Beautiful German weapon sales of the week.
Because somebody has to admire them.
The number of Germans who have acquired weapons permits has risen considerably over the past two years. Having the requisite documentation allows people in the country to carry things like non-lethal gas pistols in public. In January 2016, just under 301,000 people had such a permit; in December 2017 there were over 557,000.
Jeepers. What makes the Germans so uptight these days?
So it’s time for the German Bundeswehr troops stationed there to leave. All five (5) of them.
They couldn’t have done it without you five guy, guys. Whatever it was they done did with you. I’d skip the parade, though, if I were you.
Derzeit sind in einem schwer gesicherten Camp am Flughafen von Mogadischu fünf deutsche Soldaten im Einsatz. Mit ihrer Mission will die EU den Aufbau einer regulären Armee für Somalia fördern. Kampfeinsätze oder die Begleitung von somalischen Einheiten im Land waren stets ausgeschlossen.
That means village idiot. Dorf = village. Trottel = idiot, get it?
Well, some guy who purchased a village in Brandenburg now wants his money back after having taken a closer look at the damned thing. That’s right, a village. In Brandenburg, for crying out loud. With like people living in it and the whole bit. But in Brandenburg, like I said. Brandenburg is a place you leave in Germany, not a place you move to.
Talk about being a Dorftrottel. He wants out of the deal now because he claims that he is not legally competent. How could he be? Village idiots never are. Except in being village idiots, maybe.
The mayor said he met the buyer in December in Alwine. According to local media, the buyer was a little surprised by the crumbling condition of the town, which has now worsened after a recent storm.
Or that’s what this article seems to suggest.
And this in a country that has already been redistributing the wealth for decades and decades or longer.
When it comes to the superrich, however, there are relatively reliable estimates in the form of lists of the world’s wealthiest people, with the one compiled by the US business magazine Forbes leading the way. A similar list is compiled in Germany by manager magazin. A team of tax experts led by Stefan Bach of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) has examined the wealth statistics compiled by the ECB and augmented them with lists identifying the ultrarich. And the team did so for three countries: Germany, France and Spain.
The result: The 45 richest households in Germany own as much wealth as the bottom half of the population. Each group possessed a total of 214 billion euros in assets in 2014.
Bad superrich! Bad!
Why would more redistribution be necessary in a country like Germany? Maybe because it doesn’t work. It can’t work, in fact. It is not, nor has it ever been, a zero sum game, this wealth business. Here or anywhere else. But it’s a great way for redistributing politicians to get elected. Again and again and again. To no avail.
“Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.”
Or at least that’s the impression I get. Otherwise, if they were so terribly worried about what Facebook does with their data, they would simply stop using it. It’s still a “free” service, right? But, of course, nothing is ever for free.
Facebook is open about collecting a broad variety of personal information, from facial recognition data to, yes, “likes” on other sites. Privacy-minded people can easily find out what Facebook knows about them and even download the data. So it’s not as if users were deceptively kept in the dark about Facebook’s harvesting of “21st century raw materials.” That, however, is not the Federal Cartel Office’s main concern; it’s that Facebook, as a company dominant in its market, forces users to agree to these harvesting practices: They don’t really have any place else to go for their digital social needs if they feel uncomfortable about how their data are used. If it’s a choice “between accepting ‘the whole Facebook package,’ including an extensive disclosure of personal data, or not using Facebook at all,” as the regulator put it in a December document, and if Facebook is a dominant company, it’s illegal in Germany.
The regulatory attack on personal data harvesting is based on the unproven assumption that the data are valuable.
That means refugee distribution. A very German word.
And now Angela Merkel’s government (non-government?), slow learners that they are, has finally figured out that the rest of Europe is absolutely, positively not interested in this German word.
After years of trying to get its neighbors to take in quotas of the refugees Angela Merkel invited to Germany it has finally seen the light – that it ain’t never gonna happen – and has decided to abandon the plan “for now.”
