woodpanel

I think we're good https://www.instagram.com/ahh.gpt/reel/Da12ufvt69B/

You realize that food photography for decades essentially did the same thing? No Burger ever served at McDonalds has ever matched the looks of their advertising, nor is the actual prop-thing that was photographed remotely eatable. There exists an entire form of mastery around this work.

Most popular boys name, per place:

- Warsaw: Nikodem

- Oslo: Mohammad

- Berlin and Brandenburg: Mohammed

- England as a whole: Muhammad

Mind you that the names top these lists in spite of usually being present in there in multiple spelling versions. E.g. if all different spelling versions of Muhammad were combined it would top the Dutch statistics as well.

Non-native speaker here: really really hard, never make it past 13/18

Honestly, that even highly educated people are complaining about a host country attaching bare minimums to handing out its citizenry (I.e. the right to vote, welfare) is all the more reason to attach them in the first place.

once, if ever, the plateauing happens. Until then there is going to be this gap.

In other words, superintelligence often referred to as AGI might either be months away or just VC-Money induced cult-speak many fall victim to.

It doesn’t matter because the only certainty is that it’s not here now, and neither tomorrow etc.

There is a always going to be the gap of what you can do with LLMs if you know how to code vs if you don’t

Kind of transgressive to go from „someone not being ok with something“ to „so that’s totally fine to hack them“.

the French state owns 15% of Renault-Nissan

"15% of a distressed key industry player" is a completely different ballgame than being an actual SOE, with insane amounts of subsidies let alone absense of any red-tape for these party-run corporations, and a market that forces foreign car manufacturers to set-up shop as a "joint-venture" were the "joint" is more akin to being sucked out, never allowed to be more than 49% owned by the foreign company and a general impossibility (unless you do some HK trickery) to transfer any profits made in China out of China.

What you are doing is not just intellectual dishonest, not just whataboutism, it is comparing apples with oranges.

Edit: And we haven'T even begun discussing the glaringly state promoted IP-theft.

The scale is not even remotely comparable though to what China does

Granted, it seems inconsistent to treat Volvo different from Polestar. It might be just, that Volvo will get the Axe in a separate process, it might be sheer incompetence of the US admin, or it might be a deliberate negotiation tactic.

But what annoys me the most about the article is this constant praise of „China Speed“, Cost-Advantages and Love of the Free Market, as if not every single Chinese Automaker, including its Suppliers down to the tiniest screw is a State owned entity, massively subsidized and in general part of a rigged market.

This is not to take from the accomplishments of the Chinese, but a major part of the last 30+ years of development is just massive screwing and exploiting the western open market and its companies. Yeah, we’ve not forgotten the droves of people blatantly stealing IP on every trade show imaginable and a state completely absent from enforcing IP when ever another Chinese car is dropped to the market that looks 100% like a Benz, Porsche or Land Rover.

It’s a typical holding structure. Mostly chosen in Germany to get tax-efficiency that’s on par internationally, ie for finding and selling shares to investors.

It's a cool legal structure

No it’s not cool at all that you have to double down on the Byzantine-ness to get a reasonable amount of taxation, „investsbility“ and limited liability. Especially for digital products.

eating your cake and having it too

This is so typical of our country, the passive aggressive condemnation of founders as greedy, and selfish to even desire fewer taxes and limited liability.

Well if in a couple of years all the German Blue Chips will celebrate their bicentennials, while all the moonshots are LLM-oneshotted outside of Germany, not even talking about „normal“ incorporations: who is going to finance our vast welfare state? Speaking about

eating your cake and having it too

As AI makes it feasible to build good things with tiny teams I recently am finding myself repeatedly in discussions with friends about starting a business. It would be the first time in 20 years for me to be founding a GmbH.

The thought of all that regulatory hassle you have to go through in Germany compared to those superniche ideas you would try out in our AI days, makes me weep [1].

I wonder if the gap we‘ve already saw in the last 20 years between EU and US in terms of tech success stories is just the tip of the iceberg of what’s to come.

[1] notary costs (every visit ~400€ like changing your address or business scope), registry costs (also for every address and business scope change), hiring a tax attorney to produce compliant balance sheets (2,000 - 3,000 € /year), multiple types of yearly, quarterly, and monthly tax filings (tax attorney 150-300€/ month), different taxes which will be collected federally and locally, mandatory membership in Commerce Chambers (~350€/year), legal requirement to have a „business bank account“ (here at least today there are some startups making this easier and somewhat cheaper), mandatory membership at a trade-coop (yes it costs money), public health insurers in your neck nagging you to find some legal trap you stumbled into to extract bankrupting amounts of premiums from you, same with the state pension program. And just because you close down, it doesn’t just stop (you have operate the GmbH for years after before it gets deleted, so you pay money for years after still). Then there is the Exit Tax, which on the rare case you were successful locks you into Germany forever (unless again you pay professionals insane amounts of money).

So this leaves you and your kindergarten-Management-slash-Single-parent-CRM vibe coding idea easily with effectively 500-1000 €/month just to deal with red tape.

But it’s not just the money, each of these points I listed are just sources of endless amounts of paperwork with people/Organisations that know they don’t have to respect you or care about you at all to extract money from you.

And no, UG is not helping at all because still exactly the same GmbH red tape applies. And I am 65% certain the proposed EU Incs will - in Germany - be not exempt from this.

