demonshalo

So lets see, which is more likely?

a) It just so happened that France, Sweden, Norway, UK and a bunch of other countries turned racist over night (see the rise in numbers of voters for the extreme right parties), or

b) you are wrong because you have an incomplete picture of how the world actually looks like?

I'll let you decide which one it is.

In other words, my argument is that in order to maintain internal peace, a society needs to be mostly homogeneous. Multi-cultural societies throughout history have always had major racism and other form of group-oppression. Traditionally, in order to maintain internal peace societies have exported that conflict in order to rally the citizens around the flag (example of this would be the US).

I might be wrong about this but I have never heard, read about or seen a single multi-cultural society that have managed to remain in peace for too long. The only exception to that are societies that are ruled by dictators with an iron fist (ex. Syria prior to the war). Groups did co-exist peacefully but they had to be forced to do so.

You should have stopped there because that is the most rational conclusion to this whole thing.

But regarding the racism part: if you haven't noticed, the entire west is having a massive surge in racist ideologies. IMO it is one of two things, either a) it is not racism but classified as such by the left, or b) it is racism and the reason for its massive surge in the past few years are the current policies in place. In both of these scenarios, a change is required. Is Brexit that much needed change? I don't know. But what I do know is that leaving the EU is not as suicidal as people make it sound to be.

I think the leftists for the past 60 years have acted with good intentions; they think that they have been doing the right thing(s). However, they seem to do the same thing time and time again. Namely that they pretend to know all the variables regardless of context and argue that they are able to account for all variance via central planning. That is what Hayek called "pretense of knowledge". Nassim Taleb's Black Swan talks about that in depth. The failure to account for the "emotional" variable is what this article is about!

In fact, that is the reason Econ is not a science. It is basically impossible to create rigid future-predicting economic models. Physics can do that because you can isolate and probe, while econ is far more complex of a structure where isolation of a variable is basically impossible. Even if you managed to do that it wouldn't matter because variables in aggregate tend to give rise to emergent properties.

I think of economics as an NP-complete problem (perhaps even EXP). It might be possible to create statistical models that are "good enough" in most cases. But they are not deterministic or efficient. Therefor, I don't believe that centralized planning will ever work on these large scales.

That is flat out wrong... If it wasn't for the sensitive information, I would have posted my own tax returns here for all to see.

Syrian, Sweden, Austria, Germany, USA and Turkey.

I hold dual citizenship and speak 4 languages while learning a 5th (Spanish).

> Would you get a bank account easily in the UK if you speak German?

1. You make it sound as if "all languages are born equal". What a Jeffersonian claim that is...

2. Yes much easier than it is to open one in Germany if you speak English. how do I know? I have done it 3 times so far... When I first migrated to Europe I didn't know any English yet it all worked out within days.

3. English the 2nd most spoken language in the world, only surpassed by Mandarin. Spanish is a 2nd if you only account for native speakers only and English falls in 3rd place at that point. German is 13th on a falling scale.

4. The finance world has English as the dominant language so YES, I do expect a freaking bank to speak it.

> Are you certain that you'd get a bank account in France, Spain, Italy?

Yes I do. Especially in Spain (where I currently hold one and got it literally over the phone).

> You're coming off as rather agitated

no shit... What you said prior to my reply is just flat out infuriating.

> 'German pride' and 'Everyone should speak German' references are getting dangerously close to a rather painful and sensitive subject. I'm not sure if this is intended?

It is not sensitive at all since it is the truth. That is how people act when they want to exclude you and make you feel un-welcomed. They put up bullshit barriers that should not exist in 2016 especially not in Europe's biggest economy. All of this is purely designed to piss people off who are not a part of the German culture.

If you came over to Sweden and people acted like that toward you, I would be freaking ashamed and embarrassed. I would never make a ridiculous excuse such as "well you can't ask the most basic questions in my language"... It boggles my mind how you could even justify something like that in this day and age. It is 2016 ffs, if you are a middle-class European citizen and don't speak English, that means you have purposefully evaded learning it.

edit:

> Regarding contract issues: Let me tell you about random mails in Hebrew that I still get every now and then or my time in Israel, Tel Aviv, trying to get a bank account.. :-)

haha I guess we are on the same boat then!

Yes. And not only that. I would go as far as saying that it is the failing of the German system in general. Heck I am being too nice here. The way everything is structured in Germany is based on one idea and one idea only. The German worker > all others. Nationalistic pride at its best.

Why would bank employees speak English when dealing with foreign business consultants? its 2016, the world should speak German by now instead!!!

It is beyond me that in 2016 English literacy in Europe's biggest economy is basically 0. In fact, I speak 4 languages and all of them were useless there. Go figure...

Apologies if my experience does not reflect the reality of the situation but That's all I have to go by as that is what I experienced. The "national pride" thing is something you might be able to challenge as you yourself do not feel it or see it. But I could see it as clear as the sun. It might not be as apparent as when Americans yell out loud "USA USA USA", but it is definitely there!

