Politics on alper.nl

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 15:09:48 +0200

A really simple bit of digital activation in Zohran Mamdanis’ communication which is one of many parts that make him so effective.

https://iamwillwang.com/notes/zohran-and-the-short-link

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 18:31:22 +0200

I joke that staying off X was Woke 1.

Gruber has a point here. I also enjoy Mastodon more than I do Bluesky and my feed does have a bunch of interesting things in it. But truly, there is zero “action” there.

The people who build it even pride themselves on it. When the design goal is to be dull, that’s an easy one to hit.

https://daringfireball.net/2026/10/x_once_again_marks_the_spot

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:53:40 +0200

A strong argument written in German against the privatization of social media as a problem inflicted on us by unaccountable profit seeking corporations.

I’m not sure whether this will do anything to course correct the idiocy that our politicians seem hell bent on pushing on us. It should not be children and parents who are regulated, but the corporation taking advantage of us.

https://www.blaetter.de/ausgabe/2026/juni/die-tiktok-demokratie

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:51:31 +0200

The German car industry has remained immensely profitable all the while driving itself off a cliff (!).

The crisis is entirely self-inflicted and lots of people have taken the money and ran. There need to be political and criminal consequences for this before the country can move on.

https://www.somo.nl/manufactured-crisis/

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:21 +0200

Tooze makes a coherent argument in this episode of Surplus why expropriation of the large landlords in Berlin makes economic sense. Morally it’s of course a no-brainer.

Very much worth listening to if you still have to make up your mind for the Berlin election.

https://www.surplusmagazin.de/podcast/vergesellschaftung-okonomisch-berlin-deutschewohnenundcoenteignen-tomkrebs-adamtooze/

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 08:33:21 +0200

Why would anybody pay attention to what a German court says about something digital? The country has no idea and is behind by decades. Was the ruling delivered by fax machine?

https://the-decoder.com/landmark-german-ruling-declares-googles-ai-overviews-are-googles-own-words-and-makes-it-liable-for-false-answers/

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 08:57:14 +0200

The exact words we choose when writing matter. I want any LLM I use to choose the very best, most precise words at every single decision point.

Writers coming out publicly against LLM watermarking in one swoop both devalue their own work and betray they have no idea how this technology works.

https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/anthropics_watermark_text_adulteration_in_claude_is_a_perversion_of_writing

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 13:07:43 +0200

Here’s an idea: I think video documentation of extremely risky behaviour (parkour, rooftopping etc.) and self-harm (mutilation, mukbang, ana) should be banned on all the major video platforms.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 23:45:11 +0200

If LLMs are trained on GPL licensed code (and as it seems now they are trained on that and on pretty much everything else the companies can get their hands on), why doesn’t that make the LLMs and all the works they produce GPL licensed?

I don’t mind if we pretend that it doesn’t, but at that point we might as well get rid of the concept of intellectual property entirely.

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:46:15 +0200

It should surprise nobody that ed tech is mostly an excuse to shovel money to whoever has an open line to the politicians making decisions at the moment.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/01/22/ed-tech-is-profitable-it-is-also-mostly-useless

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:41:42 +0200

Sovereign Tech Fund investing in KDE points towards some concerted effort into weaning Europe off big tech. KDE has come a long way and with a bunch more more pushes like this, it could become a more than worthy alternative to Windows.

https://kde.org/announcements/sovereign-tech-fund-invests-kde/

Sat, 09 May 2026 16:52:24 +0200

I read some stuff by Zitron a while back and even back then it seemed untenable and divorced from reality aiming mostly to score points with an audience that’s more than eager to believe him.

Another branch of leftism that’s found it easier to retreat from reality than to try to actually do the work.

https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/ais-biggest-critic-has-lost-the-plot

Sat, 09 May 2026 16:38:41 +0200

Het is lastig te beschrijven hoe belangrijk en consequent Karin Spaink en haar schrijven waren voor Nederland en voor de digitale wereld waarin ook ik opgegroeid ben.

De beste manier om het te snappen is het lezen van dit afscheid waarin veel van waar ze voor stond bij elkaar komt.

https://www.spaink.net/2026/05/08/exit-spaink/

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:43:50 +0200

One person helping another because they have a relationship and the work needs doing. Sean frames these as workarounds. Necessary but awkward and illegible. But what if they’re not workarounds? What if they’re the actual thing?

