The upside is that this will actually provide lots of research funding to small companies. Think of it like the seed round from a VC, but instead of investing into new companies, they try to strategically invest into existing companies to boost future tax revenue.
It'll probably be very German, meaning overly bureaucratic. But the basic idea of financing R&D in small companies to grow them more competitive seems legit to me.
As an example of what was funded by similar German government grants, you can look at voize, which is (by now) also a YC company: https://en.voize.de/uber-uns
Applying for a grant in the European Commission is a labyrinth of different websites each with their own need to register. Grant Specs are largely in PDFs or Word Documents that are attached to the call. And it takes at least 6-9 months from open to decision. I have applied to about 20 grants throughout 2024 and haven't heard anything back from a single one yet.
EC scientific expert here (occasionally judging FP7/8/Horizon 2020/Horizon Europe grants in multiple areas including AI). I also authored some bigger proposals, one rejected (score: 13/15) and one funded.
It is perhaps not a good idea to apply to that many in such a short time frame, unless you have nothing else to do: the individual efforts need to be really excellent to succeed, so focus should be on quality rather than quantity. Why? There is a funding threshold, and you can have 5 proposals that get 13/15 ("good enough to fund"), but you still don't get any of them funded because there enough competing grants with 15/15 score, and after they receive their funding, the pot of money is already empty (the funding is in order of merit).
In my experience, most applications that fail to get the perfect score required are incomplete: To get excellent scores it is vital to FULLY address ANYTHING mentioned in the call. And to squeeze all that into 40 pages is an art. (There are folks that provide consulting support, which I have not used yet, or you could collaborate with someone who has worked on the other side to learn more about what is important.)
While getting grant money remains hard, I was pleasantly suprised about the judging effort and the EC's personnel energy put into the evaluation process and in making it fair; for each call, their is a special rapporteur going around and documenting that everything that should be done gets done the way it should be, and the EC take great pains to find experts that are diverse across multiple dimensions (gender, country, industry/academia, seniority, field of expertise etc.).
Thank you for your insightful reply. I am also registered as an Expert to the EC. I fully agree with you that completing all requirements in a 40-pager is hard. Which I think is exactly my point. It's competitive (that's good) and time-consuming. But I also believe grant applications are a muscle a startup should have when they want to do business with the government. In SpacecTech, Defense, and AI (my areas) this is largely unavoidable.
This has spawned almost an entire industry. Have a look at Zebra Embassy in Berlin as an example. I think it would be easier to "digitally transform" the process to be more efficient.
The websites certainly have their design quirks, as do the application forms (though you can avoid those traps by partnering with people who've done it before). But tbh a single document and 6 month turnaround for our Pathfinder bid was above average for grants we've won, and compares very favourably with our equity funding round.
I have applied for a few grants in Germany and also got them. It’s honestly not that difficult. If you have a large consortium with many partners it can become complicated but mostly because of the partners and not the government. My secret advice: when there is a grant there is also always a number you call or an email address, if anything is unclear, you can call them and they have always been very helpful.
It's boring but otherwise harmless. You skim through 20 pages of legalese and fill out the blanks. Your local goverment office has an advisor who will check the forms together with you before you submit them. (I applied for and received a De-Minimis grant.) Plus for the larger grant types, there are advisory companies that work on commission.
I'm CTO in a startup in Germany. We've applied for and gotten various grants. It's not a big deal. And there are agencies that can help with this. I know various people in different companies that benefit from this as well. There is money at the state level, at the federal level, and the European level that can be unlocked via grants.
Germany has got a well deserved reputation for its bureaucracy and lack of flexibility. We were dealing with the tax office at the same time we were dealing with grants. One part of the government trying to give us money, another taking it away. We had our first deal with not enough revenue to even pay ourselves. That was calculated as "profit". As a bootstrapped company, we got very close to emptying our accounts a few times. And stuff like this isn't helpful. But we survived and we're still around. Partially thanks to these grants.
I think this incoming government is saying the right things and looks like they are planning to do things that sound like they are good ideas. Making the process of founding a company easier, incentivizing R&D, etc. There's a lot of potential in this country in terms of companies that are very specialized and high tech, well educated people, etc. They are definitely over dependent on older companies that are a bit past their prime, e.g. in automotive.
Germany mainly needs to deal with it's risk averse bureaucracy and culture. People that want to take risk here need to move more freely and faster. It shouldn't take months to found a company. Or thousands of euros to deal with all the bureaucracy (which it does if you add it all up).
Germany tends to stifle innovation by bureaucracy, restrictive & complex rules, and a finance climate that actively discourages investment and taking risk. Especially foreign investment. If you look at a lot of big name scale ups in Germany, you'll find that they have headquarters in places like Dublin, London, or Amsterdam. There's a good reason for this: if you want foreign investors to invest, a Gmbh is simply a somewhat toxic legal construction. These companies are German in all but name. That's about more than just taxes.
That needs to change. I think people are well aware. Merz certainly seems to be. But bureaucracies have a way of pushing back and this country is run by bureaucrats, politicians, lawyers, notaries, etc. that all benefit financially from the system being the way it is. They actively resist change and insist how crucial they are to the whole thing. Everything they touch tends to get more complex and convoluted. My worry is that they'll just end up adding to the problem instead of solving it.
I am based in Germany and have helped a couple of dozen individuals and small groups to successfully apply for grants and incorporate. It’s really not that difficult once you overcome the typical psychological barriers which if you look closely are a combination of prejudices and negative self talk.
On all levels, once you really breathe that there is a human person you are directing your inquiry to, and that you can help them do their job, they will be happy to direct money towards you. That principle applies from local startup funds to federal grants to EU level project officers. The “bureaucracy“ can be annoying in the sense of feeling like a waste of time (which, since you should factor in the cost of application into your later grant, is simply not true. It is actually really well paid boring labor.), but it’s really not complex or hard. If you believe they are hard for you (“hell“), you are engaged in negative self talk.
If you approach these things as highly annoying, and direct your annoying energy to the people who are handling your application, you will annoy them, which will make you feel like they are there to annoy you. The alternative is to approach them with the understanding that they’re not trying to make your life hard but are simply doing their job. They know much better than you that some things should be changed but it’s not up to them to change them, and they are not the right target to lobby for change.
Fraunhofer is (by now) only financed 30% through tax money and 70% comes from the royalties on their past developments like MP3 and H264 and H265 and MPEG-H.
Anyway, Fraunhofer gets recurring tax funding. What voize got is a one-off research grant to a group of companies:
- voize
- Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin (a medical university)
- Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH, Berlin (a government AI research lab)
- Connext Communication GmbH, Paderborn (a tech company)
- Kleeblatt Pflegeheime gGmbH, Ludwigsburg (a retirement home, i.e. potential end user)
- Pflegewohnhaus am Waldkrankenhaus gGmbH, Berlin (another retirement home)
For this grant type, it's quite common that you pay the inventors, some assistant companies, some researchers, and some end users a lump sum to force them all to work together on commercializing the invention.
That’s not quite right for Fraunhofer: The financing model is also heavily dependent on research grants. The base funding is indeed around 30%. But another 40% are from publicly funded research projects. The last 30% are from research contracted by industry. In 2023, license fee revenue was €157M / €2991M, so roughly 5% of total contract research volume.
I dont want the govt to fund any research funding. As a tax payer i did not vote this. I want to decide who i fund or not. It just means, my taxes will not go down. :/
I suppose then you won't get nearly as much medical research, technological research, scientific research. Seriously, you may not realize just how much genuine academic research at colleges, universities, and technical institutes rely on government grants.
At least that's how it is in the US. I'm unsure how different, if at all, it is in Germany.
Tip: All highly industrialised, wealthy nations are the same. Central govt provides huge sums for academic research with the hope that it can be commercialised.
In many fields of study, the money that goes into academic research is essentially more of high-level-talent education expense, so that local companies have pools of PhDs to hire from, rather than needing to produce a invention that will be commercialized.
E.g. if you look at PhD graduates only one in a few hundred (even in STEM fields) will end up on a path that commercializes their research, with most of the other ones moving into industry and likely not working on a directly related subject to their thesis. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
That does not scale. We cannot ask every single citizen about every single decision. You want to decide on each funding. The next will want to decide on every tax law change. Government decides, and if majority of population thinks they’re doing a shit job and someone else can do a less shot job they get replaced after a couple of years. Otherwise it’s micromanagement hell.
I disagree. Lets say i own 100 percent of my money. Just that i have to write it down, makes me shiver, what we as people accept to happen.
Am i interested in progress? Of course. Am i not smart enough to see or think long term, most likely. Give me a robo advisor, that helps me distribute my money. Give me best practises. I do not need a bloated government and their politics and interest groups for a simple decision, what i do with MY money that I have earned by working. Govt is the middle management that everyone complains about. A black hole.
I don’t get it. You want everyone to decide what they do with their taxes? roads in the middle of nowhere would never get maintained for example. Orphan sickness would see even less research than they do today. Etc.
Roads in the middle of nowhere are not needed, of course i would not want that. I want them there where they are needed. Like, connecting two big citied with a lot of nowhere in between. I want the robo advisor to make that calculation for me.
And the other thing: yeah, people know, what charity is. But there is no big charity, if the welfare state already takes half of your money. The responsibility to take care of people around you is offloaded to an anonymous entity.
Ok, that means you think that everyone should move away from countryside and into cities. I think that illustrates very well the problem with your approach. Minorities have zero chances of being represented.
The argument about charity and tax levels is not substantiated by any research as far as I can tell. There is however research showing that rich people give LESS to charity proportionally, compared to poorer people.
Making charity donations tax deductible, that does help though.
When people want to live on isles or in nowhere regions, so be it. But i do not want to support this lifestyle with my money. It does not mean, that everyone has to live on cities. If there are enough people to live abroad, then they live with the consequences. It's their home. And certainly becomes noticeable financially, when you go abroad making holidays to these awesome nowhere places.
About charity or tax level and who gives more, that question i do not ask. I would not ask anyone, what are you are willing to give and how much? Little, more, much, welcome. I just would not allow free-riding on things others have paid and worked for and their life blood is in it.
The government has two jobs: 1. Steal your money, 2. Send you to die in a war.
Unless your country is a war, that means they can focus entirely on stealing your money. You're never going to be able to change that. The only thing you can do is protect your money outside their reach. Then you can decide freely how it is used.
I actually think Germany would be really good at digital infrastructure if they stopped being afraid of friend computer. Germany is immensely proud of its history of creating standards - there's literally a place in berlin called DIN Platz. Germany is also very proud, and rightly so, in its history of mathematical innovation.
Everything that isn't dross in the computer world is either a well designed standard, or a well designed algorithm. If the German government adopted a sensible standard for government documents, for example, and mandated that all documents must be saved in it, that would already make a huge difference.
Germany has tons of potential, but Germany is one of the most risk averse countries on the planet (see Uncertainty Avoidance Cultures)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_avoidance]. This makes it amazing at building high quality industrial products, taking innovation done elsewhere and refining and polishing it, slowly over many years - building standards as you say. However, it doesn't help much in the innovation department. Also as probably the world leader in data privacy and protection that's another vector working against innovation. And then there is the robust legislation and bureaucracy (in a controlling sense) around all financial products (not to mention in general), which gives Germany advantages in certain industries but is also a distinct disadvantage for innovation in many sectors. There is also a massive union culture, which provides Germans with a great quality of life, but again, that's something probably negatively correlated to innovation.
I'd like to see more innovation in general and if this leads to that its good. But I don't personally think that innovation needs to happen in Germany, so long as it happens somewhere and Germans can do what they do best with it.
How do you explain all of the groundbreaking technologies and processes that have come from Japan and Korea? Both are at the extreme end of uncertainty avoidance.
How does the Germany of today reconcile itself with the iconoclasts of its past from mathematicians, physicists, chemists, explorers, filmmakers, and industrialists who set the stage for modern life during the late 19th and early 20th centuries?
In my experience it generally generally doesn't, and instead revels in the prestige of past successes. Titles and self mythology seem to be more valued than achievement and performance.
It's a sad frustration, as there is so much potential here.
> There is also a massive union culture, which provides Germans with a great quality of life, but again, that's something probably negatively correlated to innovation.
Hmm... So if people struggle in life and have live from hand to mouth in multiple jobs to support their family and loved ones, they are more innovative?
It engrains the idea into people early on, that they should work to upskill themselves or build their own jobs, instead of coasting on the idea the government will always be there for them to provide jobs and security.
Also, plenty of people in Germany live hand to mouth now. Poverty has been on the increase due to CoL.
So, your hypothesis is that greed fuels innovation? Those innovating are rarely the ones benefiting financially. I think it rather fuels hustling. The end game of hustling are monopolies, which have little to no interest in innovation.
From what examples I can think of right now, innovation actually appears to require a certain level of coziness. I'd say great ideas come from curiosity, and if you're struggling to eat, that's usually limited. The trick is, perhaps, to be cozy, but not so cozy that lifting a finger seems pointless.
> I actually think Germany would be really good at digital infrastructure if they stopped being afraid of friend computer.
They still have the automotive / electrical engineering mindset on computers and software. Software in Germany is built to achieve a means to an end. It is never the end goal itself.
>Software in Germany is built to achieve a means to an end. It is never the end goal itself.
Well, that's how it should be, I don't write software to worship any software deities, I use it to get a job done. If you don't you end up with that 700 dollar useless gadget that was basically a python API wrapper in a box that everyone rightfully made fun of.
We can do a lot of things better in software in Germany but treating it as an engineering discipline is a good thing, I think even the US is probably past the peak of the zero interest free money toy product phase and people are focusing more on real industry again.
What he means is that Germans are less susceptible to the SV bullshit artists that are hyping up their bubble unicorns for VC money, inflating companies with workers just to sell them at peak of the hype before cutting all those “positions” and then en-shittifying the product.
Technology coasted for a few decades gaining public’s trust as an unquestionable improvement over the past. That reputation is wearing out faster than I’d like to admit.
I hear from friends and family that SV big tech are increasingly equated with surveilence, credit card leaks, and destructive games of billionaires detached from reality. I had a long potluck talk with a stranger that was convinced ChatGPT is analogous to another crypto scam. It blew my mind and opened my eyes that could be a popular opinion.
I agree Germans are less susceptible to SV bullshit artists, but they also miss out on the upside for game changing ideas. Whether this is a net negative or net positive is yet to be determined. Up to this point, it has been Germany’s financial loss to over index on the engineeriness. Maybe it is America’s loss to over index on the financial outcomes and the truly world changing ideas and those very same ideas can be a net negative. I would have said 2 months ago that you would be hard pressed to find people on this message board who would agree with the latter, but I think that may have changed significantly recently.
As a German coming from Mannheim, and now living on the Canadian West coast, I have to say that this is exactly the mindset that makes it so difficult to innovate in Germany. While people have a top education and know everything they need to, they don't have a "digital mindset". I think of myself now as computing process, and see myself as a cyberneticist in the German philosophical tradition of Hegel, Marx, Hilbert, Gödel and Bloch, but even I more often than necessary mistrust innovations.
Almost all the science fiction and cybernetic work of the last 75 years came either out of the Eastern block, or out of the US. There is basically no German sci fi vision, and there is extreme reluctance to speculative, big picture thinking as it is pursued in Silicon Valley. Software companies grow quickly and need a very different approach. Silicon Valley mostly understands this scaling aspect and winner take all markets really well. German investors are cheap and extremely risk averse, I tried to build a software company in Germany and it is hard.
While a lot of the current AI work was also done in Germany, e.g. by Schmidhuber, Germans are stuck in their business model. I recommend Münchau's book "Kaput" (or one of his podcast interviews) on how poorly Germans have adapted to the non-industrial aspects of a modern economy (read: "services"). I really hope that more tech founder thinking like Benz, Bosch or Siemens returns to Germany in a modern form. But I don't see it yet, and Germans are still super reactive and conservative to larger changes. The Greens tried to think a bit out of the box, and were heavily punished for it. In general there is basically no political representation for building a new successful economy. At best there is this nice little narrative about the long established "Mittelstand", which has produce almost zero software companies. The first step right now would be to own the idea of the EU, and wanting to win instead of complaining.
I'm not German and have only made a couple of short visits to Germany, so I have no basis on which to judge your statement that Germans don't have a digital mindset.
But if that is indeed true, I find it equally interesting the Germany has been an important center for the development of electronic music. Berlin in particular is "arguably the world capital of underground electronic music" (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/21/arts/music/women-djs-berl...)
No, he lives in Switzerland now (Lugano as far as I know). Switzerland is a big magnet for European talent, as is Germany to a lesser degree. My point though was that Germany was not lacking the thinkers to drive a technological revolution, it is rather the society that does not really have the mindset for radical changes and forward thinking.
> Software in Germany is built to achieve a means to an end. It is never the end goal itself.
How do explain the explosion of non-embedded software companies in Berlin in the last 20 years? On the continent, it is hard to beat the Berlin tech scene for start-ups.
> Everything that isn't dross in the computer world is either a well designed standard, or a well designed algorithm
You must be hanging out in a different part of the computer world.
What I see is that most standards reflect evolved systems, and those standards usually have many amendments. Most algorithms are generation descendants of broken predecessors. I love hearing about a singular talent coming up with something new and getting the world to listen, but the story is usually way messier than that.
So, I agree that good standards and (to a lesser extent) algorithms come out of practice.
However, the basic point about a standard is not that it's perfect: it's a coordination mechanism. Companies go bust all the time, technology changes all the time, but if you have standard components, large parts of complex systems can be maintained indefinitely. Like, I have a rolling press that was made in 1840, and I can still replace the bolts for it, because the standard thread gauge has not changed.
I guess the nice thing about both algorithms and standards are they are the two places where the software world is not just burning people's lives on relentlessly reinventing the wheel. If you contribute even a fraction to the study of an algorithm, your work will be part of software in a thousand years. If you contribute to a standard, you are producing the conditions for a thousand other programs. Both of these things are basically common goods, and they help everyone. I think a culture of programming where it's less about founding the next over-capitalized unicorn, and more about creating a mutually supportive ecosystem, would produce very good software.
We actually have a rather recent government agency called "DigitalHub" for that, too, which has been quite successful at pushing open standards and open source. Then there's https://zendis.de/#produkte whose sole purpose is to replace non-EU closed-source software, for example by replacing Windows + Office with Linux and the custom desktop software suite https://opendesk.eu/
Most of German standardization boils down to creating artificial competitive moats to their existing companies, while propping up an incredible lucrative 'standardization industry'.
This allows most Germans to sleep soundly at night knowing some company won't show up at the door selling the same product they do, but better and cheaper.
