If You Want To Watch YouTube Videos in Germany, Go To South Sudan Instead

Over 60 percent of the world’s most popular YouTube videos are blocked in Germany – South Sudan only manages to block about 15 percent.

GEMA

GEMA, which represents recording artists as well as publishers, wants YouTube to pay a fee for each and every video viewed on the site that contains music of one of the artists represented by GEMA (which include every major label artist, as well as most indies). YouTube has rejected that approach, and instead wants to pay a percentage of the ad revenue it makes with those videos.

Negotiations have, well, broken down. Feelings have been hurt. Lawsuits have been filed.

“Dieses Video ist in Deutschland nicht verfügbar, weil es möglicherweise Musik enthält, für die die erforderlichen Musikrechte von der Gema nicht eingeräumt wurden.”

Doing Business With Communist Regimes R Us

You won’t regret it, Pyongyang! Germans have always been the one-stop experts when it comes to laying the groundwork for foreign investment in crumbling shithole communist states!

Kim Jong Un

And here are just a few of the bennies your North Korean “companies” will soon be getting out of the coming deal:

We have absolutely no problem validating communism – we’ve been doing it for decades!

Our proven track record of indifference to the suffering populations under oppressive totalitarian regimes is virtually unmatched in the Western World!

Our economists and lawyers are all “can do will do” when it comes to selling expensive stuff to bullies of all varieties, no matter how bizarre, deranged or absolutely wacko they may be!

That is why you know that we support your latest master plan wholeheartedly – and we Germans KNOW a thing or two about master plans, too.

So remember Kim Jong: We are the pros when it comes to helping you help ourselves to help you help ourselves while helping you help us in the process.

“There is a master plan. They want to open up this year.”

Dropping Like Flies?

Or Totgesagte leben länger (there’s life in the old dog yet)?

Last week, the Frankfurter Rundschau filed for bankruptcy. The DAPD press agency had already gone down a few weeks earlier.

Now the German business daily Financial Times Deutschland has become “the latest casualty of the chill winds sweeping the global newspaper industry.”

What was that I read while surfing the other day again? Stuff printed on dead trees? What’s that?

“Ich werde Eure kurzweilige Art zu schreiben wahnsinnig vermissen! Die FTD ist eine tolle Zeitung und ich hoffe, dass ihr wenigstens online weitermachen könnt!”

Poor But Sexy But Drunk

Traditional Kneipen (neighborhood pubs) are dropping like Fliegen (flies) these days in Germany.

The latest statistics indicate that their number has dropped nationwide from 48,000 to 36,000 since 2001.

But thank goodness Berlin and Berliners are standing up to buck the trend. While the number of Kneipen in other cities like Hamburg has dropped 48.1 percent during this period, the number of new Kneipen in Berlin rose 95.8 percent. Damn. You can’t set the bar much higher than that.

“Mit dem Wirtshaus verschwindet eine Einrichtung mit hohem sozialen und kulturellen Stellenwert aus den Gemeinden.”

Just Say No

As usual, I mean. Berliners in Kreuzberg (or at least that active, left-wing kind) aren’t interested in finding new solutions for urban living, thank you. And they’ll even threaten you with violence if you try to establish “temporary cultural space” to attempt to do so (go ask BMW Guggenheim Lab). Kreuzbergers don’t do culture. Temporary or otherwise.

And speaking of resistence… The rest of the country is pretty much Kreuzberg all over again (only on a much larger scale) when it comes to saying no to the Internet (some call it the Internetz).

This isn’t really a news item or anything, but now certain German businessmen types are actually starting to get worried about their country “sleeping through the Internet” age like it does.

They have come to discover that their fellow Germans provide “too few qualified professionals, suffer way too much from risk aversion and are caught up in a tightly structured regulation frenzy.” Like I said, this isn’t anything new. But the real question is: What are you going to be able to do about that? Not a damned thing, of course.

Das Internet ist ein globaler Treiber für die Wirtschaft. Doch in Deutschland bremsen Fachkräftemangel und hohe Anforderungen an den Datenschutz die Firmen aus.

Airbus (Some Call It Airbias) Needs More Germans

At least that’s what the Germans will tell you if you ask them, which of course nobody is.

OK, we’re actually talking about EADS here. “The German government is deeply concerned by the concentration and centralisation of research and development competencies in the headquarters in Toulouse, which have to a large degree led to the current imbalance,” a pissed off big-time German politician has lamented.

So much for Franco-German understanding (yet again). And if it were up to the Germans, they would even see to it that EADS ensure “equal numbers of French and German nationals occupy positions in the top five leadership levels,” although how you would equally distribute five people is unclear to me (government can do this kind of stuff, you know).

But none of this will lead to anything, folks. I can tell you that right now. The Airbus Chief Executive and designated EADS boss isn’t about to let any pigheaded German government official tell him what to do. His name is Thomas Enders and he’s a pigheaded German himself.

EADS was formed in 2000 from French, German and Spanish assets as a counterweight to U.S. aerospace and defense giants.

Speaking Of Ingratitude

Don’t the Libyans appreciate everything the Germans have done for them? Gee, I guess they don’t.

Before the Libyan revolution, Germany was the country’s second-largest trading partner. But then Germany abstained in a 2011 UN vote to militarily intervene in its civil war. Now that the war is over, German businesses and think tanks are finding that most Libyans want little to do with them.

“Water doesn’t flow uphill on its own / And wars, too, don’t stop themselves.”

Another coalition of the willing (not)?

Or does it just stay business as usual?

“The responsibility for stopping the Iranian bomb thus rests with a coalition of the willing. The attitude of Germany—Iran’s most important Western trading partner—will be critical to the success of such a coalition. But while the recent announcement by Siemens and Munich Re to exit the Iranian market have garnered headlines, hundreds of German manufacturers remain determined to continue doing business as usual with Tehran.”

Much of that business goes undetected via Dubai.

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