Unless people empty it to buy over priced real estate 
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So, back on track? Nothingburger? Sky is not falling anymore?
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Germany only has an equivalent of AHV, and with a lot worse demographic problem coming.
Some very select companies have their (worse) version of 2nd pillar/Betriebsrente. But that‘s really nothing meaningful on population level.
Nothing 3a like at all. (there is only Riesterente which is basically a legalized insurance scam)
It‘s basically just worse AHV for the average Joe there.
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TY, didn’t know, my German colleagues told me our company (our employer) who’re basically a SME does have “private pension with employer match”.
That said, we had the same in Greece (same employer) with an insurance company (anyone can get this, employed or not), and our employer added 100% on top of our contributions, that’s not that uncommon in Greece, many companies do it, not sure about DE. I guess the difference is that in CH this is mandated (which is a good thing).
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- Don’t use pillar 3a → 14k available p.a. (as a couple)
- Car leasing (half of all cars in CH!) → 18k p.a. for a 100k car like Audi S6
Lots of people here could live such a lifestyle if they wanted.
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Did anyone notice SMI performance for 2025 so far? Seems like it’s performing better than everyone else
One month of glory at least
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Yep, no need for S6 either, S4 or BMW M3 or these beautiful beastly Dodge GTs are more appropriate for 20-somethings with good jobs, I see them in my garage and tell my wife “see, no kids, ah the dreams that were shattered…” 
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I think SMI is not even at all time high yet. So should be fine. Of course the challenges are with Pharma and what US policies will do
„Pharma companies don’t treat US fairly and overcharge“ is the rhetoric these days
Seems that Deepseek discussion with all its repercussions has already been put to rest. Here’s the benchmark comparison with other LLMs in case someone’s still interested:
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I’ve been using DeepSeek for a long time now and the model is good, but not earth shattering. The main impacts are:
- Efficiency gains and technical innovations
- Low cost
The efficiency gains were a necessity given the lack of access to newest GPUs. With only access to H800s which have certain limitations, they had to get creative to work around it. The whole architecture is a masterclass in a unified design to work around the limitations they had and once again proves that necessity is the mother of invention.
The low cost will have implications. While the best models will always be able to charge a premium, when you have something that is, say, 80% as good as a top model while costing 5%, then this damages the revenue potential of the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.
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So basically more or less on par with existing models and free of charge. I guess happy times for AI users as AI gets democratic
No need for professional hardware. AI (deepseek, llama) can now be run locally on a laptop. Very moustachian 
https://www.zi.uzh.ch/en/teaching-and-research/science-it/articles/2025-ai-on-your-laptop.html
These laptop compatible versions are distilled versions of Deepseek r1 which are much weaker.
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Too many perverse incentives in the US healthcare system. A Yank once told me “The US pays for Europe’s treatment”, this sentence is so dumb that I had to respond with “…and defence, aren’t we smart?”.
Fidelity’s Jurian Timmer:
The resilience in corporate earnings goes hand in hand with rising growth estimates for the US economy. Since the soft-landing scare of 2022/2023, GDP estimates have been on the rise and are now close to 3% (real). Add 3% inflation and you get 6% nominal GDP. A 10-year government bond yield of 4.6% doesn’t make much sense against that backdrop, especially without the help of an accommodative Fed.
(Source)
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I think, (relative) log charts would help. There is just more relevant information in them. The orange and the blue lines look the same, but the orange line grew about 2x as much over the last few years. Of course, after some years of strong underperformance. And a deceptively similar COVID drop (in reality also ~2x).
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(Source)
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just wanted to make post no. 1000
yesssss!
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