September 21 nearly 100 guests from politics Scheuchl GmbH and Laempe Mössner Sinto GmbH were welcomed to the new core production while the political representatives especially emphasized the importance of the company for the region Greetings to the guests present were directed by Rainer Haselbeck (President of the Government of Lower Bavaria) Peter Dreier (District Administrator of Landshut) and Ludwig Robold (Mayor of Markt Ergoldsbach) The major customer BMW also attended the opening ceremony with two representatives: Konrad Schweiberger (Head of Planning Light Metal Foundry − BMW Group) and Christian Huber (Head of Production Light Metal Foundry − BMW Group) spoke to the INACORE representatives INACORE is a joint venture of the two medium-sized family businesses Laempe Mössner Sinto and R the new INACORE GmbH built its own core production with most modern standards in the Jellenkofen/Ergoldsbach industrial park (Lower Bavaria) The contract for the inorganic bonded sand cores comes from the BMW plant in Landshut cylinder heads and electric motor components are produced in one of the world's most modern light metal foundries INACORE acts independently: The company is financed by shareholders' equity as well as debt capital from banks solely bearing the investment costs in a double-digit million amount The production target for INACORE in the coming years includes more than 1.5 million core packages for BMW Six core shooters operating in three shifts from January 2019The starting signal for the BMW order was launched on schedule at INACORE in January 2018 after just eight months of preparation A total of six LHL30 core shooters are used Laempe supplies the complete sand preparation (including a double mixer LVM15 at the heart) as well as sand silos and sand conveyors The air-conditioned core warehouse technology the plant infrastructure and the overall project management come from Scheuchl as a specialist for casting plants more than 20 employees and the six machines are producing in two-shift mode INACORE has occupied two halls in Ergoldsbach for the new state-of-the-art core production While production takes place in the first hall the second hall is used for the air-conditioned storage of the sand cores and the necessary raw materials Focusing on "Core Production 4.0" – with maximum data transparencyLaempe and Scheuchl bundle their existing skills for building up a state-of-the-art core production for INACORE this involves equipping the joint venture with an efficient logistics concept most modern machine technology including robot automation and sand processing there are also considerations to install a sand regeneration system Then we will be able to establish a closed-loop process circuit for BMW together The main focus of INACORE is on data transparency as one of the fundamentals for the realization of "Core Production 4.0" the company already offers 100% parts tracking and data transparency of all machines and systems INACORE is fully networked with the BMW warehouse INACORE plans to implement the automated warehouse by means of a driverless transport system and automatic storage and retrieval by the end of 2018 Laempe and Scheuchl: two strong partnersAccording to Laempe and INACORE Managing Director Andreas Mössner the BMW contract should be the beginning of a new success story: "The thrust is clear: We are joining forces to open up a promising business segment – another important milestone in achieving our growth targets." For Laempe INACORE acts as a "living showroom" that can greatly support the global marketing it serves to gain an even better customer view and to gather new ideas for innovation Laempe and their INACORE team were able to convince the BMW managers in their search for a strong partner for external core production The automotive group belongs to the customer base of both companies The company was founded in 1962 and focusses on developing planning and implementing customer-specific solutions in the areas of casting plants Laempe Mössner Sinto is the world leader in core production technology in the foundry industry As an innovative all-in-one solution developer the long-established company offers a comprehensive range of automatic core shooters and subsequent core treatment solutions as well as networking and intelligent control for the entire core production The two companies fit together very well for this task: "Of course we know each other in the industry and as innovative family businesses Laempe and we share the same values and corporate philosophies," says Dr Scheuchl are now working on the future of core production and the subsequent foundry processes as digitization and Industry 4.0 are being implemented in the province of Lower Bavaria: "Our aim is to develop INACORE into the benchmark in the industry," explain Dinglreiter and Mössner "We have now passed the establishment as well as the start-up phase of INACORE Our next goal is to further increase our efficiency and to further implement our digitization approaches we also want to win more customers for INACORE." I would like to receive the bi-weekly Foundry-Planet newsletter with all latest news Plus the special newsletters – all can be cancelled anytime and at no cost Climate change is forcing us to rethink the way we use water Three projects from Germany illustrate the form this could take.  Flooding, rising sea levels and drinking water shortages: global warming is causing numerous problems when it comes to water Three projects from Germany illustrate how we can respond successfully to changed environmental circumstances.  