Germany

cipher (n.)

Late 14c., "arithmetical symbol for zero," from Old French cifre "nought, zero," Medieval Latin cifra, which, with Spanish and Italian cifra, ultimately is from Arabic sifr "zero," literally "empty, nothing," from safara "to be empty;" a loan-translation of Sanskrit sunya-s "empty." Klein says Modern French chiffre is from Italian cifra.

The word came to Europe with Arabic numerals. From "zero," it came to mean "any numeral" (early 15c.), then (first in French and Italian) "secret way of writing; coded message" (a sense first attested in English 1520s), because early codes often substituted numbers for letters. Meaning "the key to a cipher or secret writing" is by 1885, short for cipher key (by 1835).

Figurative sense of "something or someone of no value, consequence, or power" is from 1570s.
also from late 14c.

And, of course, to figure and "decipher."

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Germany

“The problem with consensus societies is that sometimes the consensus is wrong, and when it is, there is no corrective mechanism.”-- Wolfgang Münchau, author of “Kaput—The End of the German Miracle.”

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In 2023, Germany recorded 133,000 patent applications, less than half the numbers in South Korea and Japan, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization.

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A summary from a WSJ's summary: 

Germany’s CO2 emissions per capita are above the global and the European Union average, higher than the U.K.’s and France’s, and just below China’s. Meanwhile, German households paid the highest electricity prices in the EU in the first half of 2024.

After the Fukushima nuclear accident, Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to accelerate a planned phaseout of nuclear energy. It meant Germany needed more fossil fuel, including coal and Russian natural gas, as it ramped up renewables. Then Moscow invaded the rest of Ukraine and began throttling gas deliveries, driving up prices and forcing Berlin to restart idled coal-fired plants. Germany’s last three nuclear power plants went offline in April 2023.

The country registered more than 250,000 asylum applications last year, down from 2023 but higher than any other year since 2016. Today, migrants are less likely to be working than Germans and more likely to commit crimes. The federal government alone spends 30 billion euros a year, equivalent to $31.46 billion, on benefits for refugees and asylum seekers—more than half the country’s defense budget.

One theory of Germany’s inability to change course when circumstances evolve, evident both in its nuclear energy and immigration policies, points to “a static view of the world,” that has become ingrained since reunification, that Germany no longer had to change. Its own version of "the end of history."

History may have another view.