It’s not medicine. It’s healthcare system. Doctor isn’t paid enough to go thoroughly through the complaint and dig deeper. In Germany you get 5 minutes diagnose and that’s all from health insurance. And this from the better doctor. For normal one diagnose comes from 2 minutes interaction. Believing that the diagnose is right is very naive.
Can you elaborate more? I am self employed electrician in Bavaria using simple Gewerbe. It is straightforward at the beginning. Literally hundreds of webpages describe the procedure. It is obvious, that growing the company into GmbH with own VAT number increases the complexity. But I haven’t seen it other way in Europe.
I had my experience with bootstrapping a self founded UG (Unternehmergesellschaft), and the process was long (about 8 weeks), involving me getting support from a company (firma.de) to help me prepare all the documentation which involved a lot of physical paperwork, then there's the visit to the notary which is required. After you do that, you need to register with the Finanzamt, and then you start finding out about all this other registries you need to pay and register to, or that you're automatically registered, but you receive separate invoices.
Any changes you need to make, adding more capital, change address, requires again, paperwork, tons of hours and again the notary.
Taxes are also quite difficult to figure out, I'm not German born, and my German is good for conversation, but to read and understand the tax has been a problem and I had to rely on very expensive tax consultants. (I know, this is my problem, not a german problem)
It's not that is hard, it's very time consuming, manual, and involves a lot of paperwork. Other countries do this much easier. Also, shutting down a company... I'm still trying to figure that out :(
The question is always the same: do you really need UG/GmbH at the beginning? It’s typical rookie mistake. I did it too, sold the company for 1€ to some shady people at the end. Gewerbe with 40000€ in the company’s account does not have the problems anymore. And the expensive tax consultants are just another cost of doing business in Germany. Ok, the quality of Finanzamt clerks varies heavily depending on location. Current town has nice ones.
I agree, the process is not easy or nice in Germany, but it’s enough to start businesses despite all the complications and overregulation. But getting VAT number and bank account in other comments mentioned Estonia was huge pita for friends.
Agreed. In case you do not have big investors, just register as an individual entrepreneur, get a bank account and get going! It can be turned into a LLC/GmbH later if business goes well.
Also taxes will be much easier. Just get one of the countless apps where you add invoices, and they generate tax reports for you. With an LLC or when employing other people, getting a tax consultant is advised. IMO, they are not expensive - how many hours of your time are you willing to spend on this topic instead of paying e.g. 200 EUR/mo?
It's a good price because the yearly statements for an LLC/GmbH are costly. We pay about 200/mo for accounting - with some more invoices :) -, 100/mo for payrolls but also the yearly statement alone is more than 2k. You can save that by not having an LLC - I personally think the risk in many software businesses is quite low. And some risks must be accepted as an entrepreneur...
Maybe I should have taken another road considering the size of my operations, unfortunately I was wrongly advised when starting up, I spent 1k with a Steuerberatung for advice on what was the proper structure for me, and still… I think they just adviced me the option that was gonna cost me the most to operate.
I visited many lectures about business at the university, participated at Munich business plan competitions and all the time holding structure GmbH owning other GmbH was the best solution. The reality is that this is best solution for medium enterprises, for the bootstrapped start it does not matter. If I can’t take off as crappy Gewerbe the expensive holding will not help me either. Learning was not free.
My feeling about tax consultants in Germany is that most of them are scammers helping lazy people to enter mandatory things in corresponding Elster fields. The ones with knowledge are super rare. Better ask AI and then verify the information, that’s cheaper and makes more sense.
Some tax consultants are very shady, and some are really arrogant. I'm currently looking for one as we had some disagreements on pricing with my previous one, and many won't even take me due to my volume, or maybe because I ask to speak English, idk...
But sometimes I feel they are doing me a favor by taking my company, rather than me feeling like I'm hiring them as a service.
> I had my experience with bootstrapping a self founded UG (Unternehmergesellschaft), and the process was long (about 8 weeks)
It would have been significantly quicker if you used a well-connected law firm.
I know a number of friends of friends in Germany who have all visited the lawyer, the notary and the bank all in the course of one morning. The whole experience was orchestrated by the lawyer because they knew the notary and the bank manager. In some cases the lawyer even drove them around between locations. ;)
The Steuerberater then took care of the Finanzamt.
Of course this entails extra professional fees. But the point is that there are many examples out there showing it can be done in less than 8 weeks.
But that’s the thing, even though it took weeks I spent a non insignificant amount of euros to set it up, I think it was nearly 2k at the end; and to make it quick would probably be another K or so?
It’s crazy expensive, because of all the bureaucracy. The UG is supposed to be quick and easy to set up, requiring minimum capital… but the process proves expensive.
In the UK, it took me half an hour and 30£ to open a Ltd, which I think is the equivalent of a GmbH.
It might have changed, but a few years ago you could go from 0 to a fully functional limited company, with accounting, business account, registered address with mail forwarding, etc. in a matter of days, from the comfort of your sofa.
In Germany you also have the UG which is like a small GmbH, with 1 eur minimum capital requirement, that is if you like like the 1k (and up to 2k) it cost to set up.
The question is not if renewables can replace nuclear. Obviously it is technically possible. The question is how many times bigger should be installed peak power of renewables. 20x? 50x? And of course if it’s economically viable. Because China does not gamble with renewables. They build nuclear capacity at unprecedented levels.
This is super interesting to watch. NATO will collapse as it is and hopefully Europe will crawl from under the skirt of Americans. I mean being there for 80 years after end of WW2 was a long time to develop some feeling of independence. Greenland is still a price to pay. Carelessness and ignorance aren’t cheap. Or Europe will be only very worried and sad again. I hope not. President Trump is a great wake up call for Europeans. Much better than million russian soldiers.
