It was what. What will be. About trying to escape the election campaign

As always, Hal Faber’s news wants to focus on the details: Sunday news is commentary, outlook and analysis. It is both a retrospective and a preview.

It was war.

*** Hach, finally no campaign topic. Let’s look at the new AUKUS alliance which has now emerged. Behind the acronym lies a security alliance that the coming decades will shape. France is so angry that it is recovering its ambassadors from the United States and Australia. France’s allegations are swift to Berlin, where Angela Merkel’s well-known way of doing nothing is criticized as soft: “The EU has singularly lacked consistency and backbone in its management of China’s rise, especially under the influence of Berlin. He is paying dearly today. How expensive it is for “us” today depends on who we mean by “us”. Is it only France or all of Europe that has not thwarted the rise of China enough?

*** AUKUS is a kind of Unterwasser-Five Eyes, with the exception of Canada and New Zealand, which due to its nuclear law already prohibits nuclear submarines from navigating its waters. Here you could have a good time with the trill Canadians Taking Care of Business: Because Thursday is an audit report from the law firm WilmerHale (PDF file) that China was acclaimed in the “Doing Business” report from the World Bank with some tips in ranking countries. This prompted the World Bank to make a statement that the publication of “Doing Business” will be discontinued. The lawyers make it clear in their report that the inventor of the filing, Simeon Djankow, has already given instructions on the appearance of the filing. Jordan ahead of Saudi Arabia in the rankings? It doesn’t work at all. China ranks 78th and threatens to collapse further. Take that off. This is the way the economy works, this is the way economists work. Meanwhile, it is the speculated Chinese Evergrand-Moment, by analogy with the Lehman-Moment. Do you prefer to watch the German election campaign quietly?

*** If there is anything good about the election campaign, then regional customs play a role from time to time. So you can learn that Franconia with the lightsaber cut a fabric from the future before sitting down with candidate chancellor Laschet to eat a roasted sausage with sauerkraut. The saying of the meal: “May the force be with us.” As a Lower Saxony, I was able to learn something from the “happy nature of the Rhine” that is Laschet Nubbelverbrennung. A Bavarian newspaper wrote that when it comes to Laschet in “the dwarf island state, Twitter is blown daily to burn hearts”. I don’t understand why journalists write with so much contempt on Twitter and fantasize about a state office. It’s because it’s on Twitter Digital ministry give? I also learned something on Twitter: the constituency in which Hans-Georg Maaßen is running is therefore larger than that of Saarland. A CDU candidate appears in this room with the slogans of lateral thinkers To. As we know, the AfD does not believe in the Corona dictatorship either.

*** About the digital ministry: the debate on digitization that is taking place in this electoral campaign all too often revolves around the fast internet or the promises of the law on online access. After all, this imprecise focus is also criticized in an article on this top priority, which is live as nimble democracy looms behind a dampening wall. This lists the ten things that scanning is really about: “Surveillance capitalism. The erosion of political discourse. The manipulation of users at the service of advertisers. Manipulation of voters in the interest of anti-democratic forces. The end of intimacy. The violation of human and civil rights by the automation of decision-making processes by means of artificial intelligence in the authorities. In insurance companies. In the enterprises. Cementing power structures and prejudices through unbalanced AI datasets. The radicalization of the financial system via blockchain technologies such as Bitcoin. The vulnerability of public, economic and private life through cyber warfare. Oops, those were eleven reasons. “

*** The violation of human and civil rights in companies has reached a threatening dimension. This week, the Austrian Cracked Labs published a study on the expansion of enterprise data collection in the workplace that has it all. Project manager Wolfie Christl writes in the short version: “What features and technical options does the software offer that businesses can use today, and how is employee data processed? In some case studies, the use in Austria and Germany is difficult to imagine from a legal point of view. Then follows horror scenarios from big business to smartphone-controlled delivery slaves: inside Gorillas & Co. Espionage has long since reached a dimension that mainstream surveillance software like Orvell seems old. Of course, everything is done in respectable activities to ward off threats of insider attacks, such as Securonix which formulates. This too, Celonis’ Business Execution Management System takes screenshots to analyze what a company’s employees are doing or if they are even looking for a job. As we know, it is extremely dangerous because knowledge can flow. The study says: “Under the heading“ Task Mining ”, Celonis also offers to record screen content, keystrokes, mouse clicks, scrolling processes and even clipboard content using software. spies installed on employee computers. As a result, emails sent and websites are viewed or interactions with applications such as Excel are assigned to the appropriate data records through the activities of SAP and other systems. “ On the 152 pages of the full study (PDF file) of Cracked Labs could be the saying: “Leave all hope”, but it is not over an office door, but over the door from hell. It’s good that this week we received an IEEE standard on how ethical values ​​should be taken into account in IT systems.

What will be.

The election campaign is not yet over. Seen in this light, it is all the more enjoyable when the story, haunted for some time, of a sort of recreation of the woolly mammoth in the form of a Lindner mammoth once again circling the world. The critters should be relocated to the Arctic and trample the ground so that the methane stays in the ground and the climate is preserved. What was Christian Lindner’s motto still? For more joy to invent instead of forbidding, do I walk on corpses or in unsuspected coalitions? Can the man with the woolly mammoth at the head of the FDP even become Minister of Finance? Or will the others succeed, the GRRdish knot to break. The only question that remains is whether we can not use a different DNA and an elephant as a starting point. A word of advice: 30 years ago today, there was a century of discovery in the last century. Since then, people say, at least in Austria, “We are Ötzi”. [i]“Watching Ötzi is watching people. Mysterious, a little scary and very fascinating at the same time. Religious studies once described the essence of the sacred as mysterium tremendum and mysterium fascinans. Through the peephole of the Archaeological Museum of South Tyrol you can admire the Tabernacle from the Anthropocene.[i]

(me)