This is a well know playbook, and is appealing to bureaucrats who conflate a stack paperwork with actual quality, and is not exclusive to Germans (why does FDA approved medicine cost 100x of chemically indentical stuff sold in other countries etc.)/
The point of PDF is document representation. It looks the same. This allows the government to assume an act of forgery when a non-governmental org attempts presenting documents looking like government documents. You can't do that with HTML. PDF with text source sounds perfect.
i'm swiss living in berlin currently (leaving soon)
germany is a country on the rapid decline. the recently decided investment effort and the new government are a step in the right direction but wont halt or revert that decline. the country needs a BIG shock and be rebuilt from the ground up. the new ministry is just pandering / virtue signalling and won't have any effect.
some examples:
1) legacy financial holes like the pension scheme, no bandaid will save this
3) workers rights are too strong (betriebsrat, unflexible hiring & firing)
4) taxes are ridiculously high, there's zero incentive for global talent to come here
5) bureaucracy is absolutely insane, a country run by risk averse lawyers stuck in the 1980s
6) immigration was botched so bad, they wont recover from this for another generation
7) the rise of the far right afd was handled so terribly, the trauma from ww2 is still too big to deal with it rationally, rather than calling the strongest party in the country "antidemocratic" (which ironically IS antidemocratic in itself). if they dont get a grip on this, afd will lead the country in 4 years.
8) no common identity / goal except for wanting to show being the "good guys", see misincentived sustainability initiatives, handling of israel / palestina, etc
9) weak leaders / politicians. they are all bureaucrats
Most of the things you listed are not really much of a problem, or rather a symptom of something else. Also lots of populist bla bla, where I think you don't really know what you are talking about. Anyway... the real is issue is this:
Germany is being held hostage by pensioners.
Everything comes down to finances and finances comes down to pensions. It's more than 100 billion euro of tax money going to pensions (on top of high and increasing social-insurance contributions). Retired people are the majority of voters, you can't run on politics to their disadvantage. It's politics for old people, by old people. They indebted the state for their benefit when they were young, ignored the demographic crisis for decades, and now they won't forgo a dime for their children's future.
We will get civil war, before pensions are touched. Without that money, we debate scapegoats, instead of investing in existentially necessary reforms, building houses and fixing the infrastructure debt.
I like to believe that 16 years of Merkel left people with the inability of understanding politics and democracy in general.
Handling AfD by inviting them to a talk show where the audience/presenters were mostly people with Greens/Left background is emblematic of how this country has been delegating the ability to think democratically to someone else. No wonder we have extreme parties on the rise. (Both Left and AfD are extremes, no matter what)
Instead of listening, they made fun or criticized a party of monkeys that should have never reached 22%. Because that's all they could do. Make fun, minimize, claiming you're racist, etc.
Burning Tesla factories, breaking their cars while they are parked, ... letting protesters glue themselves on the streets blocking you from reaching whichever place you planned to (be it an office or a hospital). This is daily life in Germany in the last 3-4 years. Wtf!
I am personally sad that all the good things will change because the last 20 years I think Germany really became a great country, unlike all the criticism that people like to throw at it. All just because people couldn't confront the facts. And yes, this means making hard decisions where needed.
I agree that merging the technology division from the ministry of economic affairs (BMWK) to the new research ministry is a good step as both ministries have been large providers of funding. The BMBF funds DFG, as well as the large science organizations in Germany (Fhg, Mpg, ...), the BMWK has funded research which is closer to applications, of course looking to enable economic activity.
I'm unsure why the ministry gets a special focus on aerospace, this topic is being worked on by the DLR, funded by BMBF.
I'm also not yet sure what to think about splitting education and research. It goes against the Humboldtian Ideal, especially in the universitys both topics are connected. On the other hand, it might enable the ministries to be more focused and do reforms that don't depend on each other to be performed more quickly.
The research ministry will go to CSU, the bavarian sister party of CDU. While it may not be very popular amongst many Germans, because CSU is seen as conservative and individual CSU politicians are not famous science policymakers, Bavaria is a successful science hub. Munich is home to international leading institutions (TUM, MPG, FhG). Bavaria is also a hub for aerospace with Aibus and MTU and startups like Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg. Maybe repeating what bavarian policymakers have done regionally to the whole of Germany will be good.
> I'm also not yet sure what to think about splitting education and research. It goes against the Humboldtian Ideal, especially in the universitys both topics are connected.
According to the German constitution (Grundgesetz), schools and universities are (mainly) the responsibility of the individual German states, not the federal government.[1] (A hybrid is the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology that has a university branch under the supervision of the state of Baden-Württemberg and a research centre branch under federal supervision.) The educational tasks of the federal government therefore basically relate to extracurricular and non-university education, such as early childhood education or adult further education.
At the level of the individual states, higher education and research are generally combined in one ministry and school education in another.
[1] Actually the Grundgesetz states in Art. 30: "The exercise of state powers and the performance of state duties shall be a matter for the individual states (Länder), unless otherwise provided for or permitted by this Basic Law." The authority of the federal government in education policy is therefore derived from what is explicitly mentioned in various places in the Basic Law. A short overview what that involves can be found here: https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/416682/db04b405a48dbe... (PDF, 2009, in German).
Thank you for the background explanation and the link. KIT is actually my Alma Mater (cs).
You are right the overlap is not that large. I was thinking about the WissZeitVG, Exzellenzstrategie, Tenure-Track-Program.
As for the Länder, I personally think the transition between the Abitur and university could benefit from stronger collaboration between the involved ministries. For example by better aligning the educational goals of high school to the demands of universities and by integrating education research into schools. By this I mean the continuous application of the results of educational research to schools and the constant monitoring of schools.
Some more background information on the laws and initiatives you mentioned.
The WissZeitVG falls within the competence of the federal government due to the exemption regulation of Art. 74 I Nr. 12 GG for labour laws.
The "Exzellenzstrategie" and the Tenure Track Programme are cooperations between the federation and the states based on Art. 91b Abs. 1 GG: "The federation and the states may co-operate on the basis of agreements in cases of supra-regional importance in the promotion of science, research and teaching. Agreements focussing on higher education institutions shall require the consent of all states. ..." (original: "Bund und Länder können auf Grund von Vereinbarungen in Fällen überregionaler Bedeutung bei der Förderung von Wissenschaft, Forschung und Lehre zusammenwirken. Vereinbarungen, die im Schwerpunkt Hochschulen betreffen, bedürfen der Zustimmung aller Länder. ...")
Many German companies want „Digitalisierung“, workflow automation, process improvements, they want to use AI, LLMs, but when it comes to implementing all of that, they are drowning in bureaucracy.
What Germans can do is create layers of bureaucracy.
Nobody's stopping a local mid-market manufacturer from automating workflows. Or hindering a utility company from offering a better service process.
The problem is corporate leadership.
German companies tend to be run by people who are inflexible, uninspired, and cheap. Maybe it's in the culture. Compare this to Austria, where there's a cultural flair for the dramatic (and therefore an eagerness to stand out, even if it's weird) or Switzerland where enterprises, public or private, are not afraid to place big bets.
It absolutely is. Try to open a company in Germany. Then try to do your tax. Then try to close your company.
After that, let's talk again about bureaucracy.
Oh, and the new government just announced plans that non-employeed people (freelancers, business owners, ...) are now forced to pay into national pension (with few exceptions). And don't get me started on that one. Just as an example, national pension charges based on your income. But they have a different way to calculate income than the tax office.
Let me say it in other words if it's not clear yet: If someone is practically unable to do all the above without an accountant then the bureaucracy is absolutely out of hands.
> Hire a tax advisor and accountant through a payroll
And this is exactly how you kill off lots of innovation by adding unnecessary hurdles. Tax advisors are Hella expensive and hard to contract even. I'm speaking from experience.
No offense but if that's what kills your entrepreneurial spirit it doesn't sound like it would've carried you very far. It's really not that hard if you want it. You'll need it sooner or later anyway if you want to be more than a one man show.
Like I said, you'll be facing a lot of substantially greater challenges.
The world isn't black and white like that. Some people even want to do those things on the side. And some become more than a one man show after some time and without having planned that. Not every one has (or has to have) the kind of extreme passion that you are referring to.
Sure, but if that's your reason to do that you're not being reasonable.
The point is that relative to everything else you need to get right to build a successful company in any country, taxes, payroll and accounting in Germany frankly don't even register.
Like I said, it's 1-2 days out of a year for me.
If that seems like a big hurdle, it wasn't the reason you didn't build a business.
There are challenges with building a business that are specific to Germany that actually matter.
By contrast, the concerns about bureaucracy are a tired stereotype. There's a grain of truth to them, but if they really pose a challenge to you, you didn't want to do this in the first place.
Have you also done these things in the US? I have heard this sentiment that the German system is far and above the more bureaucratic before, but for all I know, Americans could just be relatively complacent in comparison to Germans and our systems function nearly identically. I’d like to hear from someone if they have been through both processes first hand who could answer this question.
Americans constantly complain about the tax system and, like them or not in practice, a lot of US citizens on both sides of the aisle believe in one of the stated goals of DOGE (previously named the US Digital Service).
No, and in the context of the thread I care little about the US. This thread is about Germany and is specifically about "they [the companies] are drowning in bureaucracy" and "The problem is not the bureaucracy". And my post was a response to that. The US might be worse (I doubt it) but it has basically no relevance imo.
It has relevance in establishing the amount of bureaucracy relative to the largest government in the West.
I quit my last job because of bureaucracy and I’m considering moving to Germany, so as individual, it is very important to me. Thanks for explaining to me that my life and major factors in my decision are irrelevant. Very helpful.
Both can be true, and what you described is, in my opinion, one of the primary causes of insane bureaucracy in Germany. This inflexible mindset is what causes the relentless enforcement of bureaucracy and procedures in Germany, there is very little leeway here in terms of bending the rules, making exceptions, turning a blind eye. This cultural inflexibility, traditionalism and risk-aversion all ties together into a paperwork and red-tape nigthmare.
This couldn't be more incorrect. I document German bureaucracy for a living. The hardest part of my job is that every state, city, office and case worker applies the rules differently, making it really hard to predict a specific outcome. In most cases it plays in people's favour, unless the case worker is particularly grumpy and you happen to hit one of their pet peeves. I struggle to document the variance for Berlin alone.
The biggest issue with German bureaucracy is that it's largely paper-based and has little to no automation. In many cases, digitalisation when it happens just means sending documents digitally instead of delivering them during an in-person appointment. This leads to very long processing times that are constrained by available labour.
I’m familiar with your site and appreciate it a lot, and I don’t dispute anything you said, but that does not contradict anything in my comment. Those people you mention who apply the rules differently everywhere are inflexible and unwilling to give leeway or look further then their own way. This is a cultural issue in my opinion and can explain most of excessive bureaucracy here. You’re also talking specifically about the ausländerbehörde, which is one manifestation of bureaucracy here, there are many other forms.
My experience was a bit different. For example, the immigration office accepts almost all applications in the end (over 95% according to their stats). They make all sorts of exceptions in the applicants' favour. The Bürgeramt, the Ordnungsamt and the Arbeitsagentur are the same. They huff and puff and make an exception "just this time", every time. The inflexibility is an act, unless you're being difficult (from their point of view). Then you get the least charitable interpretation of their directives.
Against all expectations, German bureaucracy is very "vibes-based", specifically because it's full of humans. It's predictably unpredictable. You rarely get the downside of digitalisation where "computer says no", because a human is deciding your fate and can be convinced to give you leeway.
The bigger issue at least for me is speed. The uncertainty of human decisions is magnified by the weeks-long delays. A missing document is a big issue when bureaucracy has a 4-8 week ping. That is of course if the case worker doesn't shrug and give you what you want anyway.
I think that German bureaucrats choose the path of least resistance. Most of the time it means giving you what you ask for.
When you get the short end of the stick, a letter from your lawyer can make it abundantly clear that giving you what you want (and faster) is the path of least resistance.
This inflexible mindset is what causes the relentless enforcement of bureaucracy and procedures in Germany, there is very little leeway here in terms of bending the rules, making exceptions
This. I have worked in a Germany university and in all the supporting administration, nobody wants to make choices or take responsibility. E.g. I had some blatant cases of plagiarism and when going to the examination office (where it should be reported), they would do nothing. And when I asked whether there shouldn't be any repercussions, their answer was "there ought to be repercussions", the subtext being: but I'm not going to be the one enforcing them, because if I do and the student files a complaint, I'm going to have to defend my choice.
Or sometimes we had to order GPU servers for the department. We requested quotes from multiple companies (since we knew what we need) and would then send them to the financial administration with our preference (good price + service options). Rather than saying: LGTM, seems you did your work, they would spend four (!) weeks asking new quotes and processing them. And then they would happily come and say, "we found a cheaper option" and the cheaper option would be saving 100 Euro on a machine that cost something like 25,000 and was most likely just the natural reduction in prices in four weeks. At any rate, it is this weird mix of needing to assert themselves, following whatever rules to the letter, and not wanting to make 'bold' choices etc. Meanwhile a whole research group is under compute capacity for a month and the work of the financial department certainly cost more than 100 Euro in hourly wages.
Also, every process uses paper. Heck, once I got my tax number, to my surprise the person from the administration pulled my personnel file out of a filing cabinet!
I wish that this was just the university, but from friends that went into industry, I hear that a lot of German corporations are pretty much the same.
I've seen it described as "Germans are not efficient, they're methodical". There is a lot of truth to it, but Germans are also making all sorts of exceptions either for convenience or expediency, making the method unpredictable.
I challenge this:
How do you measure processing time?
From first customer interaction? Or from all input data are present?
I assume in most situations they are not present upfront.
Therefore it’s a tedious back and forth. Sure, that compounds with the roundtrip time.
Digitisation is a trap because it doesn’t change the paradigm to full-kit upfront necessarily. Digitisation can be a nice entry-point to this, but unfortunately digitising data does not necessarily introduce the full-kit.
The system needs to be designed in a different way:
“We guarantee processing within x hours (weekdays) from the point you’ve provided us a full-kit.”
This, in turn, requires thinking backwards from the result through all steps, resulting in a definition of what a full-kit entails. Of course this requires a different (system) thinking which is contradicted by the rigid hierarchy (and no, doing away with the hierarchy isn’t a solution either).
Work force would not be busy 80% of their time = capacity to go back and forth to figure what’s missing and switch around cases. When starting with full-kit, 80% of their wasted time becomes processing time. In turn, their throughput was 20%, it goes up to 100%, or x5.
The main problem that I see in leadership is lack of understanding and respect for software - "I don't understand it so how hard can it be?". Seems to be especially prevalent at German car companies where, apparently, mechanical engineering is still boss. (I'd be fine with a car with very little software, but that is not what they are trying to build...)
As a German I would love to contradict this but I tend to agree. Bureaucracy isn't such a big deal in my experience - might be different depending what area you are working in - but the leadership culture regarding software is the cause of most of the misery I've seen and I've been involved with.
Cheap as in no investments in people or software quality. Salaries are also not competitive in a lot of places.
Disregard for the user and disregard for usability.
Unfortunately most software shops locked in their customers and the lack of any technical merit pays well and is disconnected from product quality.
Only lots of bankruptcies might help. I have nothing but disdain for these people in leadership.
I've surely not seen all but I've seen enough. It's that bad.
> Salaries are also not competitive in a lot of places.
This implies there are other companies in the same city/region that pay better. I doubt it. From what I have seen, most German software devs are paid horribly, come to HN complain about it, then proceed to do nothing. The solution is to move to a place that pays higher salaries, like Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, or another country. Or get a 100% remote job.
> Compare this to Austria, where there's a cultural flair for the dramatic (and therefore an eagerness to stand out, even if it's weird) or Switzerland where enterprises, public or private, are not afraid to place big bets.
Can you call out with some examples for those of us unfamiliar with those 'big bets'?
Switzerland sits between Germany, Italy, and France, and was getting choked by road traffic, so voters have approved the largest tunnels in the world to get goods around and through Switzerland without using roads.
Random German company: You open your intranet, manually search through hundreds of (pdf!) application-forms (because search is not implemented), downlod the right form, print it(!), fill the form, sign it, scan the paper, send it to the ticket system. That’s what they call „Digitalisierung“, because previously they had to send the printed paper-form to the helpdesk team.
I recently signed up for a simple prepaid phone plan in Germany (I have lived here for 2 years already, fully registered etc). I had to go through the full KYC process, after waiting over a week for a physical SIM card to be sent by post to me. After this, I wanted an eSIM (this was my original goal but this was not possible on initial signup).
I had to contact customer support to send me one... by post. They only activate and send eSIMs by mail. This will take another week.
How recently? Nowadays there are a bunch of "app eSIM" companies competing in Germany that offer to get you an eSIM by just installing an app, KYC and credit card in 5 min
A few days ago - I had some strict requirements of extremely low monthly cost (I only need it for sending and receiving SMS and for signing up for certain german services that require a German number) - so I want with O2 Prepaid. There are a lot of instant sign up eSIMs that are data only, which is not what I'm looking for.
I would be surprised if you're talking about an eSIM service that give you a phone number.
luckily I haven't been working with such companies, I have had enough of my dose of Digitalisierung by interacting with public offices. But at least I can communicate with the Finanzamt via email, after signing a document where I made clear I understand that emails are not a safe communication tool (while random non-certified letters are, apparently).
> while random non-certified letters are, apparently
They kind of are. Somebody would have to go and steal the physical letter and then read/scan it to make any use of it. That excludes pretty much all attacks on the process --- at least such where criminals might hope to make a larger profit than most other criminal enterprises available to them.
Whether that makes the letters a good idea is a different discussion...
Yeah, I'm sure a thousand lovely Horizon 2040 funded research projects that result in throwaway academic solutions to hyper-specific industry issues where the first MVP is shown after 5 years will come out of this.
Not even throwaway. They will result in reports and keynote presentations, but nothing truly functional. The EU doesn't understand how to structure incentives to make things work and avoid rent-seekers and grifters. Source, I've been part of some large EU consortia. Never again.
Yeah, I was always surprised by how many organizations will actually jump at the opportunity to "participate" when some EU consortia was announcing a new program or funding round.
There's a saying for that in German involving "feeding trough" and "pigs".
Reminds me of a quote from "Yes minister" in which it says one commissioner pays a farmer a lot of money to produce and another to remove the surplus, plus a lot of paper pushing in the middle.
In the examples you mentioned bureaucracy is less of a problem. They could do it but this is hard work in a sense which the culture does not reward.
The problem with germans in general is that they are unwilling or badly trained in „thinking things to the end“. The will start a „Digitalisierungsministerium“ without a clear goal of what they want to achieve let alone how to get there. In the end they will waste a lot of money on ipads and businesses lock them into their ecosystems so the can‘t get out.
It all goes back to the culture and a rigid educational system where everyone is supposed to stay where they are.
> In a section titled “scientific freedom,” the document seems to refer at least obliquely to developments in the United States, where scientists working on topics such as gender, global health, and climate change have seen their funding slashed and important data sets have been scrubbed from the websites of federal agencies. “Funding decisions will be based on science-driven criteria,” the document states. “It seems like that should be a no-brainer, but we have seen how quickly it can change,” says Eva Winkler, an oncologist and medical ethicist at Heidelberg University and a member of the German Ethics Council.
If this obliquely refers to anything, then to a scandal under the last german government, where the minister of science and education had demanded to know whether any signatory to an open letter received funding from the ministry[1].
Surprised to see the negativity in the comments - if executed well, this is exactly the sort of thing governments should be aiming to do: solving social coordination problems and funding with long-term horizons.
