are noticably lower than the USA.
They make less money as salary but aren't cheaper overall when you take into account all the other expenses and regulations.
> They probably just used the Germans because they are cheaper.
I think a more pressing question is why businesses all over, but especially in America, are so obsessed with cost-cutting to the exclusion of everything else that they're openly, predictably setting up said business to implode once the wrong people leave.
Like I dunno, being a pink-haired lesbian communist I am, I'm somewhat suspect of my own opinions, but that said, I personally have no problem seeing that investing in your employees is probably a good idea if you want your business to remain sustainable for the long-haul. But nowadays all corporate leadership is fixated on the next handful of quarters at most. The less-skilled only on the next quarter and no further. I don't personally think capitalism and corporations are good ideas in general, but they also seem to be failing quite spectacularly at their own stated advantages at this point which I don't think gets brought up enough.
It’s weird that people are celebrating the end of Europe here every day because they „killed themselves with regulations” but one German company does well and it’s a mass freak out?
Because it's always extremes in the media? One day Germany is on the brink of collapse because so called economic scientists (in Germany we have a group of them working for the government that are colloquially called "sages" https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachverst%C3%A4ndigenrat_zur_B...) predict zero growth. Next week suddenly it's a boom because other so called economic scientists predict a GDP growth of 0.2%
>What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
A lifetime of working in mission critical environments taught me one thing. When people leave, nothing happens. People come and go, and everyone is replaceable, even those who believe the company will fail without them. Most departures barely make a ripple. With today's advances in technology, it's only becoming more likely that none of us will be needed down the road.
Sometimes things do fall apart when someone leaves, but the remaining employees are always made to paper over the gap.
I believe Napoleon once said "the graveyards are full of indispensable men"
> The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
These are shitty job tbh. Friend of a friend worked on designing and testing windscreen wiper motors in Poland. Company did a round of layoffs and there are zero jobs in the country. There is one job in US - nobody will sponsor a visa. He doesn't know the language to work in Asia.
He switched to software.
OP made clear they were talking about automation engineers, not test or design jobs.
> Amazon would bring in German contractors for months at a time to work on the robots, conveyor belts, automation hardware. They made 2.5-3x my father, had 6 weeks vacation, didn't pay for lodging in the US. To me, Amazon's idea of US jobs were the backbreaking labor 'pickers' and 'sorters'.
Saw a major brewery that operated like this too. Flew in Belgian technicians to do the really valuable work.
The manufacturing is more important than the automation, that’s how Midea was able to buy KUKA.
Being in the loop of using the tools gives you the power.
Best to have both, but if we can keep the toolmaking in Europe and Japan instead of China and move manufacturing back in to the US we are in a much better position.
You must be insane to think that investment is happening in Germany. We have negative real economic growth, by far the worst of all EU countries.
Your contractors made so much not because they are from Germany but because they were freelancers. And if they weren't, they probably had less take-home pay after taxes than your father had, despite the company paying 3 times as much. I'm an engineer with 10 years experience and I make 65k _before_ taxes. Barely over 3k net per month. Many others would be happy to even have a job in the current economic climate. And before you Americans come with "muh free health care": I wait 9 months for an appointment and paid almost 10k last year out of pocket for orthopedic work.
Invest in proper education first. The USA has been dropping the ball consistently over the last decades.
The US government spends $1.4T on education. They already invest more than anyone else. That spending may not be productive but no one can credibly say the US hasn't spent enough money on education.
The US on a PPP-adjusted per capita basis is on the upper end of OECD but 1) not the top in the world, and 2) not even uniquely high among what Americans would call their "peer countries" (Denmark, Germany, Australia, Canada, etc)
And education is unfortunately one of those things with diseconomies of scale. The US has worse wealth disparities, health disparities, nutrition disparities, and greater cultural variation than all of our peers.
The US isn't spending more than everyone else, but you really would expect them to have to do so to reach parity with others.
I think we spend about half of state budgets on education actually.
> I'm not sure if the following has any point, really.
A tell-tale sign that you're touching the third rail.
This just shows you how evil and greedy companies such as Amazon are.
And how much they lie, too. After all Trump promised to bring jobs to the USA. Well, he lied. And so did Amazon etc...
[flagged]
More like in turkey amirite lol
"Existing investors including Sequoia, Lightspeed, Greenfield, Kindred, Lingotto and Promus Ventures participated alongside new backers Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective."
What share of the investor money is from USA?
Being EU company is so hard, you can never pass the purity tests.
Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vHfbUIQeW_A
You move to USA from a 3rd world country, take money from the Americans, Arabs and the Chinese, hire bunch of Israeli, Pakistani, Canadians, Romanians and Russian engineers and and you become an American success story.
You found a robotics company in Germany and you instantly fail the purity test, you are American company if you took too much US money, you are actually Polish if you hired too many Polish engineers etc.
It's just weird attitude.
Yeah well HN is predominantly for and by American audiences I think and that already explains a lot of the attitude towards non-USA. A lot of Americans seem to think they are the main character in every story, and even if they are not, they try their best to somehow alter the narrative until they are.
For startup finance, which this forum was born from, the US is very much the main character by far.
https://dealroom.co/charts/us-hubs-map
60% of the entire world's startup funding comes from the US.
So you agree with the parent? It’s just a weird way of saying it.
I have traveled the world and the United States is functionally different than every other nation state on the planet.
The primary reason people immigrate to America is so that they can make money or become wealthy in some way. That’s it, there’s no other driver, so in general (not universally) the public doesn’t care whether you get your money from, cause they figure it’s yours now.
