If you look at the USA then the profits are made at the periphery. Profits can be made anywhere. Sooner or later, they will be made where living is more pleasant and that's at the European periphery.
Which cultural problems exists that keeps the periphery poor? I would like to argue that the cultures of the periphery are what will attract people and customers and what will allow the periphery to develop.
Germany is making a killing in selling their cars and tools to the “periphery”. East europe being their largest export market - some 30%.
The main cultural issues that keep the periphery poor are those stemming from the “core”. Always shitting on the south and east is what keeps those regions stagnating. What upsets me is that they turn the other cheek instead of slapping right back.
I don't understand how the shitting, and slapping right back is economically relevant. How is it preventing a country or a region from picking a market and becoming a global leader and thus earning high margins? E.g. people have been dissing China's product quality for ages and yet that hasn't prevented China from improving.
As a side note, it shouldn't be an economic disadvantage that Germany exports 30% to the European periphery. Cars are a competitive market with French, Korean, Japanese and American offers. The periphery should be able to make back much more if they specialize in products of a high-margin market. E.g. if I were a politician, I would go all-in on medical research and try to develop some world-leading equipment or cures.
To an extent, the political climate and the weight of existing institution can uphold the culture.
People governed by politicians with suboptimal characteristics don't necessarily get to make decisions with perfect information, or to enjoy a voting system where votes have equal weight and reflect popular sentiment.
A sufficiently corrupt system can self-sustain for many years. With enough indirection and few votes, people have correspondingly increasingly limited input into their political decisions (or the indirect decisions of their representants).
Is porn banned in germany or why do people enjoy poverty porn so much? The periphery is anything but poor. There are gaps between eu countries but east south and west are consistently ranking high in term of economic development. Anaemic growth doesnt equal poverty.
My wife speaks Spanish fluently and we often travel to Spain.
Spain as such may not be exactly poor, but quite a lot of people are living in very subpar conditions. Andalusia in particular has a lot of visibly poor natives. Even African migrants do not want to stay there and if they manage to cross the Strait of Gibraltar, they immediately travel north to France/Britain/Germany.
Oh please. Thats like saying california is poor because san francisco has homeless people. Just because people dont drive fancy cars or homes arent refurbished in a region where it rarely rains it doesnt mean they are poor. Even east eu is rich compared to most of the world. I agree with you on slow growth but eu countries are anything but poor. Mismanaged yes. Poor not so much.
I am not sure if it has anything to do with rain. Israel does not have much rain either and homes look much better there. And when we speak to the locals in Spain, their typical complaint is that they struggle to make the ends meet. "I wasn't on a vacation for seven years." - "I think twice before taking a RENFE train even though it is twice as fast as a bus." - "Kids won't probably be getting new laptops ever." etc.
Comparisons to the rest of the world are misleading. Being better off than Algeria or Brazil isn't that much of a result. Spanish people naturally compare themselves to other Europeans and the gap between the relative riches of Spain and, say, (West) Germany or Switzerland, is pretty visible. So is the fact that the gap does not seem to be closing, rather the other way round.
I agree that mismanagement is a huge part of the problem, and that it is mostly domestic. For one, the political parties seem to be enormously corrupt, on par with the Balkans.
I’ve been to germany and belgium recently and frankly wasnt impressed. German roads are constantly under maintenance - cant they just build them right or why are they constantly being fixed? Belgian motorways had potholes in them and were poorly marked.
Also most germans dont own the properties they live in and their savings would last enough for maybe a month.
Anyway the idea is that there are issues everywhere in europe you just need keep your eyes wide open. The solution is policies that benefit everyone.
Also i doubt spanish politicians are that corrupt. Or indeed any within the eu. There is corruption in the eu and even germany but nowhere near that level.
German roads are under so much maintenance to prevent the potholes you see In Belgium ;). Can't have your cake and eat it. When I used to drive from Holland to Belgium it was very clear when we'd enter the country. No signs needed, when the road gets super noisy and bumpy you know you're in Belgium.
And remember that many German motorways still have no speed limit. Hitting a pothole at 250kph is not fun and as such they need to be maintained to high standards.
And when there's a fair rental system with restricted prices there is no need to own property. Not sure if Germany has this but I know Austria does and Vienna is thriving on it.
When I used to be driven from Arnhem to Oberhausen (ca. 199x) it's been very obvious when you've crossed the border to .de, not even because of the checkpoints, which still existed then, but because of the noises the car made when it went over the gaps between the concrete plates which probably were the same as in 194x, or so, when they Autobahn has been built.
France and the netherlands have good roads and yet they dont constantly have to maintain them.
If germany would build them right and with quality in mind the first time they wouldnt break so often.
Not sure where you can reach 250kph if most of the autobahn is under repairs.
But speaking of driving in germany i found the constant tailgating and the general aggressiveness and flashing similar to east europe 10 years ago. Horrible driving culture.
But yes we can all agree belgian roads are in a league of their own. Suppose that makes belgium poor?
I am new to this game but from what i gather is that any country that has a visible issue is poor.
Maybe germany is poor because it cant afford gas? A german minister was complaining that american lng is too expensive for germany. Also renting and the government stepping in to keep rents at a low price sounds like poverty and socialism to me. Not a good sign.
> France and the netherlands have good roads and yet they dont constantly have to maintain them.
Yes they do. In the Netherlands there's a lot of maintenance going on. Once on a trip to my workplace at the time (75km away) I counted 12 individual speed restrictions due to roadwork. I constantly had to switch between 120, 100 and 70kph. Most of it happens during the night though. I guess Germany doesn't always do this.
> Also renting and the government stepping in to keep rents at a low price sounds like poverty and socialism to me. Not a good sign.
