€10K seems high to me. In France it would be lower than that, I think, save for maybe a handful of outliers. Google search suggests top earners in physics in academia in Germany is probably between €80K and €90K, or maxing out at €7.5K a month.
The challenge with CO2 monitoring is the sensor, not the electronics. Sensor accurracy and service life are key information.
It is easy to create a low power chemical CO2 sensors with a service life of a few weeks/months. Obviously not pratical for real world applications. So critical data is missing in this press release.
"Most doctoral positions and some postdoc positions will be categorized as TV-L 13, which can range from about €4630 to €6580 (gross monthly salary). The exact salary is determined by your years of experience."
-> €6000*12 -> 72K Euro, ~US$ 80K
And that is without including the various social benefits.
> The highest possible salary anyone in the university gets is 96k Euros.
Why don't you look at the document I linked which tells you exactly what people working in that university are earning. That is not a guess, not an estimate and it is not out of date it is literally exactly what they are getting paid next month.
Instead of talking about hypotheticals and ranges, why do you refuse to look at the document which talks about the exact salaries? This is very bizarre behavior.
>That is wrong, too. But not the topic of my post.
I literally linked you the literal document where it is literally written what the literal highest paid person will literally get paid in the literal next month. What evidence against this could you possibly have? Unless you have the bank statements of that person your evidence cannot possibly be better.
The link your parent posted is current. The Entgelttabelle there was last updated in 2022.
Also the PDF's (Tarifvertrag, Entgelttabelle) linked there are the authoritative source for this information - they are the legal document defining it.
>We have 2025, not 2022. So it is certainly not current. Inflation is a thing! ;-)
Do you not understand that the document I linked is the up to date contract? If you think what I linked is getting "inflation adjusted" you are totally clueless about how you get paid under a Tarifvertrag in Germany.
The document contains the exact amount of the employee is going to get paid next month.
"it is the exact contract in force for May 2025." - No, it is not. That is your mistaken thinking.
In 2025, TV-L 13 starts with 4629€ a month and goes up to 6580€ (= 78K€+), depending on experience.
Indded, the raw tax difference is substantial. But the social benefits, health insurance, vacation days,... need to be considered for a complete comparison. But that was never the topic of discussion.
You are completely delusional.
As you have been told, even when evaluating favorably the EU job, the difference will be so substantial that it's hardly comparable.
You may think there are many advantages of the social system, but the thing is with the US you get to choose exactly how the surplus will be spent. If you want coverage similar to EU you can, it will cost you lots of money but you will still come out on top.
And that is before even considering that purchasing power/quality of life is better in the US at a given salary level.
Update: Just ran our benchmark on the Mistral model and results are.. surprisingly bad?
Mistral OCR:
- 72.2% accuracy
- $1/1000 pages
- 5.42s / page
Which is pretty far cry from the 95% accuracy they were advertising from their private benchmark. The biggest thing I noticed is how it skips anything it classifies as an image/figure. So charts, infographics, some tables, etc. all get lifted out and returned as [image](image_002). Compared to the other VLMs that are able to interpret those images into a text representation.
Do you benchmark the right thing though? It seems to focus a lot on image / charts etc...
The 95% from their benchmark: "we evaluate them on our internal “text-only” test-set containing various publication papers, and PDFs from the web; below:"
Our goal is to benchmark on real world data. Which is often more complex than plain text. If we have to make the benchmark data easier for the model to perform better, it's not an honest assessment of the reality.
It’s interesting that none of the existing models can decode a Scrabble board screen shot and give an accurate grid of characters.
I realize it’s not a common business case, came across it testing how well LLMs can solve simple games. On a side note, if you bypass OCR and give models a text layout of a board standard LLMs cannot solve Scrabble boards but the thinking models usually can.
In my main job we provide SaaS services. We get more and more requests for "EU located" services.
A new trend I see is that some customers even rule out using EU located servers that are owned/run by US companies (such as the AWS Dublin or Franfurt locations).
Also EU daughter companies of US tech giants are still legally EU companies (owned by US companies) legally they have to strictly comply with EU law and it matters shit what US law says (from the EU legislative POV) so this puts them into a huge problem spot.
An EU company, even if it is owned by a US company, would not be subject to the Cloud Act and so should not find itself on the spot. The Cloud Act applies to whoever owns the data on the server, not to whoever owns the server.
