After hearing so many good things anout it, we normal people finally get to use a SAP solution as well. I wonder how quickly they’ll get out a first version for us to test and how wonderfully usable it’s going to be.
Reducing kids’ exposure to the internet and social media is something that’s very tempting for governments who want to control and surveil everything that happens online.
Through a recommendation on Bluesky I came across the Ronzheimer podcast hosted by Paul Ronzheimer, the main journalist out of the Axel-Springer media house. Listening to him talk to German notables, it becomes clear that he’s not the sharpest knife in the block. There is no spark or wit in either of the two episodes I listened to. His questions are superficial and unoriginal. I don’t understand why anybody would listen to this.
Here’s a case for the people in Germany claiming that Datenschutz is never used to limit societal progress and that it doesn’t have a vast and debilitating chilling effect.
The CDU wants to abolish the right to work part-time in Germany. Most people don’t know that anybody here can ask to work part-time and if the company does not have a good reason to refuse it, they can’t.
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.
Love to see this being in 2025 and Germany still hasn’t figured out how to get an adequate amount of bandwidth to everybody in the country. Maybe they’ll never figure it out.
A weird coincidence how a media campaign would lead to double digit billions in extra revenues for fossil fuel providers (and to worse outcomes for everybody wanting to heat their homes in Germany). Nothing behind this probably.
Good luck hiring talent for your struggling economy with racism becoming even more rampant than it normally is. Not that that is the only problem facing Germany, but it’s a huge distraction for all parties while nothing material has improved for decades.
It’s rare to find writing in German as lithe and delightful as what Christoph Rauscher puts out. The monthly lists are one particularly good example. I’m learning new and interesting words still in most of his pieces.
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:
Wer täglich, manchmal mehrmals die Stunde, die Verdammten belächelt, ist wohl zu Recht in der Hölle. Twitter, so mussten wir uns eingestehen, war der Ort, den wir bewohnten, weil wir sehr schlechte Menschen waren.
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.
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.
Of course it takes a Dutch guy, an outsider, to blow the lid off Germany’s Nazi Bilionaires. David de Jong is doing great work and the German establishment tries to bury that as much as possible (because they know which side their bread is buttered on).
The Netherlands is facing similar problems where depressed salaries, lack of housing and rampant overt racism are making it difficult to attract digital talent from all over the world.
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.
Schools wasting money is not as big of a deal as it is made out to be here. Not every investment can be a good one and you have to deal with that and just keep investing. My business partner used to say that innovation in the education field is like driving a van full of money to a school building and setting it on fire. Soit.
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.
Listened to the latest episode of the German eGovernment podcast with the Minister for Digital for Bavaria. That is the state here that’s seemingly the farthest along when it comes to digitalisation and it now has the following ambitious plans:
Extremely odd to see a nuanced take on the German political climate by a sociologist on national television. Nils C. Kumkar does a really good job here:
It’s much healthier for Germany if digital issues have an answer that goes beyond “Let’s see what the CCC has to say!” The CCC is a shady organization which is good at taking things apart but does not have that much constructive to offer.
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.
Suppose you’re a well-known journalists hosting a weekly rather left podcast around topics such as migration, the climate and criticism of right-wing frames in the media. And then suppose you let yourself get baited majorly by an American alt-right activist.
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).
I was surprised and delighted by this story (in German) about social cohesion in small town America. A look back to when everything was less of a trash fire.
Once in a while they knock them out of the park in this podcast. In this episode Friedemann Karig goes out and asks for people to understand the necessity and reasons behind violent antifascism in the void left behind when the state fails to protect its citizens.