https://protortyp.github.io/Blog by Christian Engel. 2026-06-04T02:48:48+00:00 Christian Engel https://protortyp.github.io/ Jekyll © 2026 Christian Engel /assets/img/favicons/favicon.ico /assets/img/favicons/favicon-96x96.png 2026-06-04T01:46:19+00:00 2026-06-04T01:46:19+00:00 https://protortyp.github.io/posts/the-prestige-tax/ Christian Engel

Yesterday, on the 3rd of June 2026, Germany lost a vote for a rotating seat on the UN Security Council. It received 104 votes, short of the 127 it needed, and was beaten for the two Western European seats by Portugal and Austria.1 It was the first time the Federal Republic had ever lost such a bid. Meanwhile, Germany is the second-largest funder of the entire United Nations system, after the Un...

2026-06-02T20:13:24+00:00 2026-06-04T01:41:43+00:00 https://protortyp.github.io/posts/the-cheapest-mercy/ Christian Engel

In 2024 we slaughtered 87,896,729,120 land animals for food.1 About 76 billion of them were chickens. The rest were ducks, pigs, geese, sheep, goats, turkeys and cattle, in that order. We kill around 240 million land animals a day.2 That is the small number. The large one is harder to write down, and it took me a while to find it. We count land animals to the last animal, but we count fish by...

2026-06-01T19:50:22+00:00 2026-06-01T19:50:22+00:00 https://protortyp.github.io/posts/why-a-wealth-tax-won-t-fix-germany-s-budget/ Christian Engel

Suppose that instead of taxing the wealthy, Germany simply took what they had. Not a levy or a surcharge, but the whole of it: the entire net worth of the wealthiest one percent of the country, expropriated in a single day and moved into the treasury. It would come to somewhere around €4.5 trillion, though a good chunk of that is locked up in companies and real estate1 that cannot be turned int...

2026-06-01T06:12:29+00:00 2026-06-01T17:39:57+00:00 https://protortyp.github.io/posts/can-you-stop-a-hypersonic/ Christian Engel

The headlines say yes. Patriot crews shot down a Kinzhal over Kyiv on the night of May 4, 2023. Arrow-3 batteries killed Iranian ballistic missiles over Tel Aviv in April and October 2024. A pair of THAAD batteries in Israel emptied something close to a quarter of the US national inventory across twelve days of war in June 2025. The headline word in every one of those engagements was hypersonic...

2026-05-31T18:05:10+00:00 2026-05-31T18:05:10+00:00 https://protortyp.github.io/posts/check-in-on-your-friends/ Christian Engel

A very few weeks ago a friend of mine took his own life. I keep getting stuck on the same thing. He was the last person I would have guessed. We talk now about a loneliness epidemic, about people withering alone in their apartments, and if you had asked me to point at the opposite of that, I would have pointed at him. He was always out, always with people, always laughing. He seemed like the o...