I'm not sure if the following has any point, really.
First, my father worked as an industrial mechanic in an amazon distribution hub. But he couldn't touch any of the automation. Amazon would bring in German contractors for months at a time to work on the robots, conveyor belts, automation hardware. They made 2.5-3x my father, had 6 weeks vacation, didn't pay for lodging in the US. To me, Amazon's idea of US jobs were the backbreaking labor 'pickers' and 'sorters'.
Second, half my professional career has been in office/factory configurations. Where the engineering offices are glued onto some factory. We're HEAVILY invested in automation. The factory workers are barebones crew designated by union minimums. We have a team of 2-5 people (really, 2 engineers, 3 technicians) who design, build, program, and maintain automated stations. Ranging from a robotic arm picking different components in the correct amounts and putting them in a box, heavy forklift-like robots moving product around, and robotic arms performing some manufacturing task.
What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
Why haven't we hired like 3 junior people to apprentice with the senior guys? They make machines that make money! The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
Maybe I'm wayyyy off the mark, but investing in "US Manufacturing" by importing automation (whether it's from the EU or Asia or anywhere else) probably won't end well and seems like marketing.
This is basically how the rest of the world feels with US tech giants.
It's not necessarily a bad thing if there's balance to it. Maybe it's OK if Germans are great at industrial automation and Americans are great at writing word processors. But I'm not sure there's a nice balance to it. Especially if you're in a developing country which is good at neither of those things.
This is such a misconception. There is no such thing as universal healthcare in Germany. Everyone pays for it as a mandatory percentage from their salaries every month as a health insurance fee. You can’t opt out from it and there is a very high barrier to switch to a private health insurance which can be cheaper if you’re young and healthy.
The fucked up part is that the higher your salary you end up paying more money to receive the same service as someone paying way less with a lowers salary. Think of it as one paying 5$ for Netflix and other paying 50$ to watch the same shows with no change in service offering.
Also, since covid times the health service has degraded significantly. You have to wait months to get an appointment for a specialist and also if you are single then you would be the one paying the most for it.
Further, from a 100k salary you take only 58k home (Single person that is Tax class I). Keep in mind 100k salary is not that common in Germany and only a handful of people earn that much. This site calculates the take home salary and taxes/social contributions. (https://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gross_net_calcu...)
You between 25-30 vacation days and work time can be flexible depending on where you work.
I would say Germany is a good place if you’re married and have kids. Then you get a lot of subsidies from the government and it’s relatively cheap to raise children in Germany. But if you’re young and single, you will be punished for that will be taxed the most.
That is not "fucked up" it is called the solidarity principle. You contribute when you have the capacity to contribute, and society protects you when you happen to need more than you can afford. Netflix is a consumer product, and health insurance is risk pooling. You're treating health insurance as if you're buying healthcare services. You're not. You're buying protection against an uncertain financial risk.
Also you forgot the contribution assessment ceiling at €69,750/year.
However, Germany has a legitimate problem when contribution levels, service quality, and access aren't aligned with what people feel they're paying. That is a different discussion which needs much more nuance and intimate knowledge of the German healthcare system.
It would be solidarity, if there was not a heavy anti-solidarity side to it. You can import millions into this system that dont pay a dime, do not contribute to it (in fact need subsidys to make a living wage) but also consume the services in equal amounts.
Please keep your dumb narrow political views to yourself. Just because someone tells and true fact about hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees that didn’t payed a single Euro into the health insurance system keeps on benefiting from it, doesn’t make them an AfD voter. That’s a sentiment shared by people from every political spectrum in Germany from Linke to AfD.
If you like it or not, it is anti-solidarity if you benefit from a system that you have never contributed. That is just free loading and one should be ashamed of it.
The fucked up part is the forced solidarity and high barrier to exit the so called solidarity principle. You need 77,400€ annual salary to switch to private insurance in 2026 and in 2027 it will be increased to 84,150€.
Of course it is forced, it has to be. What's the alternative? Make it voluntary, which immediately will lead to the total cost only being spread across sick people that definitely are going to cost the system money, resulting in an immediate increase in coverage cost, making it unavailable to a large part of the population? Just look at how well removal of the fee for non-coverage under the ACA worked in the US. That's just "let's take health insurance away from poor people" with more steps.
As the main reason for my expatriation out fo a similar system I'd happily stay and pay if the service was good and the providence state was not collapsing.
As it stands its just an extraction machine to the boomer benefit and it wont survive by the time i will need it
I agree with you. People would not complain and happily pay a premium for a really good service. But that’s not the case in Germany.
Younger generation would absolutely end up paying even more in the future to sustain the health costs of aging boomers.
Also the pension scheme in Germany for a lack of better word, is a ponzi scheme. Again, younger generation is paying to sustain the boomers and by the time those young people goes into retirement, they would barely get anything out of what they have paid.
That's what universal healthcare fundamentally is; everyone pays for it regardless of whether they use it or not, and regardless of the quality of service they receive in return.
What, did you think universal healthcare meant everything would be free? That's not possible; doctors don't work for free.
> I would say Germany is a good place if you’re married and have kids. Then you get a lot of subsidies from the government and it’s relatively cheap to raise children in Germany.
The number of newborns in germany last year was lowest since WW2. Seems like most germans don't agree with this assessment.
It’s not just financials. Young people just don’t want to have that responsibility and burden and restriction of freedom that comes with having children.
The German value seems very suspect. Glassdoor, for the same job role, says €53,000 to €80,000 per year which is probably lower than the truth (Glassdoor overweighs junior roles) but looks much more realistic to me.
You can't trust a quick google search nowadays for anything. I work in Germany. Any engineer making that much money has to be a senior at a higher position with loads of responsibilities (which means the average is nowhere near), plus living in a city that is considered expensive. Also, half that money goes to taxes. (someone has to pay for the universal healthcare afterall)
More precisely, given a salary of 85'000€, about 17'500 (20.5%) goes into income tax and about 16'800 (19.7%) goes into social contributions, though one can reduce the latter by taking a private health insurance*. The remaining 60% (Nettolohn) can be used to purchase things, usually paying 19% of VAT on them (though rent is exempt and food has a lower tax).
