This has absolutely been the standard in every school around where I live for years. Anecdotally, however, I wouldn't go so far and say it lead to "engaged students" and "joyful teachers" :)
Before moving to Europe, I always had this conception of Germany as being very good at organizing things, especially anything involving engineering. It doesn't take long to set this picture straight.
> From 2015 to 2024, Austin added 120,000 units to its housing stock—an increase of 30%
Compare that to the following [1]:
> The [...] government [...] intended to build 400,000 new homes annually, including at least 100,000 social housing units. This target was significantly missed from 2021 to 2024. In each year from 2021 to 2023, fewer than 300,000 new homes were built.
So, the city of Austin alone build on average 12,000 new housings each year, while all across Germany, they failed to build 300,000 new units. That's roughly a 1:25 ratio.
So, how much bigger is Germany than Austin, Texas? More than 80 times bigger.
Is that just because big projects don't scale linearly? I would think that that's definitely one factor. Also, I'm not convinced that economy of scale laws apply here, given that this is not one company building 300,000 houses.
But it does show a number of problems inherent in Germany's current situation: (a) shortage of skilled laborers; (b) high cost of labor; and (c) exorbitantly much red tape. These three points alone are among the most frequently cited factors that companies feel inhibit business, and it holds across disciplines.
Shortage of labor, high cost of labor and red tape are all consequences rather than causes. The cause is cultural. Property is the asset in much of the world and the value of property depends on limited supply. There's a disincentive to build more property, especially if you are a politician courting property owning voters.
In the U.K. people are indoctrinated from birth to believe that you work hard to save your money to buy a house and the value goes up so that you can retire with a valuable asset. Flooding the country with new property would completely upend that foundational part of U.K. culture.
If the governments of European countries wanted more property to be built, they could make it happen. The problem is, there is no appetite, they're walking a very fine line: more property must be built but property values cannot go down.
China is an extreme example (and has quality issues) but they have been building more than 10 million new homes per year for a long time, and now have tens of million of vacant homes that nobody wants to buy. That's a nightmare outcome for most Europeans who plan to retire on the value of their home.
The U.S. is fairly unique among western economies in that investing in the stock market has been a normal part of wealth building for the hoi polloi and while homes are important assets, they're not everything. In Europe, investing in the stock market is still novel, property is still the asset.
While it’s a different country my experience in Ireland and the Netherlands has been that there’s this bizarre contempt for builders. Like “I build homes and sell them to people for money” basically makes you satan incarnate. So housebuilding is bogged down in x% social, y% “affordable” (because apparently the goal of making all housing affordable by actually building enough is unthinkable) and very little gets built .
In Amsterdam the Green Party is celebrating making homes more affordable to buy…. By kicking out the people who were renting them. And they continue to say only 20% of developments can be market rate, aka for everyone. When you’re new to the city because you just got a job at booking.com or whatever you only can hope to get a flat in that 20% - the rest isn’t for the likes of you!
The Netherlands is a different kind of environment because there is a calculated policy of not doing anything that could reduce home values. This trickles through all policies for any action that could meaningfully solve the housing crisis.
I exaggerate but the tax structure is such that it encourages using your home as an investment vehicle. We'll see where things go with it but proposed changes to box 3 rules taxing unrealized gains may effectively destroy the possibility of saving any money in something that isn't your primary residence or a pension...
Both of you are really just beating around the bush of this whole issue in basically the same way as the very people you are complaining about, albeit at a different position. You both have a very elitist mentality towards this issue, i.e., “those peasants should move out of the way for superior people like me”, when what you are both describing is ironically failure of the privileged and powerful to understand what is causing the problems, conflicts, and tension; their own behaviors, actions, and mentalities.
Maybe the indigenous population you have contempt for wanting to preserve their communities and cultures don’t want your colonialist mindset of “those savages are not utilizing the land as I wish, so we can just overrule, overrun, and take it from them. How dare they not avert their eyes, for I have a job at booking.com or I go to UT/work at Oracle/Tesla.
It’s funny how you types never suggest that newcomers, i.e., colonizers, pay a high price for their colonization and that go to the indigenous, even if just to compensate them for the imposition and abuse. You always seem to insist on wanting to kick the indigenous from atop your high horse and demand they make way to your superiority as you abuse and exploit them. You’re not any different than any other past form of this colonist mentality, you want to steal from and abuse the indigenous.
I think it's funny how you think I would be "colonizing" the same neighborhood I literally grew up in.
I grew up in Austin. A bunch of people had kids there in the 1970's and 80's. More than where there before. So even if literally nobody had moved to Austin, there would still be a housing crisis without letting people build new housing.
Unsurprisingly, literally just letting the market respond to demand makes things more affordable for everyone. Yea, some people I don't like might move to Austin. They're probably not all bad. That's what multiculturalism is about.
Ah yes, the well-known "indigenous population" of the Netherlands, one of the highest-GDP places in the world at present and of course a country with its own actual colonialist past. Do you really think these "indigenous" noble savages can't afford to pay for their own rents on a market-rate basis? They're keeping outsiders away (unless they pay outsized luxury prices, of course) out of pure unchecked privilege, not for any kind of high-minded culture preservation.
> (a) shortage of skilled laborers; (b) high cost of labor; and (c) exorbitantly much red tape
Does the red tape also stop the Syrian refugees from working in construction? It's a genuine question and I am not trying to be disingenuous.
The last time I was in Germany, I aw several constructions projects in Cologne and Frankfurt. However, I rarely noticed any non-white construction workers. This was quite unusual for a Texan like me because Mexican laborers drive all the construction in Texas if not most of the US.
>But it does show a number of problems inherent in Germany's current situation: (a) shortage of skilled laborers; (b) high cost of labor; and (c) exorbitantly much red tape. These three points alone are among the most frequently cited factors that companies feel inhibit business, and it holds across disciplines.
There are 9 billion people in the world, roughly half of them are perfectly capable of doing manual labor.
There is plenty of skilled labor, and the cost is frankly not that high, you just need to let them work.
Can we be serious here? There is one and only one cause of "high housing prices" and that is a political choice to make housing expensive.
Don't tell people what they can or can't do with their property.
Don't prevent people from being brought in to build stuff.
Do these 2 things and housing will be built if the price is truly high. Anything else is bullshit.
Like most other things, labor is highly regulated in Germany. You've got to understand that (from my experience as an outsider) it seems to be a country where it matters more what you are on paper (e.g., degrees, certifications, etc) than what you can actually do (e.g., practical experience). Not that the latter is not valued at all, but on the job market, it's often not sufficient.
Labor costs are determined by a lot of regulations - minimal wage, mandatory health insurance fees, mandatory pensions fees, etc. make labor costs in Germany much higher than the average in the West. So, it's all not that easy.
Even when flying intercontinental for many hours, I usually just pull a Puddy on flights and do nothing. I have my laptop with me, of course, but I usually leave it just in the overhead compartment.
Yes, this is a duplicate post created by a new account who seems to have copied my post from <https://lobste.rs/s/hjipba>. I have emailed the moderators to ask if they can mark this as duplicate and merge the comments here into the other thread.
Thank you for the clarification and also for reaching out on IRC. I'm glad to know it was you who posted this here.
At one point there were three duplicate posts on the front page, all referring to the same project. I was concerned that if HN users flag them all as duplicates, then all three might lose the front page presence at the same time, so I reached out to the moderators to resolve the duplicates.
Unfortunately this one ended up being marked as a duplicate, even though it had gained more attention than my original announcement post at the time. So thank you for sharing it here. I really appreciate it, as it helped bring some initial visibility to this project and helped it grow.
That's cool. Another interesting metric, however, would be the false positive ratio: like, I could just build a bogus system that simply marks everything as a bug and then claim "my system found 100% of all bugs!"
In practice, not just the recall of a bug finding system is important but also its precision: if human reviewers get spammed with piles of alleged bug reports by something like Sashiko, most of which turn out not to be bugs at all, that noise binds resources and could undermine trust in the usefulness of the system.
They mention false positives as well on github: The rate of false positives is harder to measure, but based on limited manual reviews it's well within 20% range and the majority of it is a gray zone.
That 20% figure is actually better than it sounds. Coverity on kernel-scale C codebases typically lands in the 40-60% false positive range... "not wrong but not the bug you'd prioritize" is different from a true false positive.
Potentially its by either (or even both independently). Knuth originally attributed it to Hoare, but there's no paper trail to demonstrate Hoare actually coined it first
> Consumers, mostly those who buy EVs from the likes of Tesla, Rivian, and BYD, have grown accustomed to the frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems.
Guess which three items out of that list I do not want.
You don’t like active safety features ? Even if you think you are great and better than most, don’t you think it would be neat that the other drivers you share the roads with have active safety features ?
So they don’t crash into you or run over your kids?
I am convinced that some safety features (such as lane assist, for example), actually make roads less safe on net, because they allow or encourage drivers to be less engaged in the act of driving. But then, if it were up to me we'd all be driving manual transmissions.
My main argument for manual transmissions would be that because it requires both hands to be engaged it leaves less availability for the right hand to pick up their phone. The number of people I see holding and staring at their phone while driving down my residential street is shocking.
I also think it just connects you to the act of driving more, which I'm convinced (without evidence, just a hunch) makes you a safer driving
People have been distracted while driving manual transmissions for ages too. I remember my father telling me a story of drinking coffee out of a coffee cup, while smoking a cigarette, and driving his manual transmission in a blizzard.
