Though it is hard to say how well the experiment's participants were shielded from the fact that they were subject to research, since knowing that one is taking part in a psychological or behavioural study makes people act in strange ways, trying to prove their cleverness or uniqueness—the observer-expectancy effect, sort of like a clinical Stockholm Syndrome, the Frankfurter Rundschau (via the English daily the local) features the work of a sociological battery of test conducted in Bamberg, raising the stakes, to illustrate how a competitive environment can quickly undermine our convictions and values.
Monday 24 June 2013
of mice and men or hoodoo economics
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ง , economic policy
Tuesday 18 June 2013
oh weal, oh woe or ttip—ta ta for now
Watchdog CEO (Corporate Europe Observatory) delves into the details of the US-EU trade agreement that was ratified at the G9 summit and shows how, without much imagination of an embarrassment of gullibility, public welfare is becoming a nuisance easily steamrolled by business interests, constituted in such a way as to give industry carte-blanche to flagrantly ignore established national laws and policies and give pause to governments thinking of championing the common weal. Of course this development is vying for attention (or rather, seeking cover) with the Conference itself and the effective-date for FATCA in Germany, plus whatever distracting scandal of the day.
catagories: ๐ช๐บ, America, economic policy, environment, labour
Saturday 15 June 2013
silk road or it happened on the way to mulberry street
Although we did not seen much evidence of this native industry during our recent vacation to the Lombardy region (but it is surely there if one seeks it out and knows where to look), Como and its environs produce an astonishing quarter of the worldwide output of silk.
Not quite on a mission to save souls, two monks were sent to the Far East, charged by the French monarchy of finding out the secret and bringing back to Europe, in the mid fifteenth century, in what may be the earliest example of industrial espionage. Having learnt the process, the monks smuggled seeds of the mulberry tree and eggs of caterpillars in diplomatic pouches, messenger tubes of bamboo. Mulberry leaves were the exclusive diet of silk-worms, the juvenile form of the moth Bombyx mori who spin cocoons out of silk.
It's sad and unfair that these little hopeful caterpillars are boiled alive in the middle of their metamorphosis in order to harvest their weave and warp, but having mastered the cultivation and working the material, places like Lyon soon became very rich and influential for having broken the cartel. Without the zealous explosion in mills, producing ever more intricate and automated patterns, the industrial and modern computing may have never happened—the looms emerging as something programmable and Turing-complete with cards, instructions for producing designs. The rest of Europe was not content to let the French have all the profits and glory, however, and others learnt the process, including the former Italian and Venetian middle-men in the original and established trade process, sore at having their business suffer.
Prussia's Frederick the Great, whose alchemists are also credited with making the first china, porcelain, outside of China, wanted in on the game too and ordered the cultivation of mulberry trees (Maulbeerbรคume) all over Germany—this is why the mulberry is not an exotic plant these days, as fodder for the little caterpillars. This legacy still exists today, and German silk-making, in the interim led to a successful early manned-flight by a certain tinkerer and aviator in Bavaria named Gustave Weiรkopf, pre-dating more famous pioneers, with wings made of silk taut on a bamboo frame, intensive war-time production of parachutes for Fallschirmjรคger, and a textile export for the DDR that was in demand and a source of pride. What an interesting chain of events the cocoons of a little bug, that is still an ugly duckling afterwards, brings together.
Monday 10 June 2013
tune-on, turn-in
Last week, the local security apparatchik—well, echo-chamber, redoubled with the various turfs that are the realms of this petty kingdom, the Consulate and the hulking bureau called the Department of Homeland Security did its best to fend off the curious under its protection from the Blockupy rallies being held.