It’s permanent revolution. Not in the dramatic sense, but in the sense of continually choosing the thick over the thin, the contextual over the mechanical, the human relationship over the ticket.

https://eli.li/the-seed-beneath-the-snow

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:37:30 +0200

After hearing so many good things anout it, we normal people finally get to use a SAP solution as well. I wonder how quickly they’ll get out a first version for us to test and how wonderfully usable it’s going to be.

https://www.heise.de/news/SAP-und-Telekom-entwickeln-zentrale-Buerger-App-fuer-Deutschland-11247464.html

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 22:32:34 +0100

Dürer designed an amazing monument for the vanquished peasants.

http://thecityasaproject.org/2012/07/the-measure-of-turmoil-durers-monument-to-the-vanquished-peasants/

It turns out that monument was finally realized and unveiled last month. Worth taking a detour on the bike for.

https://b2b.thueringen-entdecken.de/en/w/the-duerer-monument-on-the-kornmarkt-in-muehlhausen?wbk_acb_fs=3

Mary Beard

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 22:23:24 +0100

One of my favorite episodes of Past Present Future with Mary Beard where she compares the unaccountable power of emperors of the past with today’s tech oligarchs.

https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/mary-beard-on-caesar%2C-augustus-%26-zuckerberg

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 22:10:17 +0100

You love to see the office of digitalization in Germany in such competent hands.

Not only is having a single app for every person in Germany a really old and dumb idea. But even if we assumed that that would make a difference here, such a project will take forever and yield a lacklustre unusable result.

https://www.heise.de/news/Das-wird-krass-Digitalminister-plant-bundesweite-Buerger-App-11192475.html

Klaus Programmiert

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 22:02:11 +0100

The German version of Claude Code is out.

https://klausprogrammieren.com

This is so real that it’s not funny anymore.
This website is more usable than most German government websites.

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 23:04:02 +0100

Reducing kids’ exposure to the internet and social media is something that’s very tempting for governments who want to control and surveil everything that happens online.

In reality, there is very little evidence and thinking behind both the problem and the solutions, Ulla Autenrieth explains here.

“The pandemic” for instance is another phenomenon that’s always mentioned as having hurt kids’ development. I can say what has hurt us and our kids much much more than that have been the ongoing campaigns of austerity of the Dutch and German governments. Odd, how those are mentioned so rarely.

https://kleinstadt.ch/mit-verboten-werden-jugendliche-zum-schweigen-gebracht/

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 22:28:50 +0100

A thorough teardown what it takes to build a startup (almost) entirely on European infrastructure. It’s possible but not at all easy yet.

https://www.coinerella.com/made-in-eu-it-was-harder-than-i-thought/

Ronzheimer

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 19:14:20 +0100

Through a recommendation on Bluesky I came across the Ronzheimer podcast hosted by Paul Ronzheimer, the main journalist out of the Axel-Springer media house. Listening to him talk to German notables, it becomes clear that he’s not the sharpest knife in the block. There is no spark or wit in either of the two episodes I listened to. His questions are superficial and unoriginal. I don’t understand why anybody would listen to this.

Let’s talk about the episode with Veronika Grimm. It goes entirely as expected. Ronzheimer gives Grimm a bunch of easy passes that allow her to spout the talking points the German government has been pushing about the economy.

Grimm and the government want everybody to work more for less money. The threat is that if we don’t, the economy will become even more uncompetitive than it already is.

We’ve heard them rant against people who are working part-time. Nothing is going to change because of these rants. It would be better to examine why people need to work part-time and try to figure out solutions. The vast productivity and effectiveness gaps present in almost every German company and institution need to be fixed by investment, not papered over by pushing people to work more hours.

Doing any of these of course requires a politics based on changing something. That’s not something this German government can do.

But what takes the cake is Grimm also suggesting to roll back the “telephone sick note” to increase productivity in Germany. Me dragging myself to the doctor’s office on Monday morning and waiting three hours to get a piece of paper is really going to make the country more productive.

