Tag Archives: Life

An Experiment in Globalization

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Nowadays, people’s lives often take them far from the land of their birth, right? And the internet is supposed to be able to help diminish the problems arising from distance, yes? We will see if Apple and iTunes are up to the challenge.

Dear Sir or Madam,

My sister, who lives in the United States, sent me an iTunes gift certificate for my birthday. I would like to use it to purchase music. Your software tells me that I cannot use this gift certificate for iTunes Germany. It also tells me that I cannot sign on to the iTunes store for the United States, where the certificate was purchased.

How can I use this gift certificate to purchase music?

Sincerely,

Douglas Merrill

The FAQ says to expect an answer within 24 hours. I will keep you all posted.

Superfast Update: The “thank you” page says that they will be in contact within 72 hours. This is not an auspicious start.

The “Teuro” Dissected

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Did prices really go up when the Euro arrived? The public mind, or at least the dominant media discourse, says they did. The inflation indices say they didn’t, or at least the prices that did go up were outweighed by the ones that went down. This paradox may have been solved. Erich Kirchler, of Vienna University’s Institute for Economic Psychology, tells Der Standard how.

Kirchler formed three representative groups of volunteers, and showed them prices in Schillings, then in euros. One group’s price was exaggerated by 15%, one reduced by 15%, and a control group saw correctly converted prices. All three groups were convinced the prices had risen…yes, including the second group. When he repeated the experiment with wages, rather than prices, the guinea pigs were convinced the opposite was the case.

He theorises that two well-known cognitive biases are at work – irrational perception of risk (the difference between accepting €10 now, or a 90% chance of €90 later) and the salience heuristic (unrepresentative but extreme events are over-perceived).

I was in Austria for the introduction of cash Euros, and I recall not so much that prices went up, as that the standard sums of money one withdraws from ATMs (20, 50, 100 etc) were suddenly considerably more and hence it was easy to spend more. Everyone was convinced that prices went up, though. And the German-speaking press had been hammering the word “Teuro” (roughly: “dearo”) into the meme-pool for months before the switch. (Especially, of course, Bild Zeitung and the execrable Krone..)

Signs of Summer

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The first banners for the coming World Cup have been hung here in Munich. The stadium that will host the opener on June 6 has been finished for more than a Bundesliga season; the autobahn enlargement is done; and I think even the renovations on the main subway station will be finished on time. Teutonic efficiency strikes again.

Apparently, World Cup is something of a big deal, though as an American I’m obviously predestined to be completely ignorant about all of that. In fact, I’m so ignorant that I’m not even telling my friends and colleagues here that the US team is currently fifth in the FIFA rankings. The only European teams ahead of them are the Czechs and the Dutch. Rounding out the top five are Brazil and arch-rival Mexico.

Where does Germany rank? Funny you should ask. I’m not sure, I sorta quit looking after a I got to Cameroon, Egypt and Japan. It’s that famously short American attention span. I’m sure they’re on the charts somewhere.

Forget It Jacques, It’s Clearstream

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It never stops when your blog has to cover an entire continent. Hardly had the Italian left taken AFOE’s advice to get Giorgio Napolitano elected as president than the Clearstream scandal in France was getting out of hand, and nothing at all on the blog! Fortunately, at the moment the news from that quarter is coming so thick and at such a howling rate of speed that it wasn’t going to be hard to catch up. The latest despatches suggest that, firstly, it was De Villepin and Chirac, and secondly, that the victim-Nicolas Sarkozy-probably has something to hide too, as in any good film noir.

And that’s before you get on to the 300 million francs in the president’s secret Japanese bank account. Allegedly.

So what is a Clearstream and why is it a scandal? Clearstream is a bank clearing house in Luxembourg that permits banks to carry out international payments on a net basis, paying just the balance of their transactions in cash every business day. It has a bad reputation in France because of one Denis Robert, who has written three books alleging that it’s responsible for money laundering on a vast scale. But more relevantly, it’s also the supposed cause of a major political crisis.
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The Plural of “Anecdote” Is Not “Data”, It’s “Blog”

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Overheard in the bar, Paris-Toulouse TGV near Bordeaux…

A French saloon bar bore, who has apparently just returned from a spell abroad, is in the process of berating “national decline” to the barman. Apparently these students are deluded, irresponsible fools, France is in the Middle Ages, and two of the escalators weren’t working at Montparnasse this morning! (Jesus, what would he have made of Oxford Circus tube?) Only la rupture can save us, etc, etc.

But which society had he been experiencing that made him consider France to be stuck in the Middle Ages and to be desperately in need of, ahem, “modernisation” and “reform”? Why, Sweden, of course. A few minutes later, I saw a huge full-page ad in my newspaper taken out by Alcatel to boast of how the takeover of Lucent would give them the world’s biggest laboratories and that they would be spending twice Alcatel’s €2.6bn annual R&D budget in the future.

I can’t imagine a British CEO getting away with that.

Returning to Britain, I see that Peugeot has decided to transfer production of 206s from the Ryton plant in Coventry to somewhere with less job security and lower wages…after all, that’s what we all need, no? Whoops. They are zapping 2,300 workers at Ryton to transfer the work to Mulhouse..

Theatre of Citizenship

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Everyone’s been terribly worried about France. First of all, last autumn’s carburning outbreak saw a lot of people who really ought to know better gathering to hail the end of days and the Islamofascist conquest of Eurabia, or something. Now, the students are out on the streets to protest the government’s new labour laws, and perhaps the trade unions will be coming too. And then there was the supposedly anti-semitic stabbing of a few weeks ago.

That stabbing, one will remember, brought thousands onto the streets for a heavily earnest, government supported demonstration against antisemitism, terrorism and a few other isms. I’m usually very sceptical about demos like that, and the Spanish tradition of demonstrating against terrorists-they aren’t listening, after all, and it is always worryingly close to demonstrating in favour of the government. There’s a strong case that one shouldn’t take part in a modern version of the demos by (supposedly) torpedoed merchant seamen that Winston Churchill put on in the first world war to shame strikers.

But is there more use to it than I think? (More, and more sense, below the fold..)
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You must all be very kind to Tobias today

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Regionalist tensions in Spain, murderously cold weather and French nuclear stroppiness are all important enough in their way, I suppose, but let’s not lose sight of what truly matters: Bayern Munich move ahead to the semi-finals of the DFB Cup. It will be scant comfort to Tobias, I fear, that his boys from Mainz 05 punched way above their weight, owning the pitch during the first part of the match and making Bayern worry down to the very last minutes of extra time. Special mention goes to second-string Mainz keeper Christian Wetklo, who had no reason to feel embarrassed standing on the other end of the pitch from Oliver Kahn.

Germany’s other national keeper and his Highbury comrades didn’t fair as well in their own face-off against an upstart promotee, taking a long walk off Wigan pier and out of the League Cup. But the real nailbiter is tonight in Hamburg, where piratical misfits FC St. Pauli of the northern regional league take on Bundesliga power club Werder Bremen. Come on Pauli!

UPDATE: And damned if on Pauli didn’t come! 3:1 against mighty, mighty Werder; well done the lads!

Sure is Cold

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Eastern Europe is currently enjoying its coldest weather since 1979. Temperatures in Moscow have been below minus 20 C (that’s minus 5 Fahrenheit for our American readers) for a week straight now, with regular visits to minus 30 (minus 22 Fahrenheit). In Bucharest, where we live, it’s currently minus 9 Celsius; that will drop to minus 14, or about plus 8 Fahrenheit, later tonight. To give some perspective on that, you should know that most of the houses in our neighborhood have arbors full of grape vines, and roses were blooming in our yard at the beginning of December.

It’s cold. Over 100 people have died in Russia. I’m in Pristina, Kosovo at the moment, and it’s right around minus 15 as the sun goes down. I won’t even convert that to Fahrenheit — it’s too depressing — but there’s a stiff wind blowing sinister little arcs of snow around the roads, and I’m really not in a hurry to go outside again.

The weather is coming from a cold air mass with sharply defined edges. Just a couple of hundred kilometers south and west of me, Tirana (Albania) is enjoying a balmy +3 Celsius. The cold air has been gradually creeping westward, so right now the edge seems to be somewhere in Germany; Prague and Berlin are getting whacked, but France is still pleasantly warm. It’s possible that the whole thing may dissipate without reaching further. In which case it won’t ever be much of a news story because, you know… Eastern Europe.

Ah, don’t mind me. Weather like this makes me paranoid. Because Mother Nature is trying to kill me…

Who else is sitting under that blue-white splotch on the map? Consider this an open thread for weather talk.

Sparkling Spain

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Spain’s economy is of course booming, (as it has been for the last ten years). The inflation rate is booming too. Some even go so far as to suggest that Spain should now become a member fo the G8. Spanish people are of course buying a lot more houses, indeed more housing units were built in Spain last year than in Germany, France and Italy combined, and since, as Brad Delong pointed out yesterday, as long as interest rates stay low, the housing sector can keep booming, and since in the short term interest rates in Spain will stay low, then the boom looks set to continue. Plenty of reasons then, at least for now, to break open the bubbly.

Which is what, of course, a lot of people having been doing. In Spain by bubbly people normally mean Cava, a Catalan beveridge which is really remarkably similar to French Champagne. This year, however, things may be a little different, at least in some parts of Spain, since in addition to having a smokeless celebration, many will also be having a cava-free one.

So what is this all about? Well funnily enough rather than being about Eve (whether New Year’s or Xmas), this topic is in fact much more about José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero (the Spanish Prime Minister/President).
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