The last point is just depressing. It's now 12 years ago that we started the Energiewende... It could have been the perfect opportunity to get away from oil, gas, nuclear and coal, before anyone was really talking about it. But what has come of it? We still have ridiculous laws, hindering solar and wind. grid upgrades are blocked. Villages are bulldozed for coal. Energy companies got billions because of "lost revenue". Super dependency on the east, which backfired immediately. The highest energy prices in the world for average people (!), also to subsidize our export industry. And the best thing: no one is blaming the government who mismanaged it. No. Everyone blames the people who wanted and want a greener environment.
And for what? 19%?
And gave your solar industry to China. German Q Cells were smashing it.
For whatever reason, western countries did not see solar module production technology as a protected category. So when Chinese companies decided to enter the market, it was remarkably easy. They just went ahead and bought the most advanced solar cell manufacturing equipment available. Most of it from Germany. Replacing expensive German workers with cheaper Chinese ones gave Chinese companies a real price advantage - in some cases as high as 20%.
https://www.asianometry.com/p/how-china-won-the-solar-industry
It's so wild that they just casually threw the domestic solar industry under the bus but kept subsidizing coal because of "jobs".
participation in social networks
Germans have a slight preference for facebook.eu over facebook.de?
Happy national day!
🪑
Hooray! It's the day of the German Republic, or as we like to call it, "reichstag"!
No one does that??
No, it's a joke. "Reichstag" is the name of the building where the German parlement is seated. I always thought it sounded like the name of a national holiday, because the German word for day is tag. Similarly, the name of the German parlement is "bundestag".
German numbers sad :(
Imagine being so irrelevant you have to try picking on others on their national holiday...
Just numbers mate, what does that make you then?
Maybe we should have stuck with this version
Because now we've got this one, and we really don't need a full rerun of the 20th century, we've already had the 100 year pandemic and the right is on the rise again across Europe
Now do the whole thing since Brexit. It's easy to grow when you reduce yourself to a developing country beforehand.
Did you know that Slovenia has a higher life expectancy than the UK?.
Reality disagrees with you
GDP per capita...
Slovenia has a population of one of the UK's smaller cities, not really a great comparison
Plenty of areas with a higher life expectancy
And the German GDP per capita is still above that of the UK ever since the Brexit vote. That is besides Germany being much more connect with Russia in terms of trade, which was undoubtly a massive misstake and caused a massive energy crisis hurting Covid recovery.
Nobody asked
And yet here you are
How is „economy“ measured here? Because this is not simply the relative GDP change as one might expect.
GDP Q4 2019 to Q2 2023
