almost a diary, traveling

English in Amsterdam

Let me briefly remind you of the fact that you will be socially slaughtered and then eaten (most likely without your consent) should you ever attempt to talk in English to a French person without any previous attempt to clarify whether he or she is able and willing to communicate in the aforementioned language (you should also add a “Monsieur” or “Madame” at the end of any question you ask a stranger, should you actually expect an answer).

Most of the times and in most of the countries I have ever been, asking if someone I want to talk to in English is able to speak is not only a matter of politeness and respect but the most natural thing to do as not everybody will actually be able to speak English.

But in the Netherlands, things are slightly different. When I ordered coffee (and yes, it *was* coffee) in Amsterdam on Saturday, I suddenly wondered whether it is actually more impolite to ask if a salesperson does speak English than not to ask, as asking does imply the assumption the person could not be *able* to speak English in a country (ok, I’m in Amsterdam, not in Gouda) in which everyybody speaks English.

When I asked some Dutch people at a party what their preference would be, the result was mixed. Some prefer to be asked, some don’t. Should you now ask me for a generalised recommendation, I would say – don’t ask, but be *very* polite in language and tone.

Given the special nature of the service sector in this town, there are a lot of impolite English speaking people on the streets. They, too, will get their coffee, of course. But they won’t get the waitress’s smile. And seriously, given the temperatures here this weekend, such a smile can provide life-saving warmth.

almost a diary, traveling

Trains. Again.

As much as I like trains for sleeping reasons (see earlier entry), I hate their operating company, Deutsche Bahn AG. Not only are they about to increase prices for spontaneous travellers like me by I-don’t-know-how-many-thousand percent on Sunday but they are clearly conspiring against their customers.

I am sure this has happened to all of you who have used a German train in the last 10 years: The one time that you hope a train will actually be five minutes late, as they usually are, it is on time and you miss it because this one time only you’re not on time – as you usually are.

Usually you have to wait for trains. And you do wait. All the time. Wasting days of valuable lifetime on a random platform earning money for the operating company by watching the advertisments they put on for entertainment. But does that mean the one train that arrives on time train would actually consider waiting for you (or even those suctomers who (for good reason) usually add five minutes to the time indicates on the timetable? Only a minute? Only once?

Certainly not. So now I’ll have to wait for two hours (and 10 additional minutes, as usual), which is how this entry came about.

compulsory reading, oddly enough

A new kind of suicide.
Between two consenting adults.

When I briefly mentioned the cannibalism case revealed by German police in Rotenburg, near Frankfurt, yesterday, I had just heard about it. Normally, I’d say there’s not much more to it than I wrote yesterday. It obviously goes without saying that it is unbelievably sad that things like cannibalism keep occuring on this planet. Most of us would prefer to live on one in which they wouldn’t. But we can’t choose yet. So we have to cope.

Is this the end of the story? Not quite. However tragic, there is probably more to this latest case than a life sentence for the perpetrator and some disbelieving head shaking for the rest of us. It’s about a new kind of suicide, the social ‘contract’, and, at a slightly more abstract level, about transaction costs.

It was quite interesting to see all the psychological experts interviewed on tv at loss of words. Not about the perpetrator’s behavior, which, although fortunately rare, happens frequently enough for psychologists and others to have given it some thought and at least be able to come up with wishy-washy sexual, social or genetic explanations – but they do not have the slightest idea why someone would agree to be killed and be eaten afterwards, as the victim, a gay 41 or 42 year old man from Berlin explicitly did.

Let’s recapitulate: There was a guy who seriously repeatedly posted classified ads on the internet looking for people wishing to be killed and eaten. According to “The Scotsman’s” English coverage of the story, he used the following words (well, in German, I suppose) “Seeking young, well-built 18- to 30-year-old for slaughter”.

And while the crime in all likelihood happened only once, five additional suicide candidates seem to have stood in line. Before being killed, cut to pieces and being eaten or deep fried, the victim agreed to have his penis cut off, which was then cooked and at least tasted by both men – on camera.

While the deed technically qualifies for first degree murder, according to the local prosecutor, I wonder what the legal repercussions of the victim’s taped consent to be killed will be. I suppose, some so far neglected or even undiscovered issues will now attract attention, eg the already questioned human free will (aka real consent), our social norms and abnormal, apparently suicidal sexuality.

Clearly, not everything that goes on between two consenting adults in a bedroom (or basement) should be treated as their own business. But in a society in which mutual consent between adults is de facto the only enforced and probably enforceable sexual convention, I can’t help but wonder what should not be regarded as such? And, more importantly, why – based on which principle?

I don’t know. But I fear these questions will have to be answered more precisely rather sooner than later.

Before the internet, it was probably a lot harder to find like-minded partners for perverse activities such as the one discovered yesterday. But on the web, self-selection processes have become a lot cheaper. If some consensual abnormal transactions have been barred by prohibitive transaction costs (too costly to find a partner) in the non-digital world, reduced transaction costs will by definition lead to an increase of these transactions.