So, “half goes away in taxes” is an exaggeration, but I can totally sympathize with the feeling. Especially since the quality of healthcare is declining and the pay-as-you-go pension system is only built to benefit the current generation of pensioners.
* note that, if one is earning less than 77'000€ today or less than 84'150€ in 2027, one is prohibited to switch to a private insurance. One of the most regressive precepts of the German system.
I think you should also mention the ~17k Euro social contributions that your employer pays on top, which could otherwise be part of your salary. Then it is actually pretty much 50%
"visible" and "invisble" Brutto. The one is without "contributions from employer", which is a lie anyway since an employer makes a total comp perspective and he for sure includes his "contribution" into that
Correct: if one takes as basis not the Bruttolohn but the total cost for the company, the sum of taxes and mandatory social contribution can very well reach the half of the income. The method of splitting employer-side and employee-side deductions seems just there to hide this fact.
Most taxes are deducted when money is transferred between two parties. The view that one party pays it all (Brutto-Netto and VAT) seems wrong to me.
I anyway doubt that the wages would be at the same standard if there wouldn't be any deductions (from the beginning). Wages in expensive cities are higher because the cost of living must be matched. Similarly salary negotiations account for deductions. Nobody wants a job that doesn't pay the bills.
Same in Denmark, and it really boils my piss. DR (Danmarks Radio) is 80% trash. If I was dictator in Denmark I would abolish it on the spot. I won't deny that DR produces things that are not trash or only mildly trash, but I have no interest in it. People who want it can fund it themselves. State financed reality TV is an abomination.
I think it is important to be (at least a bit) precise in this debate.
I dislike the wording "social contribution", as these are (mandatory) insurances that benefit the insured person in case of sickness, retirement, loss of employment, etc. Discussion about the cost efficiency and fairness of the system are warranted, of course. Anyway, the current generation of retirees benefit greatly from it, so for them at least it was worth paying.
Since you are accounting all those taxes, including the VAT on the citizen's side, companies only pay the Arbeitgeberanteil (you didn't mention) and the taxes on profit?
>One of the most regressive precepts of the German system.
If you mean the existence of two-tier private/public insurance, yes. The two-tier system was abolished in most of Europe for good reason. Either they abolished substitutive private insurance, restricted it, or transformed private insurers into regulated providers of universal basic coverage, e.g. very recently in the Netherlands.
Having worked in another EU country, I can attest that I paid as much as 56% in taxes, so I believe a guy who says that he works in Germany and pays half in taxes. If you have other data, you are welcome to present it.
If you make 90k in Germany, you pay around 36k to mandatory (varying degrees) insurance/pension plus taxes if you're single. About 19.5k of that are actual taxes. If you're married/have children that total can drop to ~30k and will include health insurance for your entire family unit.
I just gave you the actual numbers. The same numbers you will quickly get by using any of the many available net income calculators for Germany[0].
If you have a different idea, feel free to break the 90k down yourself. Don't lazily push the work on other people, asking them to puzzle together where some neglected Wikipedia articles' table of magic numbers actually comes from. Hint: It's a number made up by an interest group called the "German Taxpayers Federation", representing mostly entrepreneurs and wealthy taxpayers. The number being opaque is intentional, because its purpose is to mislead and support their advocacy for tax cuts.
But by all means, don't let me stand in the way of your right to blindly believe whatever someone else wants you to. God forbid we input a five digit number into a calculator.
What will it take? A notarially certified copy of tax returns mailed to your address?
I can spend that in whichever tax jurisdiction I want and the VAT rate might be whatever depending on what one buys. If you want to go that route you'd then also have to adjust for cost/quality of living to stay intellectually honest, which means you'd then have to come up with some statistical consumer basket. It's a stupid idea to even start down that route in what fits into HN comments.
You however have to admire getting things that wrong in the same paragraph that tells one to not trust what one sees in Google searches. Though I suppose HN comments would show in Google searches... maybe their humor just went over my head.
Government spending as a % of GDP in Germany is exactly 50%. So definitionally half of all money goes to taxes.
Are you counting in VAT on everything OP spends that money on? Are you counting capital gains taxes OP pays when investing that money? Are you counting the taxes paid by the employer for his role (which defacto come out of his pay, just before he gets it)? The property taxes he pays to live?
The employer doesn’t look at the employees salary as the only cost. Employers look at things rationally, using the all-in cost to employ someone (the combined total of all salary and government mandated taxes and benefits contributions). In many European countries this is 2X the persons salary or more.
That "health care argument" is getting a bit tiring tbh. The US government spends much more than any European country per capita on health care (the US system is simply less efficient), and the chunk of your wage that goes into your health insurance isn't a tax either.
US consumers also have high standards for healthcare.
I interact with a lot of engineers moving from Europe and US and it’s never how US politics portray it. German friends talk about paying for private insurance because the public one is so bad.
Complaining about the service quality for public health insurance customers in Germany is pretty much the definition of "first world problem" though. FWIW I never switched over to private insurance even though my income would allow it, also once you get above a certain age you can't switch back and that's when the private insurers really start to rip you off ;)
And despite that they are willing to pay, because if you are out of poverty your health is a high priority!
So yes, Americans love consuming healthcare. Is there any category they aren’t a high consumer of? You can’t measure efficiency only looking at the input side.
I think the main reason why high income Germans switch to private health insurance is less about service quality, but because they may actually pay less than public insurance (at least until they get near pension age). Can't talk for US citizens of course.
Maybe fully read the comment I'm responding to? The implication is that European countries (and especially Germany) spend an extraordinary amount of tax money on health care and that's why taxes are so high. This is basically wrong from start to finish. You also don't pay half of your wage in taxes in Germany. The chunk that's removed from your gross wage before pay out includes your mandatory employee insurances (health-, pension- and unemployment-insurances), and that's how you end up "losing" about 30% to 45% of your gross salary before pay out (the actual "tax part" is somewhere between 10 and 25% depending on income, marriage status etc...)
It’s really not a disputed fact at all that engineering jobs in the US pay more than in Europe, but that European jobs have more benefits such as vacation and social security, and US generally has higher cost of living.
I am surprised that this suddenly is a “based on what data?” discussion.
It has always been an apples / oranges comparison.