How distracted a driver is with phones/etc is up to them; enabling them to be safer within their existing usage is only a benefit. Same reason things like the semi-autonomous driving are a net benefit. They substantially reduce the cognitive load of driving, which makes you more able to monitor the higher level driving tasks. The fatigue is noticeable for me, especially on longer drives.
> People have been distracted while driving manual transmissions for ages too
Of course, but it's definitely worse now that people have devices designed to grab attention within arms reach constantly.
> How distracted a driver is with phones/etc is up to them
And many people choose to be quite distracted. I would love it if they had less ability to make that choice when it comes to endangering other people's lives.
In any case, I don't disagree that there are some benefits to semi automated safety features. For some people it's certainly a net benefit. But I think you're underestimating the number of people who use that extra bandwidth to dive into an even deeper distraction hole. The number of people I see scrolling through short form vídeos while going full speed on the highway is shocking
1. Some people choose the maximum amount of distraction they can while still being able to operate their car at a basic (unsafe) level.
2. Manual transmissions allow for less distraction (not zero distraction, of course), because they require more frequent use of both hands, and more engagement of the body in general.
3. Therefore, manual transmissions, if they were widely used, would result in less distracted driving
All it takes is someone to have their phone mounted on a stand near their wheel (one of the vent mounted ones would be what I’m thinking), and then they could scroll to their hearts content. You only have to pause temporarily to shift gears, and even then I don’t think it is making you any less distracted. You’re just now distracted by shifting gears too, which takes your focus off the road to some extent as well.
The “distraction” is taking your eyes and mind off the road. A car that has an automatic is inherently less distracting overall. It has a higher tolerance for people to scroll or distract themselves in another way such as their phone, yes, but the amount of focus needed to not veer off the road or crash into something is the same regardless of how much baseline focus is needed to generally operate the car.
Well, I suppose we can agree to disagree, I guess. Frankly you sound like someone who hasn't driven manual transmissions much, though I'm sure you'll tell me you have. I just find it hard to believe that someone could really believe they don't reduce the opportunities for distraction by a significant degree
I used to own a manually transmission sports car as my primary car, in fact. Trust me when I say I’m aware how much more engaged you can feel with the road if you use one. Emphasize is on can, though.
On the other side of that coin though, if you’re just driving a crappy car that has a manual, and commuting in traffic, it becomes a burden and certainly is more taxing mentally.
Maybe that alone makes you tired enough to not be distracted on your phone, and I’m sure that’s true of some people, but frankly with how hopelessly addicted some people are to their phones I don’t really have any faith that would be enough for people who are careless enough to text/scroll and drive already.
As a point of reference, I knew someone who literally veered into oncoming traffic, more than once, nearly avoiding hitting another car, in the same singular drive, and they continued to scroll on their phones (despite me loudly protesting) after this happened. I didn’t give this person the opportunity to be a passenger in their car any further after that. Some people just can’t help themselves despite the risk, even if the risk is really, really high. Turns out (you’ll be shocked to know), this person had gotten in quite a few accidents over the years…
Even if they do make people safer "on average" these systems are not tested by a lot of the auto-safety organizations. In fact, some of these organizations simply bump up the "safety rating" automatically depending on how many "safety" features are included, without actually testing the effectiveness of the feature.
This is important, because forward collusion detection is not a binary thing. Each auto maker has their own set of parameters, sensors and implementations to achieve a similar goal, but each act independently.
I would also prefer if people were more engaged with driving too. I don't think we should encourage people to "rely" on these systems to keep them out of trouble as these systems can and do act unpredictably and may harm other road users as a result of a programming decision since the car in front acted unexpectedly.
I think the whole automation of everything in a car is a bit silly. Transmissions are whatever for me, although the full lane assist, cruise control, adaptive cruise control, even automatic wipers and headlights makes people feel so much more disconnected from the car, which I think leads to unsafe habits or worse, unable to handle the car in situations where the automatic systems fail or become unreliable (e.g poor visibility, wet roads, unmapped roads, off-road, obstructions on the road, road works, etc).
> I am convinced that some safety features (such as lane assist, for example), actually make roads less safe on net, because they allow or encourage drivers to be less engaged in the act of driving.
"Birth control leads to riskier behavior and more pregnancies."
One time I gently left my lane to slightly move into the (empty) opposing lane as I passed a cyclist who was on a narrow shoulder. The lane assist thankfully corrected my clearly idiotic move by taking the wheel and swerving the car towards the cyclist, who the car probably thought was a terrorist or something. Luckily I fought the "correction" and managed to save myself the inconvenience of cleaning cyclist guts off my windshield at the next gas station.
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