Die Bundesregierung ist bereit, die Diskussion über eine gleichmäßigere Verteilung von Flüchtlingen in Europa vorerst auszusetzen.
German tanks are apparently being used by Turkish forces in their current offensive against the Kurdish YPG militia in Syria and many Germans are demanding an immediate explanation.
German tanks are meant to be admired and purchased, of course, but no one here ever expected that anybody in the real world would ever actually want to use the damned things. The German army certainly never would. Or could, I should say (most of them are broken).
Jiminy. Somebody could get hurt by one of those things if the Turks aren’t careful. Does the foreign minister know about this?
Bei ihrer Offensive gegen die Kurden-Miliz YPG setzen die türkischen Streitkräfte offenbar auch deutsche Panzer ein: Deutsche und türkische Nachrichtenagenturen berichteten, dass Bilder von der Militäroperation Panzer vom Typ Leopard 2 A4 aus deutscher Produktion zeigten. Die Türkei hatte Leopard-2-Panzer bereits im Kampf gegen die Terrormiliz Islamischer Staat (IS) in Syrien eingesetzt.
That means humiliation or disgrace. And we, as in me, can only hope that this is what the “leadership” of the SPD gets to experience up close and personal at their big grand-coalition-yes-or-no party conference today.
Many of the SPD Genossen (comrades) are against forming a new grand coalition because the agreement Martin Schulz & Co. has worked out with Merkel’s CDU/CSU is, well, not “left” enough. Whatever that might mean these days.
I’m with them, of course, although not for the same reasons. This grand coaliton was voted out of office by the German electorate. What part of “no” don’t you understand? Merkel needs to spend a little time in minority government purgatory before calling for new elections again. This is the mess Germany is now in, folks. Every once in a while reality catches up with you. But as messy as it might be, the German voter does not deserve another GroKo. Please, SPD delegates, put an end to all this nonsense and have your party “reinvent” itself already, like it says there on that Spiegel cover.
600 Delegierte und 45 stimmberechtigte Mitglieder des Parteivorstands werden am Sonntag in Bonn entscheiden, wie es mit der SPD weitergeht. Aber nicht nur das: An ihrem Votum hängt auch die Zukunft von Parteichef Schulz.
That means “certificate of poverty” but is more like “evidence of incapability” or even “pathetic display.”
And that’s precisely what the head of the SPD is displaying so pathetically right now, yet again. “German election would further harm SPD, Schulz warns.” Like duh. They’ve been sinking in the polls like rocks.
The leader of Germany’s Social Democrats on Friday urged members of his center-left party to endorse coalition talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives or risk facing new elections that could further damage the party.
Amazing, really. The head of such a “principled” political party, grabbing for straws, tells his people to knuckle under at coalition talks knowing 1) this will upset the few people who still vote for the SPD but 2) if the coalition talks with Merkel’s CDU/CSU fail then the SPD will lose even bigger when new elections are called, which then must be the case (sure hope so). There’s your rock. There’s your hard place. I almost feel sorry for them this time. But only almost.
“If the parties do not succeed in forming a government with the majorities in the Bundestag, then voters will punish them.”
More like too Lidl too big and too early.
The expansion of German discount chain Lidl into US-Amerika is turning out to be less successful than hoped, to put it mildly. Sales are disappointing and the two billion euros planned to cover investment and start-up losses will not be enough. Management apparently chose too many wrong locations and built stores that were much too big. Instead of the 100 stores planned for last year only 47 actually opened.
This puzzles me a bit. You can’t walk a quorter of a mile in Germany without running into one of these places. And when I read how Lidl prices in the US seem to be just as low or lower than they are here, how could they possibly fail? Well, if they do, there’s still Aldi, right?
Die extrem jungen Expansionsteams haben in Amerika oftmals falsche Standorte ausgewählt. Zudem wurden zu große und zu teure Märkte gebaut. Die Umsätze sind enttäuschend. Die ursprünglich kalkulierten zwei Milliarden Euro für Investitionen und Anlaufverluste werden nach Informationen vom manager magazin nicht ausreichen.