Why is that? It’s because it’s the simplest country to start a company and tons of liquid money is here.
You literally only have to have a legal resident of a state create an LLC with somewhere between 10 and $50, and you can start accepting payments for services the same day as incorporating the organization.
The regulations are only on enforcement when they get caught, and fines are usually manageable if you’re profitable, for the major majority of labor activities.
I just don’t think people understand the uniquely anarchic reason America continues to dominate capitalism: “Nobody is practically going to stop you from starting something cause you just move states which have different laws but the money flows fine”
AFAIK there are many companies that just create an HQ in USA for the attitude when all the work is done in Poland or Turkey etc.
In a lot of cases it "just makes sense", since its easier for the US-PE-VC-guys to invest if you have a HQ in US
You are not wrong. However, I don't see how your point relates to the post to which your responding.
A lot of Europeans are salty about the continent's decline into near irrelevance in terms of leading edge innovation. It's 90% the US and China at this point. But would be great to see that change.
There is a lot of innovation happening in Europe, it is just that Europe is better in small and medium businesses than startups that become unicorns and tech giants. Interestingly that has always been the case, so it isn't even a recent development. For example while Ford is known to have invented the assembly line, in Germany it is the car supply industry that always came up with innovations and the car manufacturers then just put the components together to make full cars (sure, this is a simplified view). So there are some large companies, some of which are known and very successful worldwide, but they are not usually thought of as innovators. Large companies in Europe don't take real risks, so it falls on small companies that do that with limited funding. It's just a shape of the economy that Americans have a hard time to wrap their heads around.
Fair points, thanks for the thoughts
After WWII Europeans decided to build an egalitarian society and focus on wealth creation, peace and cooperation. Pre WWII they were just too much for the world, as the concentration of powers, including clash of ideologies and need of survival, led to ultra competitive environment at a cost of aforementioned values. They were a leading edge once, due to continental race of industrialization. Because of this structure basically 80% of the world was under European rule. They just prefer watching from the backstage now. Let’s pray this continues.
Unfortunately I don't think that it looks promising for US either. "It's 90% the US and China" started to look more and more like the joke about how US and Albania together form the greatest military power and US isn't the US in the joke.
What US has a great entrepreneurial culture but it is extremely inefficient and the Chinese appear to be innovating much faster with much less drama, utilizing the resources much better. Chinese phones for example have much better batteries and some other specs although Apple has upper hand in branding and UX, Chinese are on par or even better in AI and really very few things are more advanced in US.
Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to give 100s of billions of money to a guy to spend on 3D avatars and goggles just because figured out social media? I bet you that if US had better distribution of wealth(not talking about socialism, just greater number of middle class people and even billionaires that are not all commanding 10s of billions) it wouldn't have ben "90% US and China" but %90 US. This %90 US and China combination seems to be tipping more and more in China's favor. More like %50 US %40 China, up from %70 US %20 China from a few years ago?
If anything, US looks more and more like late imperial Europe these days with nationalism, desires to have a king(and desire to get rid of that king), conserve instead of innovate, identity and pedigree over meritocracy, gender control, sex control, control of the politics by wealthy families or individuals, fascist ideals and so on.
> Chinese are on par or even better in AI
https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models
IDK why all these replies are assuming OP was insinuating some negative judgement. To me, it's interesting that US investors are apparently interested in this EU firm that is pursuing the US market, despite no shortage of US startups in the same space.
Probably because no one is questioning the nationality of the money on any US startups?
Isn't the big money always American (in startups in the US and Europe)? What example do you have in mind? I don't mean the human-scale money risked by some immigrant, I mean the big money.
I dunno I feel historically SoftBank have been a big deal in Silicon Valley
The CEO did move to the US “to focus on the fastest growing market”. Usually that means that they start building an engineering org there and embracing a more US working culture.
Feels like eventually this company ends up being based there and no longer an “EU” company.
To be fair, it all depends on the definition you choose. It's often useless to have a general definition. If you try really hard you can claim that Apple is an Irish company or Chinese company. I always buy my MacBooks From Ireland and I can track it arriving from China.
> If you try really hard you can claim that Apple is an Irish company or Chinese company
Whatever makes you feel better, I guess?
It matters who owns the company. Where your employees come from matters much less.
As long as there is no investors from Europe, these startups will just be a money funnel to America.
It's actually not just funneling money if the company gives jobs to people in the country as well, paid with the sales of the product sold worldwide. Everyone knows US is where business is done, but it's not like money stays there and never leaves the country. It would make no sense at all if that was the case.
And companies here (in eu) would immediately create a competitor. As long as we both "eat" we're friends.
Isn’t that naturally a function of who owns the most available investor money globally?
Also risk appetite.
Note specifically, my emphasis.
"alongside new backers Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective"
Invest then?
It’s not listed.
It doesn't have to be, notice how they already have investors despite not being listed.
You’re right. Let me break open my kids piggy bank and grab a few million.
Americans on HN acting like they have an ownership stake in what their ruling class owns is as much a classic as Europeans coping with having no efficient capital markets.
To be fair many of them do have at least a small ownership stake in what their ruling class owns, since their pensions are invested in the public markets as well as, to a more limited extent, VC and PE through various funds and stakes held by public companies.
Euro pensions are also invested in the American stock exchange... Ownership in global markets is a complicated thing, no doubt the US is both significantly richer, and has a lot more levers to pull. But if things really go down hill (eg. the trans-atlantic relationship breaks down), I doubt the bottom 95% in the US will be better off than the bottom 95% in Europe.