Electronics in Europe is so dead. It is past the point where where it can be revived. One thing is sick overregulation to spin hardware product. Last nail in the coffin today is Cyber Resilience Act. It dwarfs all the regulations before it.
Second thing is talent. People can’t hardware anymore. I mean putting a 0402 capacitor on the printed circuit board is not hard. But doing that in meaningful way gets hard. As a contractor I designed few boards and optimized for production in China. In my dayjob colleagues are stuck in the last century. No recent knowledge about parts, design rules, testing principles… No willingness to learn and talk to Chinese manufacturers about optimization. Just copy paste bad decisions from old boards to new designs.
Honestly I wouldn’t even try to revive anything in Europe. Chinese electronics factories are way too far in the future. The suppliers for my workplace are all stuck in the past. Even the ones with new equipment struggle to use full potential due to worker’s shortage. Which is probably a problem in whole western world. Who wants to be manufacturing technician when you can be lifestyle influencer!?
As other commenters pointed out, the electronics industry is quite big in Europe, on paper it generates a lot of money and sustains a lot of jobs. The issue is a bit more complex, and you point it out when you say people around you are old and old-fashioned.
Like I said in the talk: We used to laugh at the chinese products for how low quality they were 20 years ago, who's laughing now?
I don't believe europeans are unable to turn around this situation in as many years as a matter of fact, it's my core beliefs: That together with other young motivated people we'll build our own little electronics industry for ourselves, among ourselves and people who believe we can one day have theye crazy future factories in Europe.
Yes it's crazy hard, but like you I believe things will get sufficiently bad that more will see that the effort is worth it.
You should check out the 39c3 talk from Kliment, he understands this issue so well, and I'll paraphrase him here: Electronics is dominated by old dudes, the industry is hostile to newcomers, self-taught people, women, and more. But by making an effort to give people who are starting a good experience, we can turn this around.
Honestly there is no worker shortage, in my immediate contacts, I already know 2 or 3 people who are ready to work my production line: They have the smarts, skills, and time. They are unemployed because no one would respect them, and give them a meaningful mission like we would, and it's quite clear this is quite a widespread feeling among people.
> Electronics is dominated by old dudes, the industry is hostile to newcomers, self-taught people, women, and more. But by making an effort to give people who are starting a good experience, we can turn this around.
Completely agree.
Then the Semi industry wonders why they're running out of people
>Then the Semi industry wonders why they're running out of people
Yes but they make up with via immigration of candidates on visa. Last time I worked in semi, about 30% of colleagues were on visa from abroad. Today from former collogues still there, I hear it's close to 50%.
>I don't believe europeans are unable to turn around this situation in as many years as a matter of fact, it's my core beliefs
Actually, I DO believe we are unable to turn it around. I've done EE work both in Europe and in China for over a span of 10 years, and what sets China apart from Europe that enabled them to overtake us is the mindset, both at government support level AND at individual level.
Chinese operated a lot closer in mentality of the US compared to Europeans, as in very cutthroat move fast and break things, wanting to ship a new product every 6 months(!). This mentality is lacking in Europe who mostly stick to slow paced industries where there's a national security, regulatory or bureaucratic moat like aerospace, defense, telco, industrial automation or automotive, but nothing cutting edge in consumer space that's dominated by China, Korea, Japan and US.
Then there's the massive investments and support from the Chinese state that's missing in European electronics industry. To get an idea compare to the massive sums Europe invests in pharma(or life sciences) versus pitiful investments in electronics for example, and you'll get what I mean.
Until those change, we have no chance, we're just dreaming and huffing copium that somehow things will magically improve out of the blue.
>the industry is hostile to newcomers, self-taught people, women, and more.
Pretty much this, minus the hostility towards women part. I've had few women colleagues everywhere I worked in EE, there's no gender hostility or discrimination, just that young girls looking for a career, aren't really into sitting hunched down over a table and soldering and probing PCB's in a lab somewhere in a techo-park in the outskirts of town as a career, when stuff like HR, marketing, brand design in the city center, is way more hip and appealing to young urbanites. You can't force people to be attracted to a specific industry or line of work. Similarly how there's not much women in construction, welding, oil industry, fire fighters, LEO, etc and it's also not due to hostility, or how there's not too many men in nursing, HR or childcare.
> They are unemployed because no one would respect them, and give them a meaningful mission like we would
I hope you realize, you're not really selling the European electronics industry optimism here with this example of skilled people being passed on for employment.
I disagree. There is a great deal of variation between countries and companies. My daughter is in automotive electronics (in R & D rather than manufacturing) and her employer and country are at the better end of the spectrum, but there are definitely places where it is very difficult for women.
> You can't force people to be attracted to a specific industry or line of work.
That depends on culture and upbringing. If you bring girls up to think that electronics or software or whatever is a male pursuit they will avoid it. A lot of this is set in early childhood and subtly so. Have you seen the difference in the toys little girls and boys get? Or who helps dad (and its almost always dad!) with the DIY or setting up a new gadget or similar tasks? I was my kids primary parent, so they picked up I liked and I just assumed my kids were likely to be interested in things I found interesting.
>There is a great deal of variation between countries and companies.
Well yes, that was also part of my point. I travelled and worked all over the world in my youth and what I noticed is that women typically choose engineering careers only for the money, stability and benefits of working at engineering corporation if the alternatives like humanities, soft sciences or social/government work pay like shit and the welfare state is lackluster like it's the case is North-/Latin- America, Asia or South/Eastern Europe, not because they're really passionate about engineering.
