all ınclusıve

Never having taken a cruise or booked a full-pension vacation package, I suppose I had a bit of a naïve view of what kind of impact that a resort really has on an local economy, especially in an industry-model where luxury or authentic experiences are displaced by the accustomed bargain and an unwrested competition to preserve that environment. One such example of devastating consequences, driven by catering to a clientele lured by the dialectic of a package deal, lies in the so called Turkish Rivera, where giant hotels with a lot of logistic help, enabled to a large extent by a international hub managed by the same group that run the Frankfurt airport and facilitate the shuttling of millions of German tourists to the region for cheap holidays.

This endless and upward-spiraling throngs of vacation-goers, however, are not boons to the local-economy themselves but rather liabilities that deserve real disabusing—as I am sure that the same Spar-Fuchsen would find their trip otherwise unconscionable, like rejoicing over cheap apparel made with child-labour or discount food-stuffs traveling the world around to save a few cents on at the cash-register. Not only does competition make for revolting working-conditions and penance-wages for the staff, regardless of white-gloved ratings from the guests, the resort-system also destroys those smaller, traditional establishments in the towns and villages, who cannot maintain their customer-base regardless of how good of a service and location that they provide. Local businesses, whether or not devised as souvenir-shops, see their traffic diverted to outlet malls that pay commissions to the giant hotels (who become the only viable places for employment and can dictate their salaries) as do certain locales and attractions—real tourists' traps, for planned mass outings. Those who do venture off their self-contained resorts to explore the local-colour are naturally disinclined to purchase any mementos or dine anywhere else, since they've already paid, in their estimation, for it in kind. We're happy camping.

krafttakt or pilot-project

While German websites in China are going blank over a controversial unmasking concerning Chinese tax-havens and there is some hand-wringing over the decision whether to dub as worthy a connoisseur a share of cultural heritage, Germany is aggressively recruiting nursing assistants to try in a small way to compensate for the shortage of care-givers have imported from China and the first five of an expected 150 nurses have arrived in Frankfurt.

These trained and hopefully linguistically and cultural ready individuals have been brought over to mainly assuage the shortage of qualified personnel to care for an aging demographic, in old folks' homes. Nursing professionals are not quite the same as exported au pairs who come without credentials except by recommendation and reputation. At the same time, the body representing care-givers is bemoaning the labour-conditions and wage for the existing workforce, which is hardly an incentive in itself to recruit and retain capable individuals. Of course, in such vocations, mere money and comfort are not what motivate people. I wonder what the broader implications are of not just furthering the tradition of guest-workers but of native aspirations and ambitions that have out-grown such levels of service.

flun-dazzler

Collectors' Weekly has a brilliant gallery of Theodore Geisel's early works as an marketing artist enthralled to Big Oil and others. Seeing the shining countenances of his characters shilling for causes that seem counter to Doctor Seuss' message in The Lorax may appear a bit disenchanting at first, until—that is one remembers that everyone has to get their break somewhere, like Shel Silverstein working for Playboy magazine.

autoclave

Though most product-launches in the hygiene industry are just affirmations of ones inner-verminophobia, however now working in a clinical environment whose undefended boundaries are packed with the everyday filth and detritus and contiguous with work-stations, packed lunches, personal affects, etc.

Nothing horrifying or unsanitary but neither a comfort—especially considering the culturing stunts performed recently with swabbing a cell phone and growing the results in a Petri dish. While I am certain that any surface, handled or not, could be conduced to yield similarly repulsive results and believe that taking things to extremes is not a healthy practise either, polio erupting in part because hermetically-sealed children had no natural immunity and that abuse of anti-bacterial compounds and the like have led to truly monstrous pathogens resistant to any treatment and besides the body has its own ecology that's usually a happy, harmonic symbiosis, but I do like the idea of a kiln for ones smart phones, tablets, keyboards and other hard to clean personal peripherals. I only caught a snatch of the piece on the radio describing this product, available only in the States, and I am not sure how it functions—possibly by heat, ultra-sound or inert gas or magic, but I think such a disinfecting box would come in handy.