It's an old world attitude.
No need to be defensive. It's simply true, and I say that as a European. The money and attitude required for it is just not present in Europe. German money is much more conservative and risk averse. So the funding will have to be from the US. It's perfectly justified to roll one's eyes when these cases are presented as if Europe could produce these companies by itself.
I agree and I am not against taking US money at all. People want to build things and people with money who want to partner with people who want to build things are usually in USA. US has an amazing business and entrepreneurship culture and the capital.
Sequoia, Lightspeed, and Promus are American. Greenfield is Israeli, and Kindred Capital is British.
Don't know about Lingotto. Looks Italian.
Cherry Ventures is the only German investor. ETC is EU.
Technically, this doesn't answer the question, which was about investment money, not about the investment firms.
Still helps get you to a more accurate answer to know which firms investments to scrutinize no?
No, not really. That's info the OP could easily Google. The answer to their actual question can only be provided by someone with inside knowledge or access to paywalled trade publications.
I'm not familiar with German law / investing, but if they're public here in the US, they have to disclose amounts to investors. If they're not on the stock market, then yeah, unless German law mandates it, we may never know.
It's a startup, not a public company. I didn't know what you think your assumptions based on the US are bringing to the conversation. Not Posting is Always an Option.
You're misunderstanding: the companies doing the investing, if they're publicly traded companies HAVE to report these sorts of things in their finance reports. This is why when these companies buy out other companies they make announcements about amounts, and if they've sold off anything, this, that and the third.
When I worked for KeyW Corporation I had shares with the company, and every time they did anything they made announcements, like if they acquired someone. I had left the company and during my leave Jacobs Engineering bought out KeyW, sold off some of their own business endeavours and paid off all of KeyW's debt and shifted their focus towards government contracting and less so in oil infrastrcuture (if I remember correctly, Jacobs is a big company). This was all publicly announced.
The startup doesn't need to disclose anything, but if a public company invested in them, they will eventually have to do a quarterly report and disclose it.
Even a non public company has to post some business numbers, depending on the jurisdiction.
And in these business numbers is usually some type of (rough) balance sheet,and on balance sheets you will see your holdings in other companies. (because accounting standards require it)
Just for underlining your "not posting is always an option" ;)
I don’t know what the point is that you’re hinting at?
I read it as confirmation that there is apparently no shortage of investor money in Europe, since US investors are willing and able to invest here.
The risk of having primarily foreign, especially American, investors is that the company will leave the EU. Like what we just saw happen with Heart Aerospace [1]. EU needs its own investors.
[1] https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-relo...
I think leaving to the US is more a function of business climate than of the investors
yes, but valuations are dogshit, which means capital is scarce, runways are too short, products end up so-so, and startups fail before they gain mindshare, not to mention the long enterprise sales cycles
What does "from USA" actually mean? Say I'm a European investor, I've invested my European-earned salary into a company with their HQ in Europe, registered in Delaware. Lets say that money 10x, is that money "from Europe" or "from USA"? Does the paying user-base geolocation matter or what is it that matters to you here, where the business is registered, actually located or something else?
And, secondly maybe more important question: Who cares? As long as the business doesn't host their data in the land of the non-free, aren't affected by the whims of the current Tsar and can't be put offline by the flick of a switch, I don't really mind if the money comes from Australia, South Africa or India.
Money is effectively global these days. A lot of the money in the AI bubble is from all over the place, including Saudi funds and the ubiquitous Softbank.
It matters more where the money goes, in this case into European innovation.
People demanding the perfect isolated national champion that takes no foreign money, no foreign workers, no foreign inputs, and uses no foreign services are going to be disappointed.
I don’t know what the point is that you’re making.
I read it as confirmation that there is apparently no shortage of investor money in Europe, since US investors are willing and able to invest here.
Ain't that a kick in the head?
Ain't that a hole in the boat!
that is what a fellow once said
> Robotics-as-a-Service model
Oof. Amazed that venture-backed robotics companies are still interested in making this work.
Why not? Huge companies like Schlumberger work on a similar model. I mean these are not AI businesses (yet) but commercially the model is the same: develop gear in house and rent it out together with the specialists who operate it.
In practice, what this means is that a relatively immature startup takes on immense technological risk by having to invest in the capex and deploy a solution, all while being at the mercy of their customers to give them enough time and access to get the solution to any reasonable production standard. Usually robotics companies never get to that mark.
I believe theres on the order of 100s of millions in losses across a number of robotics companies that have attempted this in the last 10 years.
Most AI is not subscription but pay-per-use (I guess for an industrial robot that would mean pay per action the robot does), and that is a big part of why everybody piles into AI.
Why not? Extreme superiority of the Chinese supply chain network startup energy price market
AI as a service is hugely successful, at least on the stockmarket.
It makes more sense for complicated products, and things where any one user's demand is uneven. Industrial "plant" construction equipment is often leased for similar reasons.
Huh? I thought that was their entire selling point. That you can have a factory that needs retooling and instead of having to carefully plan and buy robots yourself, you can hire these guys instead.
Imagine a robot bricklayer. Some big construction companies may buy them outright, but for smaller projects, it makes sense to simply rent them.
I'm not sure a robotic bricklayer is going to open up construction to anyone who doesn't otherwise have expertise in the area. You still need design/engineering/permitting etc. The robot just replaces the grunt work.
Those have existed for quite a while now. For smaller projects it is cheaper to get a human.
