Andreas Wacker


The Bank never "goes broke." If the Bank runs out of money, the Banker may issue as much more needed by writing on any ordinary paper.


Monopoly rules, Hasbro

Transscribed word by word.


Bush: We have a dollar that’s adjusting, and I am for a strong dollar. One reason I am for a strong dollar is because I want, you know, people to — I think it helps deal with inflation.


When this man came into office it took 90 american cents ot buy a Euro. Now it’s 155 of those.

“I am for a strong dollar”

Funny that the that seems not to be enough. It’s not God setting the dollar course. It’s how many of them you print. If you print to many then they are worth less. If you print less then the they are worth more. Simple.

you need 1.51 dollars today to buy one Euro.

I know, since I bought lots of Euros today.

I needed 89 cents to buy a Euro before the moron became President.

Since it worked so great for Bush in 2000 Nader is trying the same for McCain in 08.

Looks like the people have made their mind up on the decider. Now would be the perfect time to find Osama Bin Laden. Whatever happened to that project Mr. B? Will taking my shoes when getting on an airplane help with that? Or maybe he surrenders himself if we add another really vivid colored threat level? “Hyper Mauve” or something?

After 04 I thought I would not care about the elections again. But that would actually mean letting Bush win for the third time. Regardless how odd and wrong it was to let that happen twice, it should not repeat again. It probably is always worth trying to make the world a better place. So I officially endorse Obama here. Mrs. Clinton is just this years Kerry. And we all know how well Hermann Munster worked. America can vote for the better president. It has done so in the past. Not particularly this century. But -honestly- the choices were not to great either. Bush, Kerry and Gore. 2 or less sylables in a name are simply not enough.

the small chronies (50K in tax money wasted for this site) get caught

Actually those monkeys at Desyne kick out a 403 to me, since my IP is not one that is in the US. How pathetic.

I would have not missed much. Just verbage like:


Our clients range from global Fortune 100 corporations to local retailers. They all, however, share one thing in common: an absolute commitment to a strategic marketing approach wrapped around a comprehensive web-based technology capability. It's a formula for success we have delivered to more than 1000 clients since our founding in 1996.


Awesome that they all share “an absolute commitment to a strategic marketing approach wrapped around a comprehensive web-based technology capability”.
That evokes strong mental images. No, really.

Germans don’t like to part from their money. On average each of them has 57.900 Euro (85,000 Dollars right now) in the bank or in stocks. Per person. Not per household. On average people in Germany spend 10% less than they make. That probably explains why S-Class Mercedes or Porsches are a rare sight here. They get made and sold to people that have the money (these days mostly found in countries with oil) or ones that pretend they have (hm, let me guess where that would be). Tragically much of those saved Euro’s were used to finance US mortages.

Right now the Iraq war seems to have cost 482 Billion US$.
So Germany could have paid for 14 of those. From it’s savings.

Interdubs had an awesome year in 2007. I had a certain expectation where the service should be by now. Development-wise and feature=wise I am behind. I want more features, and I want to write them now. But doing them right does always take more time than I think it would. And, my clients got what they essentially need months ago. Since then new features have been extra and on top of it.

Looking back at 2007 I particularly like the the fact that Interdubs could scale from a few beta clients to more than 20 customers. Many of them with very diverse needs. And all of them seemingly happy: Even though nobody is contractually obliged to continue their subscription each one renewed month by month. People some times wonder why Interdubs is so inexpensive. Specially compared to it’s feature set. I think it makes sense: Having the most awesome feature vs. price ratio means that I don’t have to spend much time to keep my clients happy otherwise. It also helps with marketing: If anybody interested in an online media solution should happen to talk about it to an existing interdubs user I will get a call. And when I get a call it becomes a sale. Sooner or later it does. Always.

2007 was also nice, since I had not to act on my 99.99% uptime or money back promise. By now it would be not so nice, if I can not charge anybody for a full month. Which is the whole point: I believe in Interdubs’ reliability enough to put my money where where my mouth is. Outages might happen in the future. Nothing is perfect. But by giving my clients their money back for a whole month, if Interdubs should be longer unavailable than for 5 minutes I there is at least a plan. If this should ever happen. The looming penalty of a month long ‘invoice outage’ makes it financially viable to upgrade the servers that Interdubs runs on. So that it does not happen in the first place. Or is at least less likely.

2007 I published 590 times code updates to Interdubs. That’s why I don’t like to call things “Versions”. Version 590? Sometimes I just moved a couple of links around, to make a frequently used choice easier to find. A couple of times I replaced or upgraded the entire engine that runs Interdubs. I might have gotten lucky, but at no point did I loose data during those updates. And only about 10 changes were so stupid, that my users demanded a change back or further alteration of what I did. Knowing that I will hear about things going in the wrong direction allows me to suggest things with great liberty. The same concept looks enabling from the other side as well: Interdubs users know that they will be listened to. Sometimes it takes only minutes between a suggestion and the actual feature / change showing up on the site. Actually a great deal of ideas and features that make Interdubs worthwhile are a result of this collaboration.