The warning, the issuance read, however, like an open-invitation listing venues and times with a high degree of specificity, even tipping almost towards sympathy for the movement—but still, stay away, move along, nothing to see here. I suppose I was one of those curious ones that the stern warning was intended for—and could rationalize that seeing the spectacle up close was probably another instance of seeking out trouble, since it was not exactly condemned and made Verboten out of hand. The Polizei and the European Central Bank in Frankfurt am Main also in being competently prepared and indulgent of the action that managed to defuse it a bit.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐, ๐, ๐ง , economic policy, labour, revolution
Monday 27 May 2013
hard-currency
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ฎ๐น, ๐ง, economic policy
Thursday 16 May 2013
watergate-gate
The American political landscape is really being whipped up into a frothy mess and through the spray and roil, it’s becoming impossible to distinguish among what’s generally and authentically chilling, what’s motivated but isolated, and what’s coloured by two-speed spin. Not that the volume and authorship of past transgressions excuse or assign non-cultural blame to any of current and lingering scandals, but the tempo of the demands are absolutely wilting: the US tax authority targeting conservative groups—be they called patriots or traitors, aggressive wire-tapping of journalists in apparent retribution—be they called patriots or traitors, the laming or disburdening of the functionaries of government—be they worker-bees or drones. This tug-of-war is being waged over the delicate and deliberative field of social reforms, statecraft and choices confounded by economic straits and must surely have a shrill and dulling effect. I think it shows how polarised America is becoming and reaching across the aisle is a quickly receding possibility.
catagories: ๐ฅธ, economic policy, foreign policy, labour
Sunday 12 May 2013
sunday drive or nutbush city limit
It turns out this town, displaying quietly all past influences as an agricultural area with ample spacing of field and farm among the skyscrapers, as a military garrison town for different powers (Camp Phรถnix is a commercial park, which hosted no decent flea-market as advertised, converted from a former US Army base that existed in the area until 1992), and most recently as a business annex of sorts for multi-national concerns, who’ve taken up residence here in order to be close to Frankfurt but avoiding the city’s corporate and property tax rates.
I’m as likely to find anything by chance but I did stop here to seek out the Sculpture Axis, an exhibition of public modern art, which I was looking to find in some sculpture garden but the display continues in sort of a scavenger-hunt, I saw later, along certain lines of latitude and longitude and I suppose that I’d need to do some geo-caching to find Travel-a-Head, giant chair and the rest of the collection—or maybe just keep on in a straight line but the weather was being a bit dramatic.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, economic policy, travel, Wikipedia
Monday 22 April 2013
solidarity or putting words into your mouth
soccer league presidents (not to mention the entire thrust of re-election), Germany’s chancellor is presenting a rather stilted and baiting
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ช๐บ, economic policy
Saturday 13 April 2013
who moved my cheese?
This preposterous suggestion, dismissed, made me think of this scholarly interview from Der Spiegel’s International desk examining the rise of anti-German sentiment across Europe over the euro and re-packaged austerity. It is a difficult and probing question, but I think, from these latest rounds of renegotiation, the public protests are a reflection in part at least of frustration that little flexibility—the structural might that Germany appears to have and seems to influence the body politic, that’s not accorded to the people equitably. Unfortunately, more credit does not equal a measure of determined reform, despite similarly deferred wishes for greater alignment.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ช๐บ, ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ฌ๐ท, ๐ฎ๐ช, ๐ง, economic policy, foreign policy, labour
Monday 8 April 2013
by hades’ handbag
Of all the gifts—pandora—of the gods of mythology, all the humanizing deifications, it strikes me as strange that the only “professional” endowment that has not be stricken from common-parlance is a plutocrat—though, unlike for the aristocracy, probably not a badge proudly proclaimed.
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ท, ๐, economic policy, labour
Tuesday 2 April 2013
lend-lease oder prime-directive
Not to be confused with the Emminger Reforms, an arguably kindred precedent that essentially did away with trial-by-jury for the German justice system, the Emminger Letter (PDF from the investigative memory of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum) covertly drafted by the then president of the German Bundesbank, Otmar Emminger, to Helmut Schmidt, Chancellor of West Germany, in 1978.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ช๐บ, economic policy
Wednesday 27 March 2013
mixed metaphor
catagories: ๐ช๐บ, ๐บ, economic policy, foreign policy
Friday 22 March 2013
brinksmanship or no quarter
On the surface of things, the evolving situation in Cyprus’ finances does not seem to make complete sense. There was originally a strange sort stoical solidarity as the idea of levying a deposit tax as collateral against the Euro-Group’s line of credit from the island’s government but public outrage and fears of precipitating such seizures ultimately led to the collapse in negotiations. Presently, the Cypriots look poised to renege on the terms of this rescue package, and the EU looks willing to cut its losses, recognizing the grave realities of a marshal-economy. The transformation was quick, from darling of people seeking out a safe berth for the money to anathema, over-exposed—though fundamentally, the shenanigans were no different than what when on in other crisis lands, or for that matter, what is still tolerable, attractive about other safe harbours, like Luxembourg or the Channel Islands.