I am not exaggerating at all when I say that I spent 6 months in Germany and the only people I met who could speak English well are the foreigners. In fact, I could not even get a single contract (bank acct, phone, housing, insurance, etc) to be translated into English without using a lawyer or a cousin. Even my employment contract was written in German. Heck once a week I still get emails like this because when I contact the customer support for these companies they cannot speak English to terminate my contract... :D

Ihr Kundencenter

Hallo ,

das Kundencenter bietet Ihnen schnellen Zugang zu wichtigen Informationen rund um Ihren Vertrag. Dort können Sie z.B. Ihre Rechnung abrufen, persönliche Daten verwalten oder gewünschte Extras zu Ihrem Produkt hinzubestellen.

In dieser E-Mail erhalten Sie Ihren * Benutzernamen und einen Link, über den Sie sich Ihr * Passwort selbst vergeben können.

Zu Ihrer Sicherheit ist dieser Link nur 24 Stunden ab Versand dieser E-Mail gültig. Bitte vergeben Sie in dieser Zeit ein persönliches Passwort.

Klicken Sie auf diesen Link: * oder kopieren Sie ihn in das Adressfeld Ihres Browsers.

Sollten bereits mehr als 24 Stunden vergangen sein, klicken Sie trotzdem auf den oben angegebenen Link. Sie erhalten dann die Möglichkeit, sich einen neuen Link zusenden zu lassen. Auch dieser Link wäre wieder 24 Stunden gültig.

Übrigens: Sie können sich mit Ihrem * Benutzernamen oder mit Ihrer Kundennummer und dem von Ihnen gewählten * Passwort im Kundencenter einloggen.

Es grüßt Sie

I don't understand how anyone can pick Berlin over the UK after seeing this!

Thanks!

> Now, that might attract talent but wouldn't that also raise the bar for starting up? One of the problems with SF startups at the moment is that it's impossible to start anything without tons of funding. Taxes are another very complex issue. In general though we could go circles around each point and never end up with much of a conclusion.

You are absolutely right about that. However, it is apparent, at least to me, that the middle class in Europe has no savings. And that is the reason for the lack of capital. Both income and consumption is highly taxed on all levels which makes it hard to save up and invest over time for the average middle-class worker. When I was in the US, My community college teacher had money saved up that he wanted to invest, my neighbors, colleges and everyone I knew was saving up in a hope for a good deal to show up.

Just as an example. I am a 1% income earner (in my age group) in Stockholm right now. And I can BARELY save up 10k USD/year. Those 10k would basically be burned in the 1st month of operation if I decide to start a business due to how expensive and taxed everything is. All of this makes it impossible for someone like me to take a chance and try something out in this hostile climate.

> But I don't think Berlin is a bad place to be in. In fact, at the moment I think Berlin is one of the best places to hack something together because there is tons of talent around and they would not need to be compensated much

From my personal experience, I barely saw any talent in Berlin. I consulted for a few companies there and the general software/code quality was so bad for some reason. English literacy was also another major problem that was rather shocking to me. Most of the German developers I spoke to barely knew English, which to me was so surreal :S

> You could do the same under a Delaware corp hiring people in Berlin as freelancers and you'd still be able to get US VC investment if you're solving a problem in the states and have customers there.

If I had a US visa, I wouldn't need to do any of that :P but that H1B program is just a pain in the rear.

for YOU! not workers. Thinking that what you like is good for everyone else is rather narcissistic don't you think?

> I rather have that than the exploitation of workers in IT without unions.

What does unions have to do with anything? ... I was referring to the work mentality as a cultural phenomenon. It is nothing to do with unions -.-

> I can enjoy my evenings and weekends without spending a second thinking to get reached from work, and if I need to be on call I will get properly paid for it.

That's what I am talking about. Your work for you is just that, work. Which is perfectly fine. However, There is no way for Germany to ever get a remotely interesting tech scene with that mentality in place. That's not how you foster a startup culture.

The German tax rates for singles are ridiculous (40+%) and the salaries are way below what the UK pays. In addition, the German culture's work mentality is very similar to that of factories. On top of that, the benefits are non-existent compared to the UK (let alone the US).

http://demonshalo.com/the-sad-state-of-the-european-tech-sce...

The last math class I took was in high school and I dropped out of college because my CS degree required me to do a metric fuckton of math, which I hated at the time.

A few years ago I got interested and started working on Integer Factorization. It is not that likely that I will solve that problem but in the past few years I have learned a lot more math by attempting to solve that problem that I learned in college!

Moral of the story: Just have fun and try to solve some problem(s).

1. Resources. Time and money. These research ventures might take years and sometimes need some funding in addition to your own salary. It is basically borderline impossible for most developers to contribute anything useful in an environment where they need to worry about paying their bills for this month.

2. Know-how. Right now, most industries have advanced so much that you need very specialized knowledge and a metric fuckton of math/stats to contribute to any particular field in any significant way. A developer with a BS in CS can most often not even understand the papers being currently published due to the high math/specialized required knowledge.