But if you're in a wealthy welfare state, with high taxes, low income disparity and and well funded government services where a women working as a school teacher for example can take home nearly the same as an engineer while having great government benefits, like Nordic or German speaking countries for instance, then women are more likely to choose those types of humanities careers or other such careers that revolve more around interacting with people over working in engineering.
It is literally that simple. There's no 4D chess psychology to dissect. If you have easy access to easy money, most people will choose the path of least resistance. It's all transactional following Maslow's pyramid of needs. SW dev would also have far fewer people in it if it weren't so well paid.
>but there are definitely places where it is very difficult for women.
Can you explain in detail how exactly those places make it difficult for women and it's not just the correlation I explained above?
Like I'm sure there's some toxic workplaces out there, but that's the case for everyone in a lot of jobs, including(or maybe even especially) those where women are majority, like HR.
In fact, from what I saw in engineering they tend to prioritize attracting female candidates in order to try to break up the massive sausage fest of this profession even if that part is never said out loud.
I am afraid, that when it gets too bad and too obvious it will be too late.
For me first steps would be turning bureaucratic ship around and making regulatory framework simpler and cheaper. With some exceptions for startups/small companies during very first months or years. The industry would be more attractive and with more demand for European electronics manufacturing. With more demand it would slowly start growing domestically. It’s insane that the rules for my 1 person company are the same as for Bosch or Siemens. I can praise good lobbyists work. There are two engineers at my dayjob that are writing mandatory documents about cadmium amount in screws or calculating sustainability parameters…
Of course quasi monopolies of European industry are hoping to lobby these measures to suit them more than small players, but I am hopeful, as we have some very good legislators and politicians who are on our side.
Also Eurostack (of which Eilbek Research is a member) is a lobbyist group pushing for Draghi-adjacent policies, most of all: Relocating the entire cloud stack to Europe. And while for the bigger members of this organization it means having our own Google or Facebook (including their harms), it cannot help but inadvertently push the EU to pass laws that will further the agenda of eroding the USA-Tech monopolies.
Things are moving in the right direction, not many are talking about it, but when things hit mainstream news, they're already old by the reality's standard.
The regulations argument is a red herring: those mostly apply to electronics products sold in the EU, not manufactured in the EU. You have exactly the same burden trying to sell CN-manufactured hardware in the EU.
Worker's shortage is a real problem in China as well. Their approach? Automate everything. Focus on manufacturing 1000s of designs using a handful of standard formulas, instead of treating every design as bespoke. There's no reason this couldn't be done in the EU.
It's going to require a serious cultural shift, but given the right incentive I see no reason why it would be impossible.
> You have exactly the same burden trying to sell CN-manufactured hardware in the EU.
Not if you're a Chinese OEM: you just mail it in, and thanks to the arcane operation of international postage it's cheaper to post to Germany from China than from Germany. CE is such a European type of regulation, there's almost no enforcement, while at the same time it's so vague that simply working out what directives you might need to comply with is time-consuming.
Mind you as others have pointed out, there is still EU electronics. It's just not massive production runs for consumer electronics, much more of it is for defence, aerospace, and medical. And a bit of automotive, although that is definitely going to fall to Chinese car OEMs.
Europe is starting crack down on individual CN import - for exactly this reason. But that's still not going to solve the real problems EU-based hardware companies run into.
The whole problem is that the EU electronics industy is laser-focused on those defence and aerospace runs. They expect everything to be bespoke and complicated, so their entire business model is built around it.
But the vast majority of hardware isn't that complicated. I don't want a two-month ordering process with a "call for pricing" and a €1500 "engineering fee" - I want a JLCPCB-like instant quote and click-to-order for my dime-a-dozen 4-layer 10x10cm prototype!
The fact that a handful of industy giant are still doing production in Europe while moving at a glacial pace is not that relevant when China is rapidly out-innovating the West. If it continues like this, they will eventually die too.
Hey, original talk speaker here. I agree with this sentiment, we are very geared for high-quality, high-spec industrial designs in Europe.
CE for simple consumer products is actually not so pricy, and things are moving very quickly there in the right direction. We work with Smander.com for compliance, but there are others who offer it for cheap. The more expensive measurements are EMI, but in Germany universities will let you use their chamber at low cost or even for free if you are a small business or single person.
Honestly the problem with CE is misinformation most of all. It does not need to be complicated: Cheap standards can be bought from evs.ee for 30€, a couple of hours of a CE consultant cost is only a couple hundred, getting close to a university costs only time...
The goals of the EU is also to simplify these regulations, and things are also moving very fast there.
Funfact: If you are working in the industry, you know that there are many companies who produce electronics in Europe in general and some even in Germany.
The problem is the gap between hobbyist project and hundred-thousand-unit production run.
You can't easily and cheaply get 10, 100, or 1000 units manufactured in the EU the way you can in China. This pretty much kills hardware startups and scaleups wanting to do local manufacturing.
If you're not a multinational or have an essentially-unlimited budget for your small-scale run, you have to outsource it to China.
Disagree. The main reason we use chinese fabs is because we can actually get the goods in less than three weeks, so if we have a surge in sales we are covered pretty quickly.
The other reason is that we do some low complexity boards all specified with chinese parts, JLCPCB for the win, and our contractor agrees with us. They are not interested in those jobs because they can't possibly compete.
However, for our batch size/complexity our local contractor beats the chinese, by a good margin, and they keep growing the business. In Italy. The only problem we have with them is lead time, because there is always some hiccup, some missing part, some email that gets answered a day too late. I've been asking them for years to just provide their catalog with their partnumbers so i can just specify them in the BOM, and we won't waste all that time back and forth, but it's never been a true priority, but they do need to streamline the process. All european manufacturers need to streamline their process.