With thinking like this we’ll never get a better economy. In the Netherlands sick notes do not exist and working part-time is incredibly common. Last I checked they are doing better than Germany on all fronts.

https://pca.st/episode/08560107-9341-42b6-b177-13cdff827e06

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 13:16:55 +0100

Here’s a case for the people in Germany claiming that Datenschutz is never used to limit societal progress and that it doesn’t have a vast and debilitating chilling effect.

Daraufhin teilte das LDA dem Bürger mit, dass man datenschutzrechtliche Auflagen, nach denen der Bürger den Falschparkern beispielsweise eine Internetseite zur Verfügung stellen müsse, auf der über die Datenverarbeitung informiert werde. Zudem verlangt das LDA detaillierte Angaben zu eingesetzten EDV-Geräten und Sicherheitsmaßnahmen wie automatischen Betriebssystem-Updates und Verschlüsselung der Datenübertragung.

A man sending pictures of people blocking the road in front of his kids’ school has been sent a notice by the Bayerische Landesamt für Datenschutzaufsicht that he needs to guarantee the privacy of the culprits on all levels.

The German government instead of doing its job and enforcing traffic laws would rather spend its time harrassing honest citizens.

https://www.op-online.de/na-pressemitteilungen/einschuechterungsversuche-durch-bayerische-landesbehoerde-deutsche-umwelthilfe-unterstuetzt-buerger-im-verfahren-um-falschparker-vor-muenchner-schule-zr-94130332.html

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 13:11:27 +0100

France leads the way enforcing the real laws that we have against abuse against the American platforms. Let’s push for many more governments to follow suit.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/03/french-headquarters-elon-musk-x-raided-paris-cybercrime-unit

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 15:22:05 +0100

Europe has lots of significant industries and capabilities. There is nothing stopping us from having a competitive local cloud offering (except of course the lack of political will).

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/now-how-to-get-that-european-cloud/

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 15:06:35 +0100

Germany desperately needs to be investing in its future, it needs equipment of all kinds. It needs infrastructure and it also needs to invest in human capital.

https://open.substack.com/pub/adamtooze/p/chartbook-463-polygloom-whats-wrong

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:19:31 +0100

Like the NYT has walked back its reporting and continuously grovels for its regime, you can see the exact same behavior of uncritical non-journalism in mainstream outlets over here.

https://criticalread.substack.com/p/moments-of-bravery-and-cowardice

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 23:21:26 +0100

The CDU wants to abolish the right to work part-time in Germany. Most people don’t know that anybody here can ask to work part-time and if the company does not have a good reason to refuse it, they can’t.

There are a number of issues with this idea:

For as long as I’ve worked in Germany I don’t think I’ve ever seen another man work part-time. In effect this would be abolishing a right that is only exercised by women which makes this sexist, even by the CDU’s standards.
Given the discouraged labor participation of women in Germany in general and them being the only ones using this, it’s fair to say that working part-time is rare in Germany. That makes the change here relatively inconsequential.
That majority of people who did work full-time up until now, have hardly created the economic output and innovation to put Germany in a competitive position. That makes you think part-time is not the real issue at hand here.

Like we’re used to, another bit of ‘window dressing’ politics from the CDU without real reason or consequence.

(Full disclosure I work part-time in my current job and have worked part-time in the two jobs before that as well.)

https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/cdu-wirtschaftsfluegel-ende-teilzeit-100.html

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 22:52:55 +0100

A nice profile about the Tooze phenomenon.

About Marx him and me both:

He told me that he is not a Marxist in part because he thinks treating a body of theory produced in the middle of the 19th century as “the be-all and end-all” – a stable point from which one might stand outside history and discern its hidden forces and patterns – is “a lazy way of dealing with reality”. To accept the radicalism of the present, he says, means acknowledging that you can’t understand history before it happens: “If you’re in the middle of shit, you don’t actually know what the shit is that you’re in the middle of.”

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/15/the-crisis-whisperer-how-adam-tooze-makes-sense-of-our-bewildering-age

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 11:15:02 +0100

You can trust the Verge to mostly be right and to rarely pull any punches. That is worth a lot right now.

https://www.theverge.com/policy/859902/apple-google-run-by-cowards

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 09:07:36 +0100

An thorough analysis of the position of women and the normalization of domestic abuse in South Asia.

https://yashicadutt.substack.com/p/the-south-asian-juror-in-the-diddy

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 11:30:19 +0100

Aphyr, somebody who’s technical work is widely known and respected gives a first hand account of what it’s like to live under fascist occupation.

https://aphyr.com/posts/397-i-want-you-to-understand-chicago

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 11:11:45 +0100

Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.

