Ressourcen – Innere und äußere Kraftquellen – 24.06.2015

Bin heute morgen etwas früher aufgewacht und habe die Sendung “Ressourcen – Innere und äußere Kraftquellen” vom 24.06.2015 gehört.

Gute Sendung, allerdings fehlen mir bei derartigen Sendungen immer wieder Hinweise zu weiterführender Literatur oder ächäm… zusätzlichen Quellen zum Thema.

Was aber wirklich hängen geblieben ist, war der Rahmen, in den die Sendung gesetzt wurde: die auswegslose Situation und Ermordung durch die Nazis von Helmuth James von Moltke. Und speziell ein Passage aus dem Abschiedsbrief an seine Söhne hat mich doch sehr stark berührt:

Die Sache, wegen derer ich umgebracht werde, wird in die Geschichte eingehen, und kein Mensch weiß, wie. Euch will ich aber folgendes sagen: ich habe mein ganzes Leben lang, schon in der Schule, gegen einen Geist der Enge und der Gewalt, der Überheblichkeit und der mangelnden Ehrfurcht von Anderen, der Intoleranz und des Absoluten erbarmungslos Konsequenten angekämpft, der in den Deutschen steckt und der seinen Ausdruck in dem nationalsozialistischen Staat gefunden hat. Ich habe mich auch dafür eingesetzt, dass dieser Geist mit seinen schlimmen Folgeerscheinungen wie Nationalismus und Exzess, Rassenverfolgung, Glaubenlosigkeit, Materialismus überwunden werde. Insofern werde ich vom nationasozialistischen Standpunkt zu Recht umgebracht.

Nun kann ich persönlich nicht die ganze Geschichte über Moltke nachprüfen. Das Zitat aber blieb an mir hängen!

Turning off Javascript

Oh. My. God. I have had NoScript enabled which pretty much claims to do the same thing, but it still seems to slow the browser down considerably. Not to mention the constantly nagging dialog boxes.

If you actually turn off Javascript in Firefox like so (see image), the browsing speed increase is tremendous. I was surprised myself.

about_config

Sure, it feels like you’re surfing the web in 1997 and I had to turn Javascript back on in order to be able to upload the above image to this posting, but boy is it quick.

And I suspect that there is _a lot_ of room for speed improvement with clever coding. Come on coders!! Do it! Save those CPU cycles!

Why nerd culture must die

Thank you Pete Warden for the article Why nerd culture must die

As a musician/composer heavily reliant on copyright as a means of at least some form of power in relationship to my clients (tv production companies and tv stations mostly) and as a tech lover (since my days on the C64 who never really went into science, coding or engineering because music was the bigger love for me) for the past 10 years I’ve experienced the “wrath of the internet” first hand and in painful personal attacks. And what hurts most was, that I felt the dreams painted by the geeks where my dreams (open culture, removing the middle men, direct access) but then the geeks started to actively destroy my professional field (the one that lets me provide for my family) and at the same time ignored the writings on the wall (the steady decline in revenue and the loss of the middle class musician/composer due to piracy).

There was mockery, victim blaming, talk of a “new business model” that nobody really defined. Not even the really smart people in tech managed to come up with a “new model” that actually works for the lower and middle class musicians. For them, the best solution is still to sell an album (digital or physical) for roughly ten bucks.

Throughout those last 10 years the “ignoring outsiders and believing in ourselves” that I deeply admire and that I feel I`m a part of in my field has built up such a high barrier between otherwise like minded people (nerds and musicians are always visionaries, they recognize things that most people don’t). Even though I have built up a strong resistance for it, it still hurts the sensitive side in me.

Let us work on bridging that gap.

 

 

Used books and money left on the street

I have to get something off my chest that has bothered me for quite some time. To start I have to mention that my cousin wrote the fantastic book “Albtraum Sicherheit – Interessen und Geschäfte hinter der Sicherheitspolitik” (nightmare security – interests and business behind the politics of security). The book was available on Amazon from day one and also from day one there were offers for € 0,99 cents of used copies of the book. Leaving the question aside where those used copies came from I want to focus on a more capitalistic aspect of those used books.

Let’s suppose a book costs € 12.99 on the day it is published. Right next to it, Amazon allows a third party store to sell used books. These used books typically start at € 0.99 + € 3.00 shipping.

Why does the used book seller not operate with the following equation in mind:

  € 12.99 cost of the new book
– €   3.00 shipping
– €   3.90 (30% discount towards the price of the new book, assumed a mint condition)
————
€  6.09

This means that even with a 30% discount towards the original price of the book the used book seller could have a 5 times higher revenue to the tune of € 6.09 – € 0.99 = € 5.10

Can someone please explