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Comment by durnygbur | Hacker News Reader

This is what happens in an economy without culture of "the internet" when it feels an enormous pressure to succeed in the domain. Still biggest talents in Europe are forced to relocate there, pay ridiculous rents and be humiliated by landlords' castings. Hopeless waste of human capital. Germany might have low levels of perceived corruption but behind the scenes with their "elites"... whoa... one can literally hop from chancellor of the country into strategic Russian fossil monopoly and noone will blink an eye.

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Valid point about the corruption imho.

It appears that corruption in Germany is mostly high-level corruption. It's super unlikely that a cop will say "I can make this speeding ticket go away if you donate to our fundraiser", and you won't see an average family speed up building permits by handing over stuffed envelopes, but the elite in industry and politics seems to be comfortably close.

Average folks speeding up will be caught by speeding camera and scrupulously fined by office clerks with amounts quickly reaching hundreds of euro and suspension of the license included. Individual permits will be similarly scrupulously evaluated.

For now. As mentioned above, it will trickle down. It's pretty embarrassing these days to be German tbh. Especially after what has happened in the last 12 months. Feels a lot like the country as a whole just gave itself up and stopped caring. Now people just decided to enjoy the decline as it doesn't really matter anymore. Especially since we're about to elect a party to govern is that will drastically increase state intervention. And we all know how that ends, I guess.

I can second that. Our politics has become a clown show. Traditional German values are not really upheld anymore. I don't want to sound like an old-timer here (I am not by any standards), but honesty, precision and quality seem to slowly fade away

but still, one of the big reasons for the weakness of the CDU is because of the "Maskenaffäre" (read: corruption), so in a way this IS a public intervention because of corruption. We might see how the Greens handle government but in regard to corruption they appear to be a better choice than CDU/CSU. btw I know that the SPD is an easy target (and they certainly are not completely innocent regarding wirecard) but still Scholz and his people are fighting for more openness regarding income of politicians (starting at 1 Euro income), so there are still rays of hope in Germany.

I honestly don't see the corruption potential with the greens, what I see is a great potential for the Greens to succumb to populism and incompetence outside of their core strengths.

The Berlin rent control was just a cover up rent for some stupid mistakes that were made in the past. It's basically a bribe to the public. Oh, we sold government owned housing to private investors? Here, have some forcibly lowered rent payments. Of course they rushed the bill and it was overturned.

If the greens can somehow figure out how to avoid falling into these self inflicted traps they would be strong enough to stand their own, as it is right now they still need some common sense beaten into them. My hope is that they do their big government investments, let the economy recover and then either become a boring government party or stay a quirky opposition party.

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