Another comment here lamented that the issue is that the fabs may try to treat every board as unique, whereas is should be us designers that adapt to them. I agree. That's a general issue in our attitude to designing a product, in many areas.
Manufacturers in china just do it fast, and avoid all the pains, they actually care about customer experience above all, something we have to learn from ourselves obviously!
As I said in another comment, I fully expect things to change for the better: Some manufacturers will go out of business, but yet others will turn around in time.
All these people that were laid off will find jobs again, revitalizing moribund companies. Some will create their own companies, I view myself as part of this group.
I work with companies, which have a more like small scale production. They are about 100 or so workers. Yes, this is also possible. They grew their business in the last 25 years, when it was even harder to produce something than these days. At least one of these business have PCB suppliers in the EU, which helped them in the post COVID crises where everybody struggled with supply.
I just named some big name brands. I also know mid-size and smaller brands.
Building your business and getting your stuff together is hard for any startup in any business field.
Could you perhaps share those PCBA businesses with us?
I tried quite hard to find them when I was still in the hardware world, and I never managed to find anything even remotely close to what China offers at less than 10x the price.
I'd love to give it another shot for some hobby projects if the industry has indeed changed in the last few years!
I think the original commenter means companies that manufacture their own products but do not offer manufacturing services.
You can't beat JLC because the model from JLC is that they lose money on all order less than 100 boards, so that they win order of 10 to 100k+
If you work in germany in engineering, you know a lot of mittelstand (SMEs) actually have some production machinery, as said, usually they have between 50 and 200 employees, and they manufacture pretty niche products up to 10k units a year or so.
They do not advertise this, as their business model is not manufacturing, it's selling their own products.
I am actually the speaker of the talk, and for us, manufacturing is not a business model either, it's just the capability we want to develop. Our business model would be to sell products. We shared our knowledge and results because we were curious about people's thoughts, and because if we fail and disapear we want this stuff to be online where other can find it.
>We shared our knowledge and results because we were curious about people's thoughts, and because if we fail and disapear we want this stuff to be online where other can find it.
probably the likes of Enics and GPV - nowadays this is likely a field overrun by military demand and private equity squeezing the supply side... Also I doubt that they can/want to compete with jlcpcb et al.
I can third this observation. I've even had my flat above one of these for 10 years. Small company, privately-owned, five employees or so. They have a few pick-and-place machines (SIMATICs as far as I have seen) located in a small factory building and manufacture small production runs with them.
They don't have a real website advertising their services, but they seem to do well, probably their customers know them. They've run their business continuously for at least those 10 years I've lived at that spot. I could smell the soldering oven running constantly.
For an example with a website, see Waterott, it's run by one person who has a single Siplace SMT machine and stencils manually, and he has no issues earning money.
As far as I am aware the European plants survive mostly on decent QA and regulated industries. When the cost of a defect slipping QA is high, it can be cheaper to operate European plant with intra-step quality controls than manufacture in China and slap thorough QA on top.
I feel like HN posters simply know the names of these companies because they're big, but don't actually work at those companies, otherwise they would know about the massive waves of layoffs and offshoring happening there lately.
I feel like some HN posters simply read news and don't work in the industry and have actual insights on what's happening.
Like Hydac moved some of there assembly from China to Germany.
A company in the district nearby, just moved their whole production from Thailand back to here. Yes, production costs are higher. But there is not transportation costs. They don't have long lead times anymore and can react more better to demand. So the overall costs assessment lead to the decision it is better to have production here locally.
I recommend to go to SPS, Agritechnica, and so and talk to actual people.
BTW: Even as Continental has layoff. There are other companies around that happily absorb those people. Because 2 years back, that had problems employing people.
If possible I would like to know what positions and how much they were offering.
I had offerings for a manager position, 15 people, responsibility for the 15, including in house training of them, and part responsibility in the 5 different projects these people were working on. They wanted somebody with background in HW development, 10 years experience in FPGA, experience of at least 5 years Linux driver development, cryptography, at least 5 years managing people.
Wait for it… they offered 80k/year. I don’t know… seems little bit low somebody with like 20 years experience.
That's the dirty secret of "the employment shortage".
Under pay, no one takes the job, so justify off-shoring.
The truth, having talked to employees at big firms, is that in the past, entire factories were off shored to save 10 cents from one single part in a product.
Today, most jobs are not just under-paid, they are undignified. Because any job can be gratifying in the right circumstances, even a job on a factory line, it just has to:
1. Pay a fair wage
2. Be designed to be gratifying
Companies dont even care about their customers anymore, we all know it's been more than 15 years since they've cared about their employees. That's how entshittification goes.
>Under pay, no one takes the job, so justify off-shoring.
You mean to justify easy rubber stamping work visas on candidates from abroad.
Offshoring is usually last resort when costs other than labor are also much cheaper abroad like energy, or there's other incentives like government handouts or tax exemptions that high-CoL EU countries like France or Germany can't compete with.
>Companies dont even care about their customers anymore, we all know it's been more than 15 years since they've cared about their employees. That's how entshittification goes.
Exactly. And sometimes even very strange things happen. Currently I know of a company taking lots of positions from Germany to China, people in China are having more money in the pocket per year. The cost to the company are basically the same, but people is more motivated. Mind you, that people are not working crazy hs! Mostly 8 to 9 hs per day 5 days a week.
>Wait for it… they offered 80k/year. I don’t know… seems little bit low somebody with like 20 years experience.
In which country?
