Taylorismus-Made

November 25, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Heconomy, Helplessness, Hi-tech, Hideology, Hurt Feelings, Hypochondria, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: Amazon, Employment, German, Germans, Germany, Humor, Robots, Satire, Unions, Work, Working Conditions, Zombies 2 Comments

Please read the following out loud in that classic monotone el cheapo Hollywood movie robot voice:

We are all robots here. No one talks. It is ghostly quiet here in the Amazon warehouse.

We are forced to wear these weird orange signal jackets. Amazon wants us to hand over our brains at the door once we enter here. There is no turning back.

Only the customer is allowed to have any individuality.

Everything is fully conform. Every step is standardized. Deviations would disrupt the calculation.

They have got me so far that I now do everything they say (just like I already do outside when watching the Tagesschau or when reading Spiegel Online).

I have no free will. We are all victims and are being ausgebeutet (exploited) to an unbearable degree. This is Kapitalismus pur or something. Oh my God we are all going to die. No, wait. We are dead already.

“Mich haben sie jetzt so weit. Ich mache, was man mir sagt.”

Uppity In Your Face

November 24, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Hard Facts, Heconomy, Helections, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hustle (Hoax), Hypochondria, Hypocrisy Tags: Berlin, CDU/CSU, Coalition Governments, Elections, German, Germans, Germany, Political Parties, Politics, SPD, Voting Leave a comment

My, how time flies. It’s been two months now. Talk about the tail wagging the dog.

Time for new elections, I’d say.

The SPD got 25.7% of votes compared with Mrs Merkel’s 41.5%. Mrs Merkel’s supporters are growing frustrated…

The bizarre situation has arisen because Mrs Merkel, her strong showing notwithstanding, fell just short of a majority of seats…

Mr Gabriel made another concession to the SPD’s left wing: a formal resolution on November 14th to be open in future to coalition talks with Die Linke. The two “red” parties used to detest each other, Die Linke considering the SPD sell-outs to capitalism and the SPD viewing Die Linke as a chaotic troupe of Marxists nostalgic for East Germany and dangerously hostile to NATO and America. Now, however, there is speculation that the SPD could break a coalition with Mrs Merkel in mid-term and go on to form an all-left government, unprecedented at the national level, dubbed “R2G” for red-red-green.

Just get it over with already, already, and call for a new election. They’ll never stop wasting your time otherwise.

The most important country in the European Union is thus being run by a caretaker cabinet, unable to take important decisions.

NGOs Go Home

November 21, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Heconomy, Helplessness, Hideology, Higher Education, Hustle (Hoax), Hypochondria, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: Climate Change, Climate Change Conference, CO2, German, Germans, Germany, NGOs, Warsaw 1 Comment

NGOs went home, I mean. Or at least a whole bunch of them just did.

It’s either our way or the highway said spokesmen at Oxfam, the WWF, Nabu, BUND and Friends of the Earth, among others, shortly before heading for the highway today.

They had been attending something called a “United Nations Climate Change Conference” in Warsaw and suddenly got completely and totally pissed off at the slow speed of progress and the lack of, well, media interest or ambition among those doing the negotiating. And at Poland, the host country. Poland is bad because, unlike Germany, for instance, it burns coal in its power plants.

Although holding their collective breaths until turning blue in the face hadn’t worked earlier in the day, the impulsive Weltverbesserer (starry-eyed idealists) are now convinced that this impressive act of pouty petulance is sure to put back more urgency and agitation into the ever so humdrum and tedious global climate change debate.

So you asked for this, world. Don’t say you didn’t.

“Der Zynismus hier ist nicht mehr auszuhalten.”

Saudi A.

November 20, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Heconomy, Helplessness, Hi-tech, Hideology, High Art, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy Tags: Arms exports, Berlin, Exports, German, Germans, Germany, Money, Pacifism, Profit, Weapons Leave a comment

Beautiful German weapon sale of the week.

Because somebody has to admire them.

Saudi-Arabien ist Hauptabnehmer deutscher Waffen.

Taxing Nuclear Fuel Rods That Aren’t Being Used?

November 19, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Habeas Corpus, Hard Facts, Heconomy, Higher Education, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: Berlin, Courts, Electricity, Energy, Energy Turnaround, EU, Europe, Fukushima, German, Germans, Germany, Green Shirts, Justice, Law, Nuclear power, Taxation, Taxes Leave a comment

You can never be too rich or too thin, I guess. And if you’re Germany, you can never tax too much, either.

Germany’s biggest utilities, still reeling from the country’s early exit from nuclear power, scored a major victory Tuesday when a Hamburg court said the national tax on nuclear fuel rods may violate European law.

The Hamburg finance court said it “cannot assess beyond any doubt” whether the tax on nuclear fuel used for electricity generation complies with European law. It will now ask the European Court of Justice to decide whether the levy conforms with rules that prohibit member states from creating new taxes on electricity for “general budget financing purposes.”

The tax was introduced at the beginning of 2011 and came as part of an extension of nuclear reactors’ operating lives that the government had agreed on. However, the nuclear disaster at Japan’s Fukushima power plant in March of that year triggered a U-turn in German energy policy, with Chancellor Angela Merkel ordering the immediate shutdown of the oldest plants and the early phaseout of nuclear energy by 2022. Out of 17 reactors that were in operation in March 2011, only nine are still producing power. But the fuel-rod tax remains in place, to the utilities’ annoyance.

Das Hamburger Finanzgericht will vom Europäischen Gerichtshof (EuGH) in Luxemburg zentrale Fragen zur umstrittenen Brennelementesteuer klären lassen.

