Keys Corner

No wonder Germany is still suffering from a “Reformstau” (backlog of social reforms). I always thought it was caused by so many lobby groups all pulling in different directions, so that movement was impossible.

Now, according to the Bildzeitung, my worst fears are confirmed – many of the German politicians are actually in the pay of German industry. So, on the one hand they are taking money from industry and presumably lobbying for those companies in return, and on the other, some are apparently devoting significant numbers of hours per week to working for private industry, instead of on the social reforms that everyone agrees are necessary.

After uncovering that VW is paying up to 100 politicians, they now reveal that BASF has 235 politicians on the payroll. Other companies with politicians on their payroll include Siemens, RWE and the Dresdner Bank, according to Bild. Some are prominent politicians, such as Hildegard Müller, a senior member of the opposition party, the CDU, who is apparently working some 16 – 20 hours / week for the Dresdner Bank.

(You can only appreciate this, if you speak some German as well as English – thanks to Karl for sending it to me!)

When the last Kalender-sheet
flattern through the Winter-streets
and Decemberwind is blowing,
then is everybody knowing
she does come, the Weihnachtszeit.
All the Menschen, Leute, people
flippen out of ihrem Stuebel
run to Kaufhof, Aldi, Mess
make Konsum and business.

Kaufen this and jenes Dings
and the churchturmglocke rings!
Manche holen sich a Taennchen.
When this brennt, they cry: 'Attention!'
Rufen for the Feuerwehr:
'Please come quick and rescue here!'
Goes the Taennchen up in Rauch
they are standing on the Schlauch.
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This week, a British government report on the dangers of passive smoking was leaked. The report cites passive smoking is a “substantial public health hazard”. Yesterday, Liverpool city council voted (57 votes to 7) to become the first city in the UK to ban smoking in all public enclosed spaces (such as shopping malls, restaurants or pubs), with fines of up to £1000 for offenders.

In the mean time, German politicians have been continuing their debate, which has already lasted 30 years, as to whether over-16’s should be allowed to continue to smoking in the breaks at school. Unfortunately, I fear this debate, and the lack willingness to take action, is symptomatic of the general lack of will by the politicians here to make reforms in other more important areas, such as labour laws and taxation – the ship is sinking as the band, or in this case, the politicians, continue to play.

Kassel is a couple of hours drive from where we live and home to the Documenta exhibition, which happens every five years – the last one was in 2002 – we visited and enjoyed it greatly.

However, that is not the only reason to go to Kassel. The natural history collection in the Ottoneum is also worth a visit. They have a collection of 530 wooden books, made of 441 different sorts of wood by Carl Schildbach, the park administrator at the end of the 18th century.

Each “book” is actually a wooden box, made of wood from the trunk and branches of the specific bush or tree, and containing preserved samples of the leaves, flowers and fruits of the species- when Schildbach couldn’t successfully preserve an item, he made life-like wax copies for his collection.

The spines of the books are covered by the bark of the shrub or tree (complete with any moss or lichen that had been growing on it at the time). Inside the lid of each box is information about the species of tree or shrub and of how much energy it releases when burnt.

We had an invitation to visit Ingrid, an old friend of ours, who came back from a 9 year stint in London last year. She was holding a housewarming party in Korschenbroich, which is where she grew up and where her family still lives. It gave us an opportunity to try out our latest toy, a Garmin iQue 3600 navigation unit, when we drove up to visit her.

We bought it, because we are going to change my car soon, and rather than have a built-in unit, which we have in the current vehicle, I thought it would be better to have a portable unit, which we can both use and which we can also use in rental cars on holiday. The delivery time for the navigation unit is a lot shorter than for the car, so we already have the new unit, but are still waiting for the car, which won’t be available for another 3 months. Recent tests in magazines claim that portable units are almost as good as the fixed installations. After considering the new TomTom (not currently possible to load or buy detailed maps for more than one country) and Magellan (expensive) offerings, I decided to go for the Garmin unit, which can also double as a normal PDA. There are lots of reviews on the web for all three products, so I’ll just say that considering that the Garmin device costs half of what the cheapest nagivation system costs in the new car, it provides an excellent system for the money although a permanent installation still just has the edge over the portable unit.

The main differences that we noticed are that the Garmin, with its more limited memory for spoken commands does not give the place name to look for when turning off, whereas the built in system from Toyota says “turn right to Dortmund”, for example. And being mounted on the dashboard directly under the windscreen, the Garmin screen tends to suffer more from reflections. However, we hope to cure that with a non-reflecting plastic screen protector. We were a bit concerned that the volume of the spoken commands might not be loud enough, but the car-kit for the Garmin includes an external loudspeaker in the power plug and we had no problems, even on the Autobahn with the radio on. Both units get confused on winding roads and sometimes tell you to turn left or right if a minor road joins the road that you are on in a corner, rather than keeping quiet – the Garmin is more prone to do that than the built-in Toyota unit.

Here by the way, is an unsual shot – both Ruth and I are on it – taken in the evening at Ingrid’s housewarming:

In the UK, frequent traffic jams on motorways are causing the Government to consider implementing the American idea of having dedicated lanes for cars carrying two or more persons (with fines for lone drivers caught in the wrong lane). Friends of the Earth is concerned that the scheme will be used as a reason to widen roads to create the new lanes.

There is an alternative, being tried in a country, which on occassion has seen traffic come to a grinding halt on motorway stretches up to 100 km long in the summer vacations. And where traffic jams on the motorways in the heavily populated parts of the country are common.

In Germany, a pilot traffic-forecasting scheme sponsored by the EU in Nordrhein-Westfalen, (covering 2250 km of Autobahn in the area roughly surrounding the line connecting Köln (Cologne), Essen and Bielefeld), offers 30 minute and 60 minute forecasts on the web of where traffic jams are going to occur.

It has been so successful, that some 300 000 people per day use it to plan their trips, which in turn has been enough, to make the forecasts measurably less reliable. The operators, worried that 3G mobile phones will mean even more people using the service and lowering its accuracy further, are now considering making less detailed information available on their web site, to force drivers to use more varied strategies for avoiding the jams.

The Bahn (German Railways) has repainted the underpass at Oberursel station (the station I park and ride from, when I travel to work) at least 6 times in the last two years. Every time, graffiti re-appeared the day after the work was finished, and within a week or two, you would not know that the station had been cleaned up at all.

Now the Bahn has come up with a new approach. One which has worked. They invited spray-painters to paint the walls of the underpass for them. Here are the results – two weeks after the work was finished, there hasn’t been a single graffito anywhere in the underpass or in the station building.

A big thanks to Ole Saalmann, who let me know a couple of days ago that the Diba’s internet banking now works with Apple’s Safari web browser! He’s right – I just tried it out. That’s a huge improvement as previously it didn’t work with any of the browsers I had on my Mac, and I had to fire up a PC when I wanted to use the internet banking, which was a pain as the PC is in the cellar. One less reason to keep a Windows PC!

Bad news not only for Germany, but for the EU as a whole.

Bild Zeitung reports that Gerhard Schroeder has given up trying to cut costs and reducing social security payments. Cost-cutting will not resume until the economy picks up. The surprising turn-around decision was, according to Bild, taken by senior members of both the SDP and the Green party.