Love to see these updates from the German Digital Service. Not sure everybody knows that that organization exists now and what they’re busy with.
The work they’re doing is really good but what’s really staggering is how much of a gap they have to bridge here. These are basic buildings blocks of digital transformation that advanced societies tackled 10-20 years ago.
Leuke aflevering met Menno en Wimer over de lange en rijke geschiedenis van hun bureau Booreiland en de volgende stap die ze nu zetten.
https://www.studiogeorge.nl/degebakkenperen/booreiland-clarify
Why am I not surprised that somebody like Marc Andreessen would be a NIMBY while at the same time being a hypocrite?
Something we’re also noticing here is that people with dogs gather in courtyards and on fields in groups and let their dogs roam free, illegally.
They do this in groups together so that if somebody tells them not to, they can use their numbers to intimidate and as described here they use that and many other strategies with officers of the law.
Owning a dog in a dense urban environment is a questionable choice already, but the people around us here take the cake. There are quite a number of socially at-risk individuals who have dogs where both the animal and the human are deeply and certifiably deranged. Both of them accost any human who walks by and it’s often a question of who’s louder the dog’s barking or its owner’s ranting.
I think a forced dog register and quotas/waiting lists for some areas would be a good first step to control the situation here.
Goed werk van de Groene wat onthult hoe Kroes ervoor zorgde dat Uber zijn gang kon gaan in Nederland. Het zou me verbazen als Uber het enige bedrijf was waar StartupDelta zo’n rol voor gespeeld heeft.
https://www.groene.nl/artikel/dank-voor-je-geweldige-steun-neelie
I just watched and finished season 1 of Gibi which seems to have been enough of a success for them to quickly put out a second season. It’s a Turkish dark comedy show that you can watch online on Exxen. I already wrote it’s a bit like Seinfeld but with a very dark undercurrent.
How dark? Let’s look at the next bit from an episode (S01E10 @ 16:30) where Yılmaz and İlkkan are accused of having caused the death of an old man. They are getting ready to host the deceased’s relatives at a restaurant and participate in the wake.
Did you hear anything from Ethem?
Ethem?
Lately never…
Man, look, they wrote something in fact. Hold on. Somehow we weren’t able to call the guy. (Sigh. Wails.)
Don’t.
His aunt has killed herself. Ethem’s. It was written this morning. I just saw it.
Which aunt?
His older aunt.
I don’t know many other situational comedy shows that do something like this. It has no relation to the story and serves only to set the mood. Interspersing another death that’s just brushed off in an episode that’s already about death demonstrates how little a human life is worth. People die randomly and it’s received with a wail and a shrug.
They will most likely go to the funeral just like they did in a previous episode (S01E04) where Ersoy’s grandmother was eaten by an Erasmus cannibal.
Zooming out a bit, the real theme of this first season of Gibi has been pressure, pressure of all kinds: peer pressure, family obligations, social and societal pressure.
Anybody who’s ever been to Turkey knows that the entire country is built on this kind of pressure, also known as genuine interest, shame, concern or emotional blackmail. It’s omnipresent and the only way to escape it is to exit.
Lots of hours put in over the past year to achieve this and the only thing it means is that I get to put lots more hours in. Let’s go!
https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/11/choco-unicorn-food-waste-supply-chain/amp/?guccounter=1
Lovely bit about the broodje kroket and about Dutch colonial history.
A bit ostensibly about a rice cooker but in fact much more about post-war architecture and social relations in Japan.
Not verified but an interesting data point in how German civil servants don’t have that attractive a position and can get better deals working indirectly for the people ‘at the engines of the global economy’.
That makes you wonder why the engines of the global economy are not here or if they are why it’s not possible to pay civil servants competitive both in compensation and in job satisfaction. To be able to get the best talent and create the kind of state capacity that justifies having a state, the best people working in the civil service should be paid competitively with the top of society.