I find it puzzling why they won't pivot to industries that actually matter like making competition to Micron or Samsung and manufacture RAM at scale.

Amping up military production is basically a reaction to certain countries electing maniacal pedos as presidents instead of jailing them.

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alex43578 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Precision manufacturing has been Germany’s thing for a while, but semiconductors is a completely different skill set.

Making a car and tank has way more in common than making a car and a CPU.

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noosphr 12 hours ago | parent [-]

And you won't get electric tanks for many decades. Where else could you hawk ICE at a premium without environmental regulations?

	▲	alex43578 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You won’t get electric tanks for the same reason you won’t get electric planes: energy density and supply chains. An Abrams has a multi-fuel jet turbine that’ll take diesel, gas, and jet fuel; all of which are easy to transport and store in bulk, in any environment, compared to needing to generate and store the same quantity of energy. The closest tanks will come any time soon is a diesel-electric hybrid, for noise and electric load purposes (EW, lasers, etc).

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FuckButtons 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because those are very capital intensive and don’t skew towards germanys existing competitive advantage in diesel engines and high precision heavy engineering. Same reason most places don’t try to compete, it’s cost prohibitive to do so.

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Levitz 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If we are going to look outside the country for blame, China and Russia are right there.

Not being able to trust US protection as much as in the past is evidently a terrible state of affairs, but this isn't the root of the problem.

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amarant 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When Russia is knocking at your door, weapons do matter.

Even moreso than cellphones.

	▲	hkpack 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It is upsetting that you get downvoted. I think people in the US are thinking that a war is impossible or something, and looking for a stereotypical response. Instead, for an eastern and central European countries, a war is the real threat. The chance to lose a war with Russia backed by China is very real. And the reason it is real is the loss of protection from the US. It is no longer guaranteed that the US will participate once Russia invades, and that makes the invasion itself almost inevitable. Participation of the US is important only because it has a massive stockpile of WMD. It is obvious for everyone that US is not prepared for a modern war on the ground against a real power. Prosperity and economic growth doesn't really matter when you are threatened with losing the massive war with causalities calculated in millions. You first want to secure and guarantee peace for the future, and then you think about economy, competition and so forth. And massively increasing weapons production is the way to avoid the big war.

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throwaway894345 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Presumably because those markets are difficult to break into whereas Germany can sell defense equipment to allied countries pretty easily (they don’t need to compete with China because Germany’s allies largely don’t want to be dependent on China militarily for geopolitical reasons).

	▲	jyounker 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Because Russia is waging open war with one of Germany's allies, and has been preparing for war against the Baltic states. It's not like Germany is far away either. The Western edge of Ukraine is, in some places, closer to Berlin than the Western edge of Germany.

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Barrin92 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

we're currently (indirectly) engaged in the largest land war since WW II in Europe so weapons do matter. But also the second part of that sentence isn't true, the former East German States, Saxony in particular have been building out a pretty strong microelectronics industry. See: https://silicon-saxony.de/en/