SPD In Coalition Government = Gender Quota Legislation

November 18, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Habeas Corpus, Heconomy, Helections, Helplessness, Hideology, Humor, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy Tags: Berlin, CDU/CSU, Coalition Governments, German, Germans, Germany, Humor, Political Parties, Quotas, Satire, SPD, Women 1 Comment

Thank goodness this gender quota nonsense is finally about to be settled so a new coalition government can be formed in Germany.

Word has it that the CDU has agreed to let the SPD in if the proposed legislation stipulates only that each gender will be represented by at least one gender each.

German companies listed on the stock exchange will need at least 30% of supervisory board members to be female from 2016, according to proposed legislation.

If It Works, Fix It

November 17, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Helplessness, Hi-tech, High Art, Home Cooking, Humor, Hypochondria, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: Berlin, Bureaucracy, Crime Fighting, Drones, Fluglärm, German, Germans, Germany, Graffiti, Humor, Satire, Security, Surveillance, Terror, Terrorists, Vandalism 1 Comment

This is another one of those “only in Germany” numbers. Or maybe it isn’t (I’m slowly losing track of what’s going on out there in “the real world”).

The Deutsche Bahn’s program to use small drones to patrol railyards by night in a bid to fight graffiti spraying graffiti terrorists has suffered a setback. Although the test flights worked out just wunderbar, the German Luftsicherheitsbehörden (air security authority) has stopped the program for now as no night flight permits have been permitted – for drones designed to patrol railyards by night. Ordnung muss sein already.

This is actually a bit of a relief for me, to tell you the truth. Before reading the article I was convinced that the flights had been cancelled due to Fluglärm issues. Fluglärm (aircraft noise) is a big honking major awesome all-important obsession for all Germans at all times in all regions and all locations all over the country (and tomorrow the world) and I was sure that I was about to read how these mini-drones were simply too loud for the Anwohner (local residents), whoever or wherever they were.

Whew! That wasn’t the case, like I said. At least not this time. But let’s just wait and see what happens when/if these things are ever actually allowed to fly.

“Die Tests sind exzellent gelaufen, ein hervorragendes Einsatzmittel. Jedoch erteilen die Luftsicherheitsbehörden der Länder derzeit keine Fluggenehmigung für die Nachtstunden.”

I’ll Bash Germany With The Best Of Them

November 15, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Heconomy, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: Austerity, Debt Crisis, Economics, EU, Eurozone, German, Germans, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Paul Krugman, Portugal, Spain, Zero-Sum Fallacy Leave a comment

But… How is it that its critics blame Germany for the high unemployment, declining living standards, and riots to their South?

If this were a football game, the referee should call unnecessary roughness for piling on Germany. The American Left led by Paul Krugman (The Harm Germany Does and Those Depressing Germans) excoriates Germany for forcing austerity on the rest of Europe. The U.S. Treasury – and others – (no newcomer to spending) demands that miserly Germany spend more to pull the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain) out of their economic doldrums…

I interpret the liberals’ German bashing as having an entirely different motivation – their inherent dislike of economic success… In the liberal mind set, success must be equally shared. If one person, company, or country is better off, it must be at the expense of those who are less well off. We need to even things out in their zero-sum world.

PS: And I’m going to go even further out on the limb tonight defending Germany by predicting that they will finally – after 19 encounters? – beat Italy.

Germany To Be Punished For Europe Not Having Enough Germanys

November 13, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Heconomy, Helplessness, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: Account Surplus, Berlin, Brussels, EU, Eurozone, Exports, German, Germans, Germany, Humor, Satire, Trade, Trade Surplus Leave a comment

The EU now too is concerned that Germany’s current account surplus “is harming the wider European economy” and is openly considering punishing the naughty economic powerhouse.

Germany is relying too much on exports, eurozone officials are grumbling, while not doing enough to create demand at home. And although these officials maintain that “our problem will never be German competitiveness, but whether Germany, Europe’s economic powerhouse, could do more to rebalance Europe’s economy,” their problem has always been German competitiveness and knowing that Germany, Europe’s economic powerhouse, cannot do more to rebalance Europe’s economy.

“Europe needs more Germanys,” in other words, and it’s up to Germany to now, uh, create them.

Deutschland kann dem Rest Europas nicht Regeln vorschreiben und sich selbst nicht daran halten.

PS: “It’s GOOD to be the export king.”

A Scrooge Issue?

November 12, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Heconomy, Helplessness, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy Tags: Christmas, Consumers, Debt, Debt Crisis, EU, Europe, German, Germans, Germany, Spending Leave a comment

Or is it more of a squanderer one?

I don’t know what troubles me more here; a Germany that spends too little for Christmas or the weakest European economies that spend too much.

With almost 28 percent unemployment and a lingering recession that’s wiped out one-fourth of their country’s economic output, it makes sense that Greek consumers plan to trim their Christmas spending by 12.8 percent this year. What’s more surprising is that the average Greek budget for holiday gifts, food, and drink is €451 ($608)—more than the €399 average in Germany, the country that has borne much of the cost of a Greek bailout.

Residents of Ireland, another bailed-out economy, plan to outspend the Germans more than two to one this Christmas, with an average €894 budget. In Spain, where unemployment is at 26 percent, consumers expect to spend an average €567. In recession-hobbled Italy, meanwhile, the figure is €477.

“Differences between countries’ spending habits are linked to the culture of the countries.”

Observing Hermann

“Was interessiert mich mein Geschwätz von gestern?”

Category Archives: Hypocrisy