The sad thing is the state of supply and demand in the economy, doesn't really care how many years of experience you have, or how hard you worked, or how difficult the job is. It'll pay as little as they can get away with.
Sucks, but welcome to being a tax cattle in Europe, where someone on the dole with welfare and credits takes home nearly as much as you do. Thank our politicians for outsourcing everything that wasn't nailed to the ground for 20+ years in the name of shareholder growth.
South Germany. In a capital city. And that was “tops”
And as you say, 40% is out of the bat off. Then you have expensive energy also plagued with taxes… plus of course 19% VAT, etc, etc, etc… if somebody in USA could tell me what would you earn for that there would be nice.
If you're open to being mobile right now you might consider relocating to work in the EE industry of Linz, Villach or Graz in Austria or the aerospace/defence industry Toulouse in France.
Someone with your experience wouldn't earn much less there and you'd have much lower housing CoL than the big capital cities in southern Germany, and better food and weather.
I’m sure there is one or another company generating employment. I didn’t stated something different. Did I?
I just named a fact. I know people in at least 3 different companies in the list that lost their job last year, and many others which are in the list until 2030. The people that lost their jobs are/were more than 1 year searching. I’m talking with many “actual people” in different industries, and it is not looking very bright…
Most of the open positions is management of projects in other parts of the world. I see almost no development in SW or electronics going on here, much less production.
Who is "that" in this context? Can you be more specific.
>Even as Continental has layoff
Not just Conti, but all major automotive suppliers, semiconductor, embedded companies spread across Europe had mass layoffs.
And not everyone was quickly absorbed. I have EE friends almost a year unemployed after the layoffs. They apply but only get rejections, not sure why. It's a bloodbath right now in industries in high-CoL regions.
And is not only automotive. Other sectors are also suffering a lot. As you said, finding a new job is not very easy, even if you are ok with 1hs commute. As far as I know, all big companies are moving work outside the EU in a hurry.
>Who wants to be manufacturing technician when you can be lifestyle influencer!?
Before influencers people wanted to be actors. It predates the time before Electronics was 'lost' in Europe so thats not a convincing argument.
What you are saying really is that the world enjoys what we have on the backs of inadequately paid production engineers in China. As their demographic crisis does not produce a similar sized replacement generation, that benefit will go away as experts retire and no one replaces them. So one way or another wages will go up meaning inflation will go up and some of those 'lifestyle influencers' will now consider the field because it is a viable career path in terms of pay.
What is really interesting is that worker pay in tier 1 cities in China (e.g. Shenzen) actually is higher than in EU countries such as Slovenia, Bulgaria or Czech republic. Incidentally these countries have a large number of EMS, and we know of quite a few startups that quickly grew production capability to be able to provide electronics assembly.
Yeah I didn't say that Chinese people didn't want to go down the same route, infact lifestyle influencers have a better shot there (probably 0.1% better).
There is so much overproduction of engineers that you are possibly working a customer support role with that degree.
Another reason SASS supposedly never took off there, why pay some company when you can just hire from the batch of overproduced STEM graduates and make any software you need.
When I can have an experienced engineer correct my garbage designs for free as part of a manufacturing service you know I am benefiting off of a lucky circumstance that will go away one day: https://youtu.be/ljOoGyCso8s?t=98
Not sure why your post was buried. As the EU does have a lot of rules, but if a product is reasonably made its almost the same cost as the US market entry. Robert Feranec covers a lot of the more obscure EU rules:
Designs that contain China parts are often immediately disqualified from most trade exemptions. The landed cost can bump gadget retail prices too high in some countries. YMMV =3
Where do you live/work that you don't see any of this?
I heard Poland is doing amazing right now, but where I live half my friend group including me has been through layoffs in the past 2-3 years and every day when I open the news, large companies in my country are announcing layoffs or hiring freezes, and small to medium sized ones are announcing insolvencies.
i was looking it up and the 12th biggest pcb manufacture is in austria. which is europa afaik. Its not that dead
"In Leoben befindet sich das weltweite Headquarter von AT&S. Derzeit gibt es drei Produktionslinien, die eine Reihe von verschiedenen ML/HDI Highend-Leiterplatten, Embedded Lösungen für Power Applikationen vor allem im Server Bereich und Cores für die IC-Substratwerke herstellen. Weiteres werden spezielle Technologien für Aviation & Satellites, Industrie, Automotive und den IC-Markt entwickelt und gefertigt.
Mitarbeiter: 1.759
Eröffnung: 1982
Fokus:
Automotive, Aviation, Industrial, Medical, Communication, Consumer, Computer, Semicon
Ein neues Werk, das derzeit gebaut wird, wird auch die Produktion von IC-Substraten nach Leoben bringen, einschließlich bedeutsamer Kapazitäten für Forschung und Entwicklung. Mit dem neuen Werk werden rund 700 neue Arbeitsplätze geschaffen, wodurch sich die Zahl der Mitarbeiter:innen nahezu verdoppeln wird.
To be more specific: PCB manufacture anywhere other than China is, given the current economics, so dead. This includes the USA. The only viable alternative is SE asian countries (e.g. Malaysia) but that's not at a comparable scale. The reason is simply economics (e.g. labour costs, equipment, etc).
I don’t see any involvement of evil western forces. Local clever guys took their chances. Happened in every part of broken Soviet Union. So many amazing stories about smart guys taking material possessions of disappeared KGB.
The story of Eastern Germany is much more interesting. Capital from West Germany was directly steering the process.
The question is where. Couple decades ago rent in Munich was like 3x lower. While salaries were insignificantly lower with overall lower living cost.