2007 was a very successful year for Interdubs, so I had to decide what to do for Holiday presents. I decided not to send any at all. Instead I asked my kids to pick a charity. They suggested “Doctors without Borders” which I liked as well. So instead of sending gift baskets around some people got vaccinations that they needed.

Being able to decide on these things what to do is one of the perks of running your own company. Today I found Charity Navigator and realised with great relief that only a very small percentage of the interdubs donation will go to the adminstration.

I am certainly looking forward to move Interdubs forward in 2008.

Patrick Smith writes about the TSA and how we fight an attack that happened six years ago, that is over and could not be repeated.

cheap solar panels?

That would indeed be nice.

The mightiest force ever lost some stuff in the desert it seems.

Annie Leonard talks about stuff Whoever she is.

I am with her. To a point. The breastmilk part is a bit much, and on technology she is just plain wrong. Which discredits the whole piece somewhat. And that is a real shame. Since the whole consumerism / consumption stuff weighted against diminishing returns in respect to happyness is a very important point. And there are others in this presentation that are pretty obvious and get equally ignored. Still worth the link, and maybe even worth watching.

not your usual link or idea

War really sucks. It happens if people feel they can gain from it.

According to this article China holds 1.4336 trln US$.
Big number. Each Chinese seems to make 1500 dollars a year. There are 1,321,851,888 Chinese. Which would mean that all Chinese would not need to work for 8.6 months if they would just spend the Dollars that the chinese reserve holds.

Or they could finance a seven year Iraq war. Out of the cash they have sitting around. And with the kind of spending the US military got used to. Something tells me that the red army has a different pricelist then the military in the US.

So, it seems that having stuff made over there for years somehow gave them allot of money. And therefor power.

Garry Willis writes about Abortion in the LA Times.
He says:


Evangelicals may argue that most people in Germany thought it was all right to kill Jews. But the parallel is not valid. Killing Jews was killing persons.


There has been allot of hollow talk like “we didn’t know anything about it” after WW2 in Germany. And that is wrong. It also is wrong to try to escape the responsibility of the Holocaust. It is a part of German history. But this sentence suggests that Germans in general agreed to kill Jews. Which is bullshit. Some did. And some built an industry around killing people. Yes, as horrible as that. But to suggest that there was a poll and that just happen to go against one part of the people is simply senseless.

It is pretty strange to open such a piece by invoking Godwin’s Law

Abortition is a tricky issue. Such is Holocaust. Mixing them up in one piece is not really what makes a good start. The article itself rambles around some valid points, and then falls into total pointlessness.

According tothis article the war in Iraq costs two billion dollar. A week. I am sure that those 160,000 troops risking their life will be glad to know that that amounts to 12,500 US$ a week for each of them. Or we could just leave and pay each each 75 US$ a week. Does not sound like much, but the GDP per person and week is 64US$. So, yes, the US spends more on the war than the country is producing on its own. It used to be one of the wealthiest countries with a larger population in the arab world. Now this war has been gone for quiet some time.
And, no, we still have not found those weapons of mass destruction. That was the reason why the US had ot go there. So we have been told. That is a old story you might think. Exactly that kind of thinking helps this administration. They told us that war was the only option because of those weapons of mass destruction. We should hold them to their own arguments, instead of falling for their next story version about the ‘front in the war on terror’. Some things are simple. This one is.

This ‘news’ about generating energy from burning saltwater is ridicolous bullshit.

Here we are, using those internets, which are run on computers (just ask Homer) and other products of science to mock it’s very contents and basic laws.

Of course it is an extreme example. But the same principle seem to apply frequently: Those creationists should be consequent and stop using the products and merits of science. All of them. If they don’t like what science has discovered.

Two hundred years ago when people even in the more developed countries were dying left right and center on odd diseases and epidemics there simply was no question: Science was good. Now, that we are reaping all those benefits and so many of us have these careless existences some people think, that the current state of society and wellfare would just be ‘normal’, or god given.Well, it is not. The default is much much more grim. Over the last four hundred years people worked really really hard to make all this possible. It was not easy to harvest all this knowledge our econimies and factories run on. All these efforts were based on the absence of stupity. Now it seems as if some people start to take stupid stuff serious. Since it seems that they can afford to. People living in Rome two thousand years ago were in a similar position. Why would they care? Of all Shakespear plays I liked Coriolanus the least. Now that’s starting to change. Somehow I think that it’s message is not that off after all.