Depending on the task, a human doing it may be highly discouraged by H&S regulations, or the insurer.
Even on individual small building sites in France I'm now seeing mini-diggers instead of human shoveling, everywhere, or tile elevators (for a 3 man roofing team!) instead of the stereotypical exploited immigrant manual labourer. These are justified by insurers quoting such a high price for covering the expected accident and long term health costs of human shoveling or tile carrying to roofs that buying the machines is cheaper.
Mini diggers are cheap to rent for a few days on a job and you can shift absolutely tons more in a single day than a labourer can do in a whole week.
If a roofing company can complete three jobs in a month compared to one job without a goods lift then renting one for each job makes economic sense, especially if it's physically easier too.
I agree, should have mentioned that it must help productivity too. I was just surprised to see it on even the smallest building sites, like a 2 story house, where I thought the bother wouldn't be worth it.
Have you ever dug a hole with a shovel?
If you can get him in time, plus are willing to risk unknown quality of his work. Reliable professionals tend to be booked long in advance, at least where I live.
Cheaper, for now.
aaS means you don't even rent them, you just pay someone to come and lay a certain number of bricks by any means necessary.
Airplane engine manufacturers retain ownership of their engines, and sell kilonewton-hours to airlines.
I don't know enough about airline finance to understand if this is a simplification or not. Are engine users really billed by the kilonewton-hour or by something simpler like a service hour? It seems like kN-h would be a hard thing to meter to everyone's satisfaction and some simpler proxy would do just as well.
"Under TotalCare, an airline pays Rolls-Royce a fixed rate per engine flying hour." [0] Not quite kN-h indeed. But the idea is similar (and more simple to implement, I suppose): you don't really own the engine, you pay for what you use.
[0] https://www.meritshot.com/rolls-royce-case-study
EDIT: wording
I wouldn't consider that to be not owning the engine. It seems to me that the airline does own the plane and the engines on it, and this is more of a usage-based support/maintenance/repair subscription service provided by the engine manufacturer. If you suddenly didn't want it for some reason, I don't think RR could or would force you to take off the engines and ship it back to them. They just wouldn't provide you with the support and service that you stopped paying for.
In the end the result is pretty similar as these engines are useless without regular maintenance and the engine manufacturer likely does not give the knowledge away to do it without them.
As far as I know they sell the engines at a loss or breakeven but make money on the service later.
[dead]
What is the SOTA in AI for robotics today? Is there much progress? Or is everybody too much focused on the LLMs now?
Why do you think it is separated?
https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/
And not sure what RobCo is doing exactly, but LLMs are probably part of it as well.
Some further reading on the LLM-and-robotics aspect in addition to your link:
https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen-robotsuite
https://drivingbench.com/
I'm not sure if I would consider tech demos like this state of the art. They look impressive and they do show promise but there's a huge gap between an impressive demo and a usable product. This goes for Google Gemini as well.
Ehm, I didn't say they needed to be separated :)
The link looks great, but was hoping for more research-oriented details. This honestly looks more like an advertisement, which doesn't tell me much about how progress is going.
RobCo? Is that like RonCo? "Buy the new Rob-O-Matic, as seen on TV!".
Two aspects: industry & research (worked in both).
Research is using a lot of VLM (or whatever Jim Fan decided to call them this year) when it comes to manipulation (robot arm). For navigation it is still a little mixed bag, best to see self driving advancement for that. On the control side (cool jumping humanoid) it's a mixture of RL/IL and traditional control(MPC) and running a slow ass VLM/LLM is not an option.
SOTA is hard to say in the sense that there's just so much variation to the task you want to measure. This can be considered SOTA in one aspect https://youtu.be/3aQWvdCac9o As it's an robot that can lift a heavy unknown object without information about it, RL trained in simulation, but at the same time trained eye will see that the task is made simple by fridge being put on a pallet making the bottom of it exposed for grabbing. On the other hand you have PI (Chelsea Finn / Sergey Levine) https://youtu.be/cRZNwgvcWUg that can do nothing of the thing above but can cook food and fold shirts. Deformable objects and tools interaction is hard so their demo is more focused on understanding and interacting with the world compared to the fine motion like the Boston dynamics one. The latter is also teleoperated, and teleoperation tend to look good but have pretty sad deployment success %
Industry is... Depends on startup vs established. VLA/LLM is flashy but really even 95% success rate is not enough for factory/logistics automation if the failure is unrecoverable, and VLM/LLM is far, faaaaaaaaaaaar from that success rate. In controlled settings traditional pipeline of detection + motion planning often outperform VLM/LLM hybrid models by a mile. Established ones have run humanleess logistic centers for many years now and they're seldom VLA stuff, although there is an interest in using it for the 5% failure cases. But they're not interested in SOTA.
Even if VLA reaches 100% success rate it still isn't viable. No factory operator wants a cloud hosted model in the critical path. And nobody is (yet) building a server rack that can be air gapped in the factory to run VLA, and these models don't run on a Mac Mini. Probably an opportunity for something like Oxide to pick up, but they have more profitable segments to go after.
> No factory operator wants a cloud hosted model in the critical path.
That is not true anymore. Nowadays factory operators are quite open to cloud-hosted products when it saves operating costs.
> And nobody is (yet) building a server rack that can be air gapped in the factory to run VLA
I hear Nvidia sells server racks.
Is it really possible that none of the recent crazy robot videos made it to your timeline??
what is it with people choosing evil corpo names
Indeed. The name was well established in the popular Fallout game series before this company was founded.
