389 karma · joined May 16, 2023
The overall level of subsidy-dependence in the economy is so large that no new undertaking will be done without a corresponding subsidy of some kind. Where an American might look for venture capital, a European (and especially a German) will look for a government subsidy program. Any industry that doesn't look for and mold itself along those subsidies will be leaving money on the table, therefore becoming uncompetitive. That means that all our industry will always be shaped by political programs and will always lag years behind the rest of the world.
The chain will always be:
foreign company does new thing X -> X looks good -> EU/German politician envies X -> subsidies for X -> EU/German industry does X in the exact size and amount of the subsidies.
And of course each of those arrows will be a year or more.
German car makers got lazy with research and development. In addition, they were hesitant to give up their investment in ICE production, risk staff reductions, and corresponding political and strike problems. This lead to most of the knowledge around EVs being developed and patented elsewhere, especially battery knowledge is firmly in Chinese hands.
At the same time the grandparent is also right, China wisely required knowledge transfers (in the form of forced joint ventures) in exchange for production and sales licenses. German car makers stupidly and greedily agreed, providing the Chinese with valuable knowledge about all the other parts of a car.
Both those mistakes now mean that Chinese companies have all the necessary patents and knowledge, as well as experience, for building EVs. Whereas German car makers will need to buy, license and beg for parts in China.
Not to mention that production in China will of course always be cheaper, and bureaucracy easier in the relevant circumstances.
But there was also a rather steep hike in (mostly greed-caused) inflation of everyday goods and energy prices, official overall rate was slightly above 10%, but for foodstuffs it went above 20% inflation. At the same time, wages didn't keep up, raises were below 10%, often below 5%. Inflation-corrected disposable income went down roughly 10%. So consumers also have less money to spend on their day-to-day needs and of course reallocated all the spending on "extras" (like luxury items, organic foods, leisure), to the basics (energy and less expensive basic nutrition). Which can be seen e.g. at energy providers raking in the profits while e.g. gastronomy is in a bad place.
There are mortgages with yearly adjustments, but those are rare afaik.
However, that is not the standard configuration of course.
For most of those things that aren't milk, the answer is "no". So they aren't milk alternatives, are they?
No, you don't. One example is "pizza cheese". Before the big EU dairy-product-naming crackdown, there were brands of "pizza cheese" that were actually plant fat with aromatics and binder/emulsifier. In the cheese section, without any obvious labeling that "cheese" didn't really mean "cheese".
If you'd allow stuff like "milk alternative", you'd quickly get "<huge>MILK</huge><tiny color=unreadable>alternative</tiny>".
But from experience, don't bother with any software, German taxes are sufficiently weird that only the most trivial cases will really work out, even if you pay lots of money for it. Get a tax accountant. It isn't just putting numbers into forms, it is more the problem of structuring your life around possible tax savings. Software won't help with that.
If you only ever need filing and putting numbers into forms, you can file your taxes on the official website: https://www.elster.de . You'd need a login anyways to authorize your tax accountant or enable your software to submit its data.
If there is only one or a few guard pages, you can sometimes still get your exploit to work by "jumping over" the guard page with a sufficiently large stack allocation that isn't used. But that is admittedly rare.
Struggled to do it regularly, frequency dropped off. Less frequent entries meant longer entries, because I tried to keep up with what was happening. Later on I just journaled at important (read: unhappy, difficult) events. Even that dropped off. During all this, journaling just made me more miserable, because I couldn't even do that minor unimportant thing properly.
So from my experience, don't. Just another thing to worry and despair about.
YMMV, of course.