You’re completely misinterpreting and taking out of context the whole point I’m trying to make for a cheap swipe at Europe. Do you actually disagree with what I said or are you trying to win Internet points with semantics? Do you even disagree with the bulk of my complaint about investment in Europe?
Do you even disagree that investors try to take a larger equity position in companies in the EU than in the US?
> don’t believe Europe can create unicorns so it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy for their investments
There sure would like though. What I've followed in the Horizon program was a fixation of chasing "last years" technology.
Problem was , that for all those funding programmes they had quite stingent company requirements which stopped startups and small companies from having a go at it. Larger companies had no issue navigating this process and chewing the cash without actually delivering good or innovative products.
Can you tell me which regulations are stopping them? The UK for example bent over backwards to make acquiring a banking licence part of a clear process. I think this is harder at the EU level but for me laws like GDPR are actually very reasonable (having implemented a system for container shipping crew, including lots of personal information like passport images).
I think the EU is increasingly aware of its faults, especially in Germany & France. Happy to watch them cook and I say that as an American who has watched on with pain at what the EU has done to itself over the last decade+.
I can't speak for France, but for Germany, unfortunately, by most metrics that matter (affordable housing, infrastructure, subjective well-being, energy costs, labor markets, etc.) compared to 20 years ago, yes. However, compared to most other countries, Germany is still doing quite well. So it all depends on the context for how you interpret the data.
For example there is increasing consensus that Merkel's "black-zero" budget requirements set the stage for today's collapsing German infrastructure and lack of productivity growth due to decreased public investment.
Think it has much more to do with traditional EU regulator attitudes around the dual of labor & capital markets. Both are very dysfunctional in Europe, with labor probably slightly edging out in terms of dysfunction.
thats also not helping, but it's not exactly a secret that German public infrastructure from roads to rails to electricity and whatnot are also all crumbling.
And wait till the EU starts paying it's own defense bills without the US, which is what it wants to do. But with money from where? Education? Healthcare? Welfare?
I'm thinking about things like life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality, health care, violent crime, suicide, incarceration, traffic safety...
In my view, yes - especially when you subset to native born populations. Many europeans are a proud people though so I understand this is contentious, regardless of what the numbers say.
The money never goes to actually relevant or innovative projects, because there is a whole industry devoted to "proposal writing". Companies will literally bring dedicated teams together to sit in a room and think how they could possibly grift EU money, because they cannot meaningfully compete on the open market and need to fund 25-50% of their personnel costs through such programs.
Think Siemens, Orange S.A., Technikon, Philips N.V., T-Systems, but also (!) IBM, Accenture, Deloitte, McKinsey.
There is a whole industry in Croatia specializing in EU money extraction. Hundreds of agencies writing proposals to get grants for their clients and taking their cut. Tons of those are grifts with money directly landing into people's pockets, seaside villas being bought, hotels being made. It's so blatant that politicians accuse each other for not extracting as much money as they’ve could. After decades of blatant stealing EPPO (European Public Prosecutors Office) got involved. When they go for small fish that’s fine, but when they start investigating government politicians they (government) take the case from them and those guys get a slap on the wrist. There are just so many cases that EPPO can do only a fraction of them. Terrible situation, and I don’t think it’ll change because EU doesn’t give too much of a care about a small country like that. And it’s not their money in a sense, so they care even less.
If governments would (always) execute well then we could just let them do everything and it would be great. But they don't because there is no competition.
Black_13 appears to be shadowbanned so I'm reproducing their comment here:
black_13 11 minutes ago [dead] | parent | context | unvouch | favorite | on: Germany creates 'super–high-tech ministry' for res...
The cynicism in these comments is telling, but misses crucial realities about Germany's capabilities and social achievements.
Yes, Germany creates bureaucracies. Yes, Dorothee Bär's digital infrastructure record isn't impressive. And yes, German bureaucracy can be stifling. But this myopic focus on administrative inefficiency overlooks Germany's formidable strengths.
Germany maintains world-class engineering and manufacturing excellence through their Mittelstand network while America has hollowed out its industrial base. German research institutions like Max Planck and Fraunhofer consistently produce breakthrough innovations in renewable energy, advanced materials, and chemical engineering. Their aerospace contributions through Airbus and DLR deliver real technological advances.
More importantly, Germany excels precisely where America falters. Their dual education system creates exceptional technical competence without requiring college degrees. Germans enjoy comprehensive public transportation infrastructure, universal healthcare without administrative bloat, and urban planning that prioritizes livability over speculation.
The results speak for themselves: Germans live significantly longer (81.1 years vs America's 76.4), face virtually no gun violence (2 deaths per million annually vs America's 120), and don't suffer from the manufactured scarcity that plagues American housing, healthcare, and education markets.
Critically, Germany isn't now teetering on becoming a police state. While America expands surveillance powers, militarizes police forces, and faces growing authoritarianism, Germany's post-war constitutional framework continues to prioritize civil liberties, privacy protections, and democratic norms. Their painful historical lessons have created institutional guardrails against authoritarianism that America increasingly lacks.
Let's be honest about who's posting these dismissive takes - primarily privileged tech workers disconnected from the material realities faced by average citizens. While you mock German bureaucracy from comfortable positions, their social systems deliver concrete benefits that many Americans can only dream of.
Germany's approach allows for longer, healthier lives with dramatically less precarity than what Americans experience. Their new ministry may face bureaucratic challenges, but it builds on foundations of technical excellence and social achievement that deserve genuine consideration rather than facile mockery.
> comprehensive public transportation infrastructure, universal healthcare without administrative bloat, and urban planning that prioritizes livability over speculation.
This can't be further from the truth. This is probably written by an American, and US is a very car-centric, but German infrastructure is a shitshow.
Also healthcare is absolutely stiffled by bureaucracy. I have a friend who is a cardiologist. He says that exactly half of his work time is paperwork. And not just paperwork, but German paperwork, where you manually type PDF fields one by one, then print, then sign, then scan and so on.
As someone who lived in multiple rich countries in Europe, let me tell you that the German healthcare system is awesome. It has a lot of problems, but it's head and shoulders above many-many other countries. You can actually get care by a qualified doctor, while this is absolutely not self-evident even in rich countries like the United Kingdom, and let's not talk about CEE countries.
I would disagree. German doctors regularly prescribe homeopathic medicine, misdiagnose patients and tell people they just need to drink tea, and also will not supply medicine when it is really needed. This is well researched.
Saying you can not get care by a qualified doctor in the UK is a completely false statement.
> This can't be further from the truth. This is probably written by an American, and US is a very car-centric, but German infrastructure is a shitshow.
I just know that this is a comment from a German person who has little experience with public transport in any non-top-class country. Yeah, it could be better, but it could also be so much worse.
> Also healthcare is absolutely stiffled by bureaucracy
I lived in Russia, Georgia, few European countries. Even in Georgia trains are way more punctual, than in Germany. Moscow metro works like a Swiss-clock compared to U-Bahn/S-Bahn.
Maybe what you are talking about is true for some very pour Asian/African countries, but many middle-income countries have more reliable public transportation, than Berlin. Not to mention developed ones and China.
> I lived in Russia, Georgia, few European countries
I've been to Central America, Egypt, Istanbul, Sicily, Spain and many more candidates that take a more lax attitude to daily life. Their public transport could certainly be better.
> but many middle-income countries have more reliable public transportation, than Berlin
Berlin is not Germany. Berlin is badly run, constantly out of money (especially for infrastructure) and very different than the rest. Still, inner city public transport is generally reliable, if dirty and sometimes full of questionable people.
What do you consider a non-top-class country? Is your statement just tautologically true, because any country with better public transit then germany would be considered top-class?
>Also healthcare is absolutely stiffled by bureaucracy. I have a friend who is a cardiologist. He says that exactly half of his work time is paperwork. And not just paperwork, but German paperwork, where you manually type PDF fields one by one, then print, then sign, then scan and so on.
Wait. That's exactly how paperwork has always worked for me in America. What am I missing?
This reads as FUD. I'm an American who's lived in Germany recently. On every measure, my experience was been better than the US.
I can walk to the grocery. Or ride a bike. Or take the bus. Or take the train into the city. There are options in transport and in the stores. Never, ever had those options in the States.
Yes, I've had some doctors I didn't care for. So I found another one and they've been great. Same thing happens in the States. You must advocate for yourself. Nothing different.
The big difference is the complete lack of fear going in because you know you won't have to pay an arm and a leg. And yes, it's not "free". It comes out of your paycheck. 110% better. Never had to wait an excessive time, even for specialists. No more than in the States; you schedule it out. Yet, I can go to the emergency room when there's a concern and be greeted with compassion and receive care. So much better, it's hard to convey and hard for Americans to believe. I didn't until I lived there.
As for "digitalization", yeah, it'd be nice to submit some forms online rather than through paper. But it's not a big deal. Howwver, it's super nice to talk to human beings on the phone! Haven't run into too many "your call is very important to us. Please listen as our menu may have changed" and then have to deal with a 1kbsp mega compressed audio line. Also, while I've had bad experiences with clerks, many more have been very patient and gracious. Again, contrast that to the DMV. Not much difference.
Doctors in the US also deal with tons of paper work...has your friend also worked in the States?
Interesting comment, but Germany's much-vaunted Mittelstand is in its initial death throes. Key industries and IP are being auctioned off to the highest bidder, not the least, for lack of heirs. It isn't universally acknowledged, but the same processes that caused the US's manufacturing decay have been occurring in Germany; at roughly the same speed, but with a 30 year lag (since Agenda 2010) viz-a-vis the US.
I don't even know who pushes this German exceptionalism propaganda - is it themselves or do they have 'German-weeaboos' who think everything German is better?
> Germany maintains world-class engineering and manufacturing excellence through their Mittelstand network - small companies are not unique to Germany. But you'll be surprised how many German industrial automation companies (a domain I know something about), basically haven't changed their product portfolio in the past 10-15 years. Research institutions aren't unique to Germany. The fact you're banking on the clout of having invented MP3 40 years ago is weakness masquerading as strength.
> Their dual education system creates exceptional technical competence without requiring college degrees. - they do have excellent training for skilled technicians, I do give them that.
> Germans live significantly longer - the 28th longest life expectancy in Europe
> Germany isn't now teetering on becoming a police state. - no comment on this, because I don't want to turn this into political mudslinging, but needless to day, this isn't an uncontroversial take. It'd be more accurate to say Germany isn't becoming a kleptocracy/plutocracy like the US.
Having no gun violence and having a higher life expectancy than America is not something to be proud of and not a useful benchmark. This comment is a prime example of Germany's inability to take external criticism - it nearly always devolves into comparison with America. You know many non-americans also criticise the state of Germany currently?
Having lived here for a bit over 5 years, I can say that Germans too often like to speak from the moral high ground. There are things that are sacred and indisputable, like opposition to nuclear energy. Try to complain about a strike in public services causing you inconvenience, and you will invariably get lectured on solidarity. I've seen people interrupting speakers at public events to "provide important context" that was nothing more than self-flattery from the interrupting person. I do believe in this country and think that it has way more upsides than downsides, but the people here could sure use a bit of humility.
I've often wished for /pol/ style flags on HN. I think a lot of people get offended when their country is criticized online because they feel that the criticism comes from a foreigner.
What I mean by this is - is that this is such a low bar - of not having rampant gun violence and short life expectancy, especially when correlating them with GDP. This should not be a point of pride or comparison to beat this bar. Most developed countries in the world achieve more than America on these metrics, therefore it's a useless benchmark.
>Germans live significantly longer (81.1 years vs America's 76.4)
Got to point out a nuance here.
Americans living shorter are partly the result of America's success. An aggressive big pharma and a health care system that over medicates the population and give them bad advise ( eg nutrition) is one reason why they live less. Often more technology/business is not necessarily good. Germany's overall better outcome with result to life expectancy can be attributed to their incompetence/bureaucracy but certainly not a conscious decision to be better.
I have lived in Germany twice, the first time around 2005-2006 and the second time around 2016-2018, mostly in Bavaria and other southern parts.
The first time the public transportation infrastructure was very decent, certainly better than in most countries, even if not comparable with something like Japan.
The second time, 10 years later, there was a visible degradation in their railways, because the trains were almost never on time. I have lost a flight and a very large number of train changes because of train delays. However when going by car on their freeways I have not noticed anything worse and with a good car one could travel easily with a speed much above 200 km/h for a long time without problems, though there were also some congested segments.
I have never been ill, so I cannot comment about the state of healthcare.
I have never been in USA, but all the descriptions of the transportation system that I have seen, even of the infrastructure for cars, appear inferior to even the last version from Germany, which was degraded in comparison with the older one.
> Their dual education system creates exceptional technical competence without requiring college degrees.
Unless you do your Ausbildung in a job where you can learn mostly all the skills within a couple months, after which you'll just be shamelessly exploited by your employer for the remaining duration of it.
> Germans enjoy comprehensive public transportation infrastructure,
Yeah, our train systems are pretty cool (can reach most places.) But if your expectation is anything more than 'hopefully arrive by the end of day', you'll regularly be disappointed.
> and don't suffer from the manufactured scarcity that plagues American housing
Have you tried renting in any bigger city in the past 10 or so years?
> Critically, Germany isn't now teetering on becoming a police state. While America expands surveillance powers, militarizes police forces, and faces growing authoritarianism, Germany's post-war constitutional framework continues to prioritize civil liberties, privacy protections, and democratic norms.
I disagree with the claim that Germany is currently on a path strictly "prioritiz[ing] civil liberties, privacy protections, and democratic norms."
Not only did German politicians in 2021 broaden the scope of §188 StGB to include insults against politicians, even at the local level[1], the new coalition contract also has some pretty dystopian views on how to approach opinions/statements they categorize as 'disinformation'[2] (ministry of truth anyone? - ah nevermind, they sidestep that by letting NGOs do the dirty work for them.)
Pair that with the fact that they plan to (again) try to introduce data retention laws without cause[3], I do not personally believe that claiming we strictly prioritize civil liberties etc is a correct assessment of the overall situation here in Germany.
Overall I suspect the post has been written with the aid of LLM, I wonder who/why would do such a thing though. There's just something off about the tone.
> Have you tried renting in any bigger city in the past 10 or so years?
I am German myself and I get where you're coming from, but there are worlds between German rent prices and American or even London, Amsterdam or Dublin rent prices.
I'm not sure about that. 2 bedroom apartment in Munich for ~1500 euro on maybe a 75k eur salary vs ~4000 usd in SF on a 180k usd salary. They're pretty similar numbers, relatively.
I worked on a project funded by the BMBF. I can tell you, those people had no idea of what they were funding. And the people running the project had also no idea for what they were being funded.
The title is strange: In german news there was nothing that sounded like "super hightech ministry" not even a "superhigh tech ministry". But the ministry for "education and research" got split, assigning education to the ministry for family, leaving more room for the research part which got an additional focus on technology.
Germany has no national idea, they have no reason why an average burger should work his/her ass off competing with Chinese/American/Indian scientists and working 80 hr/week on cutting edge research.
Germans are smart and capable, but the German lifestyle is not for "super high tech" industry
The people I know that do cutting-edge research mostly do it because it's fun. That might be hard to imagine, but if you have great (government-funded) local hackerspaces where you can meet others, talk to them and built stuff together, it becomes a viable free-time activity. For example, I can schedule a Prusa (FDM) / Form (SLA) / Fuse (SLS) print job remotely and then quickly walk there to pick it up. If I need custom sheet metal or wood, I'll bring a USB stick with the DXF and then walk. That kind of infrastructure massively cuts down on iteration times. Plus it's great to get feedback in-person by other tinkerers when you pick things up.
That's all good and well, but the very time you would try to start selling your tinkering, or, God forbid, hire somebody - that's where the hell begins.
Being a self-employed is a living hell in Germany, as well as receiving any money outside of employment. Esp. if money are small (but > than hobby money, 500 euro iirc) and don't justify the hurdle of dealing with Finanzamt, tax pre-payment, possible regulations with upfront Formulars etc.
you need an idea in order to mobilize the energy of the population.
German passionary patriotism has been artificially subverted and shut down, and the nation instead has been flooded with non-Germanic elements, thus completely destroying the very definition of German.
Ask any German on the street, and nobody will be able to answer: What defines being a German, who are the Germans, what is their history, and what awaits German people in the future.
Complete void of any ideology, national idea, any energy that could propel the nation in the great leap forward.
> German passionary patriotism has been artificially subverted and shut down, and the nation instead has been flooded with non-Germanic elements, thus completely destroying the very definition of German.
> Ask any German on the street, and nobody will be able to answer: What defines being a German, who are the Germans, what is their history, and what awaits German people in the future.
I don't think so, you will meet plently people that will be able to tell you about Germany's history, or at least recent history. And what defines being German, you might get different answers, but is that so bad, and where wouldn't you? Hasn't multiculturalism just become a big part of Germany's identity, and not destroyed it as you claim? Döner just as the simplest example.
If you ever visited America, it would immediately strike you that no Americans, rich or poor, black or white, are starving. Frankly, we could all use a little more starving.
In 2023...13.5 percent (18.0 million households) were food insecure. Food-insecure households (those with low and very low food security) had difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all their members because of a lack of resources...5.1 percent of U.S. households (6.8 million households) had very low food security...
Coincidentally, the collection of such detailed and useful data is at risk from the indiscriminate USDA firings.
So it's a totally subjective metric which measures whether anyone claims to have "had difficulty" buying food at least once during a calendar year. Not that they didn't get enough food--just that they had to exert effort to get it.
This is not evidence that people are going hungry, though it is clearly designed to give that impression.
Feeding America estimates more than 50 million people received charitable food assistance sometime in 2023
I'm guessing you'll respond that charities that feed people have a vested interest and are not to be trusted... (yes, I'm aware of cases of charities committing fraud; no there is no evidence that is the norm). Probably again without presenting data to support your assertion that there are no Americans who go hungry.
I'm curious what actually obtainable data you would accept as a counterfactual to your statement/belief?
You seem to have lost the thread of the argument. The original comment was
> no Americans, rich or poor, black or white, are starving. Frankly, we could all use a little more starving.
You responding by providing evidence that some people had difficulty, at least once per year, in putting food on the table. This in no way contradicts the original claim, as having difficulty doing a thing is not synonymous with being unable to do a thing.
> Here's collaborating trends for the same calendar year
This shows that people are getting food. As presented, this is not evidence that people are going hungry.
> I'm curious what actually obtainable data you would accept as a counterfactual to your statement/belief?
If you want to contradict the claim that Americans aren't starving, you would want to provide evidence that Americans are starving.
I take it you missed / didn't read the response immediately above yours where I cited data on malnutrition related deaths in the US?
• Mostafa, N., Sayed, A., Rashad, O. et al. Malnutrition-related mortality trends in older adults in the United States from 1999 to 2020. BMC Med 21, 421 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-023-03143-8
The article about elderly people who struggle to absorb nutrition?
> Of these deaths, 34.3% took place inside medical facilities, 30.2% inside nursing homes/long-term care facilities, and 25.6% inside the descendant’s home.