It’s hard to overstate how cooked Peter Thiel’s brain is. Why is this person in charge of anything?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/peter-thiel-lectures-antichrist

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 22:49:05 +0100

Instead of being able to carry my digital ID in my phone wallet as is long overdue, here in Europe we just get lots of people going on and on about these or those privacy minutiae.

Let’s not pretend that any of our goverments would meaningfully stand up to the USA anyway, so might as well just give us the goodies.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/11/apple-introduces-digital-id-a-new-way-to-create-and-present-an-id-in-apple-wallet/

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 22:40:41 +0100

Ai Weiwei is right to be angry and lashes out in this barrage of scathing statements. That Zeit would not publish this is curious given the garbage that they’ve been wont to put out over the past year. However undirected, criticism of Germany is not appreciated by the Germans.

Here, at a deserted street, people stop dutifully at a red light. Not a car in sight. This, I once thought, is the mark of a highly evolved society. At the heart of bureaucracy lies a collective endorsement of power’s legitimacy, and therefore, individuals surrender their moral judgment — or perhaps never developed one. They abandon challenge. They relinquish dispute.

That is the anecdote also with which “Two Cheers for Anarchism” (read in 2012) opens: A German village in the 80s without any traffic but with a traffic light where the people dutifully wait for the green signal even though everybody knows there is no point.

It’s hard to come up with a better illustration of the working of the German mind and its major malfunction.

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 22:36:40 +0100

It’s not just Mamdani, it’s also Jewish leaders like Rabbi Moishe Indig who make me ashamed to live in Berlin. In comparison, our local political and religious leaders are so very bad.

The Kingmaker from Williamsburg

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 22:28:57 +0100

His father is a university professor. His mother is a physician. Farritor seems to have been a child prodigy whose talents were recognized, encouraged, and incubated almost from the moment he hit puberty. He was supported by both his well-to-do family, his community, and a number of institutions that exist to identify and elevate gifted children.

And then went on to cut government programs which directly caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Kids given every privilege and every opportunity who turned into monsters.

The Boy Genius Who Killed 14 Million Poor People

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 20:13:45 +0100

Being regulated out of existence should not be near the top of the worries of anybody working on AI at X.

They should face criminal charges. If not in the USA, then in other parts of the world where the law still means something.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/02/musk-grok-ai-bot-safeguard-sexualized-images-children.html

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 20:04:45 +0100

A very useful and necessary list by the FT of who’s behind all the awfulness emanating from the X¹ website.

Who’s who at X, the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter

We shouldn’t use the word Twitter anymore since that is nothing more anymore than the dead rotting carcass from which X launches its misdeeds. ↩︎

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 10:24:18 +0100

Asis Aynan over white flight in Amsterdam:

Als je kind op de gewenste voorschool/kinderopvang zit ben je binnen, want dan heb je voorrang tot je begeerde basisschool, waarmee die hele ‘betrouwbare’ loting best een farce genoemd kan worden.

Ook in Berlijn zijn de scholen in Kreuzberg perfect gesegregeerd.

White flight is ook niet het juiste begrip omdat ik Turken ken die uit Geuzenveld wegtrokken destijds naar Hoofddorp omdat er teveel Marokkanen in de buurt kwamen. Brown from brown flight?

de periode waar ik vervreemd werd van mijn klasgenoten en een leerachterstand opliep omdat ik op de basisschool tijdens het reguliere onderwijs uit de klas werd gehaald om ergens anders in het gebouw onderricht in de Arabische taal te krijgen

Ik heb een tijd lang ook Turkse les gekregen op de basisschool. Het deed weinig ter zake en in een uurtje per week kun je ook niet heel veel bereiken behalve wat basics bijtimmeren.

Toen in de sterren bleek te staan dat onze liefde om nageslacht vroeg, zei ik tegen mijn vriendin dat als het ons gegund was om een nest op te bouwen ik mijn achternaam niet aan onze kinderen hoefde door te geven. En niet omdat ze betere kansen op de arbeidsmarkt te geven, wat verschillende mensen uit mijn omgeving tegen mij zeiden. Ja, de opmerkingen zijn niet van zijde, maar van het grofste schuurpapier.

