haizhung

I swear to god there is not one single thread on HN about Germany where nuclear reactors aren’t brought up.

Nuclear reactors are not solving this problem. Period. The technology is too expensive, building them is too slow, and no one wants them.

It’s a smoke screen (that I think is) set up by big oil to distract the focus from renewables, which are cheaper, scale better, and actually endanger their business model.

Have an EV in Germany, charging is a non-issue. The stations are everywhere to the point that it’s easier to get a parking spot with an EV than without.

That’s incorrect, in fact, fairness and equality is one of the few universal social contracts that are valued in every culture on earth (though lived/implemented differently).

And I would argue that’s one of the key differences that separates humans from animals. Humans have an intrinsic desire for things to be fair.

Famously, Switzerland is a socialist failed state where no one wants to live, of course.

What’s baffling to me about all this is that Meta/Facebook (like all big tech) seems to be completely insulated from their failures.

Take a look at their product line up and tell me one thing that they did really well in the last, IDK, 10 years? And now we also read (and probably have suspected) that their employees are treated terribly too.

And yet, they continue to be one of the most „successful“ (as defined by market cap) companies on the planet. How is that possible?

This just shows that the current indicators for success/how well a company does/how well the economy does are severely misinterpreted.

I encourage everybody to try this, if they have an iPhone. If you’re like me and don’t have the time to tinker with the latest and greatest all the time; this app lowers the barrier to entry significantly and provides a glimpse into what’s possible locally, on device.

Honestly, I was extremely impressed by the speed and quality of the answers considering this thing runs on a phone. It honestly makes me want to sit down and spin up my own homegrown AI setup to go fully independent. Crazy.

Don’t get cynic. The good news is: the worse it gets, the more impact every single .1 degree of prevented climate change has.

I’m with you in the billionaires. Research has shown again and again that people do care about climate change and want it to be stopped - but only if they have the socioeconomic status to actually care.

If, as so many people on this planet, you are living paycheck to paycheck, and the social security nets are being dismantled by the uber rich, you instead switch into a „protect what’s mine“ mindset. This further exacerbates the tragedy of the commons.

So I am of the following opinion: fix wealth inequality; which will give people their actual lives back; and will reduce the political power of the sociopathic billionaire class.

Then, the rest almost takes care of itself.

Please. The establishment is dying to capitalize on it, and puts out one ridiculous anti-immigration measure after the next. And all it does is that it simply boosts far right parties even more.

It’s completely obvious to me (and often supported by exit polls) that people who are voting far right aren’t actually against immigration - only on the surface. Once you dig just a little bit deeper, often socioeconomic struggles surface. The working class has been taking a beating since the what, 1980s now? And it’s not like there’s any sort of legislature on the horizon that would fix their predicament.

So people look for a scapegoat. The far right gives them a scapegoat goat, and the enlightened center doesn’t know how to handle it.

I would agree with you, except that the government (eg. in Germany) even battle climate tech when it’s good for the country and the economy. WHO wouldn’t want to be energy independent?

And yet, the Conservative Party in germany once killed the entire solar industry (who then moved to china); and is about to do it again, now! Both times we are losing about 50k jobs in that sector.

The question is: why would they do that, if the economy is oh so important to the conservatives?

Cowering to autocrats all over the world.

Correct. It helps by not distracting your LLM with a prompt that is, in X% of the cases, irrelevant to the task at hand.

However, when you DO need to do something special (like create a new endpoint), the LLM knows where to get more info on this.

Kinda like a library of „how to“ books.

Why not just … sell the gold? What good is gold to a society anyway, regardless of where it is placed?

Instead of drawing the anger of the US, just .. slowly over time, sell all the gold off, and move the money back. And use it to build infrastructure or something. Much better than gold.

Just a word of warning to not take this to the max. Do not define your personal self worth over how useful (you think) you are.

There’s a famous billionaire founder in Germany that attempted suicide just recently, because … he didn’t feel useful anymore.

https://7news.com.au/news/ex-boss-of-major-textile-brand-tri...

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lastenausgleich#:~:text=The%20...

2) https://www.die-linke.de/fileadmin/user_upload/20230530-PK-A...

3) theoretically people could own via the state: if the state has resources (eg. hospital buildings, schools) that benefits all people ~uniformly. However, due to privatization more and more government wealth is also sold off.

Wealth redistribution is the only way the living standards of ordinary families will improve. I’m just hoping we can skip the war part, this time. I think its possible.

The president who is willing to fix this will have to bend the knee.

A similar instance of this is happening currently in the talks between EU/UK — The EU is demanding a „Farage“ clause. They want a guarantee that the damages are paid for in case Farage becomes prime minister and will roll back all treaties and trade deals and what not.

Which, to be fair, makes total sense.

This apparent conundrum breaks away if you consider who holds the wealth now vs. in the 60s. In the 60s-70s, there was a wealth tax in Germany. Shortly after WW2, a law was drafted to redistribute wealth: All individuals and companies whose assets remained largely intact were required to pay 50% of their net wealth (as assessed on the day of the 1948 currency reform).

This means that the working class had immense wealth and so simple jobs could support a family on a single income, buy a house, etc.

Compare that to today — the two richest families in Germany hold more wealth than the bottom 50% COMBINED.

It is no wonder that normal families cannot afford to buy property anymore; and are forced to rent. This further exacerbates the wealth gap.

