Another blog entry i want to comment on is from Michael Janssen.

Well, i guess i have easy talking here. Munich is AFAIK one of the safest 1-Mio+ cities in the world. I live a bit outside in a suburb. The suburbs are even a wealthier area of germany (in fact, four of the five wealthiest districts of germany are munich and the adjacent districts). We also have an exceptionally low crime rate.

The question that troubles me more, and that also applies to all this “War against Terror” shit, is: What am i willing to pay for that?

When i see recent developments - the U.S. demanding flight passenger informations, cameras being installed on public places, calls for cameras being installed on important intersections to track number plates (similar to the city fee system in London, but without the complete coverage - so any serious car thief will know which intersections to avoid when not having the number plate replaced…), all this RFID tracking shit (i know what you bought in the supermarked yesterday…), biometric information in the passports (heck, biometric systems work worse than guessing…)…

What for? People who want to do crimes will do crimes. They won’t care.

We really need to teach people to be better people. In my opinion this includes paying more value to immaterial things. Because you cannot steal being smart from someone else. But you can steal his oh-so-cool-new-thing. Of course this is not what our industry wants, because you can’t sell it. And if you can’t make money that easily (teaching dumb people to be smart is a tough job…), but you can make a lot of money from people being scared - well, money runs the world. Figures.

Similar things apply to many places: the recent terrorism in russia, the palestinans - defending with violence against people you have been mistreating for ages just doesn’t work: They have nothing to lose. (There are reports of little boys disappearing in chechnya and their bodys being found later. The russian military there is not being paid and said to be raiding homes to make up for that. And israelis have been “settling” in areas which belonged to palestinans for some time… A woman, which was engaged in the Moscow theatre disaster, was said to have lost her boyfriend

  • shot by russian military…)

Well, i think the principle is simple: stop mistreating and killing people and there will be less people trying to kill you. This also applies to Mr.Bush and the U.S. Unfortunately it takes a long time for these wounds to seal, but you should at least try hard not to make new wounds.

Oh, and the “American dream” is misread a lot by now. In good old times it probably was about becoming what you want to. Now it’s about having stuff others do not have. And the easiest way probably is to just take it when they are not looking…

And no, this is not about the US being bad or so. Others are not that much better. And it certainly is getting worse here, too. (Probably to all the US influence, cinema and such). It’s more about the capitalism messing with the values of people.

BTW: a good read about society is Paul Grahams Why Nerds are unpopular