Couple decades ago Germany had electronics industry. Now it’s gone. More industries are following.
Couple decades ago there were rather isolated Yugoslav Wars. Now it’s introduction into WW3 with active war in Ukraine and hybrid attacks everywhere in Europe.
It depends heavily on location. Indian colleague has completely different world view and is proud how India is progressing.
Just because GDP isn't a measure of affordability or security or industrial strategy doesn't mean it's not useful. It means you should also have measures of those (which in fact do exist because economists are not idiots and do fully understand these kinds of problems).
Renting for me generally sounds like a bad deal. On the same period the stock grew even more (ex: S&P x4.5 from 2000). So, if you want to say that if you lived 30 years ago in Munich AND did not save anything you would have lived better, I will have to answer that it was just delaying the issue of not being able to save - the ones that were able to save (maybe not living in Munich, maybe other ways), might at some point come and buy something in Munich. Accumulating wealth too much into some hands was the issue decades ago and remains an issue today. Just that decades ago people might not have been aware...
The electronics industries of a couple decades ago were producing stuff that are incomparable to what we have today. Taking that into account, I would say today is "better".
Renting is actually a better deal, financially, in Israel compared to purchasing. Rent is cheaper than the mortgage payment, by hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars a month, in a society where the average price of housing is more than 14x the average annual salary but most people are highly emotionally compelled to purchase housing as a symbol of stability and wealth creation - an emotional decision instead of a financial one.
We calculated when buying the house near Munich that we pay around 140000€ more than renting our flat forever with moderate rent increase. At the moment of signing we needed bigger apartment. Few years later we see, that despite heavy construction in the old house we will save at least 200000€ as buyers. Rents in German cities are out of control. Probably it’s different in regions with solid real estate supply. Here’s nothing.
That progress in India comes as an excuse to weaken their democratic institutions. The fallacy is that Modi is to praise - the progress comes mostly because of enormously positive global trends developed in the past decades, the ones that are now being threatened.
> Couple decades ago there were rather isolated Yugoslav Wars.
A bit of nuance, they ended in 1999, however the whole thing is still influencing Europe negatively and is not as isolated as it seems. Not just there are now seven countries instead of one to consider and negotiate with, a couple of them are utterly disfunctional. Further, two biggest chunks are deeply sunk into nationalism. Far too little effort had been made back then to try to reform the place into a functional system.
Progress in India is due to policy in India. The idea that India can handwave it's successes and failures on external forces might have been well justified in 1955, but in this century they get to choose. Best hope for the anti-Modi-policy crowd is maybe it isn't Modi's policies specifically.
In fact, in the vast majority of cases (including North America, South America, Europe, East Asia, India & South-East Asia) progress is entirely about countries choosing how quickly they are comfortable with improvement happening. Africa and the Middle East it is a combination of policy choices and cultural problems. Arguably foreign interference - although even then policy and strategy tends to be the bigger thing over time.
This is an extremely bold claim. Always was, but especially in today's world it is. I am not saying that Modi's policies are bad, what I am trying to say is that he is basically playing the game on the easy mode. He has access to the unprecedentely dynamic and resilient global economy _and_ he has access to cheap Russian resources Europe doesn't want to buy anymore. All Modi needs to do is not do anything really stupid - the economy will perform well unless clubbed to the head.
And that is all fine, and I am genuinely happy for India. My problem is that Modi is using that easily achieved success to erode democratic institutions - and that will become a problem in the long-term, as it always historically has, everywhere.
Russia wasn't the group that stopped selling oil to the Europeans, the Europeans refused to take it and have a military policy of arming people to blow up the means of transporting that oil to Europe. They're very proud of not using Russian oil. Modi could have joined in with that, he had a lot of people asking him too. Doing nothing (if he did nothing, again - I have no idea about the details of Indian policy) is a rather decisive policy given the pressure the Europeans have been putting on people.
The world has been in easy mode for 70 years now. Any government can choose to sit back and let people get wealthy. It is literally so easy that even the communists figured it out.
Whats the point of this progress which is completely destroying nature and giving people all kinds of cancer, India's oligarchy is more destructive than any other country on Earth. Indians used to be the most naturalist people in the world and now look at the state of the country.
I saw a nice presentation by Michael Cruickshank with an intelligence background that was using public geospatial data like what this is based on to model how climate change would affect power outages in an African city. In that case he was trying to figure out where all the power infrastructure was that would be affected in a flooding and then model network effects to figure out which parts of the city would end up being affected. Really interesting work.
Michael presented at the Berlin Geomob. His website has a more general overview of what he does: https://www.michaelcruickshank.me/recentwork. That does not seem to include a lot of detail on what he presented. Possibly because he is trying to be responsible here.
The security angle did come during the presentation. This is not the type of information that a lot of governments would want to make public but also something that could help them. You can mine a lot of intelligence from public data. And his approach of doing some kind of scenario modelling on top of the open data actually is interesting. That's something that can be used for good and for evil. And obviously something that a lot of intelligence agencies are probably already doing.
> You can mine a lot of intelligence from public data. And his approach of doing some kind of scenario modelling on top of the open data actually is interesting.
That’s sort of how it happens in the intelligence world. A bunch of analysts can look at open source data - news snippets, public data sets etc, but once they analyze it and distill to some conclusions it may become sensitive or classified.
> It’s a double edged sword - secrecy leads to accidental damage by fishermen & anchors, so generally you want your cables and pipes charted.
Yeah, and the other edge of the sword is on display in the Baltic Sea nowadays, where "fishermen" accidentally keep dragging their anchors for miles across the sea bottom, always somehow exactly where the communication cables are.