The universal healthcare is hard to quantify - because most decent companies include health insurance in the US and the quality of the public healthcare provision in Europe can be quite patchy (i.e. location-dependent)
Remember that you are comparing gross salaries too, and taxes are much higher in Germany so the engineer ends up with much less take-home pay.
That makes it easier to quantify. If I need to work a decent job at a decent company to have good healthcare, then a large number of people don't have good healthcare.
This is not acceptable. Healthcare should be a basic right, and a lot of European countries treat it as such (e.g. in Germany, everyone is insured, no matter their employment status, and its mandatory and equal for everyone regardless of their job).
In theory yes, but they're really running the German healthcare system into the ground. Many doctors leave the country after graduating from University. Doctors cannot freely open a practice, they have to bend over for some central commie committee. And they will only receive a fixed amount of pay per quarter per patient depending on the disease. And of they have "too many" patients, at some point they have to treat them for free (payment is limited).
The whole thing is a scam run by our politicians, who of course are all private insured.
I hate to break it to you, healthcare in the US is extremely patchy and location dependent.
I can also tell you working in tech for a very long time, if you aren’t working for a Silicon Valley company you might have health insurance options, but that doesn’t mean they’re any good. Especially if you have a preexisting condition.
> Health insurance companies cannot refuse coverage or charge you more just because you have a “pre-existing condition” — that is, a health problem you had before the date that new health coverage starts.
>Health insurers can no longer charge more or deny coverage to you or your child because of a pre-existing health condition like asthma, diabetes, or cancer, as well as pregnancy.
>They cannot limit benefits for that condition either. Once you have insurance, they can't refuse to cover treatment for your pre-existing condition.
This has been in effect since 2014 due to the Affordable Care Act.
> The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
These are shitty job tbh. Friend of a friend worked on designing and testing windscreen wiper motors in Poland. Company did a round of layoffs and there are zero jobs in the country. There is one job in US - nobody will sponsor a visa. He doesn't know the language to work in Asia.
>What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
A lifetime of working in mission critical environments taught me one thing. When people leave, nothing happens. People come and go, and everyone is replaceable, even those who believe the company will fail without them. Most departures barely make a ripple. With today's advances in technology, it's only becoming more likely that none of us will be needed down the road.
The US government spends $1.4T on education. They already invest more than anyone else. That spending may not be productive but no one can credibly say the US hasn't spent enough money on education.
"Existing investors including Sequoia, Lightspeed, Greenfield, Kindred, Lingotto and Promus Ventures participated alongside new backers Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective."
You move to USA from a 3rd world country, take money from the Americans, Arabs and the Chinese, hire bunch of Israeli, Pakistani, Canadians, Romanians and Russian engineers and and you become an American success story.
You found a robotics company in Germany and you instantly fail the purity test, you are American company if you took too much US money, you are actually Polish if you hired too many Polish engineers etc.
Yeah well HN is predominantly for and by American audiences I think and that already explains a lot of the attitude towards non-USA. A lot of Americans seem to think they are the main character in every story, and even if they are not, they try their best to somehow alter the narrative until they are.
The CEO did move to the US “to focus on the fastest growing market”. Usually that means that they start building an engineering org there and embracing a more US working culture.
Feels like eventually this company ends up being based there and no longer an “EU” company.
To be fair, it all depends on the definition you choose. It's often useless to have a general definition. If you try really hard you can claim that Apple is an Irish company or Chinese company. I always buy my MacBooks From Ireland and I can track it arriving from China.
It's actually not just funneling money if the company gives jobs to people in the country as well, paid with salary of the product sold worldwide. Everyone knows US is where business is done, but it's not like money stays there and never leaves the country. It would make no sense at all if that was the case.
And companies here (in eu) would immediately create a competitor. As long as we both "eat" we're friends.
No need to be defensive. It's simply true, and I say that as a European. The money and attitude required for it is just not present in Europe. German money is much more conservative and risk averse. So the funding will have to be from the US. It's perfectly justified to roll one's eyes when these cases are presented as if Europe could produce these companies by itself.
I agree and I am not against taking US money at all. People want to build things and people with money who want to partner with people who want to build things are usually in USA. US has an amazing business and entrepreneurship culture and the capital.
My view as well, as an European. For decades already I've been working for US companies remotely; and not for the love of the people for sure. But I do love their businesses' unquenchable thirst for new shiny toys. Always pumping money into innovation.
I don't mean startups here, I mainly mean established ones.
Talking with European-funded companies, there is usually much less investment into tech. Older tech, cheaper tech, less talent, random outdated practices. Literally next door they've got an US investor or even a big US customer and it's like night and day.
IDK why all these replies are assuming OP was insinuating some negative judgement. To me, it's interesting that US investors are apparently interested in this EU firm that is pursuing the US market, despite no shortage of US startups in the same space.
Isn't the big money always American (in startups in the US and Europe)? What example do you have in mind? I don't mean the human-scale money risked by some immigrant, I mean the big money.
No, not really. That's info the OP could easily Google. The answer to their actual question can only be provided by someone with inside knowledge or access to paywalled trade publications.
I'm not familiar with German law / investing, but if they're public here in the US, they have to disclose amounts to investors. If they're not on the stock market, then yeah, unless German law mandates it, we may never know.
It's a startup, not a public company. I didn't know what you think your assumptions based on the US are bringing to the conversation. Not Posting is Always an Option.
You're misunderstanding: the companies doing the investing, if they're publicly traded companies HAVE to report these sorts of things in their finance reports. This is why when these companies buy out other companies they make announcements about amounts, and if they've sold off anything, this, that and the third.
When I worked for KeyW Corporation I had shares with the company, and every time they did anything they made announcements, like if they acquired someone. I had left the company and during my leave Jacobs Engineering bought out KeyW, sold off some of their own business endeavours and paid off all of KeyW's debt and shifted their focus towards government contracting and less so in oil infrastrcuture (if I remember correctly, Jacobs is a big company). This was all publicly announced.
The startup doesn't need to disclose anything, but if a public company invested in them, they will eventually have to do a quarterly report and disclose it.
The risk of having primarily foreign, especially American, investors is that the company will leave the EU. Like what we just saw happen with Heart Aerospace [1]. EU needs its own investors.