I mean Microsoft somehow stole Cortana of all things from Halo of all places so…
Microsoft owned Bungie when they named their assistant Cortana.
Microsoft acquired Bungie in 2000 and released the Cortana assistant in 2014. It wasn't a stolen name. It was purchased and part of their portfolio for over a decade.
Reminded of how someone took "Universal Robotics" from the Asimov novels and used it to sell .. modems.
I guess in this category, those guys are unbeatable: https://www.mordorintelligence.com/
Hahah that's hilarious. It doesn't quite feel like they chose to be explicitly evil like Palantir or Anduril though:
> Why Mordor Intelligence Private Limited is a Great Place To Work
https://www.greatplacetowork.in/great/company/mordor-intelli...
> Pottery Workshop. Roleplays in Entrepreneurship Training
https://www.mordorintelligence.com/about-us/csr
Feels a bit more like some Doctor Who-ish happy-sounding evilcorp than Omni Consumer Products
The fact a defence company is also called Stark is quite amusing, if not for the deadly weapons.
Reminds me of the first time I heard about the "Palantir" company...
Edit : typo
I'm waiting for someone to actually name something "Torment Nexus", which is the name of this phenomena.
I will name my company BlackApex Inc
Effective in this attention economy.
Eyerolling to anyone with half a brain.
But maybe most people don't have half a brain.
A couple decades ago, in Brazil, the parking lot used next to a popular Microsoft training center was called South Park. The contact e-mail was "cartman@southpark.com.br".
Evil often wins and makes a lot of money. Also effective if your target audience is evil billionaires with brain rot.
this one doesn't sound that evil though? Just a simple portmanteau that may not sound as stupid in German?
It doesn't sound evil but is a evil company in the Fallout video games and tv show
Is Robert House involved?
MMMM CHIP.
The comments here are just another reminder of how US-centric HN has become. Whenever there's positive news from Germany or elsewhere in Europe, people are quick to dismiss it. But the moment there's negative news, everyone jumps on the bandwagon to bash it.
There was an interesting study showing that while social mobility is generally greater in Europe than in the US, the European tendency to underestimate vs American to overestimate it, results in broad agreement that social mobility is in fact greater in the US.
Poking holes in every new idea is a pan-European pastime - it's how people in this region of the world managed to survive despite exhausting its resources.
Surely you can cite the study
Not that guy, but this was easy to find
[1] https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/how-closely...
Well, it seems their fastest growing market (and largest?) is in the USA.
They, per the article, have set up manufacturing there and a research lab in SF.
The co-founder has also relocated to the USA.
Much of the dismissal I think doesn’t come from a bad place - people see potential in europe, why can’t it a similar market?
Who is dismissing it?
People here work in the US tech bubble. The behavior you describe is indicative of fear.
news.ycombinator.eu
SCNR
[flagged]
Good thing then that the chancellor cannot just introduce laws in Germany then. One of the perks of having actual democratic institutions that aren’t just for show.
That's why Chat Control has vanished for good, and isn't going to be brought up over and over again until it eventually passes.
In Germany chancellor is a character who holds a parliamentary majority, and they creativity can and do introduce laws against the will of the majority of German voters.
You seem to have the mistaken belief that democracy is the rule of the majority, which it is not. It is much rather the rule of the compromise, so whether the majority of the population does or does not want something is less relevant than wether a) that majority can organise a parliamentary majority too, and b) whether that popular desire is reconcilable with the law.
Besides, Germany is a representative democracy. There is no unified “will of the people” that isn’t manifested in the existing constitution of the parliament already. And if that’s what you’re hinting at: No matter how often AfD may claim to represent the will of the people, they decidedly do not do so; not even in Saxony-Anhalt.
It's funny how CDU and SPD always find a way to do something against the will of the citizens and find a good explanation. Whether their rule was good or bad is not subjective, average German lives much worse than in before Merkel era, and things are not improving.
You may point to the AfD, but they are just a boogeyman. They don't rule anywhere in Germany, and yet, the government use the scaremongering against the AfD to cover own wrongdoings. At this point, it's like Big Brother blaming the East Asian Empire (or was it Oceania?) and Goldberg for his own faults.
1984 should have been a warning, but Germany (and the EU in general) is using it more and more as an instruction manual.
Rarely the chancellor’s party holds the absolute majority so it’s not as simple as in countries with a the-winner-takes-it-all system.
Mostly there are coalitions that prevent too bad laws.
Sometimes that can also block good ones. Thanks FDP. I hope you are gone for good from any government for being one of the true ideology driven parties in Germany.
I'm thankful to the FDP for all the laws they blocked, forceful vaccination being just one example.
[dead]
What was that US robotics startup that got tons of press like a decade ago for their "human safe" cobot you were supposed to be able to program by just dragging its arm through the motions? It had a goofy LCD face, I want to say the co. was called US Robotics or something but changed their name, all I’m finding is the modem company though.
> What was that US robotics startup ... "human safe" cobot you were supposed to be able to program by just dragging its arm through the motions?
You're probably thinking of Rethink Robotics in Boston.
Its first model was the two-arm "Baxter", very popular at universities and research labs. The second model was the single-armed Sawyer, much more capable, with built-in vision, which sold several thousand units to small manufacturers.
Rethink Robotics was co-founded by Rodney Brooks. The robots were originally built in the Boston location, and later by a contract manufacturer in New Hampshire. In 2018, the company was unable to find a buyer and shut down operations. The brand and the remaining inventory was purchased by a German distributor, but eventually the robots were sunset, afaik.
