Keys Corner

We visited a friend in Rostock from Thursday until today. It is a really lovely town – it has been nicely renovated since the reunification in the early 1990’s and is a very pleasant place to live. The historical building style uses bricks very effectively – and many of the modern buildings in the town center are also brick-built and blend in with the traditional buildings, as you can see in the case of the building on the left below.

One of the trademarks of Rostock is Warnemünde Lighthouse on the promenade (below), built in 1897. Next to it you can see on the left, a model of the sun, which is part of a scale representation of the solar system, which stretches about 6 km down the beach and includes plaques for each planet, showing the planet to the same scale and at the scale distance from the sun.

View from the Pentagon behind the scenes:

US military officials are putting huge pressure on interrogators who question Iraqi insurgents to find incriminating evidence pointing to Iran, it was claimed last night…

...Brose, 30, who extracts information from detainees in Iraq, said: ‘They push a lot for us to establish a link with Iran. They have pre-categories for us to go through, and by the sheer volume of categories there’s clearly a lot more for Iran than there is for other stuff. Of all the recent requests I’ve had, I’d say 60 to 70 per cent are about Iran.

‘It feels a lot like, if you get something and Iran’s not involved, it’s a let down.’ He added: ‘I’ve had people say to me, “They’re really pushing the Iran thing. It’s like, shit, you know.” ’

Brose said that reports about Washington’s increasingly hawkish stance towards Tehran, including possible military action, chimed with his experience. ‘My impression is they’re just trying to get every little bit of ammunition possible. If we get something here it fits the overall picture. The engine needs impetus and they’re looking for us to find the fuel – a particular type of fuel…

The official view from both the US and German government leaders:

President George W Bush and visiting German Chancellor Angela Merkel say they will continue to seek a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear programme...

...Mrs Merkel warned that if Iran refused to freeze its nuclear work, then “we need to think about further possible sanctions”.

The US, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany have agreed to draft a UN resolution calling for new sanctions and officials are meeting in nine days to finalise a text unless the UN’s nuclear watchdog reports concessions by Iran.

Mrs Merkel added that she would work with the business sector in Germany – one of Tehran’s main trading partners – to reduce trade with Iran. Washington has been lobbying its allies to cut business links.

I hope Mrs. Merkel has all her wits about her. If she should find herself on the same side as the USA in a war against Iran in a few months time, she can wave goodbye to running the government after the next elections.

The Economist has published an interesting – and if you live in Belgium or Germany, depressing – table showing what percentage of an employer’s labour costs doesn’t arrive in employee’s pay packets. In Belgium and Germany, more than 50% lands in the government’s pocket or pays for compulsary insurance.

What did surprise me, is that Hungary is in position three, I thought the “New European Countries” that used to be behind the iron curtain were the countries which had embraced “lean taxation” – not in this case, it seems.

Op Art opened in the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt am Main yesterday. It contains optical illusions from the 1950’s and 1960’s by artists such as Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley, François Morellet, Julio Le Parc, and Gianni Colombo.

We’re definitely planning to visit it in the next couple of weeks. It’s on until 20th May 2007.

“Smoke” by Stefan Sous
Stefan Sous, a German artist who specialises in displays of technological artifacts and lighting effects, has a web site which is worth a visit.

Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out how to link to individual pages, so here’s a small taste here. Take a look at his works explosion, berliner luftpost, and his concept fluxus, as well as smoke of course.

The Independent reports that 500 000 rubbish bins in the UK already carry an electronic device to identify the bin, which would allow the local council to track the weight of rubbish in the bin, and charge by weight for its collection. Which is quite a neat idea, I think. Our bin is hardly ever more than half full when it’s collected, so we should benefit from the billing system.

The Mail on Sunday doesn’t think so. Bins and the collection vehicles are being fitted with the new technology, and their headline is: Germans plant bugs in our wheelie bins. The article makes it sound like an act of war has been commited by the Germans, although in fact their only involvement is that two companies doing the fitting work on the bins happen to have their head-office in Germany. It seems to have generated heated views in the UK:

Conservative MP Andrew Pelling said burglars could hack into the computer system to see if sudden reductions in waste at individual households meant the owners were on holiday and the property empty. He said: ‘This is nothing more than a spy in the bin and I don’t think even the old Soviet Union made such an intrusion into people’s personal lives. ‘It is Big Brother gone mad. I think a more British way of doing things is to seek to persuade people rather than spy on them.’

Germany has sold Israel 2 Dolphin-class submarines at a discount of 33%. The $1.27 billion contract, which was agreed under the previous SPD government, was signed in July. The subs are said by Jane’s Defense Weekly, to have the ability to launch cruise missiles with nuclear warheads. Is this a good use of German tax-payer’s money, I ask myself? (Of course, even if the sale wasn’t subsidized, the question is also whether it is a good idea to be selling potential atomic weapons systems to countries which have demonstrated considerable aggression in the Middle East)

After the failed bomb attacks on two German trains, Norbert Geis (a CDU legal expert) and Clemens Binninger (a CDU spokeman for internal affairs) have suggested in Bild-Zeitung that Germany introduce armed “Rail-Marshalls” similar to the Sky Marshalls introduced on aircraft by the USA.

No wonder the country’s economy is in such a desolate state if we are governed by people who think that is a sensible and effective method to improve security.

The Economist has regularly published reports on how property prices are developing in different countries, and it has been very frustrating for us to see that while in the last 25 years, the average price of a house in the UK has increased from £23 000 to £158 000 (a factor of over six times), property prices in Germany have remained stagnant. (If you live in Germany, you might find that a little difficult to believe, but you can download an Excel sheet of UK prices since 1952 from the Nationwide Building Society and check the UK figures yourself). In fact, when we sold an apartment we bought in Munich in 1982 a couple of years ago, we sold it for 20% less than we paid for it. If only we’d kept our money invested in property in the UK, instead of transfering it to Germany…

What I haven’t understood until now was why the German market was performing so abysmally, when the USA, Australia and most European countries have been behaving like the UK market. However, this week the Wirtschaftswoche published an article (WiWo Nr. 27, 2006-07-03: Konjunkturkommentar – Kräftig durchluften) pushing for deregulation of the German property market and things became a little clearer.

What is different between Germany and the rest of those countries where the market has boomed for 25 years or more?

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I don’t know if this is a general phenomenon at the moment, but I’ve noticed that garages locally charge the highest prices for petrol and diesel on Friday afternoon, and the lowest prices on Monday morning. The differential can be as much as 6-8 cents. The price then goes up later in the day on Monday. Prices during the week seem to be being adjusted up to twice a day, as prices often vary between the early morning, evening and the following morning – differences of 3-4 cents are common, with prices generally higher in the evening than in the morning.

I haven’t seen this reported in the press, but it seems to me that prices are being optimised to be highest when most people need to tank; before making trips at the weekend or when they have more time – on the way home from work, rather than on the way to work.