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PhotographyI want to keep posting news – weird news, but also important ones.
- New LED traffict lights can’t melt snow:
Municipalities around the country are taking different steps to keep their signals shining brightly in the face of Mother Nature. Crews in St. Paul, Minnesota, use compressed air to keep their lights clean. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, city workers brush the snow off by hand in a labor-intensive process.
This will be (ab-)used by conservative politicians against “green technology”, I’m sure about it. Just wait.
- ‘Green’ vibrators promise sustainable pleasure:
The Earth Angel, described as “eight inches (20 centimetres) with a sleek white finish”, is a wind-up vibrator which comes with a handle built into the bottom.
- The new German government, consisting of Christian Conservatives (CDU/CSU) and “Liberals” (FDP) want to pass a bill, in order to increase economic growth in these hard times. This is heavily criticized by independent experts – some parts of the bill more than others. In any case, the idea is to make more debt now. More and more debt. Who cares who will pay it off? Who cares that money we borrow now will have to be repayed eventually? In order to get the bill passed, the second chamber – the Bundesrat – has to agree. The Bundesrat is the representation of the German counties – due to the fact that the majority of German counties are governed by CDU/CSU/FDP, no problems were expected. But two of these counties actually refused to agree. What happened? The government bought these two states now. They get more money here, and more money there, and all of a sudden they agree with the bill. (This is not the first time counties are bought – SPD and the green party did it before a couple of years ago. Under great protest of CDU/CSU/FDP … right.)
- You may have heard that US drones got “hacked” by “terrorists” – if you look a bit closer, the truth is actually this:
The potential drone vulnerability lies in an unencrypted downlink between the unmanned craft and ground control. The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s [.ö..] But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn’t know how to exploit it.
And again: if you collect information, and pay a lot of money to do so, and you don’t protect the information, it will be in vain. Everybody will have access to this information. It is useless. I wonder when people will start to understand this.
- The politician Wolfgang Neskovic from the left party only received 294 of the necessary 312 votes for becoming a member of the control commitee for the German intelligence apparatus – all other parties will be represented. There was lots of whining around by the left party after the vote. The hilarious thing is: 21 of the 76 politicians of the left party were absent during the election. Now do the maths yourself. I try to avoid it on my blog, but this is the right time for a “lol” here, I reckon.
- The municipality “Gilching” in Bavaria (Germany) – inhabited by around 17.000 people – has installed fingerprint scanners in their elementary school. Children who want to enter the building have to put a finger on an electronical reading device. Now, why is that? Because of “security reasons”. Clearly, the most dangerous people in the world are children between the age of 6 and 11.
- France is a very “clean” country, compared to European standards, regarding CO² emissions. Why? Because they nearly only use nuclear power in order to produce electricity (85%). The winter has hit them very hard now, the average temperature is over 5° C less than it is normally around that time of the year, for a couple of days already, and the power plants are not able to produce enough electricity for the country. So they have to buy energy – mostly “dirty” energy – e.g. from German coal-burning power plants.
- A couple of months ago, the old government (CDU/CSU & SPD) passed a bill regarding the censorship of the internet. It caused a huge outcry in the German population, there was a petition signed by over 150.000 people who opposed this bill, there were many independent experts (asked by the government!!! to give their opinion) who opposed it … but it was election time, so the law was passed anyway. The SPD – now in the opposition – pretends that never happened. They criticize the law, demand “deletion instead of censorship” – which was our slogan when we strongly opposed the bill! – and make themselves hilarious in more ways. Seriously: people might be stupid. But not that stupid. I hope.
- In Munich, a family father gets beaten up by the police because he barbecues at a lake (where everybody else also barbecues – i lived near the lake for 6 years and was there fairly often); but it’s not allowed. He is like, a terrorist or something! And they have to be treated without mercy …
- An interesting video of completely inappropriate police violence directed against young people who sit peacefully on the street (to protest the clearance of a church by the police) in Denmark. Check out how they pull arms and legs straight before they beat on them with their clubs, to increase the pain and maybe break …a bone or two.
- Eleven Iranian soliders went into Iraq to occupy the oil field Al-Fakka – upon arrival they hissed the Iranian flag.
(Source: most of the stuff is taken from Fefes Blog – and of course all the sources I quoted in the text)
December 19th, 2009 at 21:25
was denn nun – grafschaften oder landkreise?, keines von beiden! nach meiner kenntnis ist der bundesrat immer noch die vertretung der deutschen bundesländer!
die übersetzung von google ist echt besch… cu next yeahr perhaps in berlin.
