ratiometric or gmbh

Though the end of the Christmas shopping season and despoiled by colder, more seasonable weather has resulted in a slight turning away from positive prospects, the unemployment rate in Germany remains at historic lows, levels certainly unseen following re-unification. And though there is far less wage-gentrification and perhaps purer, more honest numbers to go by and to live by (since the struggles of the working poor are not just statistics, a divisor or remainder to be made up elsewhere with social support), the health of the German job-market may not be completely brash and rosy, as there are still inequalities and possibly expectations heaped on some who cannot hope to meet them. There is also something, not sinister or menacing exactly, but maybe a little suspect and at the expense of neighbours about the persistence of the success of the German markets.

I have no doubt that transparency and genuinely good stewardship are the major contributing factors, but I do wonder if there isn't some balance with an extra long, retributive or invisible fulcrum that's off-kilter because of Germany's recent good-run. All this was a round-about way of saying that there is no longer a one-to-one correspondence between employers and the unemployed (Arbeitgeber u. Arbeitslose), but it is certainly still fairly commensurable, and it, I think, was more than just a campaign sound-bite for the Chancellor to point out the earlier correlation: that the number of job-seekers matches, down to the person, the number of registered businesses, franchises, branches, store-fronts and firms, some 2.88 million, in Germany. Each business, the Chancellor appealed, taking on just one person would eliminate unemployment entirely. Of course, it probably would not pan out so well, and I wonder what a situation where all people are fully-employed, busy, engaged and obligated would mean not only for political attitudes and sympathies but for other elements of society as well.  Most Germans, I think, work in order to live and not the other way around, but--not free from want nor in heated competition, I wonder if those priorities might go missing as a community approaches that one-to-one ratio.

grecian grey

The economic stability of the European Union does not seem as prevalent in reporting currently, what with the Iranian standoff and campaign posturing in the US not willing to relinquish the centre ring. For those whose career’s purpose lies exclusively on reading such augers and repackaging austerities as something progressive and obliging, however, the plight of the Greeks is very much a topic for common-currency. Though usually reserved for the for the influence peddlers at the attendant transnational credit rating agencies (and their hangers-on) another industry, a group of German travel agents, is stirring the cauldron lately.

They wonder how vacation-package providers will handle the issue of remittance, in case Greece declares bankruptcy and leaves the euro-zone. How would contracts be negotiated with a devalued Drachma and would they be expected to accept a hair-cut as well? It is a practical concern but has raised some ire in this on-going situation. Seeing travel agencies at every major corner, coming from the States, I am a bit bemused and proud of how they are a part of the infrastructure, the inventory of the smallest villages. In America, it seems as if the neighbourhood travel agent was made redundant long before its time, just as the ability to book flights oneself (and direct sales from the airlines) was emerging. Seeing the store front touts and posters make me instantly distant and yonder thinking about our next adventures. Apparently, there are a lot of bargains to be had on the isles. I wonder if such commerce as tourism and green-grocers ought not be the main power-brokers behind the decisions of sacrifice and reform, since they seem a bit more fair-minded than the bankers.

urbs in horto aut lapsus linguae

As the Washington Post reports, a faction of botanists, presumably the Anglo-Saxons, are persuading the discipline to relax its rules for the use of Latin. Plants will still bear their hyphenated genus- specie- variety- cultivar-names, but new discoveries will not be required to be catalogued with an erudite Latin description. Some argue that struggling with a dead language only serves to create barriers to science, and zoology with a fraction of unnamed animal species to describe abandoned Latin descriptions some years ago, but I do fear that changing the tradition will invite academic laziness.

Latin is very much alive in the legal profession and anatomy, physics, and astronomy as well as with certain advocates in the Church, and it is in specific branches of the sciences and humanities that one finds rigour and preciseness that transcends translation. Some people bemoaning Latin grammar is no reason to replace the lingua Franca with English. How would chemists feel if they were required to use to German Sauerstoff and Wasserstoff as common parlance? Latin has remained the language of science all these years, aside from not being malleable like a living language, in part because it does require some formal education that invites peer-review and can serve as a barrier, not against progress and discovery and curiosity, but against intentional forgery and accidental duplication.

studio system

The curators for many brilliant and wonderful things, the Retronauts, feature a series of parallel-universe movie posters by artist Peter Stults. He’s very creative too with casting and choice of directors: Faye Dunaway with Steve McQueen in the Terminator series, a 2001: A Space Odyssey by Fritz Lang, and Pulp Fiction starring Charleton Heston and Harry Belafonte are just some of my favourites.

bauwerk

Slowly the flea markets are beginning to rose from Winter's hibernation and H and I hope to start up the circuit again soon in full force. There was a small antique market in a remote part of the Bundesstadt of Thüringen in a town called Suhl (abbreviated SHL on its license parts, which really does not pan out as an economy of letters). It was a nice drive through the mountains and we did find a few items, but I was just as excited to see examples of the architectural style called East German Socialist Modern (DDR Sozialistischen Moderne).

