Articles about General Events

1st of May, the Same Mess as Every Year

In the night from 30th of April to 1st of May there is Walpurgis Night a festival to dance and celebrate together while putting up the Maypole. The 1st of May then is celebrated mostly by labour parties as being an international day of workers.

Children Going Crazy

I do not know when or how it began that young children go around at night and mess other people’s property up. However, some people say that in the past it was rather thought as playing tricks on people. Nowadays children are only throwing paper and and spray shaving foam around. I never really understood this procedure and do not understand it yet.

Reading the news of our village today, I found out that this year the children used even eggs and flour to damage walls of houses and cars. The eggshells caused scratches on the car and the wall could not be cleaned again totally. The children were also said to have thrown fireworks into a crown of people obviously showing a lack of even the slightest reasonable behaviour. It must have been small firecrackers, because nobody actually got injured, but these kids must be really mindless. I could say that today’s youth does not have any moral anymore, but this has also been said by Greek philosophers. Yet, it might not be that wrong. I guess that there are two possibilities to make children go mad:

1. no future at all
2. too much of everything without having to work for it

We in Germany live in state 2 while e.g. in African slums, where there is also a lot of violence, people live in state 1. Furthermore, parents do not want to care for their children anymore (they said that 10 year old children were outside at 1am), instead—as I already mentioned on Dorji Wangchuk’s blog—they hope that the state does their work which will lead to more problems instead of solutions in my opinion. Yet, I also have to admit that exactly this system is proposed and installed by the state: They want mothers to send their children to a crèche instead of stopping work for some years and caring for the children.

Demonstration in Berlin-Kreuzberg

In Berlin, the police must think the same about the demonstrants of Berlin-Kreuzberg. In 1987 demonstrations of left-wing extremists and antifa (antifascism, yet extremists too) became to severe and police had to retrieve for a while from Berlin-Kreuzberg. Since then left-wing extremists are coming to Kreuzberg each year and cause street fights with the police.

Each year there are injured policemen and injured demonstrants. I do not want to judge about either of them here, because both of them can be very friendly and also very rude, but I think it must suck for some policemen to work there. They have to fight against people they might even support, because police service hasn’t become better within the past few years. Government puts trust in surveillance cameras instead of people and thus does not hire so many policemen anymore (they cannot be dismissed, because they are public officials). Thus, policemen have to face a lot of work and might get overworked easily, which also leads to overreaction in some cases.

Eight Subjective Reasons for not Having Children

This is a list of unordered and very probably also incomplete reasons for not having children in Germany. Moreover, it is totally subjective and manipulated by medial coverage. Comparing real statistics you might find out how wrong some of these reasons are.

• supervision: Parents have to look after their children until they are 18. This is called Aufsichtspflicht and can lead to judicial consequences if the children do something illegal. You are e.g. guilty if your four-year old child plays in garden without being supervised and then leaves the garden.
• liability: Having a internet access at home you have to make sure that your child does not do anything illegal. Otherwise you as the owner of the access might be sued (if the real culprit cannot be found). This is e.g. a major problem with regard to copyright law.
• dislike against children: There have been several cases when people sued kindergartens because they did not want the noise of the children in their area. The kindergartens either had to leave the location or hide the children inside the house instead of letting them play in the garden. The same is valid for playgrounds.
• hatred in school: Childrens are faced with hatred and bullying in school nowadays. Having an intelligent child, there is a high possibility that it will be bullied due to its intelligence by the less smart ones. Teachers meanwhile try to ignore the problem as good as possible.
• stultification of society: Besides, you have to ask yourself if you want to rise a child in a society which is becoming more dumb. Either your child adapts to the stupidity or it will have problems finding close friends.
• future: Considering the reluctance of many people to put effort into their work and many limitations the state puts upon us, there is a high possibility that other states will overtake us. It is thus possible that a child in Germany would not have a good future.
• flexibility: You are often forced to be very flexible in industry. Of course this is not better in emerging countries, but it still is a problem for having children. On the one hand there are not enough places for children, on the other hand you should not stop working.
• youth violence: Do you really want your child to grow up in a world where there is youth violence all around? Especially lower class children (including both Germans and immigrants) tend to demolate mostly public property (windows, lamps, …). Besides, they also beat up and kill people who “look strange” (this is their answer) or want to help their victims.

Besides, these problems of course exist in many societies and can be dealt with. Where some of these problems do not exist, you will find other ones.

Articles under Creative Commons

All my articles are licensed under Creative Commons as of now. You can see the hint at the right side.

What is Creative Commons good for?

Creative Commons is made to publish work under a free license to encourage other users to redistribute the contents (e.g. videos, music or text). You can choose between different restrictions, like attribution (people have to pass on your name), share-alike (derivations of the work have to be licensed under CC too), no-derivations (derivations are forbidden, only copying is allowed) or non-commercial (commercial use is forbidden). These restrictions can be mixed freely.

