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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Not just that, Chinese politicians also understand what key technologies (or even whole companies) to prioritize buying or stealing from the West, like EV and battery tech, renewables, networking, robotics, AI and semiconductors.

While German politicians still ask for the internet to be printed for them.

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> While German politicians still ask for the internet to be printed for them.

Just as a funny little tidbit here, I've been trying to gather documents to apply for my permanent residence here in Germany. When I got to one document proving I had been contributing to retirement, I was lucky to find that the German authorities had an online service for it. So I went to request my documents, but, in the name of saving paper, they were going to mail me a copy.

I worked for Canada's largest telco and colleagues would regularly print emails they had sent to me and then bring it to my desk asking if I'd seen it... also the newly hired Director of Network had to stop an all-hands meeting to ask what IPv6 was and the final straw for me was being told in a meeting of VPs that a huge push for 2016 would be to get a fax line into every business.

You wonder how stuff gets this way in some companies...

... and then you realize it's because everyone who knew better saw it as a dumpster fire and found another job.

I guess that's the silver lining for us Indians. We are so poor we can't afford printer paper or toner. So we have to use a digital display.

Actually I am kidding, both paper and toner are cheap here but we are not luddites like you guys :)

> While German politicians still ask for the internet to be printed for them.

Austrian here, but its funny how Europe in general is still so walled from technology, I'm not just talking about people don't know how to use apps or that. Im a developer and I've worked remotely with clients from Silicon Valley and now I work with local companies and I must say the wiligness to learn something new and to explore new things is just not there.

The current company has a product almost 20 years old and still runs on old Java code. Which is fine, dont fix what is broken, but now we need to rewrite everything in new Tech stack, and thats where I come in, I got hired to help the transition. However, the people are so not in to work on something new.. they just want their Eclipse and Java. I dont know if this is a culture thing or what, but they are just not fans of technology as it seems.

Hey, I've had clients in California who decided two years ago to rewrite a Rails app in PHP because it's too expensive to find rails developer, so switching to a LAMP (litterally, postgres and nginx are also out) is cheaper...

It's what their new CTO was familiar with and he wanted to get something more familiar.

Don't fix something that is NOT broken* Typo

> While German politicians still ask for the internet to be printed for them.

That's actually somewhat reassuring. I still print of long PDFs, because I actually want to read long documents rather than skim.

An exception is Angela Merkel, who holds a PhD in Quantum Chemistry.

And she's done amazing work we need in order to stop climate change now hasn't she

It actually surprises me a lot how little effect it seems to have, at least in her case, to understand what science is telling you

That's why she worked so hard on getting all German nuclear plants phased out and ended up having the tax payer pay huge fines for that decision to power companies right?

That's also why she recently said: "Das Internet ist Neuland" right? There are technical people and then there are people that grinded through their PhD. Sometimes those two are the same, sometimes they're not.

The Red/Green "environmentalist" government legislated the nuclear phase-out. in 2002 before Merkel's time.

She initially reversed it when she came to power, but she had to reverse the reversal when German public opinion overwhelmingly rejected nuclear power due to the huge risk of tsunamis in Germany after 2011.

Jezz isses halt da...

It's almost as if she's not a dictator and the majorities both in her party and the German population are not in favor of appropriate measures to lower emissions.

>While German politicians still ask for the internet to be printed for them.

as a tech guy, I must say I don't like reading anything on screen. Not even retina display. Something about having light emitting to my eyes makes it uncomfortable. Paper are just more pleasant to read. Hope they come up with better E-Ink type of tech soon.

> Something about having light emitting to my eyes makes it uncomfortable.

How do you feel about dark mode with an OLED screen for true black (pixels off)?

The ecosystem has improved a lot in the past few years and most major OSs and applications now support it. For browsing the web, there's DarkReader[0] which works very well (on Android you can use it with Firefox).

While I've never been particularly sensitive, most of my book reading nowadays happens at night with the lights out, on a 6.67" OLED display with low brightness, pure black background, and amber text.

[0] https://darkreader.org/help/en/

DarkReader is great but the slow down is huge.

I use it in Static mode which is a lot faster (afaik it just applies a CSS style). Doesn't look too bad either.

While I understand (and agree) that reading is more comfortable on paper than on a screen. I hope this doesn't mean you print out every e-mail and pdf and even sometimes websites, which still happens surprisingly often here.

The lack if strategic thinking, and subjugation by the US, of Germany has been made painfully clear with the Covid vaccine. While the UK made sure that the Oxford vaccine went to British pharma, the German let Pfizer take over BioNTech's vaccine.

BionTech needed a large partner for clinical trials and initial prodcution. The IP is still largely Biontech, they now have a significant production footprint as well. Not to bad, plus huge global sales. And the mRNA know-how mostly stayed with Biontech. For once I don't see any lack in strategy here.

Germany has large pharma companies and could have made sure one of them was picked in the same way the UK did.

Plainly, this was a war situation with countries brought to their knees and Germany handed production of a key weapon that they had developed to a foreign entity. In such a situation IP means nothing if you don't control the factories. Compare to the UK who very clearly understood the situation and intervened. That's serious lack of sovereign strategy and assertiveness on Germany's part, but, again, I don't think they are willing to, or even can, say 'no' to the US.

which subjugation? BioNTech is a German company based in Mainz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioNTech

Yes and AZ fumbled the clinical tests (still not approved by the FDA) and production (not "their fault" to be fair, they had little experience in vaccines, and the viral vector ones are hard to scale up).

Pfizer seems to be much more on point on the fabrication and regulatory aspects, it was a much needed partner.

Germany got through the pandemic with about half as many infections and deaths per capita as the UK. The vaccination rates are almost the same as the UK by now.

So I wouldn't call this a great strategic victory for the UK. Especially since it also cost them quite a bit of goodwill in Europe.

All the blaming of the UK seems to have been really blatant scapegoating that went unchallenged because it fit with what the media wanted people to believe, though. The UK suffered the same shortfall in yield of the AstraZeneca vaccine as everywhere else, though to a slightly lesser extent early on as the production line here got funded earlier and the early teething troubles sorted out sooner. We were also far more reliant on the AZ vaccine than the EU, as they themselves liked to point out in order to argue they actually did a good job. This meant the yield and blood clot issues had a much bigger impact here. The UK government just did a far better job of limiting the impact of this by ordering more vaccines early on, basing their rollout on what AZ could actually deliver, and better public communications about the safety of the vaccine. There's no reason the EU couldn't have done the same other than their own decisions - AZ was quite keen to set up larger-scale manufacturing for the EU, and they could easily have negotiated a provision like the UK's requiring timely notice of how much vaccine would actually be delivered. They just didn't because they didn't seem to understand why this was necessary.

That is so untrue!1!! Our State Minister for Digitällizäyshun appeared in hot attire at a gaming convention, and one can, or at least could talk/meet with her on Clubhouse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothee_B%C3%A4r

VORRSICHT! (gräphicäll contännt, mäntäll präppärräyshun äddvyzzed!)

[1] https://www.klatsch-tratsch.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/do...

[2] https://www.gameswirtschaft.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Do...

[3] https://images.derstandard.at/img/2019/04/10/dorotheebaer.jp...

Vee häff ze paua to shrink wrap all of you!

Jaja. So is dat. Echt jetzt.

Jawollja!

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