https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe... (in German)
Schröder is SPD and he seems to be shoulders deep in Nord Stream controversy and Gazprom money. So it kind of looks like a German political class issue rather than a CDU issue.
There's another Wikipedia article listing known corruption affairs: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Korruptionsaffären_u...
A ton of costly, endless work when you can bypass all of that by laying some passive fiber...
That assertion is highly dependent on too many factors and even recent developments to be of much use.
That general assertion needs to be backed up with everything around the soil type, the copper diameter, labour costs, protocols and type of fibre, etc., etc.
And if you’re going down the route of having VDSL ISAMs in the field anyway then you’re certainly going to have the infrastructure there already anyway to support GPON over whatever fibre is in the ground anyway.
And are you sure that by “copper’s capabilities” you’re not actually referring to progressively closer deployment of infrastructure to the customer to overcome copper’s limitations? Because the move from dial any number to the local exchange to a node (FTTN) to now the curb (FTTC) certainly seems to reflect that more adequately.
Though, if they did hit a problem, just sensibly regulating shared national infrastructure of high industrial, cultural and economic importance seems like it would solve anything that came up better rather than shouting "free market" and "regulation bad" while you hand things over to American corporations in an act of brazen corruption.
You remembered me talks, about how enhanced was Hong Kong, so they in 1990s built very high-speed internet for all.
But than I read wikipedia, and seen, Hong Kong have 6800 people per square kilometer (Germany 200, France 300, Ukraine 80, Russia less then 30).
Sure, if you have more than tenfold number of clients, you have much more possibilities to pay for expensive new technology.
But even for not poor western Europe, fiber technologies was too expensive for wide usage until mid 2000s.
Sure, backbones built on fiber from early 1990s, but backbones is not all internet, in reality 90% of resources spent on last mile. And as I said before, until late 2000s, only copper last mile was economically effective without Asian density. Also was possible fiber backbone, and wireless last mile, but air speed also very limited (should read expensive :) ).
Hong kong is essentially a city. You'd have to compare it with Munich (5k/km^2) in Germany or Paris (20k/km^2) in France to get equivalent numbers
It’s by and large not, and to the degree it is, it’s open and not insidious. The kind of corruption that kills economies is the insidious type. (And the stealy variety.)
Nobody in government or industry has really been prosecuted for either (some Wirecard folks are on the run).
You will not find much local corruption though, which is what most people think of when they hear corrupt countries. Local corruption is paying of a cop, judge, that kind of stuff. I’m sure it also happens in Germany, but that is very very rare.
So to be corrupt in Germany, and places like it, is to do the "corrupt" thing "correctly" -- e.g. in some structural fashion tied to political parties, long term associations, business connections, etc. that have the appearance of being practical, official, and "right."
A friend of mine who came from Iran originally had a comment like this about western countries corruption vs "third world" or "second world" corruption:
In Iran or etc. corruption is almost more democratic, because it means as a regular layperson you can bribe some local official to make something go your way. It's not just, it's not fair, it's ugly, but it's "accessible" if you have some spare cash.
But in the west, corruption is for the super rich and the connected at a much higher level. e.g. you can't bribe a zoning official so you can build an addition or a shed, but if you're powerful enough you can control a political party and prevent it from investigating your company, have it enact some preferential laws, or stop it from some raising some tax.
I'd trust my next door neighbor to be President more than someone who actually wants to be President.
Politicians are becoming like a caste, much too similar to each other and with very little exposure to real life.
The chance of a government staying in government for a long time also means that governments have to think long-term because they might still be in government when the consequences come around. In the US system the optimal strategy is to do things that look good in the short term but backfire as soon as your term limit expires. That way you look good, and the next president (who's with near certainty from the opposition party) looks bad.
I'd be more in favor of passing an age limit, but I'm well aware that that has no chance of happening.
Singapore's consistent ranking near the top is always hilarious to me!
People elected them and their party, their party had chosen them for the position. It's not like they forced anyone to put them there.
Term limits in democracies make very little sense when they affect a President or other directly elected positions of great personal power
They make no sense for chancellors or prime ministers who in any case are going to mostly be controlled by the parliament
Democracies benefit from change. Indeed I would argue that cadre change is their kill app. But it must be happening.
The same top politician will employ the same ministers, consultants etc., thus slowly creating an ossifying structure that aggregates a lot of mistakes of the same type. It is a process that reminds me of inbreeding in biology. Small pathologies slowly become more pronounced.
As we live longer and longer, we run into a risk that our Senates etc. will turn into gerontocracies of 80+ year old people and that a typical intern will be fifty.
In fact this kind of conglomeration between the public and private sector is why they get things done, compared to the vetocratic nature of other countries.
In fact, one of the biggest domestic criticisms of the government right now is their terrible communication strategy.
English is the lingua franca and as such Anglo media has an incredible amount of power in shaping opinions in the West.
And frankly, the reporting, particularly from Anglo and Eastern European media, has had a heavy anti-German bias for weeks now. (Up from the usual moderate bias)
I'm not sure Germany isn't experiencing negative effects from this though. Like the Gazprom thing, for example, this broadband thing, maybe even the nuclear thing?
I'm not sure if OPAL deployment at a much larger scale would have created a sufficiently large market for optical networking equipment and bring down prices much earlier. Probably the number of impacted OPAL customers would simply have been larger.
(The copper cable mentioned in the article is actually TV broadband cable, and that had much less coverage than the copper phone lines eventually repurposed for DSL.)