Here's the situation it was designed to deal with. You've got a US company that has some documents. Law enforcement gets a subpoena requiring the company to turn over copies of those documents.
If the company has used some third party cloud storage provider to store those documents it has to retrieve them. It does this using the exact same procedure it would use if it was retrieving the documents for its own use. To the cloud storage provider this is just a routine data retrieval of a customer's data by the customer.
As far as I know if someone outside the EU buys cloud storage from an EU cloud storage provider, stores some files there, and later retrieves those files the EU provider will not get in trouble if that customer later did something with the files that would not be legal in the EU.
I'd be surprised if most countries don't have something equivalent. For example when German prosecutors were investigating VW after VW's emissions test cheating came to light if they had used whatever the German equivalent of a subpoena is to ask for copies of the emission system source code, would VW have been able to say "Sorry, we've got those in a private Github repository which happens to be hosted outside of the EU, so we can't get them for you"?
I suspect that the only reason the US actually had to have something like the Cloud Act and others don't is because only in the US could you have actually had a chance to succeed in saying that you cannot be compelled to turn over a document that you control and can legally retrieve at any time just because you happen to have it currently stored somewhere that the compelling government does not have jurisdiction over.
At present, no, of course not. No company maintains surplus capacity sufficient to absorb its competitors' business if they withdraw from or are excluded from the market. You'd assume in practice there'd have to be a transition period, during which the likes of Hetzner would be... busy.
(More likely, there's another round of negotiation, and some new bandaid solution is produced; not like it's the first time. No-one, or almost no-one, really _wants_ this to break down entirely; the fallout would be widespread.)
It does seem reasonable to expect that the rate of companies moving stuff out of US-based infrastructure providers will increase, though; the whole thing is very fragile.
You've got to imagine there are limits, tho. I note that Trump backed off most tariffs, at least for now, when the markets got unhappy (I mean, you could believe it was due to symbolic troop movements if you wanted, I suppose?) And cloud services to Europe are _big_ business; it would not be a small market shock.
If there were to be a major migration from AWS and Azure to the likes of Hetzner, OVH and friends, also, that would likely be _permanently_ lost business for US megacorps; no-one does that sort of migration unless they really have to, so it's improbable that anyone would move back if and when the situation was resolved.
I thought he only backed off the Canadian tariffs, and only because there were retaliatory tariffs plus some symbolic concession? The China ones and the de minimis change are still in place.
Bezos turning up at the inauguration and directing the WaPo to not endorse Harris are strong hints that Amazon is probably going to be fine, but I would say that nothing is certain when dealing with someone who's deliberately unpredictable and willing to threaten allies.
Those were completely inevitable, though; the game theory behind all this stuff essentially requires them.
> plus some symbolic concession
A really utterly meaningless one, though. I'm fairly convinced that pissed-off markets were the major factor.
> I thought he only backed off the Canadian tariffs, and only because there were retaliatory tariffs plus some symbolic concession? The China ones and the de minimis change are still in place.
Also Mexico. I'd suspect most of the Chinese ones aren't long for this world, either.
But this isn't just cloud infra / platform like AWS etc right, but also various SaaS products. e.g. Office 365, gsuite, github etc. Are there even equivalent (enough) versions of all those that are not only hosted but owned by EU companies?
Those are also less _critical_/replaceable, though. Up until recently, most companies didn't use cloud-y office things, they used, typically, Microsoft Office 2xxx (ie the non-cloud version). Microsoft's cloud-y Office solution is only 7 years old; while Google's is older, it wasn't taken particularly seriously for a long time. Many companies (actually I would suspect _most_ companies) _still_ use on-prem Office/Sharepoint Server/Exchange Server setups, and Microsoft still sells this stuff (Office 2024 LTSC is the latest one for enterprise, Office 2024 for consumers).
As for Github, self-hosted or vendor-hosted GitLab would be the obvious solution (self-hosted Github _is_ a thing, but only for large enterprises IIRC); other GitHub-like things are available.
I also suspect that Github in particular, and maybe MS, could, if desired, rework their services such that they didn't actually touch personal data in a form that they could disclose to the US government (which is the core issue here). This could be managed via using a third-party auth service (which typically these sort of services already support for enterprise integrations) and, for the Office-y apps, end-to-end encryption.
