Random drunk post

Note: I am not really drunk, but drunk enough to philosophise...

Strange enough we claim to live in a capitalist society (well, mostly. It's called social market economy, but de-facto it's capitalism with healthcare). Yet most of us work in huge centralistic organisations, with five year plans, which are organised like any good communist party with a central commitee, a glorious leader and where you can only raise in hierarchy when you please the local district commander. Nepotism is a bit better disguised than in the usual post-communist states, but yet it exists. And then there is government, which I take out of this argument because they don't really have anything to say.

Yet we all repeat the mantras of the free market, the self healing power of free trade etc. If you look closer, most of the companies employees don't produce any value. They produce power point slides, excel files and all that kind of stuff. They do the same which lead to the downfall of the eastern block: tell the leaders that everything is fine, make plans which look nice but don't solve any problem.

Inside the company there is no market, no free trade of ideas, no capitalism. There's pure old what-people-claimed-to-be-communism (it's far from what Marx originally thought, but close to what the USSR and other states made of it). Would it work if you remove all those structures, let the markets reign and get rid of all the central commitees? Wouldn't that lead to everybody moving to the place where they can contribute best? Wouldn't that lead to enough wealth to distribute it so that we can all live better? Isn't that what real communism would be, getting rid of the parasitic rulers and all power to the people who do the work?

And please don't take the idea to the logical end, because that kills every idea. And probably tomorrow I'll have a comletely opposite idea. So don't bother to comment :-)

And of course this has nothing to do with my employer, this is just some random thought after reading too much newspapers and drinking too much beer.

Studentenpack

Sometimes I wish I could write.

Next to me in the bar two students of philosophy and german, reasoning that democracy with it's tolerance and with demonstrations being allowed, leads to all protests being in vain, as allowed protests are no protests at all. We need a totalitarian system to be able to really protest and to articulate discontent. From then on it went somehow downhill, occasional highlights were the insight that professors are not really the scholars of childish imagination but real people who do spend time away from books and sometimes do say stupid things and the insight that most students try to construct their biographies to appear as some kind of intellectual (the insight went not as far as to self-awareness).

A table further away a group of teachers, discussing everything. From the difference between canoos and kayaks, passing the geography of Erlangen to who has the orange CD. Everybody very convinced, very intellectual, very distinguished.

The third table was a frustrated physicist and his (new) girlfriend, those two were a bit boring compared to the other two tables, just like any new geek couple they were just awkwardly trying to be romantic.

Any decent writer would make a whole book out of this personnel. My Inaptitude just allows this blog post...

Something positive

Originally I wanted to post my thoughts that we are currently slippering into a new Weimar Republic, the large political parties losing ground, small come up, economic crisis is there, political turmoil will follow etc.

Originally I wanted to rant about the german internet censor law, also something which Weimar was good at, creating stupid laws which restrict civil rights and will backfire soon; and I wanted write about a letter that I am writing to our regional deputee in parliament.

But something positive would also be nice: it's amazing how much better a document looks if you TeX it! Having to work everyday with word and framemaker, seeing a TeX document after some time is really an enlightenment. It's so much better to read, it is so much better to look at! Linux Libertine is a nice font and LaTeX rules! (And yes, the letter I wrote contains footnotes)

Incompetnce

Yesterday the german Bundestag passed a law which requires internet providers to block access to sites depicting child pornography. Which sounds like a good thing to do, child pornography is bad. But what it really shows is the inability of our politicians to handle things. During the last four years they have not done a single thing which would go the roots of a problem. Child Pornography is solved just by putting the blinds on the intarwebs. School shootings will be solved by prohibiting paint ball and computer games. Economic crisis will be solved by paying huge amounts of money to banks which proved not being able to handle money. Exercise: find more examples of this.

Germany is governed now by a coalition of CDU and SPD, conservatives and social democrats. Opposition is liberal FDP and greens. None of them, neither government nor opposition showed any competence at all. When watching any discussion, they showed a complete ignorance of the facts, couldn't even talk well. So, why are they there? Is there nobody left in politics? Where did all the competent people go? Industry? Emigrated? Abducted by aliens?

Why did we even vote for them? Just out of habit? Lack of alternatives? Probably the latter...

So, join a party? Which? Will it make a difference? Or just accept that the world is going downhill and turn into an egotist collecting riches and let rome burn? Current mood: the latter. Let it burn, maybe in 2000 years it's a tourist attraction. I'll go looking for a lyra...

Prostitution

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(Google has your data anyway, so why hide?)

The future

If you ever wanted to do minority report gesture control and own a mac: this is your first step.

I use for movements to the left the script tell application "System Events" to keystroke (ASCII character 28) using command down to switch to the workplace to the left. To the right use ASCII char 29. Be sure to set the thresholds right for the motion detection, else it drives you crazy...

Too old for that shit

Just returned from a night out. It started with a bunch of old physicists getting drunk, chatting about cars, computers and ye goode ole times at uni(TM). So far, so good. At about 1AM we left the bar and entered a club, tonight a special appearance by Bukovina Club - remixed music from the balkans.

I started listening to that kind of music 10 years ago, remembering one of the best concerts of my life, Emir Kusturica live at a castle in portugal. This music was cool till about a year ago when it starting to get popular. So tonight, when we entered the scene, the music was blasting too loud for the speakers, only leaving a frequency range tolerable for people who have blasted away their ear-drums by mp3 players injecting the best of charts into their ears at a volume which silences a jackhammer.

The dancefloor was filled with drunken kids whose motoric abilities were only topped by their self-esteem and their conviction of being the future elite of germany, just because they made it to a provincial university. Those frustrated youths were so indulged into their egocentric movements that every movement on the dancefloor was interpreted as an attack, a sexual assault or at least an aggressive gesture. This only was interrupted by couples who seemed to have no place to go to be in private and needed to fiddle around on the dancefloor, dancing with a vulgarity which you cannot find in a peep show.

Probaly I have to find some new kind of music which is still so uncool that I can enjoy it. Or maybe I am just getting to old for that shit and should stay at home and get drunk on my own.