I think with the advent of cheap Chinese electric cars (new BYD for 7-9k€ in China) VW will die a slow death, slowed down by tariffs, tax-paid stimulation programs and bailouts from Germany. They can't compete on price or quality.
I hate that tax money is wasted for this garbage company. Germany and the ECB has been financing VW group by buying their bonds. VW group has hundreds of billions of debt. German Central Bank president recently said (translated): "[It is] currently in the midst of a restructuring process. However, I also see opportunities — for instance, in the defense industry."
When I compared ICE compact cars some years ago, the Audi A1 (Volkswagen Group) was the only German contender with respect to quality, repair costs, failure statistics, etc. But it lost out to a Toyota, because the Audi was more expensive.
Michael Burry's march BYD analysis was interesting. It said this (and much more): "BYD is potentially the lowest-cost producer of vehicles in the world thanks to its vertically integrated model at scale. BYD controls its supply chains and saves margin at every step. It makes its chips, batteries, bodies, motors, etc. [...] Factories are being built in Thailand, Brazil, Hungary, and Turkey. Europe put a 17% tariff on BYD cars [...]. Once local production is in gear, the tariff will disappear - a major future competitive advantage in Europe given BYD’s low cost advantage. [...] massive overseas spend [...] BYD has ~29% more revenue than Tesla and ~1/12th the market cap."
Is it good to have an immigration policy roughly half the country detests?
Who benefits from immigration the most?
The capitalist gains cheap and weak labor, consumers to sell products and services to, and rent apartments to. It doesn't matter to him if the money comes from benefits. The negative effects are externalized to ordinary citizens. The capitalists own the media, which they use to shape public opinion on immigration in their favor or divert attention elsewhere. It also gives them a target to deflect from themselves and their obscene enrichment at the expense of the taxpayer.
The problem with a population cap is that it conflates immigration that is net negative (people from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, and Turkey and their children) and net positive immigration (Western immigrants) [1].
Here's a transcript of Studs Terkel in 1980 interviewing a couple of German publishers (from 03m22s to 06m10s) highlighting the citizens aversion to incompatible people, economic asylum-seekers, and who put those rules in place [2]:
Terkel: Is there a German attitude towards the Turkish minority here? There are quite a few Turks here.
Publishers: Yes. There is an attitude, especially against immigrants who are not coming from Europe, because now the Italians and so on, they are accepted. They are Christians. But those Turkish people build a kind of reserve army of the labor market and are very often detested, viscerally, by Germans. [...] I think the big problem that you have in Germany is the "Asylantenproblem" [asylum seeker problem] [...] This is part of the normalizing of German national consciousness, this question of the asylum possibilities. As you know, as a result of the liberation of Germany by the allies, in our constitution there is a fundamental right because many founding fathers of the Western republic had been immigrants, [...] so they stated that every man or woman, persecuted for political reasons, or racial reasons, and so on, had to have asylum in Germany. Now, when the economic crisis in Germany and the technological changes have brought about also more than 2 million unemployed people, there are tendencies within the right parties to restrict, to amend the right of asylum, with the argument that those "Asylanten", those asylum seekers, are not really politically persecuted; they are so-called economic asylants.
The number of applications to change the gender in one's passport will grow with each incident or legislation that makes the draft more likely since the constitution states that only citizens designated 'male' in their passports are to be drafted. Is there a downside to changing it to 'divers' or 'keine Angabe' (not specified)?
Here's the main reason I think most people are going to try to avoid a draft. Politicians have destroyed Germany and its future while they enriched themselves and their rich friends, for example [1]. They have lured in a flood of migrants against the will of many natives. They have been transferring wealth of the natives to the migrants by printing money to give to the migrants, thereby generating inflation while overloading all kinds of services. Even medium-sized cities in the east of Germany are infested with unwanted, culturally incompatible, sketchy male immigrants loitering around in groups, making people feel unsafe in their own cities. These people are disproportionately more responsible for violent crime, such as knife attacks or gang rape. You could halve gang rape by throwing out certain migrant groups. Yet nothing effective has been done by the government. Recently, there was a case in a youth club in the notoriously high-immigrant Berlin district Neukölln, where a 16-year-old girl said she was raped by a Muslim male. She said this was video recorded and used by a group of boys to extort her. The Jugendamt (child protective services) was informed, which is reported to have refused to file a charge with the police "because it marginalizes the perpetrator group" and "the Muslim boys are already under enough police scrutiny".
Who wants to fight for that? There is little patriotism. The rich live lavishly off their Rheinmetall stocks, many refugees live very well from welfare and child benefits, and the immigrant criminals live off their ill-gotten gains without effective prosecution or punishment. None of those will be drafted; only the ordinary German will. Many of them are furious; the others are misinformed or uninformed. If the politicians try to draft the really angry people, the angry people might decide to pay them a visit instead.
A token gesture. Europe is extremely dependent on foreign tech. I don't see the political will to really change that. I think the main causes are corruption, incompetence, extortion (negotiations on trade, etc.), and short-term thinking of politicians and managers. People did warn them, but they were ignored. They fucked the citizens long-term. Treason.
Critical infrastructure, such as energy, healthcare, or train service, runs on US software and services and thus only works as long as the US allows it. In Germany, the German Railway moved all of their software services into US clouds and shut down their own data center. That didn't protect them from a recent DDoS, taking down their main customer-facing site for hours.
Meanwhile, the local job market abounds with job ads from government agencies and private businesses, requiring administrating MS software (AD, 365, Exchange), cloud and doing "Power"-stuff.