Wij hebben het wel om díe reden gedaan want er is een echte wereld daarbuiten en elk voordeel is mooi meegenomen. Onze kinderen hebben een Zuid-Duitse achternaam (want dat staat gelijk aan geld) en Turkse middelnamen die ze kunnen inzetten wanneer het hen uitkomt.

https://asisaynan.nl/er-is-iets-geknapt/

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 10:15:03 +0100

Bill Gates pretends to be good but has had his hand in many sketchy things including Epstein and climate denial here with Bjorn Lomborg.

None of them can be trusted and every billionaire needs to be abolished.

https://www.desmog.com/2025/11/05/bill-gates-donated-climate-denier-bjorn-lomborg-copenhagen-consensus-center/

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 15:01:36 +0100

The number of sources of authoritative information is indeed limited enough that the proposal of cryptographically tagging verified output is not that outlandish.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/ex-palantir-turned-politician-alex-140500353.html

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 08:14:48 +0000

I’m going through my old drafts on this blog while I prepare moving off Wordpress and I really should have read my own writing.

One thing that could’ve been prevented for instance would be me dealing with the Greens and then saying goodbye to them as described here: Reckoning with the Greens.

Turns out I did the same thing with GroenLinks in 2007…

Ik laat mijn lidmaatschap van GroenLinks maar verlopen.

With similar reasoning:

Verder denk ik niet meer dat lidmaatschap van een politieke partij een archaïsch instituut is dat niet past bij deze tijd, bij mensen van mijn leeftijd en het huidige politieke landschap. Heel cru gesproken: Wat heb ik eraan als ik niet actief wil worden in een kader en niet wil gaan hengelen naar een baantje ergens? Ik heb wel wat beters te doen.

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:23:12 +0000

https://netzpolitik.org/2025/dsgvo-reform-beim-datenschutz-ist-deutschland-inzwischen-dem-silicon-valley-naeher-als-dem-rest-der-eu/

The diagnosis here about the unique German problem with Datenschutz is mostly correct. Of course other European countries manage to have privacy without working themselves in a huff around Datenschutz. How could that be?

The causes mentioned are correct:

There are too many people working in law and compliance in Germany who do nothing but create paper and slow everything down. Lots of people’s livelihoods depend on absurd regulations being there.
The chilling effect around these regulations has contributed to a low risk appetite and a culture where problems are maintained instead of being solved.

But the real reason of course why things are like this here but not elsewhere is culture. It’s always culture.

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 23:52:30 +0000

“AI is expected to approach human reasoning”

If nothing else, von der Leyen demonstrates here that ChatGPT is smarter than the average person in her office. Not exactly what you would call superintelligence, but still.

One question you could ask is: Why is she changing laws to promote AI but not for instance self-driving cars?

https://euobserver.com/digital/ar68689659

The Acemoglu & Robinson Critique on Piketty

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 23:47:05 +0000

I read this paper right after I read the book by Piketty thinking that there would be some interesting economic debate. Unfortunately I was proved wrong and this seems to be exemplary of the stagnation of the economic field.

Most of my thinking on the paper has been confirmed by this post: http://glineq.blogspot.nl/2014/08/my-take-on-acemoglu-robinson-critique.html

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 21:34:47 +0000

Musk’s attacks on British politics have been bizarre to witness. Imagine the richest man in the world waging an influence operation trying to put the far right in power in your country.

https://news.sky.com/story/the-x-effect-how-elon-musk-is-boosting-the-british-right-13464487

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 20:45:22 +0000

Both placing these ads and serving them should be illegal in any reasonable market/democracy.

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 22:01:02 +0000

Hydrogen! Which irrelevant technology will Germany be financing next?

https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/bmw-foerdergelder-wasserstoff-suv-100.html

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 21:54:39 +0000

China is steaming ahead also with self-driving car technology.

What was the old joke again? Germany will allow self-driving cars as soon as the local car makers manage to cack the problem. Guaranteed not to happen before 2050.

https://www.economist.com/china/2025/10/16/the-secret-fuel-powering-chinas-self-driving-cars