Category Archives: Hard Facts

How poor (poorly paid) are Berliners?

January 27, 2011 By in Hard Facts, Heconomy Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

The latest statistics say that they’re the poorest in the land. Nearly a quarter of all Berlin households have to get by on roughtly 1100 euros (about $1,500) per month.

So If you’re looking for rotten work that’s grossly underpaid, Berlin is like, I dunno, El Dorado or something. No skills required, either. Come on down!

And money isn’t everything, of course. Unless you don’t have any, I mean.

Das passt ins Bild von der „armen“ Hauptstadt und hat vor allem mit der hohen Arbeitslosigkeit zu tun. Sie liegt in Berlin bei 12,8 Prozent – so hoch wie in keinem anderen Bundesland. Mehr als 600.000 Menschen beziehen Sozialtransfers.

Green Voters Damaging Environment Again

December 16, 2010 By in Hard Facts, Hypocrisy Tags: , , , , , , , 4 Comments

And the latest survey (Umweltbewusstsein in Deutschland 2010) says:

62 percent of Germans asked want more goverment involvement with regards to environmental protection.
80 percent want more legislation promoting energy efficient homes and electrical appliances.
90 percent believe that industry needs to become more environmentally friendly.


 
Strangely, however, the study also found out that the demographic group most concerned about environmental protection (Green voters) was also the demographic group leaving the biggest so-called carbon footprint.

It appears that environmentally engaged Greenists often enjoy a relatively high income and consume accordingly, often taking “climate-damaging” vacation flights, for instance.

Poorer regular folk types, on the other hand (these are the folks who start working with fourteen or sixteen to help finance the Green voters’ often quite lengthly college educations in German egalitarian society), can’t afford to go on such vacations quite as often, drive less, stay at home more and even purchase more regional products, thus making their ecological footprints smaller.

A spokesman for the survey regrets this discrepancy between „Bewusstsein und Sein” (consciousness and action or practice) but appears to be a realist (or Realo, as they sometimes say here) and is placing his hopes and bets on the next generation of digital natives to do more for the environment by implementing more of something he calls technologische Innovationen (technical innovation).

“Dabei seien es jedoch gerade die Bevölkerungsschichten mit dem größten Umweltbewusstsein, die den größten ökologischen Fußabdruck hinterließen.”

Germans? More intolerant?

December 3, 2010 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

How ya figure? Wow. Talk about your news item. The survey says: Germans view Muslims and their religion (and Jews and theirs) more negatively than their European neighbors–who don’t seem to care much for them either, by the way.

But at least Germans are fair. When it comes to being unfair, I mean. The survey also came up with similar negative results for other religions like Hinduism and Buddhism. 

“The representative survey, which polled 1,000 people in each of the four countries mentioned, found that fewer than five percent of Germans thought Islam was a tolerant religion, compared to roughly 20 percent for the Danes, Dutch and French.” 

And the loser is…

November 25, 2010 By in Hard Facts Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Don’t park here.

There’s only one thing Germans like to do more with their cars than wash them. You guesed it, it’s parking them.

And that’s why finding the proper parking garage is so important here. And that’s why German parking garages are checked out on a regular basis by the ADAC mafia. And that’s why that one up there is the miesestes (lousiest) parking garage in all of Germany: Hamburg’s City-Hof Parkhaus. And here I was sure it would be that piece of crap one I’ve had to use twice now here in Berlin.

But in the category “Drivability” (Navigability?) it got a big fat 0, which is, I must admit, relativley low.

Funny though, I never thought you had much choice in the matter of where you get to park your stupid car when you have to park it in a certain stupid part of town, but whatever.

“Die Auf- und Abfahrten zu den Parkebenen sind zu steil, haben eine Neigung von 19 Prozent. Aufsetzen und Schäden am Auto können die Folge sein. Bei Gegenverkehr muss man oft den Rückwärtsgang einlegen.”

Banana Republik Deutschland

November 10, 2010 By in Habeas Corpus, Hard Facts Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

Corruption? Here? In German government agencies? Only about two billion euros worth a year or so, so I guess it hält sich in Grenzen (keeps within reasonable limits).