Quick, somebody sent them American brothers and sisters some of those Covid era Chinese bodybag scaremongering videos, dubbing it „EurOpOoRs dying from heatwave“

No one absolutely no one considers that to be remotely true. Look at French banlieues, German Plattenbauten or British Councils - they are synonymous with Crime and physical as well as cultural despair.

And while Vienna or Stockholm are often cited as Utopias, the citees often intentionally leave out the negative side effects (ie. Waiting-times of years, housing black markets, etc) that are eventually coming full circle to the thing they were proposed as a solution against. Just with much less transparency.

There have been social housing projects that paint a more nuanced picture, eg Hamburg-Steilshoop, where a giant block (for EU standards) has been erected in the 1970s and was basically divided into three sections: one to be run by existing housing coops, one by owner occupants, and one by the city. Needless to say that those parts run by the city were quickly becoming a prime example of a German „banlieue“ while the other parts became a prime example for those eager to dismiss any criticisms.

it’s so diverse and humane

Opened the page, first entry: „white supremacist dogwhistle“

One can’t make this much diversity and humaneness up.

Yes, their frontpage overall seems normal and you probably meant well, but that this is their first entry is just hilarious.

that very thing the reader is wondering about

Don’t mistake your curiosity for everyone else’s

Exactly, it’s why tourists flock to Manhattan, while the city isn’t getting dominated by that industry. Your trip doesn’t outcompete locals, but the local economy makes it a rather expensive trip.

well a legend he is, if we are to believe what former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said about what the pardon was for: "one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes" he ever prosecuted as U.S. attorney.

Tax revenue, local jobs, and the possiblity for entrepreneurs to build businesses around that possibility of tourists leaving the premise.

With all that being said, I still think that overreliance on tourism is bad for a place in principle. Those places fossilize, the wealth of tourists overwhelmes local culture, it will create wrong incentives, draw in junk vendors, pick-pocketers, and AirBnB vultures making life more miserable for the locals. One can also be certain that the local hospitality operators will try to pass the least possible amount to locals by finding even cheaper employees from god knows where.

Out of curiosity I’ve progressed away from Angular around 2018. My peak spa-ish reduxian state management experience was building an NgRX combo with @ngrx/effects for side effects.

Till this day I remember this fondly as it gave me so much ease of control of the application’s many complex states. Especially when I nowadays deal with all sorts of false-prophets in forms of hooks and what ever reactive primitive du-jour (don’t get Me wrong they are 80% of the time the better choice, it’s just that they don’t scale).

What’s today’s version of complex state management in Angular-Land?

3 by 3 iframe layout with the center one displaying the actual content.

Yeah thanks for nothing for comparing a single kind of tax to your country, whilst your country/states don't have the excessive overall tax regimes as are present in Europe.

Nothing, absolutely nothing do we have to adjust to America, neither up or downwards.

That being said, and as much as I think Mamdani is an Ideologue, taxing second, unoccupied homes sounds absolutely reasonable (at least if they aren't rented out). Expect all kinds of shenanigans to circumvent this, but still.

FT is four years late to this.

Visited Poland in the 2000s, while there were still plenty of tokens of poorness visible. Eating out cost a third of what it cost in Germany. I remember that rain water would drop on our commie bloc hostel beds from the ceiling, even though there were still three floors above us.

I'm sure many of those tokens are gone by now. While the Poles I've worked with are on average very capable and driven, there is also the bigger picture: That they have a national ambition.

Can only guess, but it seems they know that Poland must outperform its biggest two neighbours (DE & RUS) in order to retain their freedom. Given the current state of these neighbours this fear may seem to be blown out of propotions, but history is the better guide here.

Given that ambition I would guess the population is less devided on economic and trade issues, specifically with regards to Europe/International. The need to join the Euro is certainly less present there and in hindsight might be another part of Poland's success.

Poland tries to be a serious nation at least. Which can't be said about Germany and its self-inflicted demise on almost every measruable front, ie the woke mind virus.

Fun fact: German IT magazine Heise in light of the sluggish German job market recently published an article about moving abroad for jobs, ie. to Poland https://www.heise.de/ratgeber/Auswandern-nach-Polen-Was-ITle...

FYI:

Don’t know why but this has so many upvotes, so I want to be clear: by „social sciences“ I‘ve meant the toxic „science“ disseminating from US social sciences departments colloquially referred to as „Wokeness“ which intra-US might be shrugged off as coping mechanism for mentally ill Ivy League members, but outside the US just comes down to outright cultural imperialism.

Great, as if Europe hasn’t been wrecked by American Social Sciences already.

Furthermore at current projections, the speed at which MAGA is imploding, those who still make the migration won’t be the ones fleeing „persecution“ but rather „market forces“

It’s called democracy

Exactly, dependence on solar panels effectively means switching Saudi Arabia for China.

German here, but from the diaspora. I’ve never read that propaganda kitsch and no one in my family did and now living in West Germany I can really notice the deep impact it has left on them. They don’t even realize how no one else on earth shares this view, even when on almost any other issue they routinely justify implementing it by „because Norway/Denmark/Paris/Sweden does it“.

This is in part to blame on that book, but also on the socioeconomic class that is omnipresent in our publisher‘s editing boards. As study after study has shown German journalists are 4 times as likely to vote for the Greens as the normal population.