Is America is so broke that we can't feed people in hospitals and nursing homes? Obviously not. These are people whose bodies are shutting down due to told age, not people who are being neglected by society.
In an attempt to show that people are starving due to poverty, you've instead shown that we're expending many, many times the cost of feeding them in an attempt to keep them alive. No doubt you're incapable of admitting that this is directly contradictory to the spirit of your thesis.
Receiving charitable food assistance doesn't mean that you're starving, or even that you would be starving without that assistance. What sort of data would you accept to prove that americans are not starving?
Above I've already pointed to TWO types of data that bear on food insecurity in the US, and provided citations:
1. USDA data on food insecurity
2. Food bank usage data
If you wanted to understand the extremes of food insecurity, than data on malnutrition related deaths in the US would also apply:
• Mostafa, N., Sayed, A., Rashad, O. et al. Malnutrition-related mortality trends in older adults in the United States from 1999 to 2020. BMC Med 21, 421 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-023-03143-8
From the paper above -- "Despite some initial decrements in malnutrition mortality among older adults in the U.S., the uptrend from 2013 to 2020 nullified all established progress. The end result is that malnutrition mortality rates represent a historical high...Effective interventions are strongly needed. Such interventions should aim to ensure food security and early detection and remedy of malnutrition among older adults..."
If you wanted to explore malnutrition related deaths for other groups / time periods you could query the CDC Wonder data base using ICD-10 Codes E40 – E46 (as was done in the paper cited above; see also https://www.icd10data.com/ICD10CM/Codes/E00-E89/E40-E46).
I did the query for 2023 and found were >22,000 malnutrition related deaths recorded by the CDC.
If this number went down significantly I would see that as evidence of a decrease in malnutrition in the US. If this number was near zero I would accept your assertion that no/few Americans are starving.
Given the preponderance of data, the notion that one could argue with a straight face that food insecurity in the US is of no concern seems shocking to me.
I would say Germany needs to redefine what patriotism is.
It currently has too many dual passport holders, and people with dual loyalties who do not put the long-term interests of Germany first, but rather consider Germany only as a source of welfare to extract and transfer elsewhere
The erosion of a shared German culture for decades leaves us with the result of having no national identity. Make no mistake, I'm not alluding to purism of the natives one bit. On the contrary, I would love for immigrants to be proud to be part of Germany.
In the US, immigrants make a point of showing their patriotism by immersing themselves into American culture. We don't have a similar cultural phenomenon in Germany.
> consider Germany only as a source of welfare to extract and transfer elsewhere
You would be surprised how many natives share this viewpoint. This can only work for so long before something collapses...
Sounds like you kinda just want an excuse to vote AfD without pointing to an element of their policy platform you think the rest of us should support too.
(Just for the record I don't vote AfD. I do like being German and I like what little culture we have left. You can be patriotic and at the same time left leaning.)
Gruß aus Frankfurt, you really couldn't have proven his point any better if you tried.
Some countries are approximately 50% national flag by surface area, fist pumping and chanting the country's name at every opportunity despite being run by people making Nazi salutes, but "it's okay to like your country's culture" is instantly equated with Nazism? Come on man...
I agree with your comment. It's also funny and sad to see the political and mental disconnect in this topic. Now that we need more military, people are surprised that there is no one who wants to defend a country that's just an arbitrary collection of people with no shared identity.
Germany is actively killing innovation. I propose to stop for starters.
Tho when the median voter is 55 and national motto is "that's how it was always done" and "Pensions are secure" - I don't put much hope. I still remember the outcry when the digital health cards were introduced.
Not sure how Germany is actively killing innovation to be honest.
Your other points are more or less true, I just like to think that people complain a lot and media obviously makes it worse.
Digital health cards, online tax declaration, etc. These things did happen. People complained, but these decisions were not reverted. That's the most important.
> Not sure how Germany is actively killing innovation to be honest
By many things at once: Datenschutz, (over- and premature) regulations, bureaucracy, laws favoring old ways (e.g. broadcasting licenses for streamers), active sabotage from workers who don't want to learn things (and can't be fired) etc.
But all stems from risk averseness and active unwillingness to learn new ways.
As you say, (some) things did happened, but way too slow and way too little. Compared to its peers or especially developing countries German Digitalisierung is a joke, a not so funny one.
In the end Technicolor / Thomson, Exalead, SAP, France Telecom (Orange) got most of the funding if I remember right. Other than a few university, museum digitalisation projects nothing consumer facing ever so the light of day.
Lets be honest for once -germany is deeply risk averse and conservative. Its leaders can try to cast that "we wamt that california culture" spell a million times and out hops another wirecard. You can not graft innovation cultures to conservation cultures . You would need to change the conservation culture at thr upbringing roots, by highlighting how pure conservation gets you into wars and other problems. By rewarding characters that want to go on a adventure .You can not tell the guy who wants to jump a mammoth with a pointy stick, that this is "toxic masculinity" and "the outstanding nail gets hammered" in kindergarden and open a ministry for elephant steak.
I personally know people who received funding from EU innovation funds, thought more than 10 years ago. It was graded by bureaucrats that had no idea about anything and graded it based on keyword matching (basically like tech recruiting works). It was absurd.
Looks like a last-ditch effort to salvage its crumbling technological sovereignty amid the EU's systemic crisis. Even if they invent something, production will happen in China or the US.
Germany wants to preserve Airbus and stay relevant in European space programs, but without cheap energy and raw materials this is a pipe dream. Quantum computing/hydrogen is theoretically promising, but they're already behind China and the US. Trying to catch up to Russia in drones and EW, but without energy independence or microelectronics it won't work.
Without Russian gas or nuclear power, high-tech manufacturing is unprofitable. Germany's best engineers are already in Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Russia/China/the US are sprinting ahead in hypersonics, AI, and 6G, while Germany is just forming a ministry.
Germany's move isn't a breakthrough, it's desperation. They're trying to save face, but they lack energy for advanced tech w/o Russia, have no military shield w/o the US, can’t manufacture at scale w/o China.
The phrase “super-high-tech ministry” doesn’t sound like the correctly nuanced translation of Super-Hightech-Ministeriums. In English, it begs the question whether they are really serious — why isn’t it “super-duper-high-tech” or “ultra-high-tech” or “hyper-high-tech”? Calling something “super-X” in English sounds a little marketingspeak-clumsy and opens you up to these jibes.
On the flip side we Anglo-Saxons (and Germany's descendants in general) also invented a lot of cool stuff: airplanes, trains, cars, tractors, spacecraft, even hot air balloons!
Without a doubt not the only characteristic. Simply a characteristic of these cultures today. e.g. obsession with environment to the degree of actively harming it (opposing nuclear, wind, solar, and geothermal; and dense housing) is primarily an Anglophone concern specifically UK/US/Aus. And those countries are collectively responsible for a lot of innovation.
Seems to be a truth: inventiveness moving to moribund navel-gazing.
The Greeks and Romans probably invented even more useful stuff of modern civilization, the problem is past glory doesn't pay present day bills, unless you're running a museum.
Excelling at creating paperwork... except now digitally. AUTOSAR is may favorite German software innovation. /s
That's the curse in Europe. Every European country has it's own ministry of digital innovation who's role is the grift of allocating taxpayer money to the right politically connected pockets while pretending to do innovation. Case in point, German fiber optic infrastructure is still lightyears behind Romania despite much higher costs. Means, somebody in Germany is making good money form that, even if there's nothing to show for.
Meanwhile the actuality innovative companies in Europe get real VC money from the US, then get incorporated in the US and become American companies, then EU has the audacity to complain about lacking tech sovereignty.
> Case in point, German fiber optic infrastructure is still lightyears behind Romania despite much higher costs. Means, somebody in Germany is making good money form that, even if there's nothing to show for.
Apartment I stayed in while in Germany had annual Kabelgebühr of 100 EUR. It was not related with the ISP internet subscription of course. Any negotiations or questions were responded with "IT'S KABELGEBÜHR YOU HAVE TO PAY IT".
Yep, had a coworker who was looking for financing in a EU country, but very few investor options were available, and mostly for a low amount of money, only enough for a few months. He had to go to UK to find people with deep enough pockets.
That news just confirms EU is not a country-like and any federation is not ready.
Funny that outsiders like US and Russia and probably others behave as it is one country :) It is kind of some "body" but not a well functioning one: fusion ? Unser! Spy satelites ? Notre!
But the real test will be follow-through. Big promises like "world's first fusion reactor" and wooing global talent sound great, but without a clear budget or streamlined bureaucracy, it risks becoming just another shiny headline
The more I read about this, the more it feels like a VW bailout. If you want innovation, make it easier to start up and shut down research companies, you don't need a new ministry to hand out taxpayer money to companies.
Is that just based on the quote from the Volkswagen Foundation? But that foundation is entirely independent of VW and doesn't get any taxpayer money in any case.
> A new ministry for research, technology, and aerospace will be formed, and the education portfolio will be taken over by the current ministry for family, seniors, women, and youth.
So I guess Germany is one of those countries which reorganize their government on a brainstorming board by just throwing up concepts. And then it takes years for all the bureaucracy to move around and get back to work.
> Germany needs a new alignment of defense policy and research policy, but “we do not yet know how to do this,”
I learned in middle school that you were once really good at it. There is also a consensus it got quickly out of control and destroyed Europe.
All of this sound more like an Onion or Babylon Bee piece...
> “Our goal is that the world’s first fusion reactor should be realized in Germany,”
This will never happen. At some point they will notice that fusion is something with "nuclear" and "atoms" and they will immediately jump to "scary", "dangerous" and "verboten".
This will not work. Germany is totally driven by lawyers. No room for new ideas. Everybody is doing ass covering instead of working together building something great
> The agreement stipulates that the CSU will be in charge of the “super–high-tech ministry,” as party leader Markus Söder called it in a press conference this week. The CSU has not proposed a minister yet, but it’s widely expected that Dorothee Bär, who was in charge of “digital infrastructure” in previous governments under former Chancellor Angela Merkel, will get the nod.
Sounds like her only non-political experience is working as a journalist.
It's arguable that the "corrupt" part was scrubbed off Wikipedia. But her credentials to lead a research / technology / aerospace ministry certainly sound underwhelming.
She hired her future husband as an employee until immediately before their wedding. This position was paid by the federal German parliament, i.e. the taxpayer. It's illegal to hire a relative in such a position.
You're claiming this, but average German internet speed has but recently surpassed Latvia's, easily beats Paraguay and the Philippines and is closing in on Montenegro and Barbados.
The recent rapid improvements even diminished Romania's lead to less than 250%.
Of course this is only up to the Telekom speedtest server, beyond that nearly all of Germany's 50-100Tbps get funneled through 362Gbps of interconnections onto the open internet.
Digital infrastructure was part of traffic ministry.
Her role was coordinating the government's mostly internal digital strategy. Thus reviewing new bills, looking at processes inside the administration etc. most of the work outside the public eye.
The CSU has a history of putting people in charge that do not benefit germany but bavaria (the only part of germany where the party CSU is active), e.g. Andreas Scheuer [1][2].
Notable recent examples of corruption are the Maskenaffäre [4] or Julia Klöckner and Nestlé ("Julia Klöckner and Nestlé show how the greasy closeness between politics and business can go too far" [5]).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Scheuer: "Scheuer's ministry is said to have broken budgetary and public procurement law when concluding the multi-billion dollar contracts with the operators and "deliberately deceived" the Bundestag about the real costs of the car toll."
[2] Söder (party leader of CSU) said about Scheuer: "I don't know not many ministers that bring so much money to bavaria as Andreas Scheuer" [3]
[3] German: "Bei allem, was der ein oder andere kritisiert an dem Andi Scheuer: Ich kenne wenige Minister, die so viel Geld nach Bayern holen, wie der Andi Scheuer. Auch das muss man einfach mal in der Bilanz ehrlicherweise bitte nach draußen sagen."
This ministry will not be lead by any of these people. Their replacement isn't that much better competency wise, but there is no corruption case yet.
Your source 3 is not saying what you think it does. State government can apply for federal funding. Söder and his ilk have mastered this. There is nothing corrupt here.
I read a commemt in this discussion that Dorothee Bär has a case of corruption where she was employing her husband.
„Source 3“: Well, if you are a minister for infrastructure in germany it is not part of our job description to bring money to bavaria. Maybe my definition of corruption is of but the minister has some saying in how to use its funds and if your home state benefits more than other parts of germany… I would call this a form of corruption
> Dorothee Bär has a case of corruption where she was employing her husband
That is an unfortunate case of nepotism that happens in the entire political spectrum. I was especially disappointed of the Greens setting up cozy positions for friends and family at the end of their term. I really thought they'd do better..
> Well, if you are a minister for infrastructure in germany it is not part of our job description to bring money to bavaria
Why not? If you think Bavaria is the largest net benefactor of this measure you might as well do so. It's one out of many possible strategies.
> Maybe my definition of corruption is of
I think it's something else but I can't think of a word.
I was lumping all these behaviors together (as the abuse of entrusted power) but of course its better to be precise (thank you for introducing me to "nepotism").
I must say as a bavarian citizen that this "abuse" has lots of benefits for us. Of course I am aware of my bias here. I can't find an interview but Söder has said that a lot of other states don't even apply to all Fördergelder they could possibly get. That always striked me as odd.
The upside is that this will actually provide lots of research funding to small companies. Think of it like the seed round from a VC, but instead of investing into new companies, they try to strategically invest into existing companies to boost future tax revenue.
It'll probably be very German, meaning overly bureaucratic. But the basic idea of financing R&D in small companies to grow them more competitive seems legit to me.
As an example of what was funded by similar German government grants, you can look at voize, which is (by now) also a YC company: https://en.voize.de/uber-uns
EDIT: Here's some German info on the 1.98 mio € research grant from early 2022 (meaning it was awarded shortly before they joined the W22 YC batch): https://www.interaktive-technologien.de/projekte/pysa
Applying for a grant is normally difficult. In Germany, it's outright hellish. I hope I will be pleasantly surprised.
Applying for a grant in the European Commission is a labyrinth of different websites each with their own need to register. Grant Specs are largely in PDFs or Word Documents that are attached to the call. And it takes at least 6-9 months from open to decision. I have applied to about 20 grants throughout 2024 and haven't heard anything back from a single one yet.
EC scientific expert here (occasionally judging FP7/8/Horizon 2020/Horizon Europe grants in multiple areas including AI). I also authored some bigger proposals, one rejected (score: 13/15) and one funded.
It is perhaps not a good idea to apply to that many in such a short time frame, unless you have nothing else to do: the individual efforts need to be really excellent to succeed, so focus should be on quality rather than quantity. Why? There is a funding threshold, and you can have 5 proposals that get 13/15 ("good enough to fund"), but you still don't get any of them funded because there enough competing grants with 15/15 score, and after they receive their funding, the pot of money is already empty (the funding is in order of merit).
In my experience, most applications that fail to get the perfect score required are incomplete: To get excellent scores it is vital to FULLY address ANYTHING mentioned in the call. And to squeeze all that into 40 pages is an art. (There are folks that provide consulting support, which I have not used yet, or you could collaborate with someone who has worked on the other side to learn more about what is important.)
While getting grant money remains hard, I was pleasantly suprised about the judging effort and the EC's personnel energy put into the evaluation process and in making it fair; for each call, their is a special rapporteur going around and documenting that everything that should be done gets done the way it should be, and the EC take great pains to find experts that are diverse across multiple dimensions (gender, country, industry/academia, seniority, field of expertise etc.).
edit: typos
Thank you for your insightful reply. I am also registered as an Expert to the EC. I fully agree with you that completing all requirements in a 40-pager is hard. Which I think is exactly my point. It's competitive (that's good) and time-consuming. But I also believe grant applications are a muscle a startup should have when they want to do business with the government. In SpacecTech, Defense, and AI (my areas) this is largely unavoidable.
You should blog about your experience and submit to HN. I am sure you can get lots of good advice to improve your chances.
This has spawned almost an entire industry. Have a look at Zebra Embassy in Berlin as an example. I think it would be easier to "digitally transform" the process to be more efficient.
The websites certainly have their design quirks, as do the application forms (though you can avoid those traps by partnering with people who've done it before). But tbh a single document and 6 month turnaround for our Pathfinder bid was above average for grants we've won, and compares very favourably with our equity funding round.
I have applied for a few grants in Germany and also got them. It’s honestly not that difficult. If you have a large consortium with many partners it can become complicated but mostly because of the partners and not the government. My secret advice: when there is a grant there is also always a number you call or an email address, if anything is unclear, you can call them and they have always been very helpful.
> when there is a grant there is also always a number you call or an email address
100%. That can also sometime save you a ton of work of putting together information that they may not care about.
It's boring but otherwise harmless. You skim through 20 pages of legalese and fill out the blanks. Your local goverment office has an advisor who will check the forms together with you before you submit them. (I applied for and received a De-Minimis grant.) Plus for the larger grant types, there are advisory companies that work on commission.
Finally: a good use for LLMs ;)
Not if they ban, errr I mean regulate them ;)
I'm CTO in a startup in Germany. We've applied for and gotten various grants. It's not a big deal. And there are agencies that can help with this. I know various people in different companies that benefit from this as well. There is money at the state level, at the federal level, and the European level that can be unlocked via grants.
Germany has got a well deserved reputation for its bureaucracy and lack of flexibility. We were dealing with the tax office at the same time we were dealing with grants. One part of the government trying to give us money, another taking it away. We had our first deal with not enough revenue to even pay ourselves. That was calculated as "profit". As a bootstrapped company, we got very close to emptying our accounts a few times. And stuff like this isn't helpful. But we survived and we're still around. Partially thanks to these grants.
I think this incoming government is saying the right things and looks like they are planning to do things that sound like they are good ideas. Making the process of founding a company easier, incentivizing R&D, etc. There's a lot of potential in this country in terms of companies that are very specialized and high tech, well educated people, etc. They are definitely over dependent on older companies that are a bit past their prime, e.g. in automotive.
Germany mainly needs to deal with it's risk averse bureaucracy and culture. People that want to take risk here need to move more freely and faster. It shouldn't take months to found a company. Or thousands of euros to deal with all the bureaucracy (which it does if you add it all up).
Germany tends to stifle innovation by bureaucracy, restrictive & complex rules, and a finance climate that actively discourages investment and taking risk. Especially foreign investment. If you look at a lot of big name scale ups in Germany, you'll find that they have headquarters in places like Dublin, London, or Amsterdam. There's a good reason for this: if you want foreign investors to invest, a Gmbh is simply a somewhat toxic legal construction. These companies are German in all but name. That's about more than just taxes.
That needs to change. I think people are well aware. Merz certainly seems to be. But bureaucracies have a way of pushing back and this country is run by bureaucrats, politicians, lawyers, notaries, etc. that all benefit financially from the system being the way it is. They actively resist change and insist how crucial they are to the whole thing. Everything they touch tends to get more complex and convoluted. My worry is that they'll just end up adding to the problem instead of solving it.