scientists from six research institutions in northern Germany have set themselves the goal of replanting the seagrass meadows in the Baltic Sea.   Artificial intelligence keeps a watchful eye over the 8,500 residents of Ergoldsbach in Lower Bavaria The aim is to protect them from the consequences of devastating storms and flooding the AI-based early warning system uses data from around 30 weather and water level sensors in the region and evaluates the meteorological data supplied by the Deutscher Wetterdienst – Germany’s National Meteorological Service the emergency services and local government by SMS all Bavarian municipalities are to be equipped with the early warning system.  Heatwaves and dry summers are a problem for farmers in particular. Researchers working on the HypoWave project have developed a water-saving concept for hydroponic vegetable production Hydroponic cultivation involves growing seedlings in a nutrient solution without earth their roots hanging directly in nutrient-rich water The water that this does require comes from the local sewage treatment plant large-scale implementation of the process is currently being trialled in a greenhouse in the Lower Saxon town of Weissenberge where tomatoes and peppers are being grown for the regional market on an area of one hectare.  © www.deutschland.de  You would like to receive regular information about Germany? Subscribe here: We don’t flood you with panic-inducing headlines or race to be first We focus on being useful to you — breaking down the news in ways that inform We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today The “reactionary spirit” and the roots of the US authoritarian moment by Zack Beauchamp a young man named David Rubin was about to die A Jewish capmaker from a small town he called Pruzana Rubin had managed to survive the nightmare of Auschwitz for two years SS soldiers moved Rubin and 1,620 others to Buchenwald and from there on a death march south into Bavaria they entered a small town outside Munich called Ergoldsbach A group of regular German army soldiers were in the town lounging in the street with their vehicles He stayed there until the SS guards had gone The ideas and trends driving the conservative movement Rubin lived on scraps scrounged up by a friendly Polish worker; at one point he hid from German soldiers in a pile of dry dung on a local farm When the American army liberated the town at the end of the month a soldier from Chicago found him lying in a street Seeing Rubin’s Auschwitz tattoo on his arm the soldier carried him to a hospital and ordered the Germans to take care of him Rubin became the leader of the small community of Jewish survivors stranded in Ergoldsbach He met an American who worked for the US government’s refugee aid branch The American tracked down a cousin of Rubin’s in the United States a connection that eventually helped Rubin get permission to immigrate They settled near David’s family in Philadelphia I learned the details of David’s extraordinary story in 2011 thanks to a German scholar named Gerhard Strasser Strasser had been working with residents of Ergoldsbach to document the history of the town during the Holocaust and invited our family to attend a ceremony presenting some of the findings Students at a local school had been assigned projects on Ergoldsbach’s Holocaust history including researching and writing short presentations on Jewish survivors This wasn’t just a normal school assignment; people from around the town came to watch their children recite stories of what had happened I waited anxiously to hear my grandfather’s name a German child stood up and told the class about David Rubin’s improbable survival and rise to leadership among the survivors This was not merely a commemoration; it was repentance I felt the weight Germans had put on themselves — and felt moved While Americans have long clashed over our country’s cruel and bigoted past Germans have undertaken one of the most thoroughgoing efforts of any nation on the planet to reckon with their history has attempted to pull out by the roots its homegrown variant of the reactionary spirit — the tendency of opponents of social change to choose hierarchy over democracy trying to constrain or even topple democracy to protect hierarchies of wealth and status The Nazis were born out of disgust with post-World War I Weimar democracy led by men furious about both the new government’s weakness and acceptance of the Jewish minority into German society preventing a reactionary resurgence became one of the central goals of the country’s subsequent leaders So it’s all the more extraordinary that in the past few years German chancellor Angela Merkel announced an open-door policy for those fleeing violence in Syria and elsewhere the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party a Euroskeptic faction without a single seat in Parliament morphed into a virulently xenophobic force calling for Germany to slam Merkel’s open door shut turning it into Germany’s third-largest political party Opposing the country’s approach to the migration policy did not But over time the party’s behavior has become more and more troubling AfD supporters participated in an attempted storming of the German capitol building German police busted an armed cell that was plotting to forcibly install a minor noble as Germany’s new kaiser One of the coup plotters was a former AfD member of Parliament who was serving in a minor party leadership