[in3d]

> It’s ok, the economy isn’t collapsing.

Nobody said that Germany's economy is collapsing, but it's certainly underperforming. It had a recession in 2023 (-0.3% GDP growth), stagnated with 0.1% in 2024, and is expected to grow by just 1.0% in 2025. https://economy-finance.ec.europa.eu/economic-surveillance-e...

> The trains, despite all the ineptness of Deutsche Bahn, are generally pretty good!.

They're awful. "In 2023, just 64% of long-distance trains reached their destination on time" "Germany accounted for six out of the 10 worst stations for passenger convenience in Europe" https://www.dw.com/en/how-does-deutsche-bahn-compare-with-eu...

> Promoting Nazism is banned. It’s not a slippery slope, and the country hasn’t devolved into authoritarian groupthink. You just can’t publicly support Nazism.

"No national figures exist on the total number of people charged with online speech-related crimes. But in a review of German state records, The New York Times found more than 8,500 cases."

"After Mr. Grote later made remarks admonishing others for hosting parties during the pandemic, a Twitter user wrote: “Du bist so 1 Pimmel” (“You are such a penis”). Three months later, six police officers raided the house of the man who had posted the insult, looking for his electronic devices." https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/technology/germany-intern...

[throw-the-towel]

You may think that the trains are awful, but the OP was comparing with the US which basically does not have passenger rail at all.

[aguaviva]

Perhaps it may be more instructive to look at not just the past 2 years, in which there's been a global mini-recession (due largely to the Ukraine war) - and more broadly, how Germany has been doing compared to other countries over longer time periods?

According to these two graphs, German GDP fluctuations are pretty evenly matched with those of the US (and in some years, such ast 2016-2017 they did significantly better than the US):

https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/gdp-growth-annual

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth-annual

Germany has been hit worst in the past 2 years, but there's an extremely obvious reason for that -- again, largely due to the war. Not because of the country's social system or how it manages healthcare or fuel prices.

They're awful.

True, but (1) only in the last 10 years, and (2) Germany's "awful" is still an order of magnitude better than the land-based public transit system most anywhere in the US.

Go back 20 years - Germany's train system positively rocked, while the US was still going around invading random countries for no particular reason other than to distract its population from its decaying infrastructure, rising inequality and its own slow drift toward fascism.

[ipnon]

Yes, the Berlin-centered, foreigner-dependent tech industry is one of the few growing sectors. It seems a little myopic to me to extrapolate a few thriving communities into a vibrant national economy.