The study "European Software and Cyber Dependencies" [1] (Dec 2025) from of the European Parliament explains the dire state. It's full of money quotes:
"Non-EU actors, primarily US companies, control nearly all critical layers of Europe’s digital stack. These dependencies are reinforced by vendor lock-in, long-term contracts, proprietary formats, & network effects that limit switching and suppress market entry for EU innovators"
"80% of European corporate spending on software and cloud flows to US vendors."
"Public administrations rely heavily on Microsoft and Google productivity suites, with only isolated instances of migrations to open-source alternatives"
"A case study of the EU’s energy infrastructure provides a further illustration of how its digitalisation creates critical cyber dependencies. Industrial control, grid management, and market-trading software increasingly rely on non-EU vendors and cloud platforms."
"Such heavy reliance on US tech and vendors results in [...] tangible sovereignty risks. The CLOUD Act, FISA Act and US sanctions regimes give US authorities legal reach over data of European citizens and institutions hosted by American providers."
"Dependence extends across the supply chain — from chips and hardware (90% of advanced semiconductors imported) to developer tools and standards (GitHub, Docker, and major programming frameworks are US-governed);"
"The EU’s digital trade deficit exceeds EUR 100 billion annually"
"These outflows finance US R&D and jobs: according to one study, retaining just 15% of this spending could create around 500,000 jobs in Europe by 2035;"
"Lock-in inflates long-term costs and undermines innovation, while dependence on external platforms diminishes Europe’s leverage in trade and security negotiations;"
"Europe’s software and cyber dependencies are becoming a structural strategic liability. [...] without decisive action, Europe risks becoming a “digital colony”- dependent on others’ platforms, standards, and priorities for decades to come."
"[EU]’s deep reliance on non-EU tech is a strategic vulnerability. It exposes the EU to geopolitical coercion (a de-facto “virtual kill switch”), with potential cascading disruption across finance, health, energy and transport if access to […] cloud or key software is curtailed.
"In the current geopolitical scene, technology interdependence is being weaponised. External pressure can push the EU to dilute rules or face retaliatory trade measures, while dependence reduces Europe’s geopolitical leverage."
"the EU already faces pressure to dilute its own digital regulations to appease allies or avoid retaliation – recently, trade negotiators even been softening EU digital rules (like the new Digital Markets Act) in exchange for avoiding US tariffs"
"if a major US platform suffered a prolonged outage, or if transatlantic relations deteriorated, leading to data access blocks, a large swath of European business and government services could grind to a halt."
"semiconductors account for about 80% of the strategic value of a data centre; building AI campuses without European hardware will therefore send most of the value abroad"
"After the demise of the multi-ethnic Empire of Japan in 1945, successive governments had forged a single Japanese identity by advocating monoculturalism and denying the existence of more than one ethnic group in Japan. [...] the notion of ethnic homogeneity was so ingrained in Japan, to which the former Prime Minister Taro Aso (1940-), in 2020, notably claimed in an election campaign speech that “No other country but this one has lasted for as long as 2,000 years with one language, one ethnic group and one dynasty”." [1]
They have a long history of "Aryan-like" master race theory [2].
Why would the Japanese want to trade in their distinctiveness and positive societal attributes for dubious gain? It endangers the fabric of society.
Where has mass migration been a net benefit for a larger country in recent times? Europe has been "culturally enriched", which puts even more pressure on the already strained welfare-, medical-, education- and housing-system, lessening the quality for all. There has been an increase in savage violence, such as gang rapes and brutal attacks, as well as organized crime, terrorism and epic fraud the institutions are not equipped to handle. Outrageous sums of tax payer money is used to pay off foreign countries, so that they throttle the influx of migrants somewhat, which also makes Europe vulnerable to blackmail by those countries. The people do not want (incompatible or malicious) foreigners. The governments are incompetent in letting in only the good ones and getting rid of the bad ones.
"Inflation, the wrong concept is to think of it as a single number, it is a multi-dimensional number. You have inflation for stock, real estate, food, energy. The policy makers bundle this into a single number, which is very misleading." - Didier Sornette; Oct 11, 2023; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbU70IA4Z_w
That seems cheap. The German state pissed away €76B in mostly non-productive Covid aid, made subsidy fraud so mindbogglingly easy, it resulted in billions of illegitimate aid paid out. Unbelievable levels of incompetence and/or corruption. It does not matter what other countries do, when our government shoots our own country with a bazooka. Western Europe is crumbling, besieged from the outside, corroded from the inside. Darkness beckons. Source (German): https://archive.is/Ai8u1
In Palestine 26.8% of the population is obese, 57%-67% of mothers in Gaza are obese or overweight, says Wikipedia, which cites a 2014 paper. It lists "decreased physical activity and greater than necessary food consumption" and "lack of sex-segregated facilities and cultural norms are prohibitive factors" as reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_in_the_State_of_Palesti...
When I think financial services and simple architecture, I think of Python, ORM, Kubernetes, Cloud, GraphQL and admission of "data-integrity bugs" and "paying retail public cloud prices".
The article itself mostly discusses tech choices rather than architecture. Half of their choices, they seem to regret.
On the service itself: It seems detrimental for African countries (or any country) to allow external financial services to get ingrained and allow them to milk their own populace and prevent the development of state-owned, cost-neutral, non-profit, long-term solutions for the public good. Payment should be public infrastructure, not private profiteering.
Is anyone here donating Dan $180k/year (+VAT) for his blogging?