Thus, with transaction costs close to zero (in some ways), we might be forced to witness more and more consensual but clearly abnormal behavior in the future. But let’s hope I’m wrong.

music, oddly enough

So this is Chrismas.

It happened. Yesterday I heard ‘Wham’s’ ‘Last Christmas’ for the first time this year. But it’s getting worse. It was not even the original. It was a cover version. Can you believe there are people out there making money by covering a ‘Wham’ christmas carol in 2002? That’s almost as strange as the story of the person jailed for cannibalism in Germany today. He apparently found someone through the Internet who was willing to be first killed and then eaten.

In light of this, I am going to repeat some valuable advice once more: In the Internet, you never know who you’re talking to. So please, be careful in case you click on any of those spam-mail links offering digitised female attention. Maybe the Beauty turns out to be the Beast.

German Politics, Iraq

Dear Gerhard,

Why can’t you just cut the crap and just tell us what we already know. Now I know you might not have spoken to many ordinary (that is non party-affiliated) people lately to avoid a heavy beating by angry tax payers. So believe me if I’m telling you that, really, everybody in this country knows that,

no, German troops will not actively participate in conquering Bagdad. And let’s face it, Donny & Conny & Tommy (Rumsfeld, Rice, Franks…) are most likely rather grateful that the US armed forces will not have to babysit ze Tschermans while trying ot invade Iraq, but
yes, Germany (ahm, you) will do pretty much everything else the US ask for to facilitate their (and token British) strike on Saddam’s regime. Yes, we know that includes all the “eventualities” you still refuse to discuss, especially some sort of involvement of the ABC clearing tanks only deployed in Kuwait for operation Enduring Freedom and those German soldiers in NATO AWACS planes – only “protecting” NATO territory, of course.

Ple-heease. We know you’ve been “framing the truth” all along. And yes, even those who voted for you two months ago knew it. But they liked your irredentist behavior. Bashing the rich and powerful is a natural socialist instinct (which, by the way, all too often led to schizophrenia once socialists had become rich and powerful…) and we like some good political entertainment.

But now we know how the story ends and there’s not too much repeat viewing value to it. So can you please save yourself and all others a lot of time by just telling us what we all know?

P.S.: And while you’re about to make some useful decisions, please fire Olaf Scholz (your party’s general secretary who does not believe Germany needs a makeover). I guess you hired him to make yourself look better in comparison. That’s fair enough. And I guess he did not even understand why he got that job… but seriously, that guy is lowering the level of this comparison to levels rarely seen in postwar politics.

technology

Alpha Geeks

Tim O’Reilly of the O’Reilly Network gave a keynote address titled Watching the “Alpha Geeks”: OS X and the Next Big Thing at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference in May this year. It was a speech about the concept of watching, well, Alpha Geeks’ [first in the digital foodchain ;-)] and hackers’ personal hard- and software innovations and analysing these as “weak signals” to catch a glimpse of the technological future.

One example he referred to was the story of a hacker-slash-developer, who is using speech synthesis (a basic version of which is included in WindowsXP) to listen to chatroom discussions while coding. O’Reilly concludes:

“Now I’ll guarantee that lots of people will routinely be converting text to speech in a few years, and I know it because the hackers are already doing it. It’s been possible for a long time, but now it’s ripening toward the mainstream.”

Ripening towards the mainstream? Get this: the furture is here already. Last week an older (and I’m talking 45 here, at least!) guy at my gym asked me about my mp3 player. Today he showed me his new iPod-like acquisition, which even includes a small (but optically magnifiable) screen to watch video.

But his main interest, he told me, is to listen to scientific documents while running on the belt. I am slightly impressed, I have to say. When’s the last time you listened to a .pdf-file at 13 km/h?

I guess running will lose the reputation to free your head rather quickly now…

compulsory reading

Welcome to Berlusconia!

When I recently read a study examining the extent to which Turkey is currently in compliance with the Kopenhagen criteria, allegedly necessary for membership in the EU, the conclusion was that the country is not a liberal democracy yet, but it has made significant progress. Some people there, however, seem to think that the rule of law is not actually as important as European politicians seem to emphasize, given recent developments in the European core. And while not naming any country, it is rather obvious what they have in mind.

Tonight I watched yet another shocking documentary on arte.tv. They devote this entire evening to discuss what Italy’s prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s political intentions are beyond deforming the country’s legal system so he can’t actually be jailed for doing what he did to become what he became. The name of the documentary is rightly ambigous: “Berlusconi’s Italy”. Suddenly it seems that many would prefer his government to be only about subordinating the public interest to (often his own) personal/corporate interests.

According to the documentary, songs praising the military successes of fascist black-shirts and the Duce are again being performed live on Berlusconi-controlled television channels – and it was no documentary. I did not recognise the channel logo, so don’t know if it happened on public or private tv. But that distinction seems to lose relevance in the Italian case anyway, as Mr Berlusconi owns most private tv stations and politically controls the public ones now, too). A live performance of something like the “Horst Wessel Lied” (a fascist hymn) on national German tv would clearly cause a national crisis up here. But in Berlusconia, there seem to be less and less screens available to those critical of the Prime Minister and his government.