December 20th, 2009 at 10:51
Today, you may find it funny that France has to buy our dirty energy. But wait some more years. When no sun is shining and no wind blowing and the winter is ****ing cold, we will notice that solar cells don’t burn well ;-)
December 20th, 2009 at 19:14
IF (very big “if”) the spending proposed in the “Wachstumsförderungsgesetz” bill – that was passed recently – was sensible in any way, it would be very smart to make more debt. The economy is down due to the recession, so it’s up to the state to nourish it (anti-cyclic investments). It would be far worse if we would stop making debt now and try to save money. This would only deepen the recession and cause more debt in the end, as the economy takes much longer to recover. Making debt is not bad if it’s spent in the right place, like education or infrastructure (which is a profit to future generations, too). There is no reason why Germany should fear making debt, only one caveat: if the spending does not make sense. And sadly that is the case with this infamous bill, supporting certain remote branches of service industry that will not have an impact on the entire economy.
I’d say I did not expect any sensible legislation from CDUCSUFDP, but then again I came to the conclusion that the SPD would not do better at all with its lobbyist-ridden remote-controlled head and lethargic base. It’s really a sad view when you look at Germany’s political parties.
December 21st, 2009 at 10:59
@ Thomas: so let’s keep the coal and oil down there until we need it :) … in the time when solar cells don’t work anymore, because the earth is clouded by apocalyptic radiation-dust and the four horses are lose :p
@ Franz: Yes yes, I see your point. And you know that you can’t be sure about that. Many economists say the opposite of what you say. Of course people need to spend money. But many people have enough money to spend money in Germany, the problem is that they don’t.
20 Euros more per child? Noone is gonna spend that money. It’s a freaking waste.
And: yes, it is sad indeed.
December 26th, 2009 at 10:19
@Eiko: There something I don’t understand: When the labor unions fight for higher wages, they (and political parties they are associated with) always argue that people would spend more money if they only got some more. And that would boost our economy. But then, the very same people argue that families that get more kinder geld per child will not spend but save the money. Where is the logic in that?
December 30th, 2009 at 20:55
I don’t really beleave in this “let’s spend all our money and everything’s alright” economic theory. It would be far to easy if printing and spending money would be the way to get a growing economy. Just have a look at the early 90s in Germany. That’s what happend in these years and all we got now, is a billion more depts. Of course it’s a different picture during an economic crisis as it happens twice a century. We could make an exception here. But in the long run, it doesn’t help us much if people spend 20€ more a month. Especially not in Germany where about 50% of our GDP depends on exports (figures differ a bit but it’s quite a lot anyway).
The big problem is, that dealing with politicians is dealing with non-rational persons in the economic point of view. That’s why the NEVER save money, but liked spending a lot since they’re no more monarchs who thought of state’s money as their own property.
January 2nd, 2010 at 00:31
well, maybe things got more complicated? i am not big economist really. but to be very honest, predictions in economy started getting more adequate the more psychology was involved – people are not rational, they are human.
the same thing works for politicians. well, for everybody.
and regarding things that should be done as rationally as possible, that is clearly a bad thing.
January 2nd, 2010 at 11:29
Thing have always been complicated. And it’s totally natural to use crude approximations and assumptions. And different people have different views on the world. However, when people first make a statement like “if people have more money, people spend more money” and later say “yeah, but not in this case”, I don’t believe them until they proof it or at least give a really good argument. It appears to me that certain parties only argue so furiousely against that new law because they didn’t have the chance to propose it themselves (It’s only right when we do it).
By the way: As far as I know, predictions of the behavior of economical agents improved tremendously, since rational behavior has been assumed (Game Theory, von Neumann). But that may, admittedly, not be the state of art in economy. I would be very interested if you can tell me how irrational behavior can regarded in predictions (and what irrational behavior actually is – in a scientific meaning).
January 3rd, 2010 at 02:53
I’m not good with economics either, but I know that the psychologist John Kahnemann won the nobel prize for economics in the year 2002. I will quote from the German Wikipedia article:
I heard a speech about the works of Kahnemann on the ICC in Berlin, and I think he did a lot of game theoretical work as well.
Another example of “irrational behaviour” in game-theoretic paradigms clearly is behaviour found in psychological games like the cascaded prisoner dilemma: e.g. (A) decides how 10€ are split up between (A) and (B), and the only thing (B) can do is accept or deny. People tend to deny less than 3€ on average – which is clearly irrational behavior. The paradigms are set up that people don’t know who the other person is, and are 100% sure that they will receive the money after the trials (control questionnaire later, other people excluded from studies). So people rather take 0€ than 3€. There are evolutionary theories for punishing anti-group behaviour, but for a single person – the basis of economic thinking – that kind of behaviour not uncommon in psychology is irrational.
Not sure if I was able to answer your question, but that’s what I know. And you are ofc right, game theory *did* improve predictions tremendously. But as far as I know, adding the irrational component (homo economicus vs. homo what-ever-you-may-call-him) made the predictions even more precise.