Discussion then:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35305141
Baxter by Rethink Robotics.
I wonder if these stocks are just insane, the evaluations have been so high on many things. Where is even the money coming from that determines it?
The money came from:
> Sequoia, Lightspeed, Greenfield, Kindred, Lingotto and Promus Ventures participated alongside new backers Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective.
Isn't the $1B unicorn number from like 2015? I feel like that's a pretty typical series A/B valuation at this point.
There are under 2k private unicorns so it’s still a worthwhile metric. $1B is a proper business.
The next level up of decacorn is sub 100 so if we only tracked that it’d be a bit limited.
2k private unicorns that's less than individual billionaires. Interesting.
>"The next level up of decacorn is sub 100 so if we only tracked that it’d be a bit limited."
That's kind of the point though, isn't it?
I guess but Germany is sub 50 on unicorns so it’s still news worthy
For Silicon Valley, maybe. But this is Europe, where things are still rooted in reality.
Nothing about Europe's policy has been realistic for decades now. The whole of Europe is a vassal of the US and exists at the mercy of the Americans. If they withdraw support Europe is no longer viable.
must be sarcasm. must be
If Europe was not a vassal of the US why do we refuse to stand on our own legs? Why is almost every decision of ours predicated on US participation? Europe will give guarantees to Ukraine but only if USA puts boots on the ground. Europe will secure the Hormuz straight but only once USA has secured it. It's pathetic and embarrassing.
Europe shut down more than 20 Diesel refineries in the past 20 years and then we cry that Diesel is too expensive and blame the Americans. Pathetic.
Our industrial and energy policy is that we will become completely dependent on the Middle East, US, Russia and China so we have absolutely no autonomy and no viability. Embarrassing. Pathetic. Shameful.
> Europe will secure the Hormuz straight but only once USA has secured it.
Wasn't the Hormuz straight perfectly fine before the USA decided to... well do whatever they did?
Europe destroyed domestic energy production and oil and gas extraction in order to make itself entirely dependent first on Russia, then on the Middle East for energy. It was not the Jews or the Americans that forced us to do that. It was our politicians that we elected that did that. And for what? How does it benefit us? Now everyone is crying about insane fossil fuel prices after our policy for more than a decade was to make fossil fuel non-viable. Pathetic.
> It was not the Jews or the Americans that forced us to do that.
The americans kind of forced you off the russian gas though
> Now everyone is crying about insane fossil fuel prices after our policy for more than a decade was to make fossil fuel non-viable. Pathetic.
I think its not only fossil fuel. Germany's decision to shut down nuclear power plants (while also trying to get to net zero C02 emissions) is outright suicidal imo.
Well Europe doesn't have more fossil fuels to extract, does it?
Absolutely false.
Does Europe have enough gas and oil to extract that it would be profitable and allow them to rely significantly less on importing them?
If Europe did not stop issuing licences and if we did not ban exploration, then we could probably be extracting close to double the amount of crude domestically compared to what we are currently extracting. If we did not ban fracking we could also be extracting significantly more Gas domestically. If Germany did not switch from nuclear to gas then we would also have lower demand in fossil fuels. If we went for the only viable green energy source we have, which is Nuclear we could have also significantly reduced our dependence on fossil fuels.
Instead, we went in for the Green energy scam which has not made our energy cheaper or more reliable and has not significantly reduced fossil fuel dependence and has made us totally dependent on the foreign suppliers and manufacturers. We don't even want to produce the windmills and solar panels domestically.
All of this is insane, and if the US stops underwriting our security we cannot survive. Yes sure, the European economy is better than Russia's economy, but most people in Europe has no interest in fighting in a defensive war, so if Russia with the backing of China actually does challenge us we are likely done for. Russia's money also stretches much further than ours, and they don't have to worry about their approval ratings if they mobilize their military because they are not a democracy. No German government will remain in power if they mobilize.
And let's not forget that our Nuclear umbrella providers, France and the UK, both seems on the brink of internal collapse with repeated riots and high levels of disaffection by the vast swathes of their imported populations that feel absolutely no sense of belonging with the host population and countries, and high levels of resentment and disgruntlement of the native populations with the utter failure of centre-left governance.
I really don't understand how anyone seriously believes that if the US withdraws support for Europe that France and the UK will actually go to war to defend any other European country, never mind themselves. They are much more likely to just immediately collapse internally.
All of this is deeply shameful, and it was us Europeans that chose this vassalage. We have to start choosing better. We can be the dominant power in the world. We can be the hegemony, a much better one than the US, if we get serious and choose it.
Speaking for Germany: there have been 3.5 years of center-left governance in the last 21 years and you blame them for all the issues?
Most of the actual policy that was in place under Merkel was center-left, and her non-fiscal policy choices mostly went in a centre left or left wing direction, and the centre-right fiscal policy choices under Merkel really would likely not have been implemented if it was not for the radical left policy choices that was made.
Stopping border enforcement, decommissioning nuclear power and the heavy swing towards renewable energy are some of the most far left radical policy that has ever been tried, and it all came from Merkel, and they all failed spectacularly, and have significantly damaged Europe and Germany.
If it was not for these failed far-left policy choices many of her centre-right fiscal policy choices would have never been made either. And it's not clear that a centre-left government would have had the option to make other fiscal policy choices.
So I entirely reject the premise that Merkel's era was centre-right.
> then we could probably be extracting close to double the amount of crude domestically compared to what we are currently extracting
So doubling... roughly nothing? Europe is importing almost all its oil and gas, right?