Or at least that’s what a study done by PriceWaterhousCoopers reports, but they’re probably corrupt too, right?
 
Example: In the past two years, 52 percent of all public authorities either committed an offense or were directly suspected of having done so.

“In den vergangenen zwei Jahren gab es demnach bei 52 Prozent der befragten Behörden mindestens eine nachgewiesene Straftat oder einen konkreten Verdacht.”

The crisis is over, let’s save even more!

October 29, 2010 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Heconomy Tags: , , , , , , , 5 Comments

In case you hadn’t noticed, German psychology is different than other kinds of folks’ psychology (volks-psychology?). At least when it comes to saving money it is.

Whereas Americans, let’s say, save the little that they can when times are hard and then toss it out with both fists like crazy people the first chance they get, Germans save when the times are hard and then save even more when the times are good again. The spending part gets removed from the calculation here entirely.

And that’s what’s happening now, again. Now that the financial crisis is ancient history and everything is booming here again and unemployment is supposedly under three million and milk and honey are flowing down the streets and into the gutter and all that, private Germans are saving more privately than ever–an average of about 11.5 percent of what they’ve earned this past six months.

And no, they don’t maybe know something that the rest of us don’t know. They’re just hamsters. It’s in their jeans. I mean genes.

“Für die privaten Haushalte zusammen ergibt sich ein Sparvolumen von rund 93 Milliarden Euro.”

PS: I’m thinking now it’s maybe just a big game or something that only the initiated (the Germans themselves) know about. Whoever has saved the most money by the time he or she dies, wins.

Military restructuring?

October 27, 2010 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helplessness Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Ich bin gespannt (I’m dying to know what’ll happen here).

Sure, making the German Bundeswehr more efficient and less bureaucratic sounds like a great idea, at first.

But think it through, people: There are 250,000 troops right now, of which only 10,000 (tops) can ever be deployed at once (not put into real combat situations mind you, not officially anyway, “deployed”). And I’m not joking here with the numbers, by the way.

So what happens when they drop the number of troops down to 180,000? Are we really supposed to believe that once they do the Bundeswehr will “double the number of troops that can be deployed at any one time from 7,000 to 14,000?”

Wer’s glaubt wird selig! (A likely story.)

Saving ain’t what it used to be

October 25, 2010 By in Hard Facts, Heconomy Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

In Germany, I mean. About 16 percent of the German population doesn’t have anything left over to save anymore.

But the rest who do are still pretty good at it–and they are just as conservative about their saving strategies as they have ever been. Some 49 percent of savers save using the good old-fashioned savings account, 35 percent still like the old Bausparvertrag technique (a savings contract with a home building society), 31 percent save using insurance policies and only about 22 percent go for stocks and bonds.

And that all of these numbers added up together give you a number like way higher than 100 percent only goes to show you just how good at saving these Germans really are. Damn. I wish we could do that.

“Lediglich fünf Prozent aller Sparer legen besonderen Wert darauf, dass sie die Finanzprodukte, in die sie investieren, auch vollständig verstehen.”

Too many rich people here

October 12, 2010 By in Hard Facts Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Germans everywhere are concerned about a very disturbing revelation: There are over 100 German billionaires living in or around the country as we speak, so-to-speak.

These amerikanische Verhältnisse (American conditions) are unfair and unexceptable and incommensurate with the German consitution, or ought to be, because no German should have that much capital at his or her disposal because, well, this is an outrage for some reason.

Of course that these same upset Germans made the first three on the list (the ALDI and Lidl folks) as disgustingly wealthy as they are by always wanting cheapness über alles, that’s another story. Actually, no. It isn’t.

But maybe another story is the fact that Germans live in a so-called Neidgesellschaft (a society infected with envy) and are generally filled with Missgunst (resentment) and don’t want to keep up with the Joneses as much as they want to keep the Joneses down. Or anders gesagt (in other words); there can’t be any losers in Germany, but there sure the hell better not be any winners either.

“Insgesamt erhöhte sich die Zahl der Milliardäre und Milliardärsfamilien in Deutschland im Vergleich zum Vorjahr leicht von 99 auf 103.”