Funny how names become somewhat Harry-Potterish at a certain level:

Seven Sisters
White Shoe
Magic Circle

Also interesting that they all seem to run asp website. Nothing is easier to hack. Maybe even the tough kids in Russia know whom to mess with and who has future peer potential. Better erase that, would be no fun to get in trouble with those twenty companies all at once.

Obama wants to go to Pakistan to fight Terrorists! Is he crazy? That’s where they actually are. Doesn’t he understand that the right strategy is to concquer a country a couple of thousand miles east, because. Well, because. Ah, yes, because it’s a family tradition or something. Next thing this crazy man might do is to prevent the since 2002 booming heroin industry in Afghanistan from growing any further. Doesn’t he understand that the solution is to sell more weapon systems to the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia. That very strategy that gave the Iran those lovely F14s. We certainly need more than that. And does he understand that that “Roadmap to Peace” by Mr B. was the hugest success. I mean, Israel is more peaceful than ever, right?

It feels somewhat orwellian to revisit phrases like “Coalition of the Willing” “last throes” or “roadmap to peace”, it all started with “compassionate conservatism” I believe.

Before 2003 there was no connection between Al-Quaida and Iraq. Of course now that the war drags on in that country, it sounds real great if ‘our troops’ fight ‘those terrorists’. After all: the 9-11 shock can justify allot of stuff in many peoples minds. So the news sounds often like US troops would be engaging Al Quaida Terrorists. Since there were not any before 2003 those people have to be either Iraquies that became terrorists during the occupation, or they come from the outside. One of these arguments that can often be heard is “fight them over there, instead of here”. This article focuses on the origins of those foreign fighters. What I found more shocking is the number: 135 of them are being detained right now. So it takes more than 1000 US troops to detain one of these foreign fighters??? If capturing terrorists would be the goal then the US would have spend 3.2 Billion dollars to get one of those detainees. Of course these numbers are simplifications. Of course the situtation in Iraq is probably complicated. Much more complicated than most USAmericans would understand. Wether they are here or fighting over there.

It seems that things have changed in the last decades.

Of course, I can not spell, even if my life would be depending on it. But I am not in the business of making public displays. Lame excuse. I know.

Democracy works really best, when there are three powers that have to interact in predefined roles with each other.

Some democracies have people in power that don’t really care

yikes,

Supposedly USA Today printed

this
Inlcuding a sentence like:

That amount is equal to $516,348 for every U.S. household. By comparison, U.S. households owe an average of $112,043 for mortgages, car loans, credit cards and all other debt combined.


Those are some rather long last throes

It seems as if there is a system to track all incidents around nuclear power generation. Which is great. It’s also very good that this information is public. It’s not that easy to use or understand. And in all that data the real juicy details might be well hidden. But it’s still a great concept to make the operations accountable to publish their results. I would guess that Iran does not have such a system for their similar activities. But I am afraid that that the current regime in the US would not install a similar system themselves.

I am usually not a big fan of performance art. The whole ‘let’s put a human in a Zoo’ situation is so predictabiliy of interest.
This art installation combines it with a painball gun controlled over the internet, which isn’t new either, and makes it actually interesting. Horrible too.

images of fast food: ads vs.reality

I would not be surprised if you would ask people what they just ate and showed them both pictures they would pick the one from the advertisement. Not the one from reality. The romans left their vast cities for centuries to people that had no clue how you could make such things. The Colosseum was actually a housing complex for most of the 2000 years it existed. Our civilisation will leave billions of silver discs with all sorts of ‘realities’. Like movies, TV shows and games. People might not be able to make new ones, but they sure will inhabit our cultural spaces. Fake or not: we don’t care today. We eat the burger from the billboard rather than the one in our mouth. Why should people care more in 200 years when realities might have deterioated even more.

Want fries with that?

My sister needs a new computer. These days I would recommend the cheapest MacBook with 1GB memory and 80 GB harddrive upgrades and -of course- Apple Care. Which comes down to 1473 US$. Which is not a bad price for a powerful and reliable machine.

In Germany the very same machine does cost 1518 Euros. That’s looks similar. However with todays rate this comes down to 2126 dollars. In 2000, before Bush started to dabble in economics, you only had to pay 1395 dollars for the same amount of Euros.

All my servers moved into the new DST successfully. Which makes it easy to postulate the following:

If your computer or software shows the wrong date next week then your technology install sucks.
Either the people / company you pay to maintain it are stupid, incompetence, lazy etc, or you don’t
have support in the first place.

Oh, and it was the stupid Bush administration that caused this. Not OBL or anybody else. It’s a selfmade problem.
Born out of stupidity.

Next week will show how stupid / smart America really is.

12:00

update: the register calls the panic off and the register is always there when panic can be created

eighteen Months ago the vice president predicted that the Iraq war would be over soon

What is ridicolous is that this administration is still been taken serious by some. Their track record of mis judgements is pretty stellar.

this could be the next President

And that would make America the great country that it can be.