Money is effectively global these days. A lot of the money in the AI bubble is from all over the place, including Saudi funds and the ubiquitous Softbank.
It matters more where the money goes, in this case into European innovation.
People demanding the perfect isolated national champion that takes no foreign money, no foreign workers, no foreign inputs, and uses no foreign services are going to be disappointed.
What does "from USA" actually mean? Say I'm a European investor, I've invested my European-earned salary into a company with their HQ in Europe, registered in Delaware. Lets say that money 10x, is that money "from Europe" or "from USA"? Does the paying user-base geolocation matter or what is it that matters to you here, where the business is registered, actually located or something else?
And, secondly maybe more important question: Who cares? As long as the business doesn't host their data in the land of the non-free, aren't affected by the whims of the current Tsar and can't be put offline by the flick of a switch, I don't really mind if the money comes from Australia, South Africa or India.
Why not? Huge companies like Schlumberger work on a similar model. I mean these are not AI businesses (yet) but commercially the model is the same: develop gear in house and rent it out together with the specialists who operate it.
In practice, what this means is that a relatively immature startup takes on immense technological risk by having to invest in the capex and deploy a solution, all while being at the mercy of their customers to give them enough time and access to get the solution to any reasonable production standard. Usually robotics companies never get to that mark.
I believe theres on the order of 100s of millions in losses across a number of robotics companies that have attempted this in the last 10 years.
Most AI is not subscription but pay-per-use (I guess for an industrial robot that would mean pay per action the robot does), and that is a big part of why everybody piles into AI.
AI as a service is hugely successful, at least on the stockmarket.
It makes more sense for complicated products, and things where any one user's demand is uneven. Industrial "plant" construction equipment is often leased for similar reasons.
Huh? I thought that was their entire selling point. That you can have a factory that needs retooling and instead of having to carefully plan and buy robots yourself, you can hire these guys instead.
I don't know enough about airline finance to understand if this is a simplification or not. Are engine users really billed by the kilonewton-hour or by something simpler like a service hour? It seems like kN-h would be a hard thing to meter to everyone's satisfaction and some simpler proxy would do just as well.
"Under TotalCare, an airline pays Rolls-Royce a fixed rate per engine flying hour." [0] Not quite kN-h indeed. But the idea is similar (and more simple to implement, I suppose): you don't really own the engine, you pay for what you use.
I wouldn't consider that to be not owning the engine. It seems to me that the airline does own the plane and the engines on it, and this is more of a usage-based support/maintenance/repair subscription service provided by the engine manufacturer. If you suddenly didn't want it for some reason, I don't think RR could or would force you to take off the engines and ship it back to them. They just wouldn't provide you with the support and service that you stopped paying for.
In the end the result is pretty similar as these engines are useless without regular maintenance and the engine manufacturer likely does not give the knowledge away to do it without them.
As far as I know they sell the engines at a loss or breakeven but make money on the service later.
Depending on the task, a human doing it may be highly discouraged by H&S regulations, or the insurer.
Even on individual small building sites in France I'm now seeing mini-diggers instead of human shoveling, everywhere, or tile elevators (for a 3 man roofing team!) instead of the stereotypical exploited immigrant manual labourer. These are justified by insurers quoting such a high price for covering the expected accident and long term health costs of human shoveling or tile carrying to roofs that buying the machines is cheaper.
If you can get him in time, plus are willing to risk unknown quality of his work. Reliable professionals tend to be booked long in advance, at least where I live.
A couple decades ago, in Brazil, the parking lot used next to a popular Microsoft training center was called South Park. The contact e-mail was "cartman@southpark.com.br".
robotics-as-a-service makes the upfront cost easier, but downtime is still the factory's problem. i'd be more interested in the service contract and recovery time than the valuation.
I'm not sure if I would consider tech demos like this state of the art. They look impressive and they do show promise but there's a huge gap between an impressive demo and a usable product. This goes for Google Gemini as well.
The link looks great, but was hoping for more research-oriented details. This honestly looks more like an advertisement, which doesn't tell me much about how progress is going.
Two aspects: industry & research (worked in both).
Research is using a lot of VLM (or whatever Jim Fan decided to call them this year) when it comes to manipulation (robot arm). For navigation it is still a little mixed bag, best to see self driving advancement for that. On the control side (cool jumping humanoid) it's a mixture of RL/IL and traditional control(MPC) and running a slow ass VLM/LLM is not an option.
SOTA is hard to say in the sense that there's just so much variation to the task you want to measure. This can be considered SOTA in one aspect https://youtu.be/3aQWvdCac9o As it's an robot that can lift a heavy unknown object without information about it, RL trained in simulation, but at the same time trained eye will see that the task is made simple by fridge being put on a pallet making the bottom of it exposed for grabbing. On the other hand you have PI (Chelsea Finn / Sergey Levine) https://youtu.be/cRZNwgvcWUg that can do nothing of the thing above but can cook food and fold shirts. Deformable objects and tools interaction is hard so their demo is more focused on understanding and interacting with the world compared to the fine motion like the Boston dynamics one. The latter is also teleoperated, and teleoperation tend to look good but have pretty sad deployment success %
Industry is... Depends on startup vs established. VLA/LLM is flashy but really even 95% success rate is not enough for factory/logistics automation if the failure is unrecoverable, and VLM/LLM is far, faaaaaaaaaaaar from that success rate. In controlled settings traditional pipeline of detection + motion planning often outperform VLM/LLM hybrid models by a mile. Established ones have run humanleess logistic centers for many years now and they're seldom VLA stuff, although there is an interest in using it for the 5% failure cases. But they're not interested in SOTA.
Even if VLA reaches 100% success rate it still isn't viable. No factory operator wants a cloud hosted model in the critical path. And nobody is (yet) building a server rack that can be air gapped in the factory to run VLA, and these models don't run on a Mac Mini. Probably an opportunity for something like Oxide to pick up, but they have more profitable segments to go after.
I remember few years ago couple of German fintech startups reached more than 1B$ valuation. Had it been the case in US, those startups would have gone IPOs and started expanding worldwide.
