Hacker News Reader

Comment by thiago_fm | Hacker News Reader

Germany is killing it.

Since I've moved here I've been following renewable energy numbers and also what the government commits to, and it's incredible how they've managed to meet consistently the solar and wind generation goals.

Unfortunately, they haven't been able to meet other goals such as amount of housing built etc.

But coming from a third-world country where I wouldn't trust any kind of plans coming from the government, it's really surprising to me.

To achieve this, in a bureaucratic country like Germany, they need to align many stars like building permits, subsidies, companies that can navigate the system, capital. Yet, they still manage to do it.

View on HN

And that's in a current political situation with three parties in the government that disagree all the time. Imagine what could be done in more stable times!

The huge issue I see is that they fail to implement enough social balancing, which leads to more and more people voting for the extreme right wing party AfD, which will cause a lot of trouble after the next elections.

Politics in a democratic regime end up reflecting the desire of the people, if somebody is to blame for this mess are the voters themselves.

This situation makes AFD temporarily strong, but also gives space to other parties to perhaps say yes again to atomic energy and other non-conventional ideas.

Also brings more power to CDU and other parties that resembles more stability. Politics is a self-balancing system, it's not so useful to care about it.

I'd agree if only we had more time to solve the upcoming challenges. But currently it looks like no one's going to be strong enough to do the right things. Four years are a lot of (wasted) time in the short period we have left.

German here. German middle class considers the current political situation (across all federal layers) the least trustworthy in at least 30-50 years. The majority of the people is frustrated AF because of government paralysis for no real reasons but political gambling.

It's that bad that >90% of my friends and acquaintances chose to not read the news anymore and go with ignorance and escapism. Germany seems to be going through some kind of identity crisis right now (we lack most competencies for 21st century and used to cover all problems with money and arrogance) and chances are not that low we'll end up with far right leadership.

(The only good thing is that the German army is that much underfunded and bureaucratic that a military coup is impossible. /s)

Fellow German here. I share your sentiment 100%. I quit consuming standard news early last year and replaced it with reading primary sources if the topic was substantial. Further, there are capable experts on Youtube. However, cutting through the noise and hyperbole takes time, and sometimes experts do not realize having left their field of expertise.

By now, I fully agree with Neil Postman's verdict that news primarily exists to entertain. Many discussions could be decided by looking at a chart if the discussion's participants had the will and competency to do so, which, I am afraid, is regularly not the case.

Regarding the production and consumption of electrical power, I find www.smard.de/home/marktdaten a great tool. Before using it, I had no idea of basics such as the order of magnitude of power production and consumption or the meaning of units like Watt hour. In effect, quitting news helped me to expand my horizons far more than I expected.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com