I am based in Germany and have helped a couple of dozen individuals and small groups to successfully apply for grants and incorporate. It’s really not that difficult once you overcome the typical psychological barriers which if you look closely are a combination of prejudices and negative self talk.
On all levels, once you really breathe that there is a human person you are directing your inquiry to, and that you can help them do their job, they will be happy to direct money towards you. That principle applies from local startup funds to federal grants to EU level project officers. The “bureaucracy“ can be annoying in the sense of feeling like a waste of time (which, since you should factor in the cost of application into your later grant, is simply not true. It is actually really well paid boring labor.), but it’s really not complex or hard. If you believe they are hard for you (“hell“), you are engaged in negative self talk.
If you approach these things as highly annoying, and direct your annoying energy to the people who are handling your application, you will annoy them, which will make you feel like they are there to annoy you. The alternative is to approach them with the understanding that they’re not trying to make your life hard but are simply doing their job. They know much better than you that some things should be changed but it’s not up to them to change them, and they are not the right target to lobby for change.
Are you working as a consultant on these topics? I‘m looking for someone to get assistance with incorporating and grants this fall.
I used to, but I changed field and I’m not available, sorry. Good luck!
the good thing now with AI you can write all those pages of bullshit nobody reads bit you will accountable to if things dont work out
Didn't we get MP3s this way? Or is that a slightly different pathway
Fraunhofer is (by now) only financed 30% through tax money and 70% comes from the royalties on their past developments like MP3 and H264 and H265 and MPEG-H.
Anyway, Fraunhofer gets recurring tax funding. What voize got is a one-off research grant to a group of companies:
- voize
- Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin (a medical university)
- Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH, Berlin (a government AI research lab)
- Connext Communication GmbH, Paderborn (a tech company)
- Kleeblatt Pflegeheime gGmbH, Ludwigsburg (a retirement home, i.e. potential end user)
- Pflegewohnhaus am Waldkrankenhaus gGmbH, Berlin (another retirement home)
For this grant type, it's quite common that you pay the inventors, some assistant companies, some researchers, and some end users a lump sum to force them all to work together on commercializing the invention.
That’s not quite right for Fraunhofer: The financing model is also heavily dependent on research grants. The base funding is indeed around 30%. But another 40% are from publicly funded research projects. The last 30% are from research contracted by industry. In 2023, license fee revenue was €157M / €2991M, so roughly 5% of total contract research volume.
https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/about-fraunhofer/profile-struct...
Thanks! Today I learned... :)
Definition of government funding:
Funding for everyone except you.
Even worse: only for those who suck up to those who get to choose. Which usually means if you give me funding, I'll help you back.
I dont want the govt to fund any research funding. As a tax payer i did not vote this. I want to decide who i fund or not. It just means, my taxes will not go down. :/
I suppose then you won't get nearly as much medical research, technological research, scientific research. Seriously, you may not realize just how much genuine academic research at colleges, universities, and technical institutes rely on government grants.
At least that's how it is in the US. I'm unsure how different, if at all, it is in Germany.
Tip: All highly industrialised, wealthy nations are the same. Central govt provides huge sums for academic research with the hope that it can be commercialised.
In many fields of study, the money that goes into academic research is essentially more of high-level-talent education expense, so that local companies have pools of PhDs to hire from, rather than needing to produce a invention that will be commercialized.
E.g. if you look at PhD graduates only one in a few hundred (even in STEM fields) will end up on a path that commercializes their research, with most of the other ones moving into industry and likely not working on a directly related subject to their thesis. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
That does not scale. We cannot ask every single citizen about every single decision. You want to decide on each funding. The next will want to decide on every tax law change. Government decides, and if majority of population thinks they’re doing a shit job and someone else can do a less shot job they get replaced after a couple of years. Otherwise it’s micromanagement hell.
I disagree. Lets say i own 100 percent of my money. Just that i have to write it down, makes me shiver, what we as people accept to happen.
Am i interested in progress? Of course. Am i not smart enough to see or think long term, most likely. Give me a robo advisor, that helps me distribute my money. Give me best practises. I do not need a bloated government and their politics and interest groups for a simple decision, what i do with MY money that I have earned by working. Govt is the middle management that everyone complains about. A black hole.
I don’t get it. You want everyone to decide what they do with their taxes? roads in the middle of nowhere would never get maintained for example. Orphan sickness would see even less research than they do today. Etc.
Roads in the middle of nowhere are not needed, of course i would not want that. I want them there where they are needed. Like, connecting two big citied with a lot of nowhere in between. I want the robo advisor to make that calculation for me.
And the other thing: yeah, people know, what charity is. But there is no big charity, if the welfare state already takes half of your money. The responsibility to take care of people around you is offloaded to an anonymous entity.
Ok, that means you think that everyone should move away from countryside and into cities. I think that illustrates very well the problem with your approach. Minorities have zero chances of being represented.
The argument about charity and tax levels is not substantiated by any research as far as I can tell. There is however research showing that rich people give LESS to charity proportionally, compared to poorer people.
Making charity donations tax deductible, that does help though.
When people want to live on isles or in nowhere regions, so be it. But i do not want to support this lifestyle with my money. It does not mean, that everyone has to live on cities. If there are enough people to live abroad, then they live with the consequences. It's their home. And certainly becomes noticeable financially, when you go abroad making holidays to these awesome nowhere places.
About charity or tax level and who gives more, that question i do not ask. I would not ask anyone, what are you are willing to give and how much? Little, more, much, welcome. I just would not allow free-riding on things others have paid and worked for and their life blood is in it.
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The government has two jobs: 1. Steal your money, 2. Send you to die in a war.
Unless your country is a war, that means they can focus entirely on stealing your money. You're never going to be able to change that. The only thing you can do is protect your money outside their reach. Then you can decide freely how it is used.
I actually think Germany would be really good at digital infrastructure if they stopped being afraid of friend computer. Germany is immensely proud of its history of creating standards - there's literally a place in berlin called DIN Platz. Germany is also very proud, and rightly so, in its history of mathematical innovation.
Everything that isn't dross in the computer world is either a well designed standard, or a well designed algorithm. If the German government adopted a sensible standard for government documents, for example, and mandated that all documents must be saved in it, that would already make a huge difference.
Germany has tons of potential, but Germany is one of the most risk averse countries on the planet (see Uncertainty Avoidance Cultures)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_avoidance]. This makes it amazing at building high quality industrial products, taking innovation done elsewhere and refining and polishing it, slowly over many years - building standards as you say. However, it doesn't help much in the innovation department. Also as probably the world leader in data privacy and protection that's another vector working against innovation. And then there is the robust legislation and bureaucracy (in a controlling sense) around all financial products (not to mention in general), which gives Germany advantages in certain industries but is also a distinct disadvantage for innovation in many sectors. There is also a massive union culture, which provides Germans with a great quality of life, but again, that's something probably negatively correlated to innovation.
I'd like to see more innovation in general and if this leads to that its good. But I don't personally think that innovation needs to happen in Germany, so long as it happens somewhere and Germans can do what they do best with it.
> Also as probably the world leader in data privacy and protection that's another vector working against innovation
Extremely thick irony here
How does the Germany of today reconcile itself with the iconoclasts of its past from mathematicians, physicists, chemists, explorers, filmmakers, and industrialists who set the stage for modern life during the late 19th and early 20th centuries?
There were way more young people back then. Germany as a country has the mentality of a retiree, because that's who lives there.
I say that as a German doing a startup in Germany. There's upsides as well but it's true.
It has something to do with an episode of German history that took place between 1933 and 1945.
In my experience it generally generally doesn't, and instead revels in the prestige of past successes. Titles and self mythology seem to be more valued than achievement and performance.
It's a sad frustration, as there is so much potential here.
> There is also a massive union culture, which provides Germans with a great quality of life, but again, that's something probably negatively correlated to innovation.
Hmm... So if people struggle in life and have live from hand to mouth in multiple jobs to support their family and loved ones, they are more innovative?
It engrains the idea into people early on, that they should work to upskill themselves or build their own jobs, instead of coasting on the idea the government will always be there for them to provide jobs and security.
Also, plenty of people in Germany live hand to mouth now. Poverty has been on the increase due to CoL.
So, your hypothesis is that greed fuels innovation? Those innovating are rarely the ones benefiting financially. I think it rather fuels hustling. The end game of hustling are monopolies, which have little to no interest in innovation.
From what examples I can think of right now, innovation actually appears to require a certain level of coziness. I'd say great ideas come from curiosity, and if you're struggling to eat, that's usually limited. The trick is, perhaps, to be cozy, but not so cozy that lifting a finger seems pointless.
A quick trip to sub-Saharan Africa will prove this is both true and untrue.
> I actually think Germany would be really good at digital infrastructure if they stopped being afraid of friend computer.
They still have the automotive / electrical engineering mindset on computers and software. Software in Germany is built to achieve a means to an end. It is never the end goal itself.
>Software in Germany is built to achieve a means to an end. It is never the end goal itself.
Well, that's how it should be, I don't write software to worship any software deities, I use it to get a job done. If you don't you end up with that 700 dollar useless gadget that was basically a python API wrapper in a box that everyone rightfully made fun of.
We can do a lot of things better in software in Germany but treating it as an engineering discipline is a good thing, I think even the US is probably past the peak of the zero interest free money toy product phase and people are focusing more on real industry again.
What he means is that Germans are less susceptible to the SV bullshit artists that are hyping up their bubble unicorns for VC money, inflating companies with workers just to sell them at peak of the hype before cutting all those “positions” and then en-shittifying the product.
Technology coasted for a few decades gaining public’s trust as an unquestionable improvement over the past. That reputation is wearing out faster than I’d like to admit.
I hear from friends and family that SV big tech are increasingly equated with surveilence, credit card leaks, and destructive games of billionaires detached from reality. I had a long potluck talk with a stranger that was convinced ChatGPT is analogous to another crypto scam. It blew my mind and opened my eyes that could be a popular opinion.
Popular opinion and fact can be very different.
I agree Germans are less susceptible to SV bullshit artists, but they also miss out on the upside for game changing ideas. Whether this is a net negative or net positive is yet to be determined. Up to this point, it has been Germany’s financial loss to over index on the engineeriness. Maybe it is America’s loss to over index on the financial outcomes and the truly world changing ideas and those very same ideas can be a net negative. I would have said 2 months ago that you would be hard pressed to find people on this message board who would agree with the latter, but I think that may have changed significantly recently.
As a German coming from Mannheim, and now living on the Canadian West coast, I have to say that this is exactly the mindset that makes it so difficult to innovate in Germany. While people have a top education and know everything they need to, they don't have a "digital mindset". I think of myself now as computing process, and see myself as a cyberneticist in the German philosophical tradition of Hegel, Marx, Hilbert, Gödel and Bloch, but even I more often than necessary mistrust innovations.
Almost all the science fiction and cybernetic work of the last 75 years came either out of the Eastern block, or out of the US. There is basically no German sci fi vision, and there is extreme reluctance to speculative, big picture thinking as it is pursued in Silicon Valley. Software companies grow quickly and need a very different approach. Silicon Valley mostly understands this scaling aspect and winner take all markets really well. German investors are cheap and extremely risk averse, I tried to build a software company in Germany and it is hard.
While a lot of the current AI work was also done in Germany, e.g. by Schmidhuber, Germans are stuck in their business model. I recommend Münchau's book "Kaput" (or one of his podcast interviews) on how poorly Germans have adapted to the non-industrial aspects of a modern economy (read: "services"). I really hope that more tech founder thinking like Benz, Bosch or Siemens returns to Germany in a modern form. But I don't see it yet, and Germans are still super reactive and conservative to larger changes. The Greens tried to think a bit out of the box, and were heavily punished for it. In general there is basically no political representation for building a new successful economy. At best there is this nice little narrative about the long established "Mittelstand", which has produce almost zero software companies. The first step right now would be to own the idea of the EU, and wanting to win instead of complaining.
I'm not German and have only made a couple of short visits to Germany, so I have no basis on which to judge your statement that Germans don't have a digital mindset.
But if that is indeed true, I find it equally interesting the Germany has been an important center for the development of electronic music. Berlin in particular is "arguably the world capital of underground electronic music" (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/21/arts/music/women-djs-berl...)
Hmmm, does Jurgen Schmidhuber live in Germany? I'd think primarily Ticino where he spent the majority of his career if I understand correctly.
No, he lives in Switzerland now (Lugano as far as I know). Switzerland is a big magnet for European talent, as is Germany to a lesser degree. My point though was that Germany was not lacking the thinkers to drive a technological revolution, it is rather the society that does not really have the mindset for radical changes and forward thinking.
zero interest money and consumer demand of knock-off products that SV made a decade before and proved the market is successful
> Everything that isn't dross in the computer world is either a well designed standard, or a well designed algorithm
You must be hanging out in a different part of the computer world.
What I see is that most standards reflect evolved systems, and those standards usually have many amendments. Most algorithms are generation descendants of broken predecessors. I love hearing about a singular talent coming up with something new and getting the world to listen, but the story is usually way messier than that.
So, I agree that good standards and (to a lesser extent) algorithms come out of practice.
However, the basic point about a standard is not that it's perfect: it's a coordination mechanism. Companies go bust all the time, technology changes all the time, but if you have standard components, large parts of complex systems can be maintained indefinitely. Like, I have a rolling press that was made in 1840, and I can still replace the bolts for it, because the standard thread gauge has not changed.
I guess the nice thing about both algorithms and standards are they are the two places where the software world is not just burning people's lives on relentlessly reinventing the wheel. If you contribute even a fraction to the study of an algorithm, your work will be part of software in a thousand years. If you contribute to a standard, you are producing the conditions for a thousand other programs. Both of these things are basically common goods, and they help everyone. I think a culture of programming where it's less about founding the next over-capitalized unicorn, and more about creating a mutually supportive ecosystem, would produce very good software.
We actually have a rather recent government agency called "DigitalHub" for that, too, which has been quite successful at pushing open standards and open source. Then there's https://zendis.de/#produkte whose sole purpose is to replace non-EU closed-source software, for example by replacing Windows + Office with Linux and the custom desktop software suite https://opendesk.eu/
Yes, and zendis in its very German ways only hires folks who commute to Bochum at least three times a week. Home office? Da könnte ja jeder kommen...
openSUSE!
Most of German standardization boils down to creating artificial competitive moats to their existing companies, while propping up an incredible lucrative 'standardization industry'.
This allows most Germans to sleep soundly at night knowing some company won't show up at the door selling the same product they do, but better and cheaper.
This is a well know playbook, and is appealing to bureaucrats who conflate a stack paperwork with actual quality, and is not exclusive to Germans (why does FDA approved medicine cost 100x of chemically indentical stuff sold in other countries etc.)/
There are two common standards for documents: PDF and HTML. The german government mostly uses PDFs and should move to HTML.
The point of PDF is document representation. It looks the same. This allows the government to assume an act of forgery when a non-governmental org attempts presenting documents looking like government documents. You can't do that with HTML. PDF with text source sounds perfect.
i'm swiss living in berlin currently (leaving soon)
germany is a country on the rapid decline. the recently decided investment effort and the new government are a step in the right direction but wont halt or revert that decline. the country needs a BIG shock and be rebuilt from the ground up. the new ministry is just pandering / virtue signalling and won't have any effect.
some examples:
1) legacy financial holes like the pension scheme, no bandaid will save this
2) public workers safety & pension "beamtentum" - wrong incentives, wrong people, wrong mindset
3) workers rights are too strong (betriebsrat, unflexible hiring & firing)
4) taxes are ridiculously high, there's zero incentive for global talent to come here
5) bureaucracy is absolutely insane, a country run by risk averse lawyers stuck in the 1980s
6) immigration was botched so bad, they wont recover from this for another generation
7) the rise of the far right afd was handled so terribly, the trauma from ww2 is still too big to deal with it rationally, rather than calling the strongest party in the country "antidemocratic" (which ironically IS antidemocratic in itself). if they dont get a grip on this, afd will lead the country in 4 years.
8) no common identity / goal except for wanting to show being the "good guys", see misincentived sustainability initiatives, handling of israel / palestina, etc
9) weak leaders / politicians. they are all bureaucrats
10) regulation first, innovation never. see AI
Most of the things you listed are not really much of a problem, or rather a symptom of something else. Also lots of populist bla bla, where I think you don't really know what you are talking about. Anyway... the real is issue is this:
Germany is being held hostage by pensioners.
Everything comes down to finances and finances comes down to pensions. It's more than 100 billion euro of tax money going to pensions (on top of high and increasing social-insurance contributions). Retired people are the majority of voters, you can't run on politics to their disadvantage. It's politics for old people, by old people. They indebted the state for their benefit when they were young, ignored the demographic crisis for decades, and now they won't forgo a dime for their children's future.
We will get civil war, before pensions are touched. Without that money, we debate scapegoats, instead of investing in existentially necessary reforms, building houses and fixing the infrastructure debt.
Berlin is not Germany.
I like to believe that 16 years of Merkel left people with the inability of understanding politics and democracy in general.
Handling AfD by inviting them to a talk show where the audience/presenters were mostly people with Greens/Left background is emblematic of how this country has been delegating the ability to think democratically to someone else. No wonder we have extreme parties on the rise. (Both Left and AfD are extremes, no matter what)
Instead of listening, they made fun or criticized a party of monkeys that should have never reached 22%. Because that's all they could do. Make fun, minimize, claiming you're racist, etc.
Burning Tesla factories, breaking their cars while they are parked, ... letting protesters glue themselves on the streets blocking you from reaching whichever place you planned to (be it an office or a hospital). This is daily life in Germany in the last 3-4 years. Wtf!
I am personally sad that all the good things will change because the last 20 years I think Germany really became a great country, unlike all the criticism that people like to throw at it. All just because people couldn't confront the facts. And yes, this means making hard decisions where needed.
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I agree that merging the technology division from the ministry of economic affairs (BMWK) to the new research ministry is a good step as both ministries have been large providers of funding. The BMBF funds DFG, as well as the large science organizations in Germany (Fhg, Mpg, ...), the BMWK has funded research which is closer to applications, of course looking to enable economic activity. I'm unsure why the ministry gets a special focus on aerospace, this topic is being worked on by the DLR, funded by BMBF. I'm also not yet sure what to think about splitting education and research. It goes against the Humboldtian Ideal, especially in the universitys both topics are connected. On the other hand, it might enable the ministries to be more focused and do reforms that don't depend on each other to be performed more quickly. The research ministry will go to CSU, the bavarian sister party of CDU. While it may not be very popular amongst many Germans, because CSU is seen as conservative and individual CSU politicians are not famous science policymakers, Bavaria is a successful science hub. Munich is home to international leading institutions (TUM, MPG, FhG). Bavaria is also a hub for aerospace with Aibus and MTU and startups like Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg. Maybe repeating what bavarian policymakers have done regionally to the whole of Germany will be good.
> I'm also not yet sure what to think about splitting education and research. It goes against the Humboldtian Ideal, especially in the universitys both topics are connected.