I have license for boat and use nautical maps. They show me a cable, but not the hierarchy of the infrastructure. I see a cable, but can’t evaluate if half of town stays without electricity or only an island with dozen houses if I damage it.
However the available maps do not stop russian ships regularly dropping anchors on European infrastructure in Baltic see. Obviously charting them does not help. Maybe they should stay secret at the end.
You can hide the position of the cables from fishermen and the public. But if someone knows where they are, it is the KGB, I mean, FSB.
We should make information about infrastructure public.
There was a power outtage in Berlin, due to to an attack aginst a 'secret' cable bridge. If the map of cables would have been public, then the public may have had a chance to realize that having no backup cable is a bad idea for critical infrastructure.
There were backup cables. The bridge carried 5 cables, redundancy configuration would have been 3+2 afaik. But only for purposes of maintenance, not to protect against hostile action. For that, one should have taken care to not have all redundancies on the same bridge ;)
And in most environments, you cannot hide the location of those cables. Either they are visible directly, like all overhead power lines. No use in hiding those. And for the underground ones, you could try to hide them. But every backhoe operator will rightfully want a map of those anyways, so the information will come out in some way.
The only environment where hiding this kind of infrastructure would be possible is some state-does-everything soviet-like police state. Where comrade backhoe-operator wouldn't get a map, but he would get accompanied by a secret police supervisor who would tell him where to dig and where not to.
Would you feel comfortable making a decision on putting an anchor down on a cable if you knew it would only take out a few hundred houses worth of power.
I would imagine that any body that issues you a license should inform you to not anchor in proximity to cables, regardless of size / spec etc. if you put an anchor down on a charted cable, and the cable is where it should be, I think you’d be responsible for the cost of damage.
I anchor very carefully on the rocks or sandy seabed. I don’t anchor in seaweed areas and on pipes or cables. Additional attention from local newspaper is not desired.
In the EU all that data, including high res LiDAR data has to be made publicly available by the responsible authorities. also high res aerial imagery which with the lidar together you can use to build a 3D model of the surface and ground of military buildings/area in blender, because even that in many cases is not excluded or censored. It’s already used for “criminal activities” by metal detectorists and grave robbers a lot haha but it shouldn’t be too hard for foreign intelligence to render some maps for egoshooters from them to train their soldiers for missions in specific locations
I am hardware developer and certified electrician as a hobby. I have regularly clients that are buying time while I do really simple things on the property. It’s really cringe to be asked to vacuum their dirt for couple hours. I am paid premium while the clients watch Netflix and later whine about running out of money. I tried politely ask to do rudimentary things by themselves, but it never worked out. I grew in poverty and have hard time understanding this.
My parents buy groceries delivery what is really useful and time saving on other hand. House cleaner is difficult topic, they do seldom a good job even when offered more money. Typical example: there is dirt under edges of carpet after vacuuming.
> I am paid premium while the clients watch Netflix and later whine about running out of money.
This really bothered me when I was in social situations with college students who would alternate between bragging about how much they spent on DoorDash and complaining about how they’re always struggling with money.
It was only a handful of people out of a larger group of mostly rational students, but it drove me crazy.
This is a core reason for my own burnout - why should I work for a culture that seemingly promotes lazy/hypocritical behavior? Reminds me of "Idiocracy" or "burn after reading" the "league of morons"
Yes. Not only that, but I can work with electricity meters and put seals. It’s in Germany and very complicated and best unemployment insurance I could find.
Nothing amusing. Germany is not really rich compared to nordics. And now let‘s do so math! Electricity: 0,3€/kWh and gas 0,1€/kWh. I need ~3x more gas to get same temperature in my room. And gas heating costs €10k while heat pump €40k without subsidies and probably raw €15k material cost if I install it by myself. So why should I pay more by €30k to install experimental thing for a decade when my low cost gas heating will last for 3 decades again. The monthly bill is the same.
I installed mini splits (small heat pumps) in each of our rooms. Everyone gets their own temperature and they were only 800$ a piece. Did installation myself and it was pretty easy. Hardest thing was pulling a vacuum in the lines before releasing the freon (or whatever it's called) but all I did was watch a youtube video. They've been going strong for several years. I looked at the prices and they are still the same.
BTW, in Germany you're not allowed to install it yourself. At least that's what I read some time ago. I guess nobody checks, of course, but in case things go bad and you need insurance, probably they can invalidate it due to the fact you did something illegal.
i installed mine myself and probably illegaly. But its super easy and those people who install it do a shit job sometimes. I watched professionell people flushing those pipes with compressed air....
And the fine is nonexistent so everyone should do it themself.
What is the calculus behind 40k? I just checked some Swedish vendors and here they calculate 12k for hardware and installation of a fairly large heat pump.
Yeah small air-air pumps - which are the most common for single houses - are easily under 2000EUR including installation; if you keep eyes out for special offers it'd be about 1500EUR in Swedish prices.
smart meters are paid by the grid operator and you have to pay maximum 50€ a year for a smartmeter. I honestly dont know where you get your numbers. a friend with a big house and 3 children switched to air water heatpump with floor heating etc and it was 18k€ and half of that paif by the state and the smart meter was mostly free( he pais 25€ a year for it).
and this is a hugeeee house. No solar but he is working on it.
could you link some proof of this smartmeters I have to pay? Or some calculations from firms it whatever that proof your point.
Think about cabinet from 1972 for one electricity meter. Now you have one electricity meter for house electricity and second one with dynamic plan for heat pump and spare place prepared for third meter for wallbox. So the new cabinet costs you 3000€ including my work and it’s not seldom, that the house has no grounding rod. With couple small repairs/upgrades it’s 4000€ without VAT. And since everything must be documented I can’t work without invoice.
