I just got one of these, the ecosystem is so exciting right now. I just loaded the sloop firmware on it (super painless webusb) and it's crazy. From another DX7 machine to a simple little groove box with samples and sequences and a really quite lovely UX. So fun
> 1. 60% of the Berlin population voted for nationalising (expropriating) apartments from major landlords in a referendum - this is a bipartisan issue
There's no bi-partisan thing around it: It was the fact that the city has a spcific demographic that voted for it, but the constitutional court revoked it.
Another point: Even during the campaign the group did not explain how it would work given that most of the payments would need to be done at current market rates and the constitutional court will not pass it for obvious reasons.
And on top of that, good luck to make all other states paying it and hoping that the Länderfinanzausgleich will stand.
If I'm an entity that has 3000 or more apartments, I would have sold long ago to get to 2999. Basically as soon as I heard rumors of this law, I would have started selling.
Happened before with a guy having a meat processing empire in Germany.
The guy is notoriously known for paying below minimum wage and setting the worst working conditions possible to maximize profits.
They made a law that forced companies in the meat processing industry to have certain standards if they reach a certain number of employees.
So he opened 250 companies on a weekend and split up the workforce to stay below the limits.
Then they just changed the law to declare multiple entities with below the limit they set under same ownership to become a "super entity" with even stricter regulations.
The government has the monopoly on violence of any form. That does not just include that they can send the police after you to hit you with batons, they can also make sure you’re drowning in administrative work and taxing the shit out of you, and the guy threatened to leave the country and just open meat processing in Poland and Bulgaria as well.
In the end, all his threats to leave the country and just do the whole processing in Poland and Bulgaria were empty. They simply told him someone else will just take over, because the profit was still great after the new regulations, and they were going to ban him from doing business on the German market by simply banning his product for food safety reasons.
This is the same thing with a different product. Investors threaten to no longer invest and build housing, but they will just fall in line and shut up in the end, because capitalism dictates that if you no longer want to make good profits because they took away your ability to make ridiculous profits, someone else will just do your business under the new conditions and gladly take the good money over no money at all.
That's not the experience of most Germans - the big companies here are horrible and treat you as bad as the law allows, and oftentimes even worse than that.
I've never met anyone who prefers Vonovia etc. to housing cooperatives, or failing those small private landlords.
Private landlords have been my worse experience. Both in Germany and out of Germany. They ignore the law, they try to avoid fixing things, or they fix them badly.
My last rental with a big company was perfect: they even skipped asking me for rent deposit, my work contract was enough. Their maintenance team was full time dedicated to maintain the same buildings, so they knew perfectly how to repair everything, they were quick and diligent. They knew if they didn’t fix it right, they would have to do the work again.
Economies of scale is what allows these big companies to offer better prices and better service than private landlords.
Your anecdotes might be true, but your conclusion does not align with empirical reality. I've seen multiple separate German studies looking into renter satisfaction towards their apartment/landlord, and large companies consistently rank lowest, while private landlords are consistently rated much better (sometimes first place, sometimes after unions and municipal offerings).
It's great that your last landlord company treated you well! But that's not the experience most people in Germany have. For example, I personally know >10 individuals who rented from Vonovia and deeply regretted it, because there were so many issues that maintenance only covered up superficially while NEVER fixing the actual issue. Even for severe issues, they usually waited 3+ months before sending anyone out - in one case a wall showed obvious water damage & mold, and it took 4 months PLUS a letter from a lawyer before anyone followed up on their dozen reports!
> Economies of scale is what allows these big companies to offer better prices and better service than private landlords.
Sure, that's the theory. But when reality does not align with theory, something must be missing: your model only works as long as the market fulfills certain conditions, which the housing market in Germany (and likely most of the west) does not fulfill. If you haven't heard of these assumptions, I'd recommend looking into non-fungible & inelastic markets.
Because previous attempts at discussing such topics were usually met with hostility, I'll only go into more detail if you can bring empirical counter-evidence, or if you were sincerely unaware of the limits I've mentioned.
They're just blocked from OTA updates, you can flash whatever you want on the sdcard and then unlock OTA. (I did this yesterday with an aliexpress version x4)
You can. But if you build your own stuff, you can also easily lock yourself out. That whole mechanism that tells the software to look for a new bin file on the SD card and to use that to update is something that needs to be contained in your software. If you forget it, or you get it wrong, the thing will be bricked.
Because this kind of behavior was rampant in the past - where one company owned everything and could leverage it's size and influence to crush competition across distinct market spaces. It prevented other companies from operating in the same space, which led to stagnation, outrageous human exploitation, inequality, and ultimately the great depression.
It is now illegal as laws have been introduced with the aim to prevent this from happening again. The effectiveness of these laws, with regards to how well they fit the current era, is a different matter.
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