However, raising capital in Europe/Germany is so hard. Still majority of the Germans don’t invest their money and just let it depreciate in their savings accounts. Because of that most startups are funded by US venture capitalists. Hope this one would be able to sustain the valuation
> Still majority of the Germans don’t invest their money and just let it depreciate in their savings accounts
Do you have a source on this? I live in Germany and most people I know either invest into stocks (safe, boring ones), invest into a house/apartment/land or similar, or are too broke to even save anything at all (most people).
You must be interacting with young people because they have started investing after Covid with neobrokers. But the real wealth is with boomer generation and they just let it rot in savings accounts. Maybe things would change once the wealth transfer from boomers to millennials happens
What was that US robotics startup that got tons of press like a decade ago for their "human safe" cobot you were supposed to be able to program by just dragging its arm through the motions? It had a goofy LCD face, I want to say the co. was called US Robotics or something but changed their name, all I’m finding is the modem company though.
The comments here are just another reminder of how US-centric HN has become. Whenever there's positive news from Germany or elsewhere in Europe, people are quick to dismiss it. But the moment there's negative news, everyone jumps on the bandwagon to bash it.
There was an interesting study showing that while social mobility is generally greater in Europe than in the US, the European tendency to underestimate vs American to overestimate it, results in broad agreement that social mobility is in fact greater in the US.
Poking holes in every new idea is a pan-European pastime - it's how people in this region of the world managed to survive despite exhausting its resources.
Good thing then that the chancellor cannot just introduce laws in Germany then. One of the perks of having actual democratic institutions that aren’t just for show.
In Germany chancellor is a character who holds a parliamentary majority, and they creativity can and do introduce laws against the will of the majority of German voters.
Rarely the chancellor’s party holds the absolute majority so it’s not as simple as in countries with a the-winner-takes-it-all system.
Mostly there are coalitions that prevent too bad laws.
Sometimes that can also block good ones. Thanks FDP. I hope you are gone for good from any government for being one of the true ideology driven parties in Germany.
Nothing about Europe's policy has been realistic for decades now. The whole of Europe is a vassal of the US and exists at the mercy of the Americans. If they withdraw support Europe is no longer viable.
If Europe was not a vassal of the US why do we refuse to stand on our own legs? Why is almost every decision of ours predicated on US participation? Europe will give guarantees to Ukraine but only if USA puts boots on the ground. Europe will secure the Hormuz straight but only once USA has secured it. It's pathetic and embarrassing.
Europe shut down more than 20 Diesel refineries in the past 20 years and then we cry that Diesel is too expensive and blame the Americans. Pathetic.
Our industrial and energy policy is that we will become completely dependent on the Middle East, US, Russia and China so we have absolutely no autonomy and no viability. Embarrassing. Pathetic. Shameful.
> Our industrial and energy policy is that we will become completely dependent on the Middle East, US, Russia and China so we have absolutely no autonomy and no viability. Embarrassing. Pathetic. Shameful.
Germany shutting down nuclear and coal powered plants was their own decision.
I kind of agree with your evaluation, but confusingly it seems like they want it like that (?)
Europe destroyed domestic energy production and oil and gas extraction in order to make itself entirely dependent first on Russia, then on the Middle East for energy. It was not the Jews or the Americans that forced us to do that. It was our politicians that we elected that did that. And for what? How does it benefit us? Now everyone is crying about insane fossil fuel prices after our policy for more than a decade was to make fossil fuel non-viable. Pathetic.
> It was not the Jews or the Americans that forced us to do that.
The americans kind of forced you off the russian gas though
> Now everyone is crying about insane fossil fuel prices after our policy for more than a decade was to make fossil fuel non-viable. Pathetic.
I think its not only fossil fuel. Germany's decision to shut down nuclear power plants (while also trying to get to net zero C02 emissions) is outright suicidal imo.
If Europe did not shut down domestic energy production and oil and gas extraction in order to buy oil and gas from Russia then oil and gas would be a lot cheaper today.
Blaming the Americans for what we did to ourselves is insane and rooted in deep ignorance of what actually happened in Europe in the past two decades.
But yet again this just shows how totally dependent we in Europe are on Americans for everything. Pathetic.
Coming right up: Belgian Hybrid shower curtain and defense startup Aperture Science raises 780M Euros, while biotech unicorn Umbrella in on the verge of coming out of stealth and releasing a vaccine for cancer.
I just found out about them. To me it seems their core product is "boring" industrial robots with some AI fluff on top, which imho is smart because you can capaitalize on the hype without having it be pivotal to their entire business model. What I find interesting is the robot-as-a-service model.
Definitely not.
I have laundry that I hang. Everything else goes unfolded into sorted bins.
Of course it drives my wife crazy, and if she takes my laundry out of the dryer, she folds it. What drives her more crazy is that I proceed to just dump it in the bins.
If it would work, it would be mildly useful. Actually, if it would work, that would be more exciting by itself than it would be useful.
But it doesn’t, really.
I assume you got a spouse or parent do all the laundry for you? I’m not sure you realize how spoiled you sound.
Seriously a laundry folding robot excites me much more than a CLI that can generate code. I enjoy generating code myself! I don’t enjoy laundry. Total killer app.
At the risk of making yet another wrong assumption, that sounds like you don’t have a family?
Fwiw laundry takes a pretty significant chunk out of my weekend. I wouldn't spend “thousands of dollars” to reduce it but at around the price of a new phone I’m totally in the market.
I understand why humans get fixated on the nominal threshold of a large, round number like $1B.
But the thing about private market valuations is that you can't know if investors are right ex ante, so it's helpful to discount.
A $1B valuation sort of just means you now effectively "owe it" to shareholders, and you're now 100% incentivized to deliver that to them in some form, instead of being fully incentivized to deliver on your true vision to your customer.
When done well, private diligence can help uncover blind spots and fund company growth in key areas at the service of that true vision.
When done poorly because of FOMO over AI, robotics, or the latest hype, it can turn into preemptive enshittification.
True. But, had they succeeded at conquering the world, they might have given their supporters the status of supreme human beings, at least on paper. It's good it didn't work out that time, but, it seems, some people want to try a variation of it again to see if it sticks.
No, we're quite happy doing that. However on behalf of the German people I wish to thank everyone involved for the thoughtful suggestions and intelligent way to approach a possibly interesting topic. I can tell your hearts and minds are in the right place.