> If we went for the only viable green energy source we have, which is Nuclear
Well I do agree that it was unfortunate that Germany (and others) actively avoided nuclear power. Though it's nice that renewables are improving, too.
> if Russia with the backing of China actually does challenge us we are likely done for
Really? Russia has been fighting Ukraine for years. You're saying that Russia can easily beat a much larger part of Europe? How?
> France and the UK, both seems on the brink of internal collapse with repeated riots
Times are hard. Germany does not look that good with AfD, if you ask me.
> high levels of disaffection by the vast swathes of their imported populations that feel absolutely no sense of belonging with the host population and countries, and high levels of resentment and disgruntlement of the native populations with the utter failure of centre-left governance.
Not sure where you're going, this sounds racist.
> if the US withdraws support for Europe that France and the UK will actually go to war to defend any other European country
When did the US last go to war to defend any European country again?
> We can be the dominant power in the world
Is that the goal? I just want to live in peace.
>Instead, we went in for the Green energy scam which has not made our energy cheaper or more reliable
No shit sherlock. The subsidies are still being paid out and will start crashing in 2030.
https://share.google/aimode/yZvPy6zX1ycyyrKsp (This link is only valid for 7 days, sorry).
https://imgur.com/a/UvEfoIy
>and has not significantly reduced fossil fuel dependence
???
What's your suggestion here? It's not like you can go back to fossil fuels.
Not to mention by 2030 it's completely game over for ICE cars and fossil fuel plants except gas for peaker plants and even gas heating is becoming financially unviable today. All the old EEG subsidies will start to run out in 2030 and even the remaining subsidized PV plants will be cheaper than fossil fuels.
Diesel prices are high because of the Americans, blaming them is entirely correct.
If Europe did not shut down 30 refineries since 2009 the premium of Disel over crude oil would be a lot lower than it is today: https://x.com/BjornLomborg/status/2105736980072153328
If Europe did not shut down domestic energy production and oil and gas extraction in order to buy oil and gas from Russia then oil and gas would be a lot cheaper today.
Blaming the Americans for what we did to ourselves is insane and rooted in deep ignorance of what actually happened in Europe in the past two decades.
But yet again this just shows how totally dependent we in Europe are on Americans for everything. Pathetic.
It's good to compare Europe's energy policy with China, since both are nations that are relatively resource poor, although Europe has far more energy resources than China.
Europe has a faith based energy policy, sort of the opposite of "if you build it, they will come". With respect to fossil fuels, Europe has adopted the point of view that "if we destroy it, we won't need it".
Now contrast with China. China is expanding use of coal(1), they have signed long term contracts with Iran and Russia for oil and natural gas, they are building more pipelines(2), they are increasing their own oil exploration to further exploit any fossil fuel resources they have domestically (3), and they are expanding domestic refining capacity (4).
Plus, they have accumulated a massive 1.5 billion barrel strategic reserve of oil. All while also expanding investments in nuclear and renewables. It's not like if you build a refinery, then that prevents you from building a nuclear power plant also. You can do both! You can make energy cheap and abundant.
That is why China is awash in low cost energy to fuel domestic industry (5) while Europe is energy starved. One is led by strategic thinking rooted in reality while the other is led by a policy of wishful thinking and then scolding when things go sideways.
(1) https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-coal-power-ri...
(2) https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202608/17/WS6a82d860a3107385...
(3) https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/new-updates/china-...
(4) https://en.sedaily.com/international/2026/10/05/us-japan-eur...
(5) https://www.globalelectricity.org/electricity-prices-by-coun...
The problem for Europe is that blaming another country is not going to solve their diesel problem.
So you have a choice:
1. Blame America
2. a) Take responsibility for not exploiting Europe's own existing gas and oil resource sufficiently. Increase exploitation of natural resources within the EU to reduce reliance on external resources.
The advantage of 2 is that you can still blame America if you want, as a treat. But you will also be taking steps to free yourself from America.A resentful slave is still a slave, and right now Europe is America's slave, dependent on the US for energy, food, and weapons. Nursing resentments about America is nothing more than psychological venting.
> Our industrial and energy policy is that we will become completely dependent on the Middle East, US, Russia and China so we have absolutely no autonomy and no viability. Embarrassing. Pathetic. Shameful.
Germany shutting down nuclear and coal powered plants was their own decision. I kind of agree with your evaluation, but confusingly it seems like they want it like that (?)
I remember few years ago couple of German fintech startups reached more than 1B$ valuation. Had it been the case in US, those startups would have gone IPOs and started expanding worldwide.
However, raising capital in Europe/Germany is so hard. Still majority of the Germans don’t invest their money and just let it depreciate in their savings accounts. Because of that most startups are funded by US venture capitalists. Hope this one would be able to sustain the valuation
> Still majority of the Germans don’t invest their money and just let it depreciate in their savings accounts
Do you have a source on this? I live in Germany and most people I know either invest into stocks (safe, boring ones), invest into a house/apartment/land or similar, or are too broke to even save anything at all (most people).
That's very european. Even the ones who invest in stock mostly choose US tech stocks to get some double digit growth.
Here’s the source( https://www.statista.com/statistics/1365598/stock-ownership-...). In comparison the percentage in US is more than 65%.
You must be interacting with young people because they have started investing after Covid with neobrokers. But the real wealth is with boomer generation and they just let it rot in savings accounts. Maybe things would change once the wealth transfer from boomers to millennials happens
Why exactly is a >1B valuation necessary to expand worldwide?