It has nothing to do with smart meters. Some electrical installations are heavily outdated by today’s norms. And norms are obviously written by greedy suppliers of the cabinets and parts for them. Worst thing is that I can’t make any money by selling this stuff. It’s already too expensive for the people. And it will not be cheaper with Paragraf §14a EnWG.
No. Everything in Germany has been three-phase since forever.
But especially with old houses, with any "not insignificant change" to your electrical setup, you have to bring everything up to modern standards.
Also, and connected with that, metering is weird in Germany. If your consumption rises above a certain amount (I think 10MWh for a single-family home) you are required to get a "smart meter", meaning a digital meter which includes the possibility (just the possibility, not actually the real thing) of online reporting and minute-by-minute pricing. In the rest of the world, that would just be swapping the meter or slapping some Wifi-to-IR-interface on it, but not so in Germany. You need to install a new metering cabinet that provides space for at least one digital meter (but better provide more than one...), one remote control receiver (for old-style night/day tariff switches, obsoleted by smart meters but still required nonetheless) and a smart meter gateway. That new metering cabinet needs to conform to standards set by your local electricity supplier (which can be as small as a city), so there is no nation-wide standards, more like 50 of them. And the metering cabinet is huge, not someting like the 30x40cm thing you see on sidewalks in spain or something, no. More like 200x140cm in the smallest(!) version. So those are really expensive just because the market is tiny and the requirements are completely crazy: Even though most smart meter gateways are wireless nowadays (UMTS or GSM) and usually such a gateway won't be installed anyways (because just the possibility of installing one is required), you also need to provide for cabled internet uplink to the metering cabinet. That uplink is a Cat6 cable to the gateway, but it crosses through the electrical uplink part of the cabinet. So the insulation of that cable has to be certified for at least 10kV insulation voltage, at least 80A current on the shielding and more stuff like that. So e.g. just that one stupid half-meter Cat6 cable will set you back 50Eur. Installation isn't any less crazy. You definitely cannot do anything yourself. Even your licensed electrician can only do the menial preparations. When your licensed electrician is done with the prep, you request an appointment with the local supplier's meter installer, who, after a typical wait time of 2 months, will install and seal the meter in the presence of your licensed electrician (who is there to receive complaints about incorrect prep, followed by another 2 months wait time for another appointment...).
That's why it's 4kEur...
And if you want your power to be a few cents cheaper (28ct/kWh instead of the usual 35ct/kWh), you need an extra meter for your heat pump. Have solar? Another extra meter. Want to charge your electrical car? You guessed right. And you cannot bring your own. Each of those "smart" meters has to be rented from your local supplier at around 20 to 120Eur/year.
Ok.
For once, I’m glad to be Italian :-D Here the national grid operator has installed smart meters. They support remote management of limits (maximum power in watts, tariffs, time-of-use tariffs), remote meter reading by the operator or local access plus an app, remote diagnostics, and simplified installation (strict rules and operator intervention, but in the end nothing particularly complex).
OK, but what about the rest of the price difference? Once the electrical is taken care of it should just be a matter of replacing the furnace and pulling some tubes and wires to the outer unit? You said 40k, but the heat pump itself isn’t even 10k.
The biggest factor is almost certainly the subsidy for switching to a heatpump.
But there are other factors as well. Air to Air heatpumps are uncommon in Germany, we usually install Air to Water ones, which are more complex. Unlike other countries, our heat pumps are usually mounted on a concrete slab and not on the wall. Then there are some norms for quality of the water, etc. they aim to increase the lifespan of the system, but increase upfront costs
AFAIK we do all of that in Sweden. The 12k I mentioned above is if a large air to water pump suitable for the northernmost of Sweden. It includes a water heater and direct electric heating element for when temperature go below -15.
And why do subsidies INCREASE the price in Germany compared to Sweden?
In the US, the subsidy is paid only when the heat pump is installed by a certified contractor. Unshockingly, the certified contractors are able to capture the vast majority of the subsidy as additional profit.
Here the upgrades for meters are paid for by the grid operators. No changes to the cabinets are required, old analog meters were replaced by them for smart meters, at no extra cost to the consumer, and now they will replace them with new meters capable of metering by 15 minute interval.
This cost in germany is really only created by overregulation and insane bureaucrats creating work for them.
I first heard that in Germany there is much resistance to smart meters and I thought they were just silly people, but if it costs so much..
no people are stupid. Smart meters are paid by the grid operator like everywhere else. Friends of mine got one and it was 25€ a year for it.
Yes germans are very stupid. we fight everything new because we think this country worked rly well in the 80s and thats where we want to be 1980
Digital and Smart thats for othet countries.
I got air air heatpumps for 3 rooms 1000€ a room and it slashed my heating cost to 1/3. And I have to explain that its not foor cooling but for heating and then the response is " heatpumps are like 20k plus you liar" or " heatpumps dont work in the cold" ... germans
Still many people dont switch because the read somewhere about magic costs that dont exist. Russian Gas propaganda is big here
40k for heat pumps is wildly overkill here if that’s what you where quoted someone is trying to scam you. More critically, those prices aren’t set in stone over the next 30 years.
Home PV for example is way less than 0,3€/kWh and rather dramatically changes these comparisons.
that doesnt even make sense. if gas is 3x of electricity it should be the same cost but for every watt of electricity you get 3 watt of heating. so by your math if I pay 1w gas but need 3w for 1w of electricity and heatpumps give 3w on every watt of electricity heatpumps are 300% more effective then gas. sooo your point is also heatpumps ftw ;)
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