I don't think it is a uniquely German thing to trust the old institutions - which I think is what allowed Wirecard to do wire fraud. I'd say all of Western Europe is rather naive to Kremlin's shenanigans.
First, my father worked as an industrial mechanic in an amazon distribution hub. But he couldn't touch any of the automation. Amazon would bring in German contractors for months at a time to work on the robots, conveyor belts, automation hardware. They made 2.5-3x my father, had 6 weeks vacation, didn't pay for lodging in the US. To me, Amazon's idea of US jobs were the backbreaking labor 'pickers' and 'sorters'.
Second, half my professional career has been in office/factory configurations. Where the engineering offices are glued onto some factory. We're HEAVILY invested in automation. The factory workers are barebones crew designated by union minimums. We have a team of 2-5 people (really, 2 engineers, 3 technicians) who design, build, program, and maintain automated stations. Ranging from a robotic arm picking different components in the correct amounts and putting them in a box, heavy forklift-like robots moving product around, and robotic arms performing some manufacturing task.
What happens when those 2 engineers get sick? or retire? One guy who built half the factory is in his 50s. the line could go down with no backup.
Why haven't we hired like 3 junior people to apprentice with the senior guys? They make machines that make money! The new investment in people is happening in Germany, Poland, Scandinavia
Maybe I'm wayyyy off the mark, but investing in "US Manufacturing" by importing automation (whether it's from the EU or Asia or anywhere else) probably won't end well and seems like marketing.
It's not necessarily a bad thing if there's balance to it. Maybe it's OK if Germans are great at industrial automation and Americans are great at writing word processors. But I'm not sure there's a nice balance to it. Especially if you're in a developing country which is good at neither of those things.
They probably just used the Germans because they are cheaper.
And the German has universal healthcare, clocks out at 5 and can’t be bothered, and gets real vacation time.
https://www.salaryexpert.com/salary/job/automation-engineer/
The fucked up part is that the higher your salary you end up paying more money to receive the same service as someone paying way less with a lowers salary. Think of it as one paying 5$ for Netflix and other paying 50$ to watch the same shows with no change in service offering.
Also, since covid times the health service has degraded significantly. You have to wait months to get an appointment for a specialist and also if you are single then you would be the one paying the most for it.
Further, from a 100k salary you take only 58k home (Single person that is Tax class I). Keep in mind 100k salary is not that common in Germany and only a handful of people earn that much. This site calculates the take home salary and taxes/social contributions. (https://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gross_net_calcu...)
You between 25-30 vacation days and work time can be flexible depending on where you work.
I would say Germany is a good place if you’re married and have kids. Then you get a lot of subsidies from the government and it’s relatively cheap to raise children in Germany. But if you’re young and single, you will be punished for that will be taxed the most.
Also you forgot the contribution assessment ceiling at €69,750/year.
However, Germany has a legitimate problem when contribution levels, service quality, and access aren't aligned with what people feel they're paying. That is a different discussion which needs much more nuance and intimate knowledge of the German healthcare system.
If you like it or not, it is anti-solidarity if you benefit from a system that you have never contributed. That is just free loading and one should be ashamed of it.
Of course it is forced, it has to be. What's the alternative? Make it voluntary, which immediately will lead to the total cost only being spread across sick people that definitely are going to cost the system money, resulting in an immediate increase in coverage cost, making it unavailable to a large part of the population? Just look at how well removal of the fee for non-coverage under the ACA worked in the US. That's just "let's take health insurance away from poor people" with more steps.
As it stands its just an extraction machine to the boomer benefit and it wont survive by the time i will need it
Younger generation would absolutely end up paying even more in the future to sustain the health costs of aging boomers.
Also the pension scheme in Germany for a lack of better word, is a ponzi scheme. Again, younger generation is paying to sustain the boomers and by the time those young people goes into retirement, they would barely get anything out of what they have paid.
What, did you think universal healthcare meant everything would be free? That's not possible; doctors don't work for free.
This is the part that makes it universal.
The number of newborns in germany last year was lowest since WW2. Seems like most germans don't agree with this assessment.
https://web.arbeitsagentur.de/entgeltatlas/beruf/59351
outside germany the `,` reads as thousands-separator. may I offer you a `.` in exchange?
also that's gross, not net (Brutto/Netto) which is _painfully_ lower.
That is a misguided simplification. Please correct this, before anyone starts to believe it for real.
So, “half goes away in taxes” is an exaggeration, but I can totally sympathize with the feeling. Especially since the quality of healthcare is declining and the pay-as-you-go pension system is only built to benefit the current generation of pensioners.
* note that, if one is earning less than 77'000€ today or less than 84'150€ in 2027, one is prohibited to switch to a private insurance. One of the most regressive precepts of the German system.
"visible" and "invisble" Brutto. The one is without "contributions from employer", which is a lie anyway since an employer makes a total comp perspective and he for sure includes his "contribution" into that
I anyway doubt that the wages would be at the same standard if there wouldn't be any deductions (from the beginning). Wages in expensive cities are higher because the cost of living must be matched. Similarly salary negotiations account for deductions. Nobody wants a job that doesn't pay the bills.
I think it is important to be (at least a bit) precise in this debate.
I dislike the wording "social contribution", as these are (mandatory) insurances that benefit the insured person in case of sickness, retirement, loss of employment, etc. Discussion about the cost efficiency and fairness of the system are warranted, of course. Anyway, the current generation of retirees benefit greatly from it, so for them at least it was worth paying.
Since you are accounting all those taxes, including the VAT on the citizen's side, companies only pay the Arbeitgeberanteil (you didn't mention) and the taxes on profit?
If you mean the existence of two-tier private/public insurance, yes. The two-tier system was abolished in most of Europe for good reason. Either they abolished substitutive private insurance, restricted it, or transformed private insurers into regulated providers of universal basic coverage, e.g. very recently in the Netherlands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Freedom_Day
If you have a different idea, feel free to break the 90k down yourself. Don't lazily push the work on other people, asking them to puzzle together where some neglected Wikipedia articles' table of magic numbers actually comes from. Hint: It's a number made up by an interest group called the "German Taxpayers Federation", representing mostly entrepreneurs and wealthy taxpayers. The number being opaque is intentional, because its purpose is to mislead and support their advocacy for tax cuts.