Let’s hope that Berlusconi’s second reign will turn out to be only one of those many unhappy episodes of post WW2 Italian political life. Let’s hope he won’t be able to damage the country for good. Let’s hope I won’t have to ask my Italian friends one day if they are ok with me starting to actually propagate the use of “Bella Berlusconia”…

compulsory reading, German Politics

Why ’68 was so important for Germany.

Not a lot of you will have read Tierry Jonquet’s novel “Rouge. C’est la vie”. It wasn’t a bestseller. It’s a generational novel about love and life of two teenagers in Paris during the infamous 1968 revolts on Boulevard St. Germain, which is exactly where I read it in the Summer of 1998. 30 years later, in a different world. No doubt, Paris saw the most violent expressions of social unrest in ’68. But I contend that in most respects, ’68 was far more important for Germany than for France or any other Western country.

These days, most people over here tend to concentrate on the incentive distorting economic policies implemented in this country during the last 30 years when they talk about the consequences of ’68. And it’s fair enough to say that ’68 was followed by a general shift to the (economic) left in the German party system that led, in combination with the experience of rapid economic growth during the 1950s and ’60s and macroeconomic mismanagement during the oil crises of the 1970s, to a pervasive, somewhat problematic incentive structure in this country. But that’s not the entire story about ’68. And it is plainly unfair not to mention the rest of it – because the rest is much more important than the economic mess which my generation will have to clean up now.

I was born in 1975, so I don’t have any personal memories of what this country was like before 1968. But it must have been a different county. Sometimes people say that 1945 made the difference. And yes, it clearly was 1945 that made the difference – but it did not make that difference in 1945. It happened in 1968. One generation later.

To those who only know contemporary Germany, the image painted by Martha Gellhorn’s brilliant article Is There A New Germany(from the February 1964 issue of the Atlantic), will probably seem slightly bizarre. Sometimes I find it hard to believe how much things have changed since then. There might not have been a new Germany in 1964. But it was clearly about to hatch out. And it did.

In 1968. Let’s not forget about that.

almost a diary, oddly enough

To Sonya: The One With The Best Nap Ever.

Do you remember the “Friends” episode in which Ross and Joey fall asleep together on a sofa and later discover that it was the “best nap” they ever had?

Well, I did not fall asleep on another guy, but in the train on the way back from Cologne. But in that train, I did have my best nap ever.

And I thought I’ll shock all you, my gentle readers, with the following statement: Call me crazy, but sleeping in trains is the most relaxing experience I can think of. I can’t tell you why, but I suppose it must have something to do with the constant low pitch background noise and slight vibration the (high speed) train is producing when in operation. I guess that’s why I wake up when it stops in a station for a bit.

If you think I lost my mind, I’ll let you into a little secret of mine. When I was a little boy and would not fall asleep, my dad took me for a ride in the car. Once he was driving on a highway with a constant speed, I would instantly fall asleep. Hmm, I wonder if I should invent a noisy, vibrating bed and become rich and famous by changing the world’s sleeping habits.

German Politics

Hayek for Social Democrats.

While reading the following excerpt from a speech called “Flexibility for the Labour Market” given by Germany’s new economics & labour super-secretary Wolfgang Clement’s at a conference in Berlin yesterday, you might become a little confused about the current position of the German Social Democrats on the economic left-right scale. Has the SPD become a proponent of Hayekian laisser-faire econmics instead of state-regulated intervention? Hardly. But let’s see (quick-and-dirty translation by myself)

we tend to continuously pass new legislation to improve social welfare. But this well-meaning attempt can be perverted if those whose lifes are supposed to be improved by new legislation are getting lost and drown in the wave of regulations that are imposed on many different levels. In addition, there is the danger, that too strict rules are making the necessary development of processes more difficult or are preventing them entirely instead of speeding them up.”

But let me assure you: It’s just words. And words can be, at most, a promise for deeds. They are a lot more credible if backed by acredible record or credible committments. The problem with the former is, there is no credible SPD record regarding deregulation for the post 1998 period. Social security reforms, yes, to some extent. But labour market DE-regulation? No. If anything, things have become worse due to the still rampant union inducied insider-outsider problems.

Actually, Clement somewhat recognizes the lack of a record in the excerpt. So past experience does not quite work to help convince the public of the truthfulness of his (speechwriter’s) words.

And there’s the core of the government’s communication problem (which is huge, but evidently pales in comparison to the fiscal and regulatory ones.) It has no idea how to credibly commit itself to the reform rethoric it is once again employing.

That’s why so many people are wary believing the SPD today when it employs libertarian rethoric. They believe it just means further state regulation and more unemployment, however much disguised.

Shame on you if you fool me once, shame on me if you fool me twice…