Leuk en informatief interview over ICT-projecten bij de overheid met Cokky Hilhorst.

Alleen een raar moment waar beide personen in de aflevering zich afvragen waarom de mensen zo boos worden terwijl zij projecten waar honderden miljoenen mee gemoeid zijn kapot schiet. Misschien draait het hier om het geld?

In this podcast episode a court case is treated (with the public prosecutor) where during a fluke accident a girl riding along on a bike is killed by a bus in Amsterdam.

The thoroughness and consideration with which that is done contrasted immensely with how things run in Berlin and made it clear to me (again) how unserious this city is.

4 trillion

Here’s an absolutely staggering number to take with you: four trillion dollars per annum

That’s what it takes to turn the entire world sustainable. That’s an awful lot of money but also it’s not that much more than things like military expenditures or the assets of a handful of billionaires.

As Tooze says:

Rather than shrinking away from the $ 4 trillion in shock the really striking thing about it, is that it is far from utopian. If we take the Songwe, Stern, Bhattacharya figures at face value then the explosive conclusion is that sustainable development for the entire planet is within reach. All the more egregious and inexcusable will be our failure, if we do not. It is one thing to fail grandly in the face of an impossible challenge, it is quite another not to do something of immense important that is, in fact, manageable.

We can leave it at that.

Sustainable development is totally possible and it’s being blocked by a minority elite who stand to lose a bunch of assets and revenues if we would do this.

Cucumber saudis. Nice.

Two questions have long dogged Dutch farming. The first is whether quantity made up for quality: having tasted the tomatoes, cucumbers and chilies grown in its hyper-efficient greenhouses, one may be forgiven for not being able to tell them apart.

picking people over cows turns out to be politically fraught

Well, the cows are owned by millionaire farmers so it’s more a question of which people you are picking.

The Netherlands, a generally well-run place, has made a hash of adapting its economy to ecological constraints it knew about for decades. That does not bode well for everyone else.

Chaser.

https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/03/23/the-cucumber-saudis-how-the-dutch-got-too-good-at-farming

Mensen die dit soort haatcampagnes de wereld in slingeren moeten strafbaar gesteld worden. De minste straf voor de aanjagers van dit soort haat zou een (social) media black-holing kunnen zijn; voor de komende zoveel jaar geen vertoon in media toegestaan.

https://pointer.kro-ncrv.nl/hoe-misinformatie-de-online-haatmachine-tegen-de-week-van-de-lentekriebels-op-gang-trok

But these subjects of the Islamic Emirate could not be kept from watching Stranger Things or Game of Thrones or Japanese anime; they had a better knowledge of Breaking Bad than I did. On Twitter—they, like so many Afghans, were avid users—shared soyjack memes and called themselves “sigma males.” They talked about feminism, “LGBTQ,” and pronouns—strange things to complain about in a country where women can’t go to school. They were becoming Westerners: culture war, America’s most successful soft-power export, was their induction. The younger members of the Taliban, online enough to follow Andrew Tate, were not immune.

Now he was getting excited. “Martyrdom,” he said, “would make me much happier than being a bureaucrat and working in the ministry. On the word of Sirajuddin Haqqani, we would happily blow ourselves up tomorrow!”

This is a wild piece about peaceful life under Taliban rule in Afghanistan.

https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/02/23/the-west-lives-on-in-the-talibans-afghanistan/?mc_cid=cafacd5506&mc_eid=a3e0af2d0a