First thing that came to mind. I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed.
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/RobCo_Industries
I’d like my Pip-Boy in matte black please.
really putting on the petal to the metal for reaching 2077
so the website is basically called it physical AI
The Fallout nod alone justifies millions in value.
I understand why humans get fixated on the nominal threshold of a large, round number like $1B.
But the thing about private market valuations is that you can't know if investors are right ex ante, so it's helpful to discount.
A $1B valuation sort of just means you now effectively "owe it" to shareholders, and you're now 100% incentivized to deliver that to them in some form, instead of being fully incentivized to deliver on your true vision to your customer.
When done well, private diligence can help uncover blind spots and fund company growth in key areas at the service of that true vision.
When done poorly because of FOMO over AI, robotics, or the latest hype, it can turn into preemptive enshittification.
Hype for the inevitable NYSE IPO!
Capital Markets union is coming :-)
Coming right up: Belgian Hybrid shower curtain and defense startup Aperture Science raises 780M Euros, while biotech unicorn Umbrella in on the verge of coming out of stealth and releasing a vaccine for cancer.
I was expecting to be disappointed at seeing another humanoid robot that can fold laundry BS startup.
But it looks like they're trying to build something that is actually useful.
I just found out about them. To me it seems their core product is "boring" industrial robots with some AI fluff on top, which imho is smart because you can capaitalize on the hype without having it be pivotal to their entire business model. What I find interesting is the robot-as-a-service model.
I assume you got a spouse or parent do all the laundry for you? I’m not sure you realize how spoiled you sound.
Seriously a laundry folding robot excites me much more than a CLI that can generate code. I enjoy generating code myself! I don’t enjoy laundry. Total killer app.
> I assume you got a spouse or parent do all the laundry for you? I’m not sure you realize how spoiled you sound.
What a weird accusation. I do this myself, it takes like half an hour a week and is actually quite relaxing.
I'm not sure you realize how spoiled people sound who would spend thousands of dollars to replace such an insignificant inconvenience.
At the risk of making yet another wrong assumption, that sounds like you don’t have a family?
Fwiw laundry takes a pretty significant chunk out of my weekend. I wouldn't spend “thousands of dollars” to reduce it but at around the price of a new phone I’m totally in the market.
There are four of us. It takes me 5 minutes to gather everything up and put it in the washing machine, 3 minutes to transfer it to the dryer when it's done, and ten minutes to separate it out and drop it in the right drawers when dry. That happens 3-4 times a week. Say 60-80 minutes total per week.
I have found that in order to reduce laundry times to something like this, you have to very deliberately make very specific tradeoffs in the types of clothes you wear and purchase. It is perfectly possible to have a wardrobe that is very low-maintenance (such as by opting for synthetics or synthetic blends for all your clothing), but more likely you have some special cases such as wool, linen, and cotton (which may require air drying and/or ironing or steaming), clothing with small stains that require spot cleaning with stain remover, delicates that need to be hand-washed, whites that need to go in their own load with bleach, or other specific cases.
True. We very much value time over owning things that require that much maintenance. If your preference is the other way round I could see it taking up much more time (and you getting, presumably, more joy from your clothes. Most of the joy I get from clothes is from t-shirt designs. YMMV.)
Yeah, that assumption is correct. So doing laundry for others as well wasn't really something I was considering.
Laundry folding machines already exist. What are you excited about?
folding laundry is not useful?
Definitely not. I have laundry that I hang. Everything else goes unfolded into sorted bins. Of course it drives my wife crazy, and if she takes my laundry out of the dryer, she folds it. What drives her more crazy is that I proceed to just dump it in the bins.
It would be. But it also feels like the "Can it run Crysis?" of robotics.
By the time we get robots capable of folding laundry, we'd already have solved many, many other use-cases.
If it would work, it would be mildly useful. Actually, if it would work, that would be more exciting by itself than it would be useful. But it doesn’t, really.
It is about as useful as robot that chews your food for you
Better to put the items on hangers.
Robocop is missing a 'p'. And one 'o'.
Weren't germans so accurate in the past? The AI slop degrades all quality.
I prefer the variant in the movie from 1987.
Cries in dystopian
Just as long as the CEO’s name isn’t Robert House, I guess
"But autocracy? Firm control in the hands of a technological and economic visionary? Yes, that Vegas shall have."
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
Will this also be a Russian scam?
What is this a reference to?
Wirecard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_scandal
How dare you!
Germans are totally capable of their own scams (see Dieselgate or Berlin airport or ...).
Or AfD
AfD is hardly a scam. They promise nazism and they deliver it.
They campaign for traditional values and opposes same-sex marriage, immigrants, and political elites, yet their leader Alice Weidel is a former investment banker who lives in Switzerland and is in a relationship with a woman. How is that not a scam?
Yeah, but Nazism was a scam.
True. But, had they succeeded at conquering the world, they might have given their supporters the status of supreme human beings, at least on paper. It's good it didn't work out that time, but, it seems, some people want to try a variation of it again to see if it sticks.
They are going hard with the downvotes, maybe they should be as self righteous when it comes to not committing fraud at a national level for once
No, we're quite happy doing that. However on behalf of the German people I wish to thank everyone involved for the thoughtful suggestions and intelligent way to approach a possibly interesting topic. I can tell your hearts and minds are in the right place.
The downvotes are puzzling.
I don't think it is a uniquely German thing to trust the old institutions - which I think is what allowed Wirecard to do wire fraud. I'd say all of Western Europe is rather naive to Kremlin's shenanigans.