Deutsche Bahn’s once-admired service has descended into chaos. Whether decades of poor investment or the company’s unusual structure is to blame, it’s a huge headache for a coalition trying to meet climate goals
15 years ago I thought the Germans were the smartest people in the world because they understood the importance of investing in public services and had a central european style of capitalism that focused on fundamentals over financialization. since then they've slowly been adopting more neoliberal policies and making really stupid foreign policy decisions. I've lost a lot of respect for them as a world leader.
I'm sorry but, I always find it strange when people talk about nuclear energy as the simplest solution.
Nuclear energy is extremely expensive compared to wind and solar once you also account for the cost of processing the uranium and then dealing with the radioactive waste afterwards.
Also take France for example. The EDF has (after being privatized) ran on substance without reinvesting in repairs and renovation so much that last year more than half of its 56(54?) reactors stood still because of problems relevant for their save operation. This was before the last record-breaking summer in 2022 when even more of them didn't have enough cool water to operate.
As a consequence the EDF made mountains of dept because they had to buy so much energy from Germany last summer (from all the solar and wind) that Macron (the famously socialist and anti-market-driven-everything-president of France had to re-nationalize EDF last year. If a neoliberal government like France's nationalizes the EDF (famous for its highest percentage of nuclear energy in the mix) you can really see how great of a solution it really is.
Also: where does most of the world's uranium come from? Russia. So not really much of a difference to the gas. France takes a lot of it from Mali as well (which explains their involvement there. So uranium isn't that great in this regard as well).
Also: Nuclear reactors create the most important resource for nuclear weapons automatically.
In north-east Germany there's the Wendelstein 7X an experimental stelarator-type fusion generator that since its operation blew all the best estimates for experimentation out of the water. But it can never create more energy than it takes because it's too small. But it took decades to ensure the funding to even build a small one like this.
For a fraction of the subsidies tat nuclear power plants, or gas or coal gets ever year we could've build many larger ones that would be much closer to be net positive in power production.
I'm not against nuclear energy per se. But it's really annoying to hear all these voices from outside that from thousands of miles away know everything about Germany turning off its power plants.
The main advantage of nuclear in capitalism is that its central. Everybody having solar power and large fields of wind farms distributed evenly across the country make it less controllable by singular entities.
I might warm up more to nuclear energy it would be run in a more socialist society where there's no profit-driven operation that drives companies to skip repairs.
The corrosion crisis in France is a direct result of "market forces".
If something like Chernobyl happened in France... holy shit. That country has the most tourists in the world and exporting their food into the whole wide world.
And -yes - I know that the chernobyl-type reactor (Graphite-mediated and so on) isn't used in France anymore. As someone who lived half of his life worth in 30km to "Fessenheim" - France's oldest and now shut down Graphite-Based reactor - I can yell you that you examine the possible impact more closely from time to time and think about it more.
Solar and Wind are better. But they naturally don't create market monopolies and dilute power over energy. That's why they're not pushed that hard.
If a resource is spread out evenly you cannot make money from it. There's no market. Capitalism doesn't like this.
Nuclear is not displaced by wind and solar, it's displaced by fossil fuels. Nobody's arguing that we should stop building solar or wind to start 20 year long nuclear constructions (though china has it down to 5).
The continued existence of German lignite mining and their expansion of gas are due to turning off nuclear plants before the end of their lifespan.
I'm German and have been in France quite often in recent years. It's fascinating to hear their opinions on Germany. Outside our country is still imaged as having great engineering, efficiency - that Trains run on time. It's quite puzzling to me.
I came to the conclusion that the only real innovation in the last 30 years has been accounting. largely driven by neoliberalism. So every neo liberal country has kind of become more similar. Germany is not special, but has the advantage of having a lot of old successful companies that only slowly get sold of to international conglomerates. (Like Kuka etc). We behave as shitty as the rest, but our downward trajectory started higher up.
Modern computers and software made it possible to account for basically every item in a company with little cost. Before you'd have needed so many people and hours of work to judge profitability of small things that it wouldn't have been sensible to do so. CAD-Software also enables a special kind of accounting - simulating hardware components enables engineers to judge which parts are necessary and how much thickness is really needed. This is a huge and complicated process of optimization.
Accounting made it possible to turn a mostly opaque company structure that ran inefficient (but mostly on par with the competition) and judge every employee, every item. That's why supermarkets have outsourced the job of restuffing the shelves to a different company (that has to somehow make it work with the shitty pay that get).
But it's also the reason why appliances seem to hold just slightly over the warranty period. CAD-simulations made it possible for the accountants to change the products (make them shittier) so that people would need to buy new ones often.
The Deutsche Bahn is the same. Has made it possible to invest the smallest amount possible, because they realized they can just work with the deterioration infrastructure as well - most people don't have a choice and have to take the late train anyways.
It's the same with telecommunications here btw. With only few companys owning most Internet services they realized they don't have to invest a lot into fiber. People need Internet and will have to pay anyways. It's more profit to just raise prices.
Optimization feels a lot less optimal when it leads to enshittification. I have worked on the tech side of accounting systems in the US for the last 10 years and can say that American companies have largely embraced this category of innovation as well.