Another nice statistic is the productivity VS wage VS pensions curve: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KDug!,f_auto,q_auto:...

(Black line - GDP, blue line - avg comp; red line - avg pension)

In short - the productivity increased; but ordinary people are being squeezed out of the gains regardless. No wonder that everyone turns sour at some point.

No. Mass building (while not touching inequality) will NOT solve the issue.

It’s easy to see why: there already IS enough housing around for everybody. If there wasn’t, you would see a massive amount of homeless people. And even in the US where that might be the case - the amount of empty real estate is larger than the amount of homeless people. You could easily house them if you wanted. It’s a question of distribution.

The other reason to see why this doesn’t work is: there is no country that managed to do it. Miraculously, the housing crisis has hit all (western) countries on the planet. All of them try to build their way out of it, no one succeeds. Why?

If you just mass build, the new units will be bought immediately by the rich, and the working people will have no housing still.

Housing is not part of the inflation calculation. There IS a housing inflation crisis.

Yep, people in this thread are claiming that this doesn’t work.

In fact, it does work, and it is already implemented! Here in Germany we also have the concept of „Bürgerräte“, and we have similar problems as in France (no political power to implement their solutions).

However, one takeaway was that people vastly underestimated how carefully the participants would try to understand the topic at hand. People that would usually just regurgitate angry propaganda were forced to form their own opinion and they did!

IMHO it’s this is a great tool for democracy that is yet underused.

After world war 2, most of the western world had wealth taxes. The US had eg. >90% income taxes, and death taxes of up to 77% on inherited wealth.

You know, exactly that span of time that everyone agrees on being really prosperous.

Interesting take. Not that I disagree, but it’s interesting to see that on HN.

Wouldn’t that mean that it’s unethical to work on anything that improves productivity? AI, in particular?

As long as (almost) all the benefits/wealth generated by your work is captured by the 0.1%?

Because that’s the case right now.

Im not owning the product. I’m getting a wage (and some stocks, so I guess I own .0000001% of it or so).

Very well put. I am working on tooling that will likely increase developer productivity by a large factor; and will most likely be used to lay off more developers as their labor is no longer required.

I often ask myself whether that is ethical or not. But in the end, it’s not the tooling that’s unethical. Productivity increases are good for everyone, under normal circumstances.

It’s the fact that all the gains are being collected by the already uber-wealthy that’s wrong.

Im seeing the same in Germany. Here’s an incomplete list of all books that I read as mandatory high school assignments, which I can recall from memory.

* Die Vorstadtkrokodile

* Faust I

* Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum

* Antigone

* Die Verwandlung

* Bahnwärter Thiel

* Der Sandmann

* Die Räuber

* Hamlet

* Der Besuch der alten Dame

* Im Westen nichts Neues

* Unterm Rad

* Woyzeck

Im probably missing 5 books or something like that. Many of these books have had a profound impact on my views on the world, more than I would have guessed at the time.

I see this all the time in real life though. Right-wing „influencers“ with the worst takes you could imagine are getting funded somehow, while even the best scientists are getting deplatformed left and right.

It’s more likely than you think. In fact, this was true for almost the entirety of human history. The last 100 years, where the common person is NOT in destitute poverty, is the exception to the rule.

I use bazzite. I am a software developer at day, working on Unix exclusively. Let me try to give my reason.

I don’t WANT to fiddle around with some random bullshit when all I have in the evening are 1-2 hours. I want to boot the system and just get cracking with a game. Even the 1-2 hours of installation time are already a hard sell to me. It’s ~20% of my weekly gaming time.

And it’s never usually just „a minor amount of configuration“, is it? Depending on what game you are playing, what hardware you have, you can easily spend hours getting a game to work properly, and that’s with bazzite.

I want something that just works, I don’t want to spend hours figuring out magic incantations.

Though admittedly, with AI it’s gotten easier to figure out magic incantations.

Obviously every nominal value is going to be higher YoY. That just immediately follows from inflation.

Almost every year in almost every country will have:

- record GDP

- record government spending

- record total wages

- record stock market prices

- record asset prices

- record government debt

You need to put these values in relation to something, otherwise they don’t mean anything.

For the UK, take for instance the public sector net wealth (Ie. Everything the UK public collectively owns). It collapsed drastically, from 220bn in 2006 to -900 bn in 2025.

Absolutely off the charts. As a result of this, the government can’t provide health care and basic support for its citizens anymore.

Question: who has all this wealth now, who is the UK indebted to?

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxe...

Funny that you are being downvoted. Maybe we need this feature at hackernews too :-)

Curious to see that no one mentions the drastically rising inequality in western society as the root cause of the housing crises.

What we are seeing to date is a transfer of wealth from the working class, the middle class, and the government to rich people at a rate that is unprecedented in human history. The rich are getting richer at an extremely high rate, and barely any country taxes wealth.

So what you get is multimillionaires and billionaires who get passive income of several million dollars per month. What are they going to do with that money? There is a rule that you should let your money work for you, and so rich people buy: assets, stock, shares.

That’s why the prices of all of these things go up despite living standards falling and falling for ordinary people. We have an asset price inflation, due to the enormous amount of money given to the ultra rich.

Housing prices will never go down unless you tax the rich. Regardless of zoning laws or what not.