According to the German constitution (Grundgesetz), schools and universities are (mainly) the responsibility of the individual German states, not the federal government.[1] (A hybrid is the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology that has a university branch under the supervision of the state of Baden-Württemberg and a research centre branch under federal supervision.) The educational tasks of the federal government therefore basically relate to extracurricular and non-university education, such as early childhood education or adult further education.
At the level of the individual states, higher education and research are generally combined in one ministry and school education in another.
[1] Actually the Grundgesetz states in Art. 30: "The exercise of state powers and the performance of state duties shall be a matter for the individual states (Länder), unless otherwise provided for or permitted by this Basic Law." The authority of the federal government in education policy is therefore derived from what is explicitly mentioned in various places in the Basic Law. A short overview what that involves can be found here: https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/416682/db04b405a48dbe... (PDF, 2009, in German).
Thank you for the background explanation and the link. KIT is actually my Alma Mater (cs). You are right the overlap is not that large. I was thinking about the WissZeitVG, Exzellenzstrategie, Tenure-Track-Program. As for the Länder, I personally think the transition between the Abitur and university could benefit from stronger collaboration between the involved ministries. For example by better aligning the educational goals of high school to the demands of universities and by integrating education research into schools. By this I mean the continuous application of the results of educational research to schools and the constant monitoring of schools.
Some more background information on the laws and initiatives you mentioned.
The WissZeitVG falls within the competence of the federal government due to the exemption regulation of Art. 74 I Nr. 12 GG for labour laws.
The "Exzellenzstrategie" and the Tenure Track Programme are cooperations between the federation and the states based on Art. 91b Abs. 1 GG: "The federation and the states may co-operate on the basis of agreements in cases of supra-regional importance in the promotion of science, research and teaching. Agreements focussing on higher education institutions shall require the consent of all states. ..." (original: "Bund und Länder können auf Grund von Vereinbarungen in Fällen überregionaler Bedeutung bei der Förderung von Wissenschaft, Forschung und Lehre zusammenwirken. Vereinbarungen, die im Schwerpunkt Hochschulen betreffen, bedürfen der Zustimmung aller Länder. ...")
The latest revision of the administrative agreement for the "Exzellenzstrategie" can be found here: https://www.gwk-bonn.de/fileadmin/Redaktion/Dokumente/Papers... (PDF, 2022, in German).
And here the same for the Tenure Track Programme: https://www.gwk-bonn.de/fileadmin/Redaktion/Dokumente/Papers... (PDF, 2016, in German)
Many German companies want „Digitalisierung“, workflow automation, process improvements, they want to use AI, LLMs, but when it comes to implementing all of that, they are drowning in bureaucracy.
What Germans can do is create layers of bureaucracy.
The problem is not the bureaucracy.
Nobody's stopping a local mid-market manufacturer from automating workflows. Or hindering a utility company from offering a better service process.
The problem is corporate leadership.
German companies tend to be run by people who are inflexible, uninspired, and cheap. Maybe it's in the culture. Compare this to Austria, where there's a cultural flair for the dramatic (and therefore an eagerness to stand out, even if it's weird) or Switzerland where enterprises, public or private, are not afraid to place big bets.
> The problem is not the bureaucracy.
It absolutely is. Try to open a company in Germany. Then try to do your tax. Then try to close your company.
After that, let's talk again about bureaucracy.
Oh, and the new government just announced plans that non-employeed people (freelancers, business owners, ...) are now forced to pay into national pension (with few exceptions). And don't get me started on that one. Just as an example, national pension charges based on your income. But they have a different way to calculate income than the tax office.
Let me say it in other words if it's not clear yet: If someone is practically unable to do all the above without an accountant then the bureaucracy is absolutely out of hands.
You make it sound much harder than it is. I've done that and am doing that.
It's totally possible that it's easier in other countries, I don't know that.
But if you're serious about building a company, this is the least of your challenges.
Hire a tax advisor and accountant through a payroll and tax service provider and you'll spend 1-2 days a year dealing with this stuff.
> Hire a tax advisor and accountant through a payroll
And this is exactly how you kill off lots of innovation by adding unnecessary hurdles. Tax advisors are Hella expensive and hard to contract even. I'm speaking from experience.
No offense but if that's what kills your entrepreneurial spirit it doesn't sound like it would've carried you very far. It's really not that hard if you want it. You'll need it sooner or later anyway if you want to be more than a one man show.
Like I said, you'll be facing a lot of substantially greater challenges.
The world isn't black and white like that. Some people even want to do those things on the side. And some become more than a one man show after some time and without having planned that. Not every one has (or has to have) the kind of extreme passion that you are referring to.
One might decide to act out one's entrepreneurial spirit in a different country ...
Sure, but if that's your reason to do that you're not being reasonable.
The point is that relative to everything else you need to get right to build a successful company in any country, taxes, payroll and accounting in Germany frankly don't even register.
Like I said, it's 1-2 days out of a year for me.
If that seems like a big hurdle, it wasn't the reason you didn't build a business.
There are challenges with building a business that are specific to Germany that actually matter.
By contrast, the concerns about bureaucracy are a tired stereotype. There's a grain of truth to them, but if they really pose a challenge to you, you didn't want to do this in the first place.
Have you also done these things in the US? I have heard this sentiment that the German system is far and above the more bureaucratic before, but for all I know, Americans could just be relatively complacent in comparison to Germans and our systems function nearly identically. I’d like to hear from someone if they have been through both processes first hand who could answer this question.
Americans constantly complain about the tax system and, like them or not in practice, a lot of US citizens on both sides of the aisle believe in one of the stated goals of DOGE (previously named the US Digital Service).
> Have you also done these things in the US?
No, and in the context of the thread I care little about the US. This thread is about Germany and is specifically about "they [the companies] are drowning in bureaucracy" and "The problem is not the bureaucracy". And my post was a response to that. The US might be worse (I doubt it) but it has basically no relevance imo.
It has relevance in establishing the amount of bureaucracy relative to the largest government in the West.
I quit my last job because of bureaucracy and I’m considering moving to Germany, so as individual, it is very important to me. Thanks for explaining to me that my life and major factors in my decision are irrelevant. Very helpful.
I feel that Germany can do better than reach for criticism of America whenever challenged on its own merits.
>The problem is not the bureaucracy.
I'm no expert by any means, but have you ever actually worked with Germans?
The existence of Betriebsräte (Workers' Councils, as implemented in Germany), while not necessarily 'bad', comes with a mountain of bureaucracy...
… yeah, never give rights to workers! Back to the middle ages again!
Betriebsräte are actually a really sane measure once you think about it. And the more intelligent managers take them as an asset.
Did you completely miss the "while not necessarily 'bad'" part of my post?
Not the OP, but I don't understand what your original comment was trying to convey.
You took in my opinion unfortunately the worst example you could. Unions are by definition bureaucratic because they need to be...
Betriebsräte are not unions though...
You're right, technically they are different. However, the context is relatively similar - lots of laws to know about, etc.
Both can be true, and what you described is, in my opinion, one of the primary causes of insane bureaucracy in Germany. This inflexible mindset is what causes the relentless enforcement of bureaucracy and procedures in Germany, there is very little leeway here in terms of bending the rules, making exceptions, turning a blind eye. This cultural inflexibility, traditionalism and risk-aversion all ties together into a paperwork and red-tape nigthmare.
This couldn't be more incorrect. I document German bureaucracy for a living. The hardest part of my job is that every state, city, office and case worker applies the rules differently, making it really hard to predict a specific outcome. In most cases it plays in people's favour, unless the case worker is particularly grumpy and you happen to hit one of their pet peeves. I struggle to document the variance for Berlin alone.
The biggest issue with German bureaucracy is that it's largely paper-based and has little to no automation. In many cases, digitalisation when it happens just means sending documents digitally instead of delivering them during an in-person appointment. This leads to very long processing times that are constrained by available labour.
I’m familiar with your site and appreciate it a lot, and I don’t dispute anything you said, but that does not contradict anything in my comment. Those people you mention who apply the rules differently everywhere are inflexible and unwilling to give leeway or look further then their own way. This is a cultural issue in my opinion and can explain most of excessive bureaucracy here. You’re also talking specifically about the ausländerbehörde, which is one manifestation of bureaucracy here, there are many other forms.
My experience was a bit different. For example, the immigration office accepts almost all applications in the end (over 95% according to their stats). They make all sorts of exceptions in the applicants' favour. The Bürgeramt, the Ordnungsamt and the Arbeitsagentur are the same. They huff and puff and make an exception "just this time", every time. The inflexibility is an act, unless you're being difficult (from their point of view). Then you get the least charitable interpretation of their directives.
Against all expectations, German bureaucracy is very "vibes-based", specifically because it's full of humans. It's predictably unpredictable. You rarely get the downside of digitalisation where "computer says no", because a human is deciding your fate and can be convinced to give you leeway.
The bigger issue at least for me is speed. The uncertainty of human decisions is magnified by the weeks-long delays. A missing document is a big issue when bureaucracy has a 4-8 week ping. That is of course if the case worker doesn't shrug and give you what you want anyway.
Except they might not even if you have the correct documents and are as pleasant and cooperative as can be.
My experience when it mattered was that my rights were not recognised by the human in the loop. It was solved by going above their heads.
If you aren't willing or able you might just get the short end of the stick.
I think that German bureaucrats choose the path of least resistance. Most of the time it means giving you what you ask for.
When you get the short end of the stick, a letter from your lawyer can make it abundantly clear that giving you what you want (and faster) is the path of least resistance.
This inflexible mindset is what causes the relentless enforcement of bureaucracy and procedures in Germany, there is very little leeway here in terms of bending the rules, making exceptions
This. I have worked in a Germany university and in all the supporting administration, nobody wants to make choices or take responsibility. E.g. I had some blatant cases of plagiarism and when going to the examination office (where it should be reported), they would do nothing. And when I asked whether there shouldn't be any repercussions, their answer was "there ought to be repercussions", the subtext being: but I'm not going to be the one enforcing them, because if I do and the student files a complaint, I'm going to have to defend my choice.
Or sometimes we had to order GPU servers for the department. We requested quotes from multiple companies (since we knew what we need) and would then send them to the financial administration with our preference (good price + service options). Rather than saying: LGTM, seems you did your work, they would spend four (!) weeks asking new quotes and processing them. And then they would happily come and say, "we found a cheaper option" and the cheaper option would be saving 100 Euro on a machine that cost something like 25,000 and was most likely just the natural reduction in prices in four weeks. At any rate, it is this weird mix of needing to assert themselves, following whatever rules to the letter, and not wanting to make 'bold' choices etc. Meanwhile a whole research group is under compute capacity for a month and the work of the financial department certainly cost more than 100 Euro in hourly wages.
Also, every process uses paper. Heck, once I got my tax number, to my surprise the person from the administration pulled my personnel file out of a filing cabinet!
I wish that this was just the university, but from friends that went into industry, I hear that a lot of German corporations are pretty much the same.
I've seen it described as "Germans are not efficient, they're methodical". There is a lot of truth to it, but Germans are also making all sorts of exceptions either for convenience or expediency, making the method unpredictable.
Sums it up pretty well
I challenge this: How do you measure processing time? From first customer interaction? Or from all input data are present? I assume in most situations they are not present upfront. Therefore it’s a tedious back and forth. Sure, that compounds with the roundtrip time. Digitisation is a trap because it doesn’t change the paradigm to full-kit upfront necessarily. Digitisation can be a nice entry-point to this, but unfortunately digitising data does not necessarily introduce the full-kit.
The system needs to be designed in a different way: “We guarantee processing within x hours (weekdays) from the point you’ve provided us a full-kit.”
This, in turn, requires thinking backwards from the result through all steps, resulting in a definition of what a full-kit entails. Of course this requires a different (system) thinking which is contradicted by the rigid hierarchy (and no, doing away with the hierarchy isn’t a solution either).
Work force would not be busy 80% of their time = capacity to go back and forth to figure what’s missing and switch around cases. When starting with full-kit, 80% of their wasted time becomes processing time. In turn, their throughput was 20%, it goes up to 100%, or x5.
The main problem that I see in leadership is lack of understanding and respect for software - "I don't understand it so how hard can it be?". Seems to be especially prevalent at German car companies where, apparently, mechanical engineering is still boss. (I'd be fine with a car with very little software, but that is not what they are trying to build...)
As a German I would love to contradict this but I tend to agree. Bureaucracy isn't such a big deal in my experience - might be different depending what area you are working in - but the leadership culture regarding software is the cause of most of the misery I've seen and I've been involved with.
Cheap as in no investments in people or software quality. Salaries are also not competitive in a lot of places.
Disregard for the user and disregard for usability.
Unfortunately most software shops locked in their customers and the lack of any technical merit pays well and is disconnected from product quality.
Only lots of bankruptcies might help. I have nothing but disdain for these people in leadership.
I've surely not seen all but I've seen enough. It's that bad.
Or move on from software dev- or not even code a single line and jump to „architect“ or some other bs position straight out of university.
Skip a step? In Germany? Surely you’re joking.
> Compare this to Austria, where there's a cultural flair for the dramatic (and therefore an eagerness to stand out, even if it's weird) or Switzerland where enterprises, public or private, are not afraid to place big bets.
Can you call out with some examples for those of us unfamiliar with those 'big bets'?
One very big bet I would say would be the NRLA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRLA
Switzerland sits between Germany, Italy, and France, and was getting choked by road traffic, so voters have approved the largest tunnels in the world to get goods around and through Switzerland without using roads.
I trade you anecdata for my anecdata: How about the Fehmarn Belt tunnel? Not big enough?
Paid for and owned by Denmark :)
> The problem is not the bureaucracy
The problem is definitely bureaucracy. Any German founder will agree with this.
LOL - I can second that. There are a lot of memes about nothing screams more "Digitalisierung!" than having to send papers via fax.
Or having to carry cash coz a lot of places don't even give you the option to pay by card (even though this seems to come to an end, hello 2025!)
Random German company: You open your intranet, manually search through hundreds of (pdf!) application-forms (because search is not implemented), downlod the right form, print it(!), fill the form, sign it, scan the paper, send it to the ticket system. That’s what they call „Digitalisierung“, because previously they had to send the printed paper-form to the helpdesk team.
I recently signed up for a simple prepaid phone plan in Germany (I have lived here for 2 years already, fully registered etc). I had to go through the full KYC process, after waiting over a week for a physical SIM card to be sent by post to me. After this, I wanted an eSIM (this was my original goal but this was not possible on initial signup).
I had to contact customer support to send me one... by post. They only activate and send eSIMs by mail. This will take another week.
How recently? Nowadays there are a bunch of "app eSIM" companies competing in Germany that offer to get you an eSIM by just installing an app, KYC and credit card in 5 min
A few days ago - I had some strict requirements of extremely low monthly cost (I only need it for sending and receiving SMS and for signing up for certain german services that require a German number) - so I want with O2 Prepaid. There are a lot of instant sign up eSIMs that are data only, which is not what I'm looking for.
I would be surprised if you're talking about an eSIM service that give you a phone number.
Absolutely, the data-only ones don't count :D Fraenk [1] is one example, there are a few competitors all in about the same price range
[1]: https://fraenk.de/esim
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luckily I haven't been working with such companies, I have had enough of my dose of Digitalisierung by interacting with public offices. But at least I can communicate with the Finanzamt via email, after signing a document where I made clear I understand that emails are not a safe communication tool (while random non-certified letters are, apparently).
> while random non-certified letters are, apparently
They kind of are. Somebody would have to go and steal the physical letter and then read/scan it to make any use of it. That excludes pretty much all attacks on the process --- at least such where criminals might hope to make a larger profit than most other criminal enterprises available to them.
Whether that makes the letters a good idea is a different discussion...
Sounds like my random Japanese company, except for the fact that here all the forms are created in Excel.
Well, that's better, right?
I don't know if you are serious, but I can tell you that the way these people abuse Excel is maddening.
Yeah, I'm sure a thousand lovely Horizon 2040 funded research projects that result in throwaway academic solutions to hyper-specific industry issues where the first MVP is shown after 5 years will come out of this.
Not even throwaway. They will result in reports and keynote presentations, but nothing truly functional. The EU doesn't understand how to structure incentives to make things work and avoid rent-seekers and grifters. Source, I've been part of some large EU consortia. Never again.
Yeah, I was always surprised by how many organizations will actually jump at the opportunity to "participate" when some EU consortia was announcing a new program or funding round.
There's a saying for that in German involving "feeding trough" and "pigs".
Reminds me of a quote from "Yes minister" in which it says one commissioner pays a farmer a lot of money to produce and another to remove the surplus, plus a lot of paper pushing in the middle.
In the examples you mentioned bureaucracy is less of a problem. They could do it but this is hard work in a sense which the culture does not reward.
The problem with germans in general is that they are unwilling or badly trained in „thinking things to the end“. The will start a „Digitalisierungsministerium“ without a clear goal of what they want to achieve let alone how to get there. In the end they will waste a lot of money on ipads and businesses lock them into their ecosystems so the can‘t get out. It all goes back to the culture and a rigid educational system where everyone is supposed to stay where they are.
To be fair though, once they do get through all those layers, the end result is often incredibly well-structured and precise
Yes. But also "flexible like a closet", "well, but this is how we always did things around here".
> In a section titled “scientific freedom,” the document seems to refer at least obliquely to developments in the United States, where scientists working on topics such as gender, global health, and climate change have seen their funding slashed and important data sets have been scrubbed from the websites of federal agencies. “Funding decisions will be based on science-driven criteria,” the document states. “It seems like that should be a no-brainer, but we have seen how quickly it can change,” says Eva Winkler, an oncologist and medical ethicist at Heidelberg University and a member of the German Ethics Council.
If this obliquely refers to anything, then to a scandal under the last german government, where the minister of science and education had demanded to know whether any signatory to an open letter received funding from the ministry[1].
[1]: https://www.forschung-und-lehre.de/politik/foerdermittel-aff...
Surprised to see the negativity in the comments - if executed well, this is exactly the sort of thing governments should be aiming to do: solving social coordination problems and funding with long-term horizons.
*executed well*
but first regulated to death
I have an alternative theory about tech and growth in Europe - the rich are too greedy here and are not optimistic enough about growth. They:
a) don’t fund risky things
b) don’t believe Europe can create unicorns so it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy for their investments
c) try to cash out too quickly from potentially huge businesses
d) valuations are half the investment for double the equity, so of course the companies have half the runway and half the upside.
No comment except that 'the rich are too greedy here' is an extremely european explanation for EU economic underperformance.
You’re completely misinterpreting and taking out of context the whole point I’m trying to make for a cheap swipe at Europe. Do you actually disagree with what I said or are you trying to win Internet points with semantics? Do you even disagree with the bulk of my complaint about investment in Europe?
Do you even disagree that investors try to take a larger equity position in companies in the EU than in the US?
Europe is mostly "old money" so this makes sense. They didn't earn that money they are custodians of it.
> don’t believe Europe can create unicorns so it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy for their investments
There sure would like though. What I've followed in the Horizon program was a fixation of chasing "last years" technology.
Problem was , that for all those funding programmes they had quite stingent company requirements which stopped startups and small companies from having a go at it. Larger companies had no issue navigating this process and chewing the cash without actually delivering good or innovative products.