role at the time of her arrest the executive vice president of the International Auschwitz Committee — a Berlin-based anti-hate group founded by Holocaust survivors — compared the party to the Nazis Yet AfD’s rise has continued. Politico Europe’s average of German polls shows that, between July 2022 and 2023, the party’s nationwide support nearly doubled — going from 11 percent to 20 percent. By early 2024, AfD was solidly the second-most popular party in Germany; it won a new record vote share in June’s European Parliament election The threat AfD poses to German democracy is in which every mainstream party has so far refused to consider forming a national governing coalition with the AfD But its rise illustrates something vitally important: That Germany could fail to prevent a surge in reactionary antidemocratic politics suggests there’s something eternal and enduring about the reactionary spirit And there is something about our current time period that makes it especially likely to flourish — not just in Germany Political scientists often separate the rise of democracy into three broad waves The first dates from the early 19th century to the years immediately following World War I The second begins immediately after World War II defined by the rebirth of democracy in western Europe and its emergence in a handful of postcolonial states This would soon be eclipsed by a massive third wave beginning in the 1970s and lasting for somewhere around 40 years dictatorships of both the right and the left fell almost everywhere: Latin America and the Eurasian countries of the former Eastern Bloc roughly half of all countries around the world were democracies that it’s easy to lose sight of just how stunning this transformation was Some variant of authoritarianism has been the default setting of human government for thousands of years democracy went from nearly extinct — just 12 democracies survived the Second World War — to globally dominant No single political system had ever conquered the entire planet so rapidly or so thoroughly it appeared that the 20th-century triumph of democracy was complete Western-style liberal democracy truly faced no challenger Its spread around the globe seemed assured The 1990s saw some of the most significant activity of democracy’s third wave including across nearly all of Eastern Europe Former communist states and Soviet republics — like Czechia and Estonia—democratized with remarkable speed the new democratic systems appeared to be fully stable in less than a decade the world appeared mostly Americanized in the sense that democracy was the barely contested benchmark by which governments were measured Culturally and locally specific antidemocratic ideologies remained influential in countries like China and Iran But those governments did not present any kind of plausible or attractive alternative vision for most people around the world individual autonomy — became the assumed argot of global politics It was during this time that the phrase “end of history” entered the lexicon thanks to a 1989 essay and subsequent book by political theorist Francis Fukuyama Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy was the ultimate stage in the evolution of society including deep human desires for recognition and equality Fukuyama did not claim that this state of affairs would necessarily last forever the very triumph of the system contained the seeds of a future crisis “No regime — no ‘socioeconomic system’ — is able to satisfy all men in all places This includes liberal democracy,” he wrote in the book “Dissatisfaction arises precisely where democracy has triumphed most completely: it is a dissatisfaction with liberty and equality Thus those who remain dissatisfied will always have the potential to restart history.” Some of this “dissatisfaction” was visible soon after the Cold War’s end the far right began making its presence felt in a handful of European elections: Austria’s Freedom Party even entered a governing coalition in 2000 after a strong showing in the 1999 election The 2000s and early 2010s saw varying signs of antidemocratic activity in consolidated democracies from both the religious right (Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s consolidation of power in Turkey) and the socialist left (Hugo Chavez’s attack on democracy in Venezuela) it became clear that something new was happening on the right across advanced democracies The reactionary right had risen to power in the United States Extreme-right western European parties — some of which had a tenuous relationship at best with democracy — enjoyed an unprecedented wave of electoral success winning larger seat shares in Parliaments and joining governing coalitions in larger numbers Every one of these new authoritarian movements presented itself as deeply and authentically democratic While the parties openly attacked democracy-adjacent values — like liberalism or secularism — they all insisted that they supported the basic ideas of popular sovereignty and elections This strategy reflected the enduring global democratic consensus: A 2017 Pew survey of people in 38 countries found that huge majorities believed that “a democratic system where representatives elected by citizens decide what becomes law” was a good way to run a country autocrats around the world began singing a more democratic tune political scientists Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman quantitatively documented a transformation in global authoritarianism: a movement away from