For Super Bowl Amerika, I mean?
They should have at least tried using a real German.
“Algorithm” isn’t VW’s official ad for Super Bowl XLVIII, it’s simply meant as a teaser. Artistically speaking, it’s designed to give viewers a sense of the tone Volkswagen will strike on February 2. Creatively speaking, it’s pretty lazy.
PS: Thanks for the funny Passat/Charger clip, Murph. Perfect intro to this.
For rigging the prestigious (yawn) “car the year” award competition, I mean.
Mr. Ramstetter, 60, admitted to Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung that he had increased the number of ADAC member votes tenfold for this year’s “Golden Angel” award which went to the Volkswagen Golf.
Although the ADAC did not admit it, there were suspicions that its executives may have taken sizeable backhanders from Germany’s powerful car manufacturers in exchange for manipulating the figures.
The EU’s reputation as a model of environmental responsibility may soon be history. The European Commission wants to forgo ambitious climate protection goals and pave the way for fracking — jeopardizing Germany’s touted energy revolution in the process.
The Commission’s move further isolates Germany. Merkel’s government, a “grand coalition” of her conservatives and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), seeks to increase the share of renewables in the country’s energy mix to 60 percent by 2036.
OMG! Is Germany now headed for WAR ITSELF?!? Where is Guido Westerwelle when you need him? “The deployment of German combat troops is not an option. And I have to mention just one more point. We Germans are highly involved in Afghanistan, where the French are hardly involved at all.”
According to a report in the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” on Saturday the German government is planning to help reinforce the ongoing military operation in Mali through a larger and more robust French-German contingent. The newspaper also reported that government would support a possible EU military operation in the Central Africa Republic (CAR) with transport aircraft and aerial refueling.
“Europe cannot leave France on its own down there.”
PS: In a related story (not), Barack Obama Tells Germans In TV Interview That It’s OK For Them To Stop Worrying About US Spying Now So Everything Is OK Again.
What’s not to like here?
“Super minister?” I’d say this is more like a job for Superpenner.
The difference between the market price for electricity and the higher fixed price for renewables is passed on to consumers, whose bills have been rising for years. An average household now pays an extra €260 ($355) a year to subsidise renewables: the total cost of renewable subsidies in 2013 was €16 billion. Costs are also going up for companies, making them less competitive than rivals from America, where energy prices are falling thanks to the fracking boom…
Cost is not the only problem with the Energiewende. It has in effect turned the entire German energy industry into a quasi-planned economy with perverse outcomes. At certain times on some days, sun and wind power may provide almost all German electricity. But the sun does not always shine, especially in winter, and the wind is unpredictable. And “batteries”—storage technologies that, for example, convert power to gas and back again to electricity—on a scale sufficient to supply a city are years away. Nuclear-power plants are being phased out (this week’s court decision that the closure of a plant in Hesse was illegal will raise costs even more, as it may entitle the operator to more compensation). So conventional power plants have to stay online in order to assure continuous supply.
When Germans register private weapons, they do it thoroughly. But by always keeping thorough privacy protection policies in mind, too, of course.
There are 550 various Waffenbehörden (weapons agencies) in the country and they must all now register their registered weapons at the Nationale Waffenregister (national firearmes registry) to boot. Sound well-registered? It should. It is.
Unfortunately, for those who advocate strict weapon registration policies here (99.9 percent of the population?), things aren’t going to plan.
First of all, those who advocate strict weapon registration (“the public”) want to KNOW who has the weapons, how many these owners have, etc. but the firearms registry legislation does not provide for this so they are Scheiße outta luck (law enforcement officials have access, of course).
The second problem is that the numbers now indicate (as they always have elsewhere) that registered weapons still kill people. Along with all of those other “bad” illegal unregistered weapons out there, too, I mean.
Wer wie viele Waffen hat, geht die Öffentlichkeit nichts an – “Bitte betrachten Sie unsere Ablehnung nicht als unhöfliches Vorgehen. Wir sehen leider keine Möglichkeiten, Ihrem aus öffentlichen Interesse erwachsendem Anliegen geeignet zu entsprechen.”
Yeah, me too. I’ve always felt that wedding veils add a certain mystique to a bride’s look.
Berlin Fashion Week. It’s not just for fashion designers anymore.
Sozialtourismus has just been selected by the Brain Police as Germany’s Unwort des Jahres (non-word of the year). It means “social tourism” and is terribly cynical and politically incorrect as it refers to “unwanted immigrants from eastern Europe” who come to Germany to presumably milk all the wonderful social benefits here, something of course social tourists from eastern Europe or elsewhere would never, ever do.
Non-word of the year? The year has just begun, hasn’t it? And there are way more cool non-words out there that are much more deserving, if you ask me (I know you didn’t, but I’m telling you anyway). How about Superpenner (Super Bum), for instance? Bum is totally politically incorrect, too (that is what they used to call the homeless) and super is, well, super. So there.
Anyway, in case you didn’t know, Superpenner is a new comic action hero who has now arrived to save Berlin. And it’s about freakin’ time, too. To save it from all of those Straßenfeger (street sweeper) newspaper salesmen who accost us with their sales pitches in the U-Bahn all day long. I can hear it already: “Now with the Supperpenner comic book!”
Berlins Straßen haben einen neuen Helden: Den Superpenner – wenn auch nur auf dem Papier. Der Comic-Actionhero soll den Absatz der Berliner Obdachlosenzeitung Straßenfeger steigern.
Observing Hermann 