15 years ago I thought the Germans were the smartest people in the world because they understood the importance of investing in public services and had a central european style of capitalism that focused on fundamentals over financialization. since then they've slowly been adopting more neoliberal policies and making really stupid foreign policy decisions. I've lost a lot of respect for them as a world leader.
Don't forget turning off all their nuclear plants to become reliant on brown coal and russian (now american) gas.
I'm sorry but, I always find it strange when people talk about nuclear energy as the simplest solution.
Nuclear energy is extremely expensive compared to wind and solar once you also account for the cost of processing the uranium and then dealing with the radioactive waste afterwards.
Also take France for example. The EDF has (after being privatized) ran on substance without reinvesting in repairs and renovation so much that last year more than half of its 56(54?) reactors stood still because of problems relevant for their save operation. This was before the last record-breaking summer in 2022 when even more of them didn't have enough cool water to operate. As a consequence the EDF made mountains of dept because they had to buy so much energy from Germany last summer (from all the solar and wind) that Macron (the famously socialist and anti-market-driven-everything-president of France had to re-nationalize EDF last year. If a neoliberal government like France's nationalizes the EDF (famous for its highest percentage of nuclear energy in the mix) you can really see how great of a solution it really is.
Also: where does most of the world's uranium come from? Russia. So not really much of a difference to the gas. France takes a lot of it from Mali as well (which explains their involvement there. So uranium isn't that great in this regard as well).
Also: Nuclear reactors create the most important resource for nuclear weapons automatically.
In north-east Germany there's the Wendelstein 7X an experimental stelarator-type fusion generator that since its operation blew all the best estimates for experimentation out of the water. But it can never create more energy than it takes because it's too small. But it took decades to ensure the funding to even build a small one like this. For a fraction of the subsidies tat nuclear power plants, or gas or coal gets ever year we could've build many larger ones that would be much closer to be net positive in power production.
I'm not against nuclear energy per se. But it's really annoying to hear all these voices from outside that from thousands of miles away know everything about Germany turning off its power plants.
The main advantage of nuclear in capitalism is that its central. Everybody having solar power and large fields of wind farms distributed evenly across the country make it less controllable by singular entities.
I might warm up more to nuclear energy it would be run in a more socialist society where there's no profit-driven operation that drives companies to skip repairs. The corrosion crisis in France is a direct result of "market forces".
If something like Chernobyl happened in France... holy shit. That country has the most tourists in the world and exporting their food into the whole wide world. And -yes - I know that the chernobyl-type reactor (Graphite-mediated and so on) isn't used in France anymore. As someone who lived half of his life worth in 30km to "Fessenheim" - France's oldest and now shut down Graphite-Based reactor - I can yell you that you examine the possible impact more closely from time to time and think about it more.
Solar and Wind are better. But they naturally don't create market monopolies and dilute power over energy. That's why they're not pushed that hard. If a resource is spread out evenly you cannot make money from it. There's no market. Capitalism doesn't like this.
Nuclear is not displaced by wind and solar, it's displaced by fossil fuels. Nobody's arguing that we should stop building solar or wind to start 20 year long nuclear constructions (though china has it down to 5).
The continued existence of German lignite mining and their expansion of gas are due to turning off nuclear plants before the end of their lifespan.
It is straight from the neoliberal privatisation playbook. Defund public infrastructure until the public complains, then "fix it" by privatising it
I'm German and have been in France quite often in recent years. It's fascinating to hear their opinions on Germany. Outside our country is still imaged as having great engineering, efficiency - that Trains run on time. It's quite puzzling to me.
I came to the conclusion that the only real innovation in the last 30 years has been accounting. largely driven by neoliberalism. So every neo liberal country has kind of become more similar. Germany is not special, but has the advantage of having a lot of old successful companies that only slowly get sold of to international conglomerates. (Like Kuka etc). We behave as shitty as the rest, but our downward trajectory started higher up.
Modern computers and software made it possible to account for basically every item in a company with little cost. Before you'd have needed so many people and hours of work to judge profitability of small things that it wouldn't have been sensible to do so. CAD-Software also enables a special kind of accounting - simulating hardware components enables engineers to judge which parts are necessary and how much thickness is really needed. This is a huge and complicated process of optimization.
Accounting made it possible to turn a mostly opaque company structure that ran inefficient (but mostly on par with the competition) and judge every employee, every item. That's why supermarkets have outsourced the job of restuffing the shelves to a different company (that has to somehow make it work with the shitty pay that get). But it's also the reason why appliances seem to hold just slightly over the warranty period. CAD-simulations made it possible for the accountants to change the products (make them shittier) so that people would need to buy new ones often.
The Deutsche Bahn is the same. Has made it possible to invest the smallest amount possible, because they realized they can just work with the deterioration infrastructure as well - most people don't have a choice and have to take the late train anyways.
It's the same with telecommunications here btw. With only few companys owning most Internet services they realized they don't have to invest a lot into fiber. People need Internet and will have to pay anyways. It's more profit to just raise prices.
Optimization feels a lot less optimal when it leads to enshittification. I have worked on the tech side of accounting systems in the US for the last 10 years and can say that American companies have largely embraced this category of innovation as well.