Tooze makes a coherent argument in this episode of Surplus why expropriation of the large landlords in Berlin makes economic sense. Morally it’s of course a no-brainer.
This tallies with my intuition for why it’s often more profitable to leave commercial properties vacant. The operating costs to maintain an empty office building are really not that high.
The current Berlin government has as its Chief Digital Officer, Martina Klement a woman from Bavaria who’s overhauling large parts of the city administration.
Ai Weiwei is right to be angry and lashes out in this barrage of scathing statements. That Zeit would not publish this is curious given the garbage that they’ve been wont to put out over the past year. However undirected, criticism of Germany is not appreciated by the Germans.
It’s not just Mamdani, it’s also Jewish leaders like Rabbi Moishe Indig who make me ashamed to live in Berlin. In comparison, our local political and religious leaders are so very bad.
Hundred percent sure that if the same policy would be applied to Berlin most car traffic would evaporate from our streets here immediately. Most traffic in my neighborhood is people without really that much to do who could be doing something other than driving and drug dealers.
We’ve revived our tech blog and will be sharing a bunch of stuff around our AI process and what it means to be an “AI first” company. Here’s an in-depth first piece about what it takes to develop a successful real life product with LLMs.
So I felt I couldn’t really bring myself to do Advent of Code this year since I have more than enough other things to do (and watch and play) and with work and the kids, it’s always pretty miserable to keep up.
Nicolas from All About Berlin has done so much to make living in this administrative nightmare bearable for people. It’s a very clear example of what kind of 10-100x improvements are there to be had.
An interesting article to read about how the city botched renaming the Manteuffelstraße to Audrey-Lord-Straße. I cycle past this street every day and I don’t think it’s a bad change. Unfortunately, they’ve done it in such a bad way that it’ll poison every person who hears about it against the very concept of government:
Love having the kids be off school every 6 weeks or so which means we get a week of everybody adjusting to them being at home and then another week of adjusting them being back at school. All thanks to the trash tier school logistics of Germany.
After some occasional brushes with party politics and reading up on the minimal political agency that we foreigners get here, I dove in. The rise of right-wing sentiment seemed to be a good reason to become a member of the Greens just like I imagine it did for a number of people. Much good that did do if you see the continued rise of that sentiment and this Green government all but enabling right-wing parties with their politics of austerity.
Wanted to show the kids some chiaroscuro for their art class about light and dark tomorrow and ran through some of the all time greats from Caravaggio. They were particularly impressed by Holofernes being beheaded.
Krasse Links looks like yet another collection of links but the German wall of text notwithstanding, it’s a remarkable act of curation and contextualisation. Remarkable and unique for sure in Germany.
Trying for years to explain to people that Germany has almost zero project power and is incapable of any progress and then suddenly a movement springs up that agrees entirely with that assessment.
Met een nieuwe identiteitskaart of paspoort die je in het buitenland krijgt (als je niet meer in Nederland woont), kun je niet meer ID-Check van DigiD gebruiken.
I remember when I got banned from the forum of one of Germany’s larger liberal podcasts for saying that Bitcoin is mostly something by and for criminals. I think that statement was pretty much entirely correct.
Netzpolitik has done a lot of good things, no doubt. But I’m left with a bit of a double feeling after reading Beckedahl’s farewell post. Imagine having spent 20 years to improve the state of the German internet (“eine bessere digitale Welt möglich ist”) and you leave with the situation like it is.
The news that an OSINT researcher spent 30 minutes to find a fugitive that the German police couldn’t find in the past 30 years says a lot about how government works here.
I found a new German podcast crush in Hart Unfair which is my favorite format: three people (Anna Dushime, Yelda Türkmen and Ari Christmann) rambling through one another but in a way that’s funny, intelligent and diverse. It’s a shame that they publish so irregularly that I can’t tell if the podcast is dead or not.
I’m enjoying another light season of SPY x FAMILY. It’s a light anime whose premise is that of a spy (Loid) who needs live in deep cover in hostile territory and forms a family of convenience. He finds a woman (Yor) who’s secretly an assassin also in need of cover and an orphan child (Anya) who’s a telepath. It’s great fun.
As somebody who dove pretty deep into how to run a creative agency in a way that’s innovative and goes against the grain, I really like what Village One here in Berlin are doing with their cooperative approach.
I don’t really buy this idea that Japan’s urban environment has been the key factor to create its immense specialization in crafts. Compare it to Berlin where rents have been incredibly cheap and zoning mixed but without the necessary human capital the only thing those factors generated were cheap bars.
The last episode of Spaßbremse treats the history of German-Israeli relations and clarifies what the strategic foundations of the current complex are: white-washing and moral standing for one side and economic reparations and industrial capacity building for the other.
Given the current developments around the German debt brake, I think it’s good to refer to this bit about German financial politics and Adam Tooze’s initial prediction (FT, Zeit) that Christian Lindner as finance minister would not be good.
An unexpected deep dive on the problem of unaffordable and underutilized land as it relates to Berlin. It manages to even sneak in some mentions of land reform and land value taxes (which would solve this problem pretty much instantaneously).
Finding time for side projects and putting out new versions of Cuppings is difficult as always, but I’m glad we have a new version out this week again.
SOMETIME IN THE 2000S, a group of mostly Turkish women from an immigrant group called Neighborhood Mothers began meeting in the Neukölln district of Berlin to learn about the Holocaust. Their history lessons were part of a program facilitated by members of the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, a Christian organization dedicated to German atonement for the Shoah. The Neighborhood Mothers were terrified by what they learned in these sessions. “How could a society turn so fanatical?”a group member named Nazmiye later recalled thinking. “We began to ask ourselves if they could do such a thing to us as well . . . whether we would find ourselves in the same position as the Jews.”But when they expressed this fear on a church visit organized by the program, their German hosts became apoplectic. “They told us to go back to our countries if this is how we think,”Nazmiye said. The session was abruptly ended and the women were asked to leave.
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.
It’s super lovely that Berlin has a lab which does these kind of user tested innovations on city processes. The work that needs to be done is written up here and it’s relatively straight-forward (there are just no short-cuts).
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’.