With the difference that with an EV you always leave home with a full battery and you never have to step into a gas station unless you have a long trip ahead.
But even when you, the amount of time is not 60minutes. If you have kids, the time to go to the restroom, grab a coffee and come back is usually already around 20min, which tends to be enough to charge from 20-60% or even to 80% in newer vehicles. If you have a meal and take around 40minutes, you are probably already hitting 90% or higher.
I don’t care if German prices for electricity are below inflation. They’re just still expensive. As an EV owner is difficult to find an electricity provider with costs below 0,25€/kWh, and most of them go beyond 0,30€. While I had prices in other European countries for around 0,05€/kWh at night for example.
Not only that, Conservatives, Socialists and the Green all managed to increase our electricity CO2 footprint by moving from nuclear to coal/lng.
That’s mainly because German has fucked up the smart meter rollout. In their wisdom they separated the meter and the gateway when other countries just combined it. They also made it super secure (good), but then didn’t look at the fact that lots of people live in rented apartments and their meters in the cellars have really poor or no cellular connectivity. When Germany can finally do steerable dynamic loads properly at 95% of the market rather than under 10%, it will finally make a difference on steering pricing for such consumers as yourself.
Germany is investing in massive battery parks dotted around the grid. This will make a difference to supporting base load and offsetting coal, but it will take time.
If there’s anything about the Germans you can count on, is that they move slowly.
I wonder what would be the proportion of answers between different society economic levels.
What we know so far though is that many of the traditional values were bound to the old society structures, based on the traditional family.
The advent of the sexual revolution, brought by the contraception pill, completely obliterated those structures, changing the family paradigm since then. Only accentuated in the last decade by social media and the change in the sexual marketplace due to dating apps.
Probably today many young people would just prioritize reputation (eg followers) over wealth and life philosophy. As that seems to be the trend that dictates the sexual marketplace dinámics.
That’s not a good summary of capitalism at all because you omit the part where interests of sellers and buyers align. Which is precisely what has made capitalism successful.
Profit growth is based primarily on offering the product that best matches the consumer wish at the lowest price, and production cost possible. That benefits both the buyer and the seller. If the buyer does not care about product quality, then you will not have any company producing quality products.
The market is just a reflection of that dinámica. And in the real world we can easily observed that: Many market niches are dominated by quality products (outdoor and safety gear, professional and industrial tools…) while others tend to be dominated by non-quality (low end fashion, toys).
And that result is not imposed by profit growth but by the average consumer preference.
You can of course disagree with those consumer preferences and don’t buy low quality products, that’s why you most probably also find high products in any market niche.
But you cannot blame companies for that. What they sell is just the result of the aggregated buyers preferences and the result of free market decisions.
I have lived in 3 countries with socialized health care system and the public systems were just average to poor, and costing me a lot.
In Germany if you’re mid to high earner, a private insurance can cost you less than half than the public healthcare system and you get much better service. Starting with appointments with specialists, who always give preference to privately insured people.
In this day and age public healthcare system are not efficient and bill the wrong people.
They are mostly payed by young population, between 18 and 65 years old. Specially the highest earners.
However most of the usage comes from 65+ citizens, which are starting to become majority. And also tend to be the ones concentrating the wealth of the country.
These public systems work great when most of the population is young and is paying into the system. But modern western societies are not like that anymore. Wealth is not owned mostly by older people while they barely pay into the system.
Private systems work better because each citizen pays into his old age health coverage during his young years.
> In Germany if you’re mid to high earner, a private insurance can cost you less than half than the public healthcare system and you get much better service. Starting with appointments with specialists, who always give preference to privately insured people.
The solution here is to get rid of private insurance in Germany and only have public. It creates a two class system and private is a terrible choice once you are older, as costs will skyrocket.
Costs when you get older skyrocket, but not your monthly contribution.
You subsidize your own elderly costs by paying slightly more during your younger years. That slightly more is part of the insurance companies Float, which gets invested and is used 30-40 years later to cover your extra costs in old age.
In a public system there’s no float. Everyone pays to cover the costs of the healthcare for that budget year. Which has the consequence that whenever there are population age shifts, the system becomes not sustainable, which is our current situation in Germany.
If everyone (except unemployed) had private health insurance, population age would be non-problem.
So your complaint is that the young subsidize the old in a public system, and your solution is a private system that somehow doesn't raise rates on high risk (older people) and to use the young...to pay for the old?
You also ignore that you can't switch and magically have 30-40 years of float for old people currently receive healthcare, so you have to keep the same system in place until they are gone because insurance companies would instantly go bankrupt under your plan (since they have yet to build a float but have payouts instantly), so now young people subsidize old and have to pay for their non-subsidized future so they will basically have to pay double. Or do you plan just leave old people out of the public system? Pretty nice demographic to just ignore in your plan.
I’m in Germany, and for a family of four, the public healthcare system, covering my wife and my two kids costs us around 2,200€ per month. The company pays half.
A switch to a private insurance would lower the costs around half.
I was under the impression that German healthcare was essentially free (government funded) at the point of delivery, with additional top-insurance carried by most people similar to how it is in here in France.
Here I am self-employed and pay about 100 euros a month in top-up insurance (mutuelle) for myself and a couple of kids. Of course, the healthcare costs more, that’s why my taxes are high; but the insurance cost is about €1200 a year, not €2200 a month.
Free at point of delivery does not mean free at all. Netflix is also free when delivering you movies, but it costs a monthly fee.