overt violent repression and toward manufacturing consent through ersatz elections and a managed press Guriev and Treisman noted that this trend had even touched countries like Russia and Singapore where public support for democracy as a governing system is far weaker than it is in the United States or western Europe has a lot to do with democracy’s post-20th-century ideological dominance: On an interconnected planet where large portions of the world’s governments and citizens take democratic ideals seriously even the most hardened authoritarian can face tangible consequences for open crackdowns on rights and freedoms The result was that political movements everywhere but especially ones in seemingly consolidated democracies had powerful incentives to develop a democratic-sounding justification for their actions — to Americanize their politics By identifying domestic “enemies” that stood in for unwanted social change they learned to galvanize a chunk of the public against those enemies in the name of protecting the homogeneous majority — an ironically universal playbook for antidemocratic success While studying the rhetoric of these new authoritarian movements helps explain how they appealed to a mass audience it doesn’t explain why people were especially attracted to their political vision today The theory of the reactionary spirit helps us understand this phenomenon As democracy’s reach expanded across the globe brought tensions over status and identity to the fore of the political conversation — ideal circumstances for the reactionary spirit to threaten democracies old and new This is the underlying structural reality that helped the authoritarian right break through in country after country all it would take to start a reactionary fire was some kind of spark: an external shock a high-visibility left-wing push for social change or some combination of all three (as in the United States in the post-Obama era) The 2010s saw a series of such trigger events around the world: decades of democratic expansion and evolving reactionary responses leading to a simultaneous surge in support for reactionary factions the 2015 refugee crisis played a central role in the story violent bloodshed in countries like Syria and Afghanistan produced the single greatest number of refugees since World War II many of whom fled to Europe seeking a better life creating an opportunity for far-right parties to increase their support among Europeans uncomfortable with a massive influx of people who looked different The effect was swift and striking: Data from The PopuList which catalogs far-right electoral support in European elections since 1989 shows a spike in these factions’ support around the continent in the wake of the crisis the evidence suggests that European resentment toward immigration is rooted in concerns about changes to Europe’s traditional ethnic composition and hierarchy A 2007 study that examined 20 European countries and over 38,000 individuals found that negative attitudes about multiculturalism were by far the best predictor of individual opposition to immigration like a country’s unemployment level or a person’s individual income This underlying hostility toward cultural difference created fertile grounds for far-right parties to profit from a sudden spike in immigrant numbers especially since many immigrants came from nonwhite Muslim countries A 2018 paper by two German political scientists examined a survey that asked the same group of people their opinions on elections and immigration before and after the refugee crisis hadn’t changed much: The same people who disliked immigration before the crisis still did afterward But their partisan allegiances had shifted dramatically; anti-immigrant voters who had supported Merkel’s CDU defected to the AfD in significant numbers The refugee crisis heightened the stakes for culturally conservative voters forcing them to choose between centrist parties that were more welcoming to migrants and potentially antidemocratic extremists who opposed it prioritizing preserving the traditional white-dominant society over protecting their democracy far-right parties started to reap electoral dividends the surge in power of anti-immigrant politics allowed a government that had already moved in an authoritarian direction to push a new and potent propaganda line harnessing the reactionary spirit to consolidate its hold on power Post-Cold War Israel went through multidecade struggles over its ethnoreligious identity and occupation of Palestinian land ultimately creating conditions for the reactionary spirit to spread from a small handful of extremists to a significant portion of the population the reactionary right’s rise began with a staged crisis designed to bring out the Hindu majority’s unease with India’s vision of equality Frustration with the dominant era of equality and liberal rights has kept history going with the reactionary spirit threatening democracy even in its strongholds Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day Auto workers supported tariffs to protect their jobs The most surprising consequence of Trump’s trade war Today, Explained podcastMay 4Love on the Spectrum stars call on RFK Jr. to resignTwo cast members of the hit Netflix reality TV show on what the HHS secretary misunderstands about autism The Gray AreaMay 3Did our politics fail us during Covid?Political scientist Frances Lee examines the “noble lies” and truth-seeking failures of the pandemic. 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