I did not realize that this was a particular and distinct school of design that is typified by some of the structures in Suhl, like this Kulturhaus across the way and the exposition center (Congress Centrum and formerly the Hall of Friendship) that held the antique show.  There is a better perspective (nur auf Deutsch) of the hall and architecture of East Germany here, as it was difficult to manage a good vantage point for taking pictures.  It is pretty remarkable how ancient and post-modern, the future of the past, can co-exist and ideology's buidlings survive on the quality of one's convictions.

plagerize, bowdlerize

It was not as if the activistas and the internet community was too busy running a premature victory-lap on putting off the votes on SOPA and PIPA not to notice, the matter was simply not being covered by the media and could not compete for anyone's attention it until it signatures were already penned, and without much debate, protest or bother twenty-two EU member states along with Mexico and Japan chose, in authoritarian style, to join America's Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a treaty which contains many of the same entertainment-industry engineered provisions and much of the same language as SOPA and PIPA. The spirit of the law, at least as it is being portrayed to signatories that needed little convincing, has merit for commerce but endangers freedoms, and at odds with existing and enforced national policies, raises the spectre of censorship. Those few who were aware of this unilateral decision did voice their concerns: there were rallies on the streets of Poland and some representatives in Poland’s national donned Anonymous, Guy Fawkes masks in protests.

That the people had no voice but will be the ones enforcing and working within the framework of the law is nearly as big of an affront as any of the bad policies it contains. The treaty will not come into effect until it is passed by the EU Parliament in June, and the parliamentarian formerly negotiating the treaty resigned his post in protest over the character of the treaty, the secretive lobby and that no regular citizens had any input. In related developments, another social-networking service has agreed, in order to continue operations internationally, to comply with redacting notices at government request. This is tragic news, especially for one of the facilitators and moderators of the revolutions of the Arab Spring to bow to oppression, but they had little choice. Perhaps, however, as bad as it is, all is not lost: approaching threats of censorship more systematically than has been done by others forced to comply, the blacked-out content will not just be elided but obviously censored and only within country, not to the world, and all redacted items and the take-down requests will be archived in a clearing-house that fights for freedom of expression. Faced with the unsavory task of unpublishing uprisings, no other service has gone so far to ensure the censors will be held to account.

lethe

Just recently, European Union courts have ruled that individuals have the right to be forgotten (DE), to truly have their auto-biographies expunged from the internet--at least, what people have contributed themselves to social-networking sites. It would not be feasible to have one's record totally cleared, but hosts of the bigger gatherings are obliged to remove, retaining no copy, remove material at the user's request, for instance, old images from parties that might prove embarrassing or incriminating, regrettable and untoward announcements or opining or one's entire profile, although there is a definite persistence of memory given all the connections that one forms with automatic gestures, fast and deep. Lethe was one of the legendary rivers of the Underworld of Greek myth, and to drink of its waters helped the recently arrived to forget and lose some of the sting associated with no longer being among the living, and according to some traditions, the forgetting waters that ensured reincarnated souls could not recall their past lives. Ownership of one's personal and private memories is an essential part of one's selfhood, but there are times when one does need to dull and filter recollections (verbatim memory of the wonderful, banal and the debilitatingly mortifying) with some selectivity in order to function, and it would be equally torturous to know that our imperfect memories would always be bailed out by such a permanent and unwavering record.

origami or copy pasta

I have written a little bit previously about three-dimensional printing and what that might mean for manufacturing and industry in the very near future. Recent legal defensive and international offensive wrangling over copyrights and property law could make the technology, as the process advances, an even bigger game-changer, as this thoughtful tract from the Big Think posits, and does a great job of illustrating, in a few words and leaving much up to the imagination, what a wonderful Santa's Workshop the whole concept is.

How will design, form and function change once everyone has such a workshop and the only constraints are individual imagination and motivation? What will it mean for the transportation sector once items can be produced on site and in situ? One is not beaming or faxing physical objects but as materials, the substrate--the paper now folded into form--and instructions, formulas, recipes, DNA to reproduce become more precise, I suspect that civilization will undergo another industrial revolution.