Street View Egging Update

No good “anti-privacy vandals,” egging Street View opt-out homes like that.

It’s folks like this (the vandals, not them there folks up there) that give Street View a bad name in this country. Other than Google itself, I mean.

And the latest bizarre German Street View shot? How about this one: Capturing the birth of a baby on a street in a Berlin suburb, “although there are question-marks over the veracity of the incident.”

“We respect people’s right to remove their house from Street View and by no means consider this to be acceptable behaviour,” a Google spokesperson said.

Who’s clueless now?

“About two weeks ago, Germany’s finance minister described U.S. economic policy as “clueless.” We don’t want to sound childish…

But after yet another bailout for an insolvent European country – about $137 billion for Ireland – we are inclined to ask: If the United States is clueless, what does that make Germany? The de facto leader of the crisis-ridden, 16-nation eurozone, Berlin has not performed its role brilliantly over the past year.”

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Fehlalarm des Tages (false alarm of the day):  A suitcase at the Düsseldorf Main Station.

Street View way cool after all

Now that Google’s Street View is up and running in Germany, many of the very Germans so entsetzt (horrified) at the Datenkrake (data octopus) invading their privacy in the first place finally get to see how way cool this service really is and are now horrified that their homes have been pixelated without their permission–although this naked guy down here in his trunk in Mannheim was obviously thrilled with the Street View concept right from the start and wasn’t pixelated one tiny little bit, though he maybe shoulda outta been.

Many of these horrified Germans have now asked to have their pixelated homes unpixelated again ASAP but unfortunately this is now no longer possible, says Google, as one of the conditions for introducing Street View to Germany in the first place, as demanded by Germany’s horrified data security officials, was the immediate destruction of all photographic raw material once the data has been entered into the Street View database.

Lots of German real estate and tourism companies are upset about this unfortunate pixelization process too, by the way.

But hey,  you can’t displease all of the people all of the time, I guess.

“In keinem der 26 anderen Street-View-Länder gab es am ersten Tag einen solchen Zulauf wie in Deutschland., gab Google bekannt.”

Gottcha!

Just kidding about that being a bomb yesterday, folks. Just testing, I mean.

Wasn’t that hysterical? And here you thought American companies couldn’t export any cool stuff anymore.

And today’s Fehlalarm (false alarm)? A suspicious object that wasn’t a bomb this time either caused an ICE train to be evacuated at Düsseldorf Hauptbahnhof (sorry, the linking is acting up a bit at the moment: http://www.stern.de/politik/deutschland/terrorgefahr-in-deutschland-fehlalarm-im-ice-attrappe-in-namibia-1625680.html)

“BKA officials have examined it and the result is that it is a so-called ‘real test suitcase’ from a U.S. company. This company produces alarm and detection systems and these test suitcases are made to test security measures.”

German drones in action

No, not in Afghanistan or in Pakistan.

In Gorleben. Unconfirmed reports say that up to 20 innocent (although greenish) German civilians were not killed in a recent non-attack, but were photographed instead, which is pretty much the same thing over here.

It is unclear at this time if the folks over at Google’s Street View have expressed an interest in purchasing the photos or not–pixelated, of course.

Um Straftaten nachträglich aufklären zu können, hat die Polizei erstmals eine unbemmannte Drohne mit Kamera eingesetzt.

Maybe history does repeat itself

At least when it comes to Germany’s interest in benefitting from currency troubles, I mean. Hey Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy… Stay hard-up or shut-up.

”The key principle of German economic policy was to persuade the French and Italians to lower the value of the D-mark so as to make Germany more competitive.”

“The Berlin government’s intransigence over the debt issue, while politically understandable from a German point of view, seemingly pays little heed to the realities of the euro economy, which are heavily tilted towards Germany.”

“In pre-EMU days, if the German economy were growing at an estimated 3.7% as it is this year, the German currency and interest rates would both come under upward pressure – damping exporters’ performance and the growth outlook. Now, however, with all EMU economies shackled together, and devaluation an impossibility for the peripheral countries, the hard-up states have nowhere to hide. Germany continues to profit from excellent export performance — and it can self-righteously point the finger of blame for the euro area’s woes at those debt-ridden peripheral states.”

Nothing Nouveau on the German Front

This is a very complex article, I grant you, a lot like that other one I mentioned recently, but with a little bit of effort I think I can somehow manage to summarize it for you thus (and I quote, more or less):

American society is breaking apart.

Everything is spiraling further and further into the abyss.

The American people are going through a Kafkaesque odyssey, the humiliation of which is hard to comprehend.

Help is not in sight, our government and our society have abandoned us.

Wall Street is preoccupied with chasing new profits again.

That old myth about working your way up, of bootstrap success and its ultimate prize, homeownership, has evaporated.

The middle class, America’s backbone, is crumbling.

The American Dream has turned into a nightmare.

Nothing’s going to happen because the political swing to the right is extremely hurtful and absolutely disastrous to the interest of the weakest.

Becoming unemployed is a devious trap. And on and on and tra, la, la until the amen part.

Like, you had no idea, did you? My fellow Americans, I mean. So there you have it. Yet again. And no, the O Word didn’t appear in this article either.

The Way We Were

Is the way we still be.

Bush: “As someone who valued personal diplomacy, I put a high premium on trust. Once that trust was violated, it was hard to have a constructive relationship again.”

Schroeder: “We noticed that the intellectual level of the (US president) was exceedingly limited. As such, it was difficult for us to communicate with him.”

“What is true of Afghanistan is true of Iraq. Nations that sponsor terror must face consequences. If you make it fast and make it decisive, I will be with you.”

Germany and China vs. the USA

Guess who wins (these days, I mean)? Duh. But it’s only a paritial victory, as Germany tries to spin it (they don’t want to gloat all too much publically).

After China and Germany teamed up and publicly slammed the Federal Reserve’s decision to buy $600 billion in Treasury bonds last week, now they’re shoulder to shoulder at the G20 successfully resisting this EVIL infusion of cash (= dollar devaluation) together too. They are doing this because, well, only China is allowed to devaluate its currency, I guess. And a weak dollar also means a strong euro which would hurt German exports and, well, this isn’t allowed to happen either.

Strange bedfellows aren’t they? Sure. What can/will President Obama do about it? Not much, it seems. But at least everybody over there still really, really likes him. And that’s the main thing.

It’s a mystery, isn’t it? How we got here, I mean? Well, no. I guess it isn’t. But why this happened as it did is all too, uh, deep for me. It’s kind of like this current German hole within a hole conundrum going on.

I mean, don’t like two holes make a non-hole?

“Obama muss klein beigeben”

Banana Republik Deutschland

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.”