Can you tell me which regulations are stopping them? The UK for example bent over backwards to make acquiring a banking licence part of a clear process. I think this is harder at the EU level but for me laws like GDPR are actually very reasonable (having implemented a system for container shipping crew, including lots of personal information like passport images).
I think the EU is increasingly aware of its faults, especially in Germany & France. Happy to watch them cook and I say that as an American who has watched on with pain at what the EU has done to itself over the last decade+.
Are their people worse off?
I can't speak for France, but for Germany, unfortunately, by most metrics that matter (affordable housing, infrastructure, subjective well-being, energy costs, labor markets, etc.) compared to 20 years ago, yes. However, compared to most other countries, Germany is still doing quite well. So it all depends on the context for how you interpret the data.
[1] https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2024/03/27/germanys-rea... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_economic_crisis_%282022...
It depends on what you are looking at.
For example there is increasing consensus that Merkel's "black-zero" budget requirements set the stage for today's collapsing German infrastructure and lack of productivity growth due to decreased public investment.
Think it has much more to do with traditional EU regulator attitudes around the dual of labor & capital markets. Both are very dysfunctional in Europe, with labor probably slightly edging out in terms of dysfunction.
thats also not helping, but it's not exactly a secret that German public infrastructure from roads to rails to electricity and whatnot are also all crumbling.
it's hard to build infrastructure when you have dysfunctional labor markets & your tax base is declining in real terms.
The black zero literally means that in real terms they have been decreasing government investment for years now.
"You eventually run out of other peoples' money"
And wait till the EU starts paying it's own defense bills without the US, which is what it wants to do. But with money from where? Education? Healthcare? Welfare?
I'm thinking about things like life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality, health care, violent crime, suicide, incarceration, traffic safety...
According to this article, the answer is yes:
https://www.wsj.com/world/europeans-poorer-inflation-economy...
In my view, yes - especially when you subset to native born populations. Many europeans are a proud people though so I understand this is contentious, regardless of what the numbers say.
You say that like Germany as a country isn't doing well. I swear, people just stop thinking when it comes to things like this.
The money never goes to actually relevant or innovative projects, because there is a whole industry devoted to "proposal writing". Companies will literally bring dedicated teams together to sit in a room and think how they could possibly grift EU money, because they cannot meaningfully compete on the open market and need to fund 25-50% of their personnel costs through such programs.
Think Siemens, Orange S.A., Technikon, Philips N.V., T-Systems, but also (!) IBM, Accenture, Deloitte, McKinsey.
There is a whole industry in Croatia specializing in EU money extraction. Hundreds of agencies writing proposals to get grants for their clients and taking their cut. Tons of those are grifts with money directly landing into people's pockets, seaside villas being bought, hotels being made. It's so blatant that politicians accuse each other for not extracting as much money as they’ve could. After decades of blatant stealing EPPO (European Public Prosecutors Office) got involved. When they go for small fish that’s fine, but when they start investigating government politicians they (government) take the case from them and those guys get a slap on the wrist. There are just so many cases that EPPO can do only a fraction of them. Terrible situation, and I don’t think it’ll change because EU doesn’t give too much of a care about a small country like that. And it’s not their money in a sense, so they care even less.
If governments would (always) execute well then we could just let them do everything and it would be great. But they don't because there is no competition.
Waiting eagerly for the first contracts to land at SAP/T-Mobile.
They will swallow and maul any budget you throw at them. Legally and fully documented.
Black_13 appears to be shadowbanned so I'm reproducing their comment here:
black_13 11 minutes ago [dead] | parent | context | unvouch | favorite | on: Germany creates 'super–high-tech ministry' for res...
The cynicism in these comments is telling, but misses crucial realities about Germany's capabilities and social achievements. Yes, Germany creates bureaucracies. Yes, Dorothee Bär's digital infrastructure record isn't impressive. And yes, German bureaucracy can be stifling. But this myopic focus on administrative inefficiency overlooks Germany's formidable strengths.
Germany maintains world-class engineering and manufacturing excellence through their Mittelstand network while America has hollowed out its industrial base. German research institutions like Max Planck and Fraunhofer consistently produce breakthrough innovations in renewable energy, advanced materials, and chemical engineering. Their aerospace contributions through Airbus and DLR deliver real technological advances.
More importantly, Germany excels precisely where America falters. Their dual education system creates exceptional technical competence without requiring college degrees. Germans enjoy comprehensive public transportation infrastructure, universal healthcare without administrative bloat, and urban planning that prioritizes livability over speculation.
The results speak for themselves: Germans live significantly longer (81.1 years vs America's 76.4), face virtually no gun violence (2 deaths per million annually vs America's 120), and don't suffer from the manufactured scarcity that plagues American housing, healthcare, and education markets.
Critically, Germany isn't now teetering on becoming a police state. While America expands surveillance powers, militarizes police forces, and faces growing authoritarianism, Germany's post-war constitutional framework continues to prioritize civil liberties, privacy protections, and democratic norms. Their painful historical lessons have created institutional guardrails against authoritarianism that America increasingly lacks.
Let's be honest about who's posting these dismissive takes - primarily privileged tech workers disconnected from the material realities faced by average citizens. While you mock German bureaucracy from comfortable positions, their social systems deliver concrete benefits that many Americans can only dream of.
Germany's approach allows for longer, healthier lives with dramatically less precarity than what Americans experience. Their new ministry may face bureaucratic challenges, but it builds on foundations of technical excellence and social achievement that deserve genuine consideration rather than facile mockery.
> comprehensive public transportation infrastructure, universal healthcare without administrative bloat, and urban planning that prioritizes livability over speculation.
This can't be further from the truth. This is probably written by an American, and US is a very car-centric, but German infrastructure is a shitshow.
Also healthcare is absolutely stiffled by bureaucracy. I have a friend who is a cardiologist. He says that exactly half of his work time is paperwork. And not just paperwork, but German paperwork, where you manually type PDF fields one by one, then print, then sign, then scan and so on.
As someone who lived in multiple rich countries in Europe, let me tell you that the German healthcare system is awesome. It has a lot of problems, but it's head and shoulders above many-many other countries. You can actually get care by a qualified doctor, while this is absolutely not self-evident even in rich countries like the United Kingdom, and let's not talk about CEE countries.
How many years ago?
I would disagree. German doctors regularly prescribe homeopathic medicine, misdiagnose patients and tell people they just need to drink tea, and also will not supply medicine when it is really needed. This is well researched.
Saying you can not get care by a qualified doctor in the UK is a completely false statement.
> This can't be further from the truth. This is probably written by an American, and US is a very car-centric, but German infrastructure is a shitshow.
I just know that this is a comment from a German person who has little experience with public transport in any non-top-class country. Yeah, it could be better, but it could also be so much worse.
> Also healthcare is absolutely stiffled by bureaucracy
This I agree with.
I lived in Russia, Georgia, few European countries. Even in Georgia trains are way more punctual, than in Germany. Moscow metro works like a Swiss-clock compared to U-Bahn/S-Bahn.
Maybe what you are talking about is true for some very pour Asian/African countries, but many middle-income countries have more reliable public transportation, than Berlin. Not to mention developed ones and China.
> I lived in Russia, Georgia, few European countries
I've been to Central America, Egypt, Istanbul, Sicily, Spain and many more candidates that take a more lax attitude to daily life. Their public transport could certainly be better.
> but many middle-income countries have more reliable public transportation, than Berlin
Berlin is not Germany. Berlin is badly run, constantly out of money (especially for infrastructure) and very different than the rest. Still, inner city public transport is generally reliable, if dirty and sometimes full of questionable people.
What do you consider a non-top-class country? Is your statement just tautologically true, because any country with better public transit then germany would be considered top-class?
>Also healthcare is absolutely stiffled by bureaucracy. I have a friend who is a cardiologist. He says that exactly half of his work time is paperwork. And not just paperwork, but German paperwork, where you manually type PDF fields one by one, then print, then sign, then scan and so on.
Wait. That's exactly how paperwork has always worked for me in America. What am I missing?
The difference is in Germany you print that PDF out from the institution's website, and then send it to them by mail.
Or you scan the printed form (which you filled out electronically), and send it by fax.
This reads as FUD. I'm an American who's lived in Germany recently. On every measure, my experience was been better than the US.
I can walk to the grocery. Or ride a bike. Or take the bus. Or take the train into the city. There are options in transport and in the stores. Never, ever had those options in the States.
Yes, I've had some doctors I didn't care for. So I found another one and they've been great. Same thing happens in the States. You must advocate for yourself. Nothing different.
The big difference is the complete lack of fear going in because you know you won't have to pay an arm and a leg. And yes, it's not "free". It comes out of your paycheck. 110% better. Never had to wait an excessive time, even for specialists. No more than in the States; you schedule it out. Yet, I can go to the emergency room when there's a concern and be greeted with compassion and receive care. So much better, it's hard to convey and hard for Americans to believe. I didn't until I lived there.
As for "digitalization", yeah, it'd be nice to submit some forms online rather than through paper. But it's not a big deal. Howwver, it's super nice to talk to human beings on the phone! Haven't run into too many "your call is very important to us. Please listen as our menu may have changed" and then have to deal with a 1kbsp mega compressed audio line. Also, while I've had bad experiences with clerks, many more have been very patient and gracious. Again, contrast that to the DMV. Not much difference.
Doctors in the US also deal with tons of paper work...has your friend also worked in the States?
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Interesting comment, but Germany's much-vaunted Mittelstand is in its initial death throes. Key industries and IP are being auctioned off to the highest bidder, not the least, for lack of heirs. It isn't universally acknowledged, but the same processes that caused the US's manufacturing decay have been occurring in Germany; at roughly the same speed, but with a 30 year lag (since Agenda 2010) viz-a-vis the US.
I really dislike the Germany against America sentiment of this post. This is not how you bring arguments to the table. Saying this a German.
There is a large number of people that mistake generic Trump Derangement Syndrome prose for insightful analysis.
>Black_13 appears to be shadowbanned so I'm reproducing their comment here:
Pity this happens, I was looking at his posts, and most of them seem to have a higher degree of original thought than most other HN posters.
I don't even know who pushes this German exceptionalism propaganda - is it themselves or do they have 'German-weeaboos' who think everything German is better?
> Germany maintains world-class engineering and manufacturing excellence through their Mittelstand network - small companies are not unique to Germany. But you'll be surprised how many German industrial automation companies (a domain I know something about), basically haven't changed their product portfolio in the past 10-15 years. Research institutions aren't unique to Germany. The fact you're banking on the clout of having invented MP3 40 years ago is weakness masquerading as strength.
> Their dual education system creates exceptional technical competence without requiring college degrees. - they do have excellent training for skilled technicians, I do give them that.
> Germans live significantly longer - the 28th longest life expectancy in Europe
> Germany isn't now teetering on becoming a police state. - no comment on this, because I don't want to turn this into political mudslinging, but needless to day, this isn't an uncontroversial take. It'd be more accurate to say Germany isn't becoming a kleptocracy/plutocracy like the US.
Having no gun violence and having a higher life expectancy than America is not something to be proud of and not a useful benchmark. This comment is a prime example of Germany's inability to take external criticism - it nearly always devolves into comparison with America. You know many non-americans also criticise the state of Germany currently?
Having lived here for a bit over 5 years, I can say that Germans too often like to speak from the moral high ground. There are things that are sacred and indisputable, like opposition to nuclear energy. Try to complain about a strike in public services causing you inconvenience, and you will invariably get lectured on solidarity. I've seen people interrupting speakers at public events to "provide important context" that was nothing more than self-flattery from the interrupting person. I do believe in this country and think that it has way more upsides than downsides, but the people here could sure use a bit of humility.
> You know many non-americans also criticise the state of Germany currently
Germans are also masters at criticising Germany. You just read more defence online than what happens in real life.
I've often wished for /pol/ style flags on HN. I think a lot of people get offended when their country is criticized online because they feel that the criticism comes from a foreigner.
/s?
Not sure what could be interpreted as sarcasm in my comment. It is pretty direct and on the nose.
> Having no gun violence and having a higher life expectancy than America is not something to be proud of and not a useful benchmark
/s ?
What I mean by this is - is that this is such a low bar - of not having rampant gun violence and short life expectancy, especially when correlating them with GDP. This should not be a point of pride or comparison to beat this bar. Most developed countries in the world achieve more than America on these metrics, therefore it's a useless benchmark.
if America has gun violence, then Germany has car ramming into crowds violence, and both problems have similar roots
>Germans live significantly longer (81.1 years vs America's 76.4)
Got to point out a nuance here.
Americans living shorter are partly the result of America's success. An aggressive big pharma and a health care system that over medicates the population and give them bad advise ( eg nutrition) is one reason why they live less. Often more technology/business is not necessarily good. Germany's overall better outcome with result to life expectancy can be attributed to their incompetence/bureaucracy but certainly not a conscious decision to be better.
> Germans enjoy comprehensive public transportation infrastructure, universal healthcare without administrative bloat
Tell me you have never lived in Germany without telling me...
I have lived in Germany twice, the first time around 2005-2006 and the second time around 2016-2018, mostly in Bavaria and other southern parts.
The first time the public transportation infrastructure was very decent, certainly better than in most countries, even if not comparable with something like Japan.
The second time, 10 years later, there was a visible degradation in their railways, because the trains were almost never on time. I have lost a flight and a very large number of train changes because of train delays. However when going by car on their freeways I have not noticed anything worse and with a good car one could travel easily with a speed much above 200 km/h for a long time without problems, though there were also some congested segments.
I have never been ill, so I cannot comment about the state of healthcare.
I have never been in USA, but all the descriptions of the transportation system that I have seen, even of the infrastructure for cars, appear inferior to even the last version from Germany, which was degraded in comparison with the older one.
> Their dual education system creates exceptional technical competence without requiring college degrees.
Unless you do your Ausbildung in a job where you can learn mostly all the skills within a couple months, after which you'll just be shamelessly exploited by your employer for the remaining duration of it.
> Germans enjoy comprehensive public transportation infrastructure,
Yeah, our train systems are pretty cool (can reach most places.) But if your expectation is anything more than 'hopefully arrive by the end of day', you'll regularly be disappointed.
> and don't suffer from the manufactured scarcity that plagues American housing
Have you tried renting in any bigger city in the past 10 or so years?
> Critically, Germany isn't now teetering on becoming a police state. While America expands surveillance powers, militarizes police forces, and faces growing authoritarianism, Germany's post-war constitutional framework continues to prioritize civil liberties, privacy protections, and democratic norms.
I disagree with the claim that Germany is currently on a path strictly "prioritiz[ing] civil liberties, privacy protections, and democratic norms."
Not only did German politicians in 2021 broaden the scope of §188 StGB to include insults against politicians, even at the local level[1], the new coalition contract also has some pretty dystopian views on how to approach opinions/statements they categorize as 'disinformation'[2] (ministry of truth anyone? - ah nevermind, they sidestep that by letting NGOs do the dirty work for them.)
Pair that with the fact that they plan to (again) try to introduce data retention laws without cause[3], I do not personally believe that claiming we strictly prioritize civil liberties etc is a correct assessment of the overall situation here in Germany.
Overall I suspect the post has been written with the aid of LLM, I wonder who/why would do such a thing though. There's just something off about the tone.
1. https://www.buzer.de/gesetz/6165/al144303-0.htm
2. https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/politik-gesellschaft/kampf-g...
3. http://golem.de/news/koalitionsvertrag-bundesdigitalminister...
> Have you tried renting in any bigger city in the past 10 or so years?
I am German myself and I get where you're coming from, but there are worlds between German rent prices and American or even London, Amsterdam or Dublin rent prices.
I'm not sure about that. 2 bedroom apartment in Munich for ~1500 euro on maybe a 75k eur salary vs ~4000 usd in SF on a 180k usd salary. They're pretty similar numbers, relatively.
> 2 bedroom apartment in Munich for ~1500 euro
What do you mean by 2BR? 2 Bedroom capable apartments? I have 1BR one living room for 1470 (1670 with heating & co) in Munich.
I worked on a project funded by the BMBF. I can tell you, those people had no idea of what they were funding. And the people running the project had also no idea for what they were being funded.
So basically like any funding?
The title is strange: In german news there was nothing that sounded like "super hightech ministry" not even a "superhigh tech ministry". But the ministry for "education and research" got split, assigning education to the ministry for family, leaving more room for the research part which got an additional focus on technology.
Germany has no national idea, they have no reason why an average burger should work his/her ass off competing with Chinese/American/Indian scientists and working 80 hr/week on cutting edge research.
Germans are smart and capable, but the German lifestyle is not for "super high tech" industry
The people I know that do cutting-edge research mostly do it because it's fun. That might be hard to imagine, but if you have great (government-funded) local hackerspaces where you can meet others, talk to them and built stuff together, it becomes a viable free-time activity. For example, I can schedule a Prusa (FDM) / Form (SLA) / Fuse (SLS) print job remotely and then quickly walk there to pick it up. If I need custom sheet metal or wood, I'll bring a USB stick with the DXF and then walk. That kind of infrastructure massively cuts down on iteration times. Plus it's great to get feedback in-person by other tinkerers when you pick things up.
That's all good and well, but the very time you would try to start selling your tinkering, or, God forbid, hire somebody - that's where the hell begins.
Being a self-employed is a living hell in Germany, as well as receiving any money outside of employment. Esp. if money are small (but > than hobby money, 500 euro iirc) and don't justify the hurdle of dealing with Finanzamt, tax pre-payment, possible regulations with upfront Formulars etc.
What is the national idea of the other listed countries in comparison? Also: a "national idea" isn't the only reason people do cutting edge research.
you need an idea in order to mobilize the energy of the population.
German passionary patriotism has been artificially subverted and shut down, and the nation instead has been flooded with non-Germanic elements, thus completely destroying the very definition of German.
Ask any German on the street, and nobody will be able to answer: What defines being a German, who are the Germans, what is their history, and what awaits German people in the future.
Complete void of any ideology, national idea, any energy that could propel the nation in the great leap forward.
> German passionary patriotism has been artificially subverted and shut down, and the nation instead has been flooded with non-Germanic elements, thus completely destroying the very definition of German.
> Ask any German on the street, and nobody will be able to answer: What defines being a German, who are the Germans, what is their history, and what awaits German people in the future.
I don't think so, you will meet plently people that will be able to tell you about Germany's history, or at least recent history. And what defines being German, you might get different answers, but is that so bad, and where wouldn't you? Hasn't multiculturalism just become a big part of Germany's identity, and not destroyed it as you claim? Döner just as the simplest example.
Are you seriously claiming that Döner is a German culture???? Not schnitzel, not bratwurts, but doner??
Your post highlights all the problems with modern Germany
> the great leap forward
... doesn't sound very desirable, with how things by that name have gone historically.
I hope this works out (even if it's a net negative for the US). I have worked with German engineers, and have been quite impressed.
I sincerely wish Germany luck. They'd better do a good job of securing their IP, though...
You mean as opposed to the American national idea of "work or starve, bitch"?