But by all means, don't let me stand in the way of your right to blindly believe whatever someone else wants you to. God forbid we input a five digit number into a calculator.
What will it take? A notarially certified copy of tax returns mailed to your address?
[0] First Google result: https://www.brutto-netto-rechner.info/gehalt/gross_net_calcu...
Government spending as a % of GDP in Germany is exactly 50%. So definitionally half of all money goes to taxes.
Are you counting in VAT on everything OP spends that money on? Are you counting capital gains taxes OP pays when investing that money? Are you counting the taxes paid by the employer for his role (which defacto come out of his pay, just before he gets it)? The property taxes he pays to live?
The employer doesn’t look at the employees salary as the only cost. Employers look at things rationally, using the all-in cost to employ someone (the combined total of all salary and government mandated taxes and benefits contributions). In many European countries this is 2X the persons salary or more.
I interact with a lot of engineers moving from Europe and US and it’s never how US politics portray it. German friends talk about paying for private insurance because the public one is so bad.
So yes, Americans love consuming healthcare. Is there any category they aren’t a high consumer of? You can’t measure efficiency only looking at the input side.
I am surprised that this suddenly is a “based on what data?” discussion.
It has always been an apples / oranges comparison.
If it's true it should be trivial to provide said evidence.
The universal healthcare is hard to quantify - because most decent companies include health insurance in the US and the quality of the public healthcare provision in Europe can be quite patchy (i.e. location-dependent)
Remember that you are comparing gross salaries too, and taxes are much higher in Germany so the engineer ends up with much less take-home pay.
This is not acceptable. Healthcare should be a basic right, and a lot of European countries treat it as such (e.g. in Germany, everyone is insured, no matter their employment status, and its mandatory and equal for everyone regardless of their job).
People also can't be fired for being sick.
The whole thing is a scam run by our politicians, who of course are all private insured.
I can also tell you working in tech for a very long time, if you aren’t working for a Silicon Valley company you might have health insurance options, but that doesn’t mean they’re any good. Especially if you have a preexisting condition.
I'd love to hear about people working in 'tech' who don't have decent health insurance options. If that's you, where do you work and what do you do?
> preexisting condition
Not with ACA compliant plans
What does this mean?
https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/pre-existing-conditions/
https://www.hhs.gov/healthcare/about-the-aca/pre-existing-co...
> Health insurance companies cannot refuse coverage or charge you more just because you have a “pre-existing condition” — that is, a health problem you had before the date that new health coverage starts.
>Health insurers can no longer charge more or deny coverage to you or your child because of a pre-existing health condition like asthma, diabetes, or cancer, as well as pregnancy.
>They cannot limit benefits for that condition either. Once you have insurance, they can't refuse to cover treatment for your pre-existing condition.
This has been in effect since 2014 due to the Affordable Care Act.
And how much they lie, too. After all Trump promised to bring jobs to the USA. Well, he lied. And so did Amazon etc...
These are shitty job tbh. Friend of a friend worked on designing and testing windscreen wiper motors in Poland. Company did a round of layoffs and there are zero jobs in the country. There is one job in US - nobody will sponsor a visa. He doesn't know the language to work in Asia.
He switched to software.
A lifetime of working in mission critical environments taught me one thing. When people leave, nothing happens. People come and go, and everyone is replaceable, even those who believe the company will fail without them. Most departures barely make a ripple. With today's advances in technology, it's only becoming more likely that none of us will be needed down the road.
What share of the investor money is from USA?
Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vHfbUIQeW_A
You move to USA from a 3rd world country, take money from the Americans, Arabs and the Chinese, hire bunch of Israeli, Pakistani, Canadians, Romanians and Russian engineers and and you become an American success story.
You found a robotics company in Germany and you instantly fail the purity test, you are American company if you took too much US money, you are actually Polish if you hired too many Polish engineers etc.
It's just weird attitude.
Feels like eventually this company ends up being based there and no longer an “EU” company.
As long as there is no investors from Europe, these startups will just be a money funnel to America.
And companies here (in eu) would immediately create a competitor. As long as we both "eat" we're friends.
Note specifically, my emphasis.
"alongside new backers Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective"
I don't mean startups here, I mainly mean established ones.
Talking with European-funded companies, there is usually much less investment into tech. Older tech, cheaper tech, less talent, random outdated practices. Literally next door they've got an US investor or even a big US customer and it's like night and day.
Don't know about Lingotto. Looks Italian.
Cherry Ventures is the only German investor. ETC is EU.
When I worked for KeyW Corporation I had shares with the company, and every time they did anything they made announcements, like if they acquired someone. I had left the company and during my leave Jacobs Engineering bought out KeyW, sold off some of their own business endeavours and paid off all of KeyW's debt and shifted their focus towards government contracting and less so in oil infrastrcuture (if I remember correctly, Jacobs is a big company). This was all publicly announced.
The startup doesn't need to disclose anything, but if a public company invested in them, they will eventually have to do a quarterly report and disclose it.
I read it as confirmation that there is apparently no shortage of investor money in Europe, since US investors are willing and able to invest here.
[1] https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-relo...
I read it as confirmation that there is apparently no shortage of investor money in Europe, since US investors are willing and able to invest here.
It matters more where the money goes, in this case into European innovation.
People demanding the perfect isolated national champion that takes no foreign money, no foreign workers, no foreign inputs, and uses no foreign services are going to be disappointed.
And, secondly maybe more important question: Who cares? As long as the business doesn't host their data in the land of the non-free, aren't affected by the whims of the current Tsar and can't be put offline by the flick of a switch, I don't really mind if the money comes from Australia, South Africa or India.
Oof. Amazed that venture-backed robotics companies are still interested in making this work.
I believe theres on the order of 100s of millions in losses across a number of robotics companies that have attempted this in the last 10 years.
It makes more sense for complicated products, and things where any one user's demand is uneven. Industrial "plant" construction equipment is often leased for similar reasons.
Airplane engine manufacturers retain ownership of their engines, and sell kilonewton-hours to airlines.