What about my work?

In my case the texts are licensed under CC-BY (Creative Commons Attribution). You thus may copy and edit my texts by giving my name (i.e. berlinerstrasse.net). Creative Commons goes further than usual fair use or citing rules in other countries; you are allowed to copy the whole text.

Please send me a message if you use one of my articles. I am totally happy if you use my articles in your own products, the best thing would be of course to use it in a magazine or similar.

Epic Fail in German School

Many public buildings, e.g. schools, in Germany are trying to make the buildings more energy efficient. This is done by replacing windows, renovating heaters or also exchanging light systems—sometimes with a lot of drawbacks.

It is always obvious in Germany that both politicians and business managers are easily blinded by modernization. Everything that is “modern” is also good at the same time, and there is no other possibility, it just has to be good.

Modernization as Loss of Control

This can be seen very well in case of a German school at the moment. In Itzehoe, a town in Schleswig-Holstein, the administration has decided to introduce a new light system with motion sensors. Removing the light switches also took away the full control over light and darkness. This is of course a problem when there are lessons and nobody moves in the room.

The problem with modernization is that we want everything to go automatically without caring about the loss of control. It’s not wrong to try solving problems automatically, but it is wrong to forget your own influence. To give another example: Some people take a car and they think the ABS will do their job so they can drive faster. However, you should only see the ABS as a feature, not as your saviour.

In the current case the administration bought a system which cannot be controlled by light switches directly. Since the school had complained about the new system, they received a remote control—which does not work steadily. The question is: Why not only use motion sensors as a feature and include manual light switches?

Opinion of the Affected?

According to the head master of the school, the government didn’t even ask him if he wanted the new system or if there were any problems. It was just installed: What’s modern is good, how should it be different? This lack of communication has now led to a faulty system in school and interrupted lessons.

However, this is a usual behaviour: When the administration of Baden-Württemberg wanted to introduce G8, a reduction of secondary school eduction by one year, they came to schools to ask teachers, but the criticism was ignored. The system was introduced and students have to learn for their final exams in 8 years while other students had 9 years time. Moreover, there will be the double amount of alumni one year searching for university places.

Politicians have to stop thinking they knew everything better (known as the Dunning-Kruger effect), they have to return to asking experts—which does not mean only asking companies. Sometimes it even isn’t about any experts at all, but only the affected persons. Can this be so difficult?

The Race for Extreme

“Catastrophic Blizzard”

It was two weeks ago when media announced horrible winter weather with huge loads of snow. What then came was rather normal winter incidents, because there were road problems in some regions, some towns in North Germany were isolated for a few hours, and in my region everything was totally normal, or even more harmless than normal.

However, the reports about it were hyped like hell, even in the so called “reliable news”. A reporter was standing somewhere in the snow and talked about plow men who removed the snow to a village were a young woman was getting a baby or an older one needed medical help. As if this had not been there every year! We’re seeing snow every year, we’re seeing cut off villages very often and—guess what—sometimes there’s even no electricity for some hours!

I can just repeat myself and say that it seems Germany is waiting for an apocalypse. Probably, it’s not the people who are waiting for this, but rather the media, because they always need to increase their viewer levels. This is easiest achieved by reporting about horrible incidents, unbelievable events and maybe also an upcoming apocalypse (without making the mistake to name it directly, because otherwise you would be called a Nostradamus and become noncredible).

TV superlatives

First Germany, then the world

You can also see this will for ever more important news in an advertisment for a TV movie. A German TV station is advertising a movie called Gonger 2 as “world premiere”. Now guess where that movie comes from: It is a German production for exclusively this TV station and it was never released in any other country. Therefore, the correct description would be just “premiere” or “Germany premiere”.

Moreover, they started calling their evening movies “blockbusters”. Of course, now this is not enough anymore, so they came up with the term “superblockbuser” for the same type of movies. I am already wondering if they do not even recognize that there are not any “blockbusters” anymore, so there cannot be a even higher level. Probably, the producers of the advertisment know it, but since the usual audience will not sense they do not care.

Oh my god, he will die!

Watching other TV series it is always the last chance if something finally gets done. There is only one last chance to rescue a specific person. Some series started with a nice concept, e.g. helping companies or restaurants to become better, but then they also surrendered to the lovely sound of emotion. They soon started to show only people who were deadly sick, who lost a son or suffer from some other stroke of fate.

It is just disgusting to use the sorrow of people for one’s own income, to increase the ratings. Moreover, it deadens tactfulness and makes viewers become dumb which is then reused by the media to avoid the need of new series. Instead the same sentences are repeated over and over, even only one or two days later.