Replacing AWS and Azure and friends would in many ways be the big problem, especially if all this were to happen quickly (in practice, there'd almost inevitably be a significant grace period if things broke down). There's a big capacity problem there; all of these sorts of services operate basically at capacity, because economically it makes no sense to do anything else. That said, in the doomsday scenario, Amazon et al would presumably end up selling off a lot of data centres in Europe (restricted to only non-personal-data applications, they'd need fewer).
I agree each thing is not difficult to replace, but replace all SaaS products that are used might be more challenging. Some data out there from a quick google is saying companies use on average 300+ SaaS products. Not all of them are going to be from US companies, but probably a large amount is, so we're looking at probably over a hundred or 2 of products that need to be replaced with local or EU ones across all companies in Europe. That seems like a lot of work and disruption.
Oh, yeah, it’d be a complete nightmare for everyone involved. But it’s likely doable; in particular providers would be _strongly_ incentivised to provide compliant solutions (again, many SaaS providers could manage this by avoiding directly touching PII).
According to [1] "Synergy Research Group data indicated that since early 2017, the collective market share of European cloud players including SAP, Deutsche Telekom, OVHcloud, Telecom Italia, Orange has dropped from 27% to just 13% in their home territory. In the past year alone, their share has dropped around two percentage points. In contrast, Amazon, Google and Microsoft now account for 72% of the regional market."
Doing without would be extremely painful in the short/medium term.
Of course if you could instead force AWS to sell the EU arm of their business, that would be a different matter...
What is the time span until it need to be fully enforced? Regulations are rarely if ever instantaneous. For the industry I work in (domain name, hosting, email, and similar services), you start to hear about it when they are being drafted, when they are about to be voted on, when they have been voted on, when it get ratified, when they get a date for when they are going to start being enforced, and once they are being enforced there is a generally a grace period of getting into compliance.
For a lot of stuff this is process that takes 10+ years. A fairly large step is the time between a EU regulation being created and when the same law is ratified by each country, and the span between those two events where the government seeks input from the industry on how to implement the regulation.
I disagree. The main downside of moving to Germany - or any other EU country except Ireland - is the need to learn German (or French etc) if you want to fully participate in daily life. Other than that, the quality of life is better compared to USA. Example: EU Bluecard better than H1B and Greencard, health care, public safety, public transportation, walkable cities,... even now, I would recommend Berlin over San Fransciso - especially if you plan to start a family.
If there would be a magic pill that enabled anyone to learn a new language instantly, that would be the end of the US and UK as major immigration destinations.
I know where you are coming from, but I want to point out that this is not the typical skilled immigrant experience.
I have met a couple of Americans with 10+YOE who have been imported to Germany with competitive salaries, like 150k€/year. They live in Berlin or Munich, are already partnered up, have a nice nest egg from their years working in the US, and just enjoy being expats on a little adventure.
This is not the typical skilled immigrant experience. If you start with 0YOE in Germany, it's much harder to go anywhere in life. And when you don't already have a well populated nest egg, you start getting anxious about your inability to accumulate savings. And a lot of jobs are unfortunately not in Berlin or Munich. A lot of these skilled immigrants end up in some 20,000 pop town, 1hr away from the nearest mid sized city. And then, if they come from non-western countries and they do not look European enough, that also adds something to the experience.
Honest question: What major German company is in a 20,000 pop town in the middle of nowhere?
And if so, would that mean life in such a town is worse than in a comparable small town somewhere in the middle of the US?
Indeed, salaries are better in the US, especially AI jobs salaries.
But you also need less savings in the EU due to a much better social security system, e. g. free healthcare in case you get unemployed, free university (that alone saves you > 100K US$/kid),...
Lots of bigger companies like Zeiss or Bosch have many locations and depending on your team you might or might not end up in a really terrible location.
> would that mean life in such a town is worse than in a comparable small town somewhere in the middle of the US?
You lose a lot of the advantages that you listed such as public transportation, walkable cities and free healthcare (availability is terrible in certain locations). But honestly, it's a terrible location to live in, if you want to have any kind of social life, and consider that as a foreigner you probably don't have loads of contacts in the country.
The German car industry is completely outdated and very, VERY conservative. This includes Bosch. I would never work there.
The VW board even fired the CEO (Herbert Diess) because he wanted to make too many changes at once. The German car industry is a hopeless case, except maybe BMW.
Germany and a lot of other European countries do a lot of cool cutting edge research. Problem though is that one needs to commercialize it via products and services to reap the benefits. That happens a lot in the US/UK. See the sibling thread about covid vaccine research as an example.