catagories: ๐จ๐พ, ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ฌ๐ท, ๐ฎ๐ธ, ๐ท๐บ, ๐น๐ท, ๐, ๐ง , economic policy, environment, foreign policy, labour
Monday 18 March 2013
and that’s a pretty nice hair cut—charge it like a puzzle, hit men wearing muzzles
Oh dear—this is a potentially disturbing development that is making international markets anxious as well as any and every John Q. Public, Max Mustermann, or ฮคฮฌฮดฮต ฮคฮฑฮดฯฯฮฟฯ
ฮปฮฟฯ who’ve brooded any nest-egg. In exchange for a ten-billion euro lifeline to save the country from insolvency, banking and finance accounting for a large proportion of the island nation’s economy, European Union finance ministers are demanding a percentage of the savings deposits of Cypriot citizens.
Wednesday 13 March 2013
schuldenbremse
catagories: ๐จ๐ญ, ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, economic policy
Thursday 7 March 2013
stella! or fiat means of payment
The EU monetary union and its currency, the euro, has deeper roots, reaching back to the nineteenth century with attendant problems and complications, and was directly inspired by a earlier coalition by the name of the Latin Monetary Union. Founding members Switzerland, Italy, France and Belgium decided in 1865 to tether their respective national coinage to a certain ratio of silver redeemable in gold, which was legal tender among all members.
catagories: ๐ช๐บ, economic policy, Wikipedia
Saturday 2 March 2013
ab in beurlaubt
The US executive and legislative branches were unable to reach or fake a compromise, which triggers a count-down, sort of like a Rube Goldberg contraption, towards budgetary sequestration across most of America’s federal programmes, mandatorily paring funding and raising the spectre of furloughs (unpaid absences) for hundreds of thousands of government workers world-wide.
This fifth does is not a chuck out of the whole of the abstract US economy, mostly conjuring money out of the movement of money and pushing paper, but—and perhaps even more urgently, this reduction is a double-decimation, not just in terms of income and employment and delivery, but a realignment, like annexing twenty percent of the America’s smaller communities, absorbing them into larger neighbours with an even more massive yet over-burdened civil institutions. It is like the pettiness and gridlock of the Congress leaking out of the Beltway and set loose on all aspects of the American public. The wheels of government will continue to turn with skeleton-crews, more work pressed out of staff remaining, rotating singly through the work week with less continuity and more matters overcome in the transition because it will have to. Authorities, in spite or because of the knock-on effects, may realize that adjustments (austerity American-style) can be accommodated and can make do with a scaled back government—or, and probably heralded by flagging spending and all around timidity, essential and uniting services both will become untenable under a reorganization that excised too much stability, functional determination and assuredness, whether or not misplaced, out of communities too quickly.
catagories: America, economic policy, labour, Wikipedia
Saturday 23 February 2013
exchequer
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐, economic policy, labour
Monday 18 February 2013
across the pond
While the media focus on European economic policies and tax accords from the perspective of the States seems more preoccupied with the potential spillage and knock-on effects of the proposed Tobin Tax, a levy on financial transactions and market trades, the burgeoning talk of a trans-Atlantic Free-Trade-Agreement, urged by both the US administration and European commission president seems an idea comfortably, tantalizingly far away.
Those sound positive on balance, but I fear that consumer protections will suffer through compromise. Instead of meeting half-way or adopting the more stringent standards of one partner, existing safeguards, like employment rights, food labeling requirements, safety standards and protection for the environment and livestock will be relaxed, diluted in order to meet industry imposed milestones. I hope that this is not the case, because risking health and security is no lubricant for trade, and to prevent these attitudes from prevailing, one cannot take the stance that procrastination and off-putting is acceptable, any more than in the here and now surrendering one’s sovereignty and self-determination to creditors is.
catagories: ⚕️, ๐ช๐บ, ๐ฝ, economic policy, environment, foreign policy, labour, transportation
Wednesday 6 February 2013
grand coalition or what say you, alcibiades?
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ช๐บ, ๐ฌ๐ท, economic policy, labour