[0] https://www.meritshot.com/rolls-royce-case-study
EDIT: wording
As far as I know they sell the engines at a loss or breakeven but make money on the service later.
Even on individual small building sites in France I'm now seeing mini-diggers instead of human shoveling, everywhere, or tile elevators (for a 3 man roofing team!) instead of the stereotypical exploited immigrant manual labourer. These are justified by insurers quoting such a high price for covering the expected accident and long term health costs of human shoveling or tile carrying to roofs that buying the machines is cheaper.
Edit : typo
this one doesn't sound that evil though? Just a simple portmanteau that may not sound as stupid in German?
Eyerolling to anyone with half a brain.
But maybe most people don't have half a brain.
https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/
And not sure what RobCo is doing exactly, but LLMs are probably part of it as well.
https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen-robotsuite
https://drivingbench.com/
The link looks great, but was hoping for more research-oriented details. This honestly looks more like an advertisement, which doesn't tell me much about how progress is going.
Research is using a lot of VLM (or whatever Jim Fan decided to call them this year) when it comes to manipulation (robot arm). For navigation it is still a little mixed bag, best to see self driving advancement for that. On the control side (cool jumping humanoid) it's a mixture of RL/IL and traditional control(MPC) and running a slow ass VLM/LLM is not an option.
SOTA is hard to say in the sense that there's just so much variation to the task you want to measure. This can be considered SOTA in one aspect https://youtu.be/3aQWvdCac9o As it's an robot that can lift a heavy unknown object without information about it, RL trained in simulation, but at the same time trained eye will see that the task is made simple by fridge being put on a pallet making the bottom of it exposed for grabbing. On the other hand you have PI (Chelsea Finn / Sergey Levine) https://youtu.be/cRZNwgvcWUg that can do nothing of the thing above but can cook food and fold shirts. Deformable objects and tools interaction is hard so their demo is more focused on understanding and interacting with the world compared to the fine motion like the Boston dynamics one. The latter is also teleoperated, and teleoperation tend to look good but have pretty sad deployment success %
Industry is... Depends on startup vs established. VLA/LLM is flashy but really even 95% success rate is not enough for factory/logistics automation if the failure is unrecoverable, and VLM/LLM is far, faaaaaaaaaaaar from that success rate. In controlled settings traditional pipeline of detection + motion planning often outperform VLM/LLM hybrid models by a mile. Established ones have run humanleess logistic centers for many years now and they're seldom VLA stuff, although there is an interest in using it for the 5% failure cases. But they're not interested in SOTA.
Weren't germans so accurate in the past? The AI slop degrades all quality.
I prefer the variant in the movie from 1987.
However, raising capital in Europe/Germany is so hard. Still majority of the Germans don’t invest their money and just let it depreciate in their savings accounts. Because of that most startups are funded by US venture capitalists. Hope this one would be able to sustain the valuation
Do you have a source on this? I live in Germany and most people I know either invest into stocks (safe, boring ones), invest into a house/apartment/land or similar, or are too broke to even save anything at all (most people).
You must be interacting with young people because they have started investing after Covid with neobrokers. But the real wealth is with boomer generation and they just let it rot in savings accounts. Maybe things would change once the wealth transfer from boomers to millennials happens
They, per the article, have set up manufacturing there and a research lab in SF.
The co-founder has also relocated to the USA.
Much of the dismissal I think doesn’t come from a bad place - people see potential in europe, why can’t it a similar market?
Poking holes in every new idea is a pan-European pastime - it's how people in this region of the world managed to survive despite exhausting its resources.
SCNR
Mostly there are coalitions that prevent too bad laws.
Sometimes that can also block good ones. Thanks FDP. I hope you are gone for good from any government for being one of the true ideology driven parties in Germany.
The next level up of decacorn is sub 100 so if we only tracked that it’d be a bit limited.
That's kind of the point though, isn't it?
Europe shut down more than 20 Diesel refineries in the past 20 years and then we cry that Diesel is too expensive and blame the Americans. Pathetic.
Our industrial and energy policy is that we will become completely dependent on the Middle East, US, Russia and China so we have absolutely no autonomy and no viability. Embarrassing. Pathetic. Shameful.
Germany shutting down nuclear and coal powered plants was their own decision. I kind of agree with your evaluation, but confusingly it seems like they want it like that (?)
Wasn't the Hormuz straight perfectly fine before the USA decided to... well do whatever they did?
The americans kind of forced you off the russian gas though
> Now everyone is crying about insane fossil fuel prices after our policy for more than a decade was to make fossil fuel non-viable. Pathetic.
I think its not only fossil fuel. Germany's decision to shut down nuclear power plants (while also trying to get to net zero C02 emissions) is outright suicidal imo.
If Europe did not shut down domestic energy production and oil and gas extraction in order to buy oil and gas from Russia then oil and gas would be a lot cheaper today.
Blaming the Americans for what we did to ourselves is insane and rooted in deep ignorance of what actually happened in Europe in the past two decades.
But yet again this just shows how totally dependent we in Europe are on Americans for everything. Pathetic.
But it looks like they're trying to build something that is actually useful.
By the time we get robots capable of folding laundry, we'd already have solved many, many other use-cases.
Seriously a laundry folding robot excites me much more than a CLI that can generate code. I enjoy generating code myself! I don’t enjoy laundry. Total killer app.
What a weird accusation. I do this myself, it takes like half an hour a week and is actually quite relaxing.
I'm not sure you realize how spoiled people sound who would spend thousands of dollars to replace such an insignificant inconvenience.
Fwiw laundry takes a pretty significant chunk out of my weekend. I wouldn't spend “thousands of dollars” to reduce it but at around the price of a new phone I’m totally in the market.
But the thing about private market valuations is that you can't know if investors are right ex ante, so it's helpful to discount.
A $1B valuation sort of just means you now effectively "owe it" to shareholders, and you're now 100% incentivized to deliver that to them in some form, instead of being fully incentivized to deliver on your true vision to your customer.
When done well, private diligence can help uncover blind spots and fund company growth in key areas at the service of that true vision.
When done poorly because of FOMO over AI, robotics, or the latest hype, it can turn into preemptive enshittification.
Germans are totally capable of their own scams (see Dieselgate or Berlin airport or ...).
The downvotes are puzzling.