I think it’s time that we all stop with the nonsense that government funded healthcare is free. Because who ends up funding the government are us, the citizens, and that costs lots of money.
Some governments, like the German one, still make the costs transparent to the citizen, something you can even see in your payslip. Other governments, after failed policies and extreme inefficiencies, hide that and just budget healthcare costs out of the rest of the taxes.
In your case you believe your cost is only 1200€ a year, because your government has not made at all clear to you how much you’re paying from your other taxes into the healthcare system. When governments hide that type of information is because they actually do have something they don’t want the normal citizen to see. And that’s worrying and not democratic at all.
>> In your case you believe your cost is only 1200€ a year, because your government has not made at all clear to you how much you’re paying from your other taxes into the healthcare system.
I absolutely do not believe my healthcare costs only €1200 a year. As I wrote, my top-up insurance costs about €1200 a year, and the healthcare costs more and that is why my taxes are so high.
However it’s still unclear how much you’re paying, as the problem with socialized services like healthcare is that you never know exactly how much you’re paying and if you’re overpaying or underpaying as there’s no free competition whatsoever.
There are of course also negative second order consequences. In socialized health care systems, where doctors and hospitals are payed the same no matter their performance, the economical incentives to provide modern treatments or provide better services do not exist, so best professionals need to leave the public systems if they believe they are being underpayed according to their value.
I’ve seen that happening in Germany and Spain a lot. Best doctors I had left their public healthcare position to open their own private business as that was the only way to be compensated economically according to the level of service they were providing.
> as the problem with socialized services like healthcare is that you never know exactly how much you’re paying and if you’re overpaying or underpaying as there’s no free competition whatsoever.
Also true in America, in which there is no socialized healthcare. (In any standard use of the term)
Hell, even Medicare ended up partially privatized. (At huge extra cost)
The worst thing about government-run monopoly services is there's little bottom-up incentive to optimize.
The worst thing about private-run services is there's little incentive for anything other than profit.
Given the fundamental realities of must-deliver services (e.g. healthcare, prison, etc.), I'd rather have them government-delivered than some bastardized free market without competition.
At least the former has a path to excellence. The latter just inevitably turns into a hostile hellscape for the end consumer.
Hot take - the private doctors tell you they are great but the public doctors can often be spectacular because their motives are not primarily economic.
For example, the absolute best diagnosticians in Houston are at the public hospital primarily serving Medicaid and Harris Health patients. Super evidence based, order tests for differential diagnosis not to make $$. Passionate about what they do. In a unexplained emergency my doctor friends would go there to be diagnosed and then the fancy privates to be treated.
Bro, try going to the doctor in America's not socialized services. You have zero idea how much that specific visit is going to cost, on top of the tens of thousands in insurance premiums paid on your behalf yearly.
My understanding (British citizen living in Berlin) is that the German system looks and acts like a tax, but is actually mandatory payments to one of a handful of almost-but-not-quite-identical private insurance companies, with care being free-at-point-of-use.
It's possible to opt out if you're rich enough, but if you change your mind later it's very hard to return to the normal system.
I'm currently not working*, my monthly insurance cost is €257,78.
* thanks to my very cheap lifestyle, my passive income of only about €1k/month means I don't strictly speaking need to work ever again.
Nevertheless, I am treating this time as a learning opportunity with a view to being able to change career path, given that I think LLMs make the "write the code" skill I've been leaning on for the last two decades redundant in favour of, at a minimum, all the other aspects of "engineering", "product management", and "QA", and possibly quite a bit more than that.
Plus, y'know, get that B1 certificate so I can get dual citizenship.
That will be hard to explain in English but you can find what you're paying to French healthcare system by looking at your paycheck (the document you receive every month that detail your paycheck rather). It basically either 7% or 13% of your paycheck (and .5% of non-work income via the CSG), and you have a hard cap on total contributions (4k/month, and healthcare if a bit more than half of that, so a bit more than 2k/month). It cover universal healthcare of course , but also maternity/paternity leave and invalidity benefits.
Paternity/maternity also cover the pension parents get (half a year of contribution to the pension system per child if you take care of them til they are 13, plus half a month for giving birth) (that's so awkward explaining this in English, sorry)
Thanks for this. I work independently (no CDI or CDD) so I don’t get the paycheck/payslip. I imagine it is broken down somewhere in the different taxes I pay, but unfortunately I don’t get the monthly reminder.
The maximum personal contribution to public health insurance (GKV) is capped at around 400/m for healthcare (and an additional 200 towards long-term/elderly care). Spouse and children are free if they are unemployed.
If you are paying more than that then you are already paying for private health insurance (PKV) or private supplementation on top of GKV for some premium coverage.
I am not mistaken. I know how to read my own payslip.
Both me and my wife are employed. We have GKV both and we’re basically paying the maximum rate. That’s around €1100/month each, pre-tax. Half of it comes from my official bruto salary and the other half comes from my unofficial bruto salary. Which is how governments hide the costs of public healthcare. Ultimately is part of my salary deductions for the finances of my employer.
Kids are not free: kids doctors don’t work for free. They need to be payed, and they’re paid from the contributions me and other employed fellow citizens pay every month.
But even when you, the amount of time is not 60minutes. If you have kids, the time to go to the restroom, grab a coffee and come back is usually already around 20min, which tends to be enough to charge from 20-60% or even to 80% in newer vehicles. If you have a meal and take around 40minutes, you are probably already hitting 90% or higher.
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