If you ever visited America, it would immediately strike you that no Americans, rich or poor, black or white, are starving. Frankly, we could all use a little more starving.
The actual data about food insecurity from the USDA tells quite a different story:
https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details?pubid=1098...
In 2023...13.5 percent (18.0 million households) were food insecure. Food-insecure households (those with low and very low food security) had difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all their members because of a lack of resources...5.1 percent of U.S. households (6.8 million households) had very low food security...
Coincidentally, the collection of such detailed and useful data is at risk from the indiscriminate USDA firings.
So it's a totally subjective metric which measures whether anyone claims to have "had difficulty" buying food at least once during a calendar year. Not that they didn't get enough food--just that they had to exert effort to get it.
This is not evidence that people are going hungry, though it is clearly designed to give that impression.
Talk about a bad faith response. No counter data presented. Just deny and distract.
Here's collaborating trends for the same calendar year:
https://www.feedingamerica.org/research/charitable-food-assi...
Feeding America estimates more than 50 million people received charitable food assistance sometime in 2023
I'm guessing you'll respond that charities that feed people have a vested interest and are not to be trusted... (yes, I'm aware of cases of charities committing fraud; no there is no evidence that is the norm). Probably again without presenting data to support your assertion that there are no Americans who go hungry.
I'm curious what actually obtainable data you would accept as a counterfactual to your statement/belief?
You seem to have lost the thread of the argument. The original comment was
> no Americans, rich or poor, black or white, are starving. Frankly, we could all use a little more starving.
You responding by providing evidence that some people had difficulty, at least once per year, in putting food on the table. This in no way contradicts the original claim, as having difficulty doing a thing is not synonymous with being unable to do a thing.
> Here's collaborating trends for the same calendar year
This shows that people are getting food. As presented, this is not evidence that people are going hungry.
> I'm curious what actually obtainable data you would accept as a counterfactual to your statement/belief?
If you want to contradict the claim that Americans aren't starving, you would want to provide evidence that Americans are starving.
I take it you missed / didn't read the response immediately above yours where I cited data on malnutrition related deaths in the US?
• Mostafa, N., Sayed, A., Rashad, O. et al. Malnutrition-related mortality trends in older adults in the United States from 1999 to 2020. BMC Med 21, 421 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-023-03143-8
The article about elderly people who struggle to absorb nutrition?
> Of these deaths, 34.3% took place inside medical facilities, 30.2% inside nursing homes/long-term care facilities, and 25.6% inside the descendant’s home.
Is America is so broke that we can't feed people in hospitals and nursing homes? Obviously not. These are people whose bodies are shutting down due to told age, not people who are being neglected by society.
In an attempt to show that people are starving due to poverty, you've instead shown that we're expending many, many times the cost of feeding them in an attempt to keep them alive. No doubt you're incapable of admitting that this is directly contradictory to the spirit of your thesis.
Receiving charitable food assistance doesn't mean that you're starving, or even that you would be starving without that assistance. What sort of data would you accept to prove that americans are not starving?
Above I've already pointed to TWO types of data that bear on food insecurity in the US, and provided citations:
1. USDA data on food insecurity
2. Food bank usage data
If you wanted to understand the extremes of food insecurity, than data on malnutrition related deaths in the US would also apply:
• Mostafa, N., Sayed, A., Rashad, O. et al. Malnutrition-related mortality trends in older adults in the United States from 1999 to 2020. BMC Med 21, 421 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-023-03143-8
From the paper above -- "Despite some initial decrements in malnutrition mortality among older adults in the U.S., the uptrend from 2013 to 2020 nullified all established progress. The end result is that malnutrition mortality rates represent a historical high...Effective interventions are strongly needed. Such interventions should aim to ensure food security and early detection and remedy of malnutrition among older adults..."
If you wanted to explore malnutrition related deaths for other groups / time periods you could query the CDC Wonder data base using ICD-10 Codes E40 – E46 (as was done in the paper cited above; see also https://www.icd10data.com/ICD10CM/Codes/E00-E89/E40-E46).
• https://wonder.cdc.gov/ -- Search CDC Wonder for underlying cause of death
I did the query for 2023 and found were >22,000 malnutrition related deaths recorded by the CDC.
If this number went down significantly I would see that as evidence of a decrease in malnutrition in the US. If this number was near zero I would accept your assertion that no/few Americans are starving.
Given the preponderance of data, the notion that one could argue with a straight face that food insecurity in the US is of no concern seems shocking to me.
I've lived most of my life in America, where I was born.
What’s your proposal? Give up?
We should stop treating any kind of patriotism and German culture like it is from the devil.
I would say Germany needs to redefine what patriotism is. It currently has too many dual passport holders, and people with dual loyalties who do not put the long-term interests of Germany first, but rather consider Germany only as a source of welfare to extract and transfer elsewhere
The erosion of a shared German culture for decades leaves us with the result of having no national identity. Make no mistake, I'm not alluding to purism of the natives one bit. On the contrary, I would love for immigrants to be proud to be part of Germany.
In the US, immigrants make a point of showing their patriotism by immersing themselves into American culture. We don't have a similar cultural phenomenon in Germany.
> consider Germany only as a source of welfare to extract and transfer elsewhere
You would be surprised how many natives share this viewpoint. This can only work for so long before something collapses...
Sounds like you kinda just want an excuse to vote AfD without pointing to an element of their policy platform you think the rest of us should support too.
Q.E.D
(Just for the record I don't vote AfD. I do like being German and I like what little culture we have left. You can be patriotic and at the same time left leaning.)
Ok, so what policies do you like about BWS, then?
Gruß aus Frankfurt, you really couldn't have proven his point any better if you tried.
Some countries are approximately 50% national flag by surface area, fist pumping and chanting the country's name at every opportunity despite being run by people making Nazi salutes, but "it's okay to like your country's culture" is instantly equated with Nazism? Come on man...
I agree with your comment. It's also funny and sad to see the political and mental disconnect in this topic. Now that we need more military, people are surprised that there is no one who wants to defend a country that's just an arbitrary collection of people with no shared identity.
people like you are the reason for the downfall of Germany as a nation
Germany is actively killing innovation. I propose to stop for starters.
Tho when the median voter is 55 and national motto is "that's how it was always done" and "Pensions are secure" - I don't put much hope. I still remember the outcry when the digital health cards were introduced.
Not sure how Germany is actively killing innovation to be honest.
Your other points are more or less true, I just like to think that people complain a lot and media obviously makes it worse.
Digital health cards, online tax declaration, etc. These things did happen. People complained, but these decisions were not reverted. That's the most important.
> Not sure how Germany is actively killing innovation to be honest
By many things at once: Datenschutz, (over- and premature) regulations, bureaucracy, laws favoring old ways (e.g. broadcasting licenses for streamers), active sabotage from workers who don't want to learn things (and can't be fired) etc.
But all stems from risk averseness and active unwillingness to learn new ways.
As you say, (some) things did happened, but way too slow and way too little. Compared to its peers or especially developing countries German Digitalisierung is a joke, a not so funny one.
Cool, scientists persecuted in the USA can now free to Germany. Kind of like Einstein & Co, but exact opposite direction.
yeah, who still remembers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero the German-French initiative against Google. A European search engine.
In the end Technicolor / Thomson, Exalead, SAP, France Telecom (Orange) got most of the funding if I remember right. Other than a few university, museum digitalisation projects nothing consumer facing ever so the light of day.
Because all that EU "initiatives" is form of scam and just media noise.
Lets be honest for once -germany is deeply risk averse and conservative. Its leaders can try to cast that "we wamt that california culture" spell a million times and out hops another wirecard. You can not graft innovation cultures to conservation cultures . You would need to change the conservation culture at thr upbringing roots, by highlighting how pure conservation gets you into wars and other problems. By rewarding characters that want to go on a adventure .You can not tell the guy who wants to jump a mammoth with a pointy stick, that this is "toxic masculinity" and "the outstanding nail gets hammered" in kindergarden and open a ministry for elephant steak.
And what super high tech background will the ministers have?
>Friend of The Merkler
>Protested nuclear energy
>Invited a million illiterates to an all-inclusive life in Germany, none who ever had an encounter with the technology of literacy
And so forth.
European research and innovation funding is absurdly gamed and just money wasted.
Citation needed [1]:
[1] Wikipedian Protester:
https://xkcd.com/285/
I personally know people who received funding from EU innovation funds, thought more than 10 years ago. It was graded by bureaucrats that had no idea about anything and graded it based on keyword matching (basically like tech recruiting works). It was absurd.
Looks like a last-ditch effort to salvage its crumbling technological sovereignty amid the EU's systemic crisis. Even if they invent something, production will happen in China or the US.
Germany wants to preserve Airbus and stay relevant in European space programs, but without cheap energy and raw materials this is a pipe dream. Quantum computing/hydrogen is theoretically promising, but they're already behind China and the US. Trying to catch up to Russia in drones and EW, but without energy independence or microelectronics it won't work.
Without Russian gas or nuclear power, high-tech manufacturing is unprofitable. Germany's best engineers are already in Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Russia/China/the US are sprinting ahead in hypersonics, AI, and 6G, while Germany is just forming a ministry.
Germany's move isn't a breakthrough, it's desperation. They're trying to save face, but they lack energy for advanced tech w/o Russia, have no military shield w/o the US, can’t manufacture at scale w/o China.
The phrase “super-high-tech ministry” doesn’t sound like the correctly nuanced translation of Super-Hightech-Ministeriums. In English, it begs the question whether they are really serious — why isn’t it “super-duper-high-tech” or “ultra-high-tech” or “hyper-high-tech”? Calling something “super-X” in English sounds a little marketingspeak-clumsy and opens you up to these jibes.
Nothing surprising about Germany excelling at its strongest fields: creating ministries.
Accretive policy is strong there and in their Anglo-Saxon descendants.
On the flip side we Anglo-Saxons (and Germany's descendants in general) also invented a lot of cool stuff: airplanes, trains, cars, tractors, spacecraft, even hot air balloons!
Without a doubt not the only characteristic. Simply a characteristic of these cultures today. e.g. obsession with environment to the degree of actively harming it (opposing nuclear, wind, solar, and geothermal; and dense housing) is primarily an Anglophone concern specifically UK/US/Aus. And those countries are collectively responsible for a lot of innovation.
Seems to be a truth: inventiveness moving to moribund navel-gazing.
The Greeks and Romans probably invented even more useful stuff of modern civilization, the problem is past glory doesn't pay present day bills, unless you're running a museum.
Excelling at creating paperwork... except now digitally. AUTOSAR is may favorite German software innovation. /s
That's the curse in Europe. Every European country has it's own ministry of digital innovation who's role is the grift of allocating taxpayer money to the right politically connected pockets while pretending to do innovation. Case in point, German fiber optic infrastructure is still lightyears behind Romania despite much higher costs. Means, somebody in Germany is making good money form that, even if there's nothing to show for.
Meanwhile the actuality innovative companies in Europe get real VC money from the US, then get incorporated in the US and become American companies, then EU has the audacity to complain about lacking tech sovereignty.
> Case in point, German fiber optic infrastructure is still lightyears behind Romania despite much higher costs. Means, somebody in Germany is making good money form that, even if there's nothing to show for.
Apartment I stayed in while in Germany had annual Kabelgebühr of 100 EUR. It was not related with the ISP internet subscription of course. Any negotiations or questions were responded with "IT'S KABELGEBÜHR YOU HAVE TO PAY IT".
Yep, had a coworker who was looking for financing in a EU country, but very few investor options were available, and mostly for a low amount of money, only enough for a few months. He had to go to UK to find people with deep enough pockets.
You can replace 'Europe' with 'Canada' and everything said here will still be true.
That news just confirms EU is not a country-like and any federation is not ready.
Funny that outsiders like US and Russia and probably others behave as it is one country :) It is kind of some "body" but not a well functioning one: fusion ? Unser! Spy satelites ? Notre!
But the real test will be follow-through. Big promises like "world's first fusion reactor" and wooing global talent sound great, but without a clear budget or streamlined bureaucracy, it risks becoming just another shiny headline
The more I read about this, the more it feels like a VW bailout. If you want innovation, make it easier to start up and shut down research companies, you don't need a new ministry to hand out taxpayer money to companies.
Is that just based on the quote from the Volkswagen Foundation? But that foundation is entirely independent of VW and doesn't get any taxpayer money in any case.
> A new ministry for research, technology, and aerospace will be formed, and the education portfolio will be taken over by the current ministry for family, seniors, women, and youth.
So I guess Germany is one of those countries which reorganize their government on a brainstorming board by just throwing up concepts. And then it takes years for all the bureaucracy to move around and get back to work.
> Germany needs a new alignment of defense policy and research policy, but “we do not yet know how to do this,”
I learned in middle school that you were once really good at it. There is also a consensus it got quickly out of control and destroyed Europe.
All of this sound more like an Onion or Babylon Bee piece...
> “Our goal is that the world’s first fusion reactor should be realized in Germany,”
This will never happen. At some point they will notice that fusion is something with "nuclear" and "atoms" and they will immediately jump to "scary", "dangerous" and "verboten".
Germany is home to one of the most promising Fusion projects - "Wendelstein 7-X "
Germany also was home to some of the most cutting edge fission research. Otto Hahn (the ship, not the guy), THTR-300, EPR, SNR-300, ...
All gone now.
Of course, there is more fusion research now.
They are also a large supporter of ITER.
No fax ? :P
> also plans to woo scientists from abroad
but also god forbid you arrive to Germany with <C1 German. ABH office is waiting with guns fully loaded
What's with the mis-matched hyphens/dashes?
This will not work. Germany is totally driven by lawyers. No room for new ideas. Everybody is doing ass covering instead of working together building something great
Ministries cannot keep up with the velocity of free market / startup culture like SV. So I wouldn't exactly be bullish on this.
What kind of comparison is this? A government ministry is not a private enterprise, it has different goals and structures.
It's like saying a cargo ship can't keep up with a speed boat.
Well let me put it this way:
What is the point of the ministry, and why does the current global leader of super-high-tech (USA) not seem to be in need of such?
It says in the article what the point if the ministry is
> the current global leader of super-high-tech (USA)
I think you are a couple of decades late for that claim.
I need an LLM in my fax machine.
And the win goes to China, as always. Well played.
This is a militarization effort to counter Mad King Trump who has overthrown the USA and is threatening the global order for his own sick pleasure.
They need to call Mrs. Merkel back.
Just one more ministry bro, I beg you, just one more ministry and we solve European growth, a couple more bureaucrats, c'mon
The plan is foolproof.
And it will probably be headed by one of the most incompetent and corrupt politicians they were able to find. Disgusting.
Evidence? Citations? Suggested reading?
> The agreement stipulates that the CSU will be in charge of the “super–high-tech ministry,” as party leader Markus Söder called it in a press conference this week. The CSU has not proposed a minister yet, but it’s widely expected that Dorothee Bär, who was in charge of “digital infrastructure” in previous governments under former Chancellor Angela Merkel, will get the nod.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothee_B%C3%A4r
Sounds like her only non-political experience is working as a journalist.
It's arguable that the "corrupt" part was scrubbed off Wikipedia. But her credentials to lead a research / technology / aerospace ministry certainly sound underwhelming.
German only, sorry. Both are reputable news outlets (though the Spiegel has gone down quite a bit in recent years IMHO).
https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2013-04/baer-csu-geh... https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/csu-politikerin-d...
She hired her future husband as an employee until immediately before their wedding. This position was paid by the federal German parliament, i.e. the taxpayer. It's illegal to hire a relative in such a position.
Thanks. Having read the (auto-translated) article in Der Spiegel, I agree that Bär's prior behavior suggests nepotism.
It's CSU, of course it is.
Not that other parties are better...
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>who was in charge of “digital infrastructure” in previous governments
germany's digital infrastructure is a global laughing stock, this doesn't bode well.
You're claiming this, but average German internet speed has but recently surpassed Latvia's, easily beats Paraguay and the Philippines and is closing in on Montenegro and Barbados.
The recent rapid improvements even diminished Romania's lead to less than 250%.
Of course this is only up to the Telekom speedtest server, beyond that nearly all of Germany's 50-100Tbps get funneled through 362Gbps of interconnections onto the open internet.
That's more a mistranslation of the role.
Digital infrastructure was part of traffic ministry.
Her role was coordinating the government's mostly internal digital strategy. Thus reviewing new bills, looking at processes inside the administration etc. most of the work outside the public eye.
The CSU has a history of putting people in charge that do not benefit germany but bavaria (the only part of germany where the party CSU is active), e.g. Andreas Scheuer [1][2].
Notable recent examples of corruption are the Maskenaffäre [4] or Julia Klöckner and Nestlé ("Julia Klöckner and Nestlé show how the greasy closeness between politics and business can go too far" [5]).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Scheuer: "Scheuer's ministry is said to have broken budgetary and public procurement law when concluding the multi-billion dollar contracts with the operators and "deliberately deceived" the Bundestag about the real costs of the car toll."
[2] Söder (party leader of CSU) said about Scheuer: "I don't know not many ministers that bring so much money to bavaria as Andreas Scheuer" [3]
[3] German: "Bei allem, was der ein oder andere kritisiert an dem Andi Scheuer: Ich kenne wenige Minister, die so viel Geld nach Bayern holen, wie der Andi Scheuer. Auch das muss man einfach mal in der Bilanz ehrlicherweise bitte nach draußen sagen."
[4] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maskenaffäre
5] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/julia-kloeckner-und-nestle-ze...
This ministry will not be lead by any of these people. Their replacement isn't that much better competency wise, but there is no corruption case yet.
Your source 3 is not saying what you think it does. State government can apply for federal funding. Söder and his ilk have mastered this. There is nothing corrupt here.
I read a commemt in this discussion that Dorothee Bär has a case of corruption where she was employing her husband.
„Source 3“: Well, if you are a minister for infrastructure in germany it is not part of our job description to bring money to bavaria. Maybe my definition of corruption is of but the minister has some saying in how to use its funds and if your home state benefits more than other parts of germany… I would call this a form of corruption
> Dorothee Bär has a case of corruption where she was employing her husband
That is an unfortunate case of nepotism that happens in the entire political spectrum. I was especially disappointed of the Greens setting up cozy positions for friends and family at the end of their term. I really thought they'd do better..
> Well, if you are a minister for infrastructure in germany it is not part of our job description to bring money to bavaria
Why not? If you think Bavaria is the largest net benefactor of this measure you might as well do so. It's one out of many possible strategies.
> Maybe my definition of corruption is of
I think it's something else but I can't think of a word.
I was lumping all these behaviors together (as the abuse of entrusted power) but of course its better to be precise (thank you for introducing me to "nepotism").
> as the abuse of entrusted power
I must say as a bavarian citizen that this "abuse" has lots of benefits for us. Of course I am aware of my bias here. I can't find an interview but Söder has said that a lot of other states don't even apply to all Fördergelder they could possibly get. That always striked me as odd.
I don't think grandparent's characterization matches. Typical career oriented "conservative" politician.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothee_B%C3%A4r
..?mmjnnm mmmmmm
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