I personally like socialism and many in Europe do. The richest countries have the best welfare systems in general (like Scandinavia). Holland itself is an unfortunate exception with its Anglo-Saxon liberal model.
It's becoming more important as the housing market is out of control and buying a house is near impossible now on a modal salary. Regulation keeps pricing fair to those who need it. It's not a sign of poverty but of the systemic choices we make.
> But speaking of driving in germany i found the constant tailgating and the general aggressiveness and flashing similar to east europe 10 years ago. Horrible driving culture.
This is something we do agree on :) I try to avoid driving in Germany.
Actually I’d be very surprised if houses in Spain where worse than houses in Britain, whose lack of housing quality rivals with some central African countries.
So if all of these countries are not poor in general then why this poverty fetishism? Why the constant “i am richer than you” in europe when all of europe is sinking?
Competitive markets reach equilibrium. With or without tracking it’s going to barely cover costs because otherwise more people enter the market due to minimal barriers to entry.
It think that means that advertising is not going to save content, and people will have to think of alternative revenue streams, because revenue from advertising is only going to go down.
What in tech makes you open minded? I work in tech and many of my friends work in tech too and we aren’t particularly open minded. Of course we don’t tell anybody about that…
I’ve never seen these. I don’t know if it’s because I disable third party cookies, because I never log into Google using my main browser profile, or because of my ad blocker.
You need third party cookies activated, you need to be logged in currently with your google account and have adblocker disabled. As you don't have any these, you don't see them.
It’s interesting how much this depends on your bubble… most of the news I follow and people I know side with Russia or are at least extremely sceptic of nato/etc and from what I see everything is the opposite.
This war has taught me that even though there is only one truth to everything it’s impossible to know it unless you are there to see it with your eyes.
I'm guessing you might be from a non-western country like India if there really isn't anyone around you who sides with Ukraine.
I'm curious about how a population across the political spectrum (i.e. not just marginal political ideologies) can justify siding with Russia in this situation.
I mean, is it really that Ukraine's intent to join NATO was provocative enough that Russia had no choice but to invade?
I'm only really curious to understand a potential non-western perspective here, not an argument.
Are you familiar with the Cuban Missile Crisis? Why on earth was the US so concerned about a defensive pact between Cuba and the Soviet Union? Surely that wasn't provocative enough to almost go to war over, was it?
I live in the other bubble and yours always puzzles me. How do the folks in your bubble justify a full-scale war against Ukraine? Do you find their explanations convincing? So far the justifications I heard are pretty weak, like Russians in Eastern Ukraine felt threatened or were worried they wouldn't be able to speak Russian. Do you personally find any of these sensible reasons for invading another country and effectively killing thousands of people?
First, most people in the West were very much against the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Especially before the Iraq war, we had the largest anti-war protests in modern Europe:
Not hundreds of thousands but millions went on the streets in major European streets. The invasion on Iraq was as bad as invasion on Ukraine, and it doesn't matter that Saddam was a cruel dictator killing his own people. There is absolutely no justification for that.
And history shows we were right: starting a war in Middle East doesn't bring peace but only more wars, and sometimes even evil we hadn't imagined like the ISIS. And I'm happy Americans finally left both countries, and they finally learned the hard lesson that this kind of aggression has only negative consequences.
I was just pointing out that if you know somebody who was pro invading Afghanistan (which in 2001 was like, 90%, so most people do) or Iraq you know somebody who would probably be pro-Ukraine war were they born Russian. It shouldnt be a mystery.
I don’t side with either country, I don’t care about them personally. I see this war the same way I’ve always seen wars in the Middle East: who gives a shit.
I lament the incompetence of the eu in securing sources of energy for us, but I’ve always seen the eu as incompetent so this is hardly surprising.
Can’t really tell because I don’t pay much attention. It’s a proxy war between the us and Russia, the oblasts belong to Russia, Ukraine breached the Minsk treaty, Russia needs access to the sea to secure the country against the nato aggression, Ukraine massacres civilians… etc
Nothing justifies the dead civilians but I guess war is war, what are you going to do.
I agree with this, I feel the regulations at the time they were cheating were unjust, as the technology didn't exist to meet them yet. Most of their competitors simply pulled diesels from the market, but the VW TDIs were still the most efficient cars on the market in terms of CO2, a more important environmental issue than the things they were cheating on (NOx).
Ironically, my thoughts are that what they chose to do was the most responsible course of action environmentally and ethically, because the alternative outcome (people driving less efficient vehicles) was worse.
It's not that simple... the cars VW retrofit and resold to the public under the lawsuit are not really driveable or usable at the level needed to sell to consumers as a new car. They use massive amount of adblue, causing the tanks to run empty and the components to fail frequently. They also have other performance issues. VW couldn't have realistically done this from the beginning and expected consumers to accept it. I'm actually a big fan of these retrofit cars, but only because they are now super cheap, I wouldn't consider the issues they have acceptable in a new car, at new car prices.
VW cars, sure. Because VW designed them with cheating in mind. All other European manufacturers using things like temperature windows (not cheating, but skirting the edge of the text of the regulation, VW was straight out breaking those regulations by illegally cheating. That the other manufacturers were found to be in violation of regulations due the way they interpreted temp windows very loosely is a different thing from outright cheating) don't have those problems. So, either VW included the plan of cheating in the engine design, or they were uncapable of engine design and were thus forced to cheat. Both scenarios seem to be unique to VW at the time, and other companies of VW group.
Quite impressive how VW came out of it, still the biggest car maker and really pushing EVs. It could have easily turned out differently.
I haven’t noticed any difference. If anything high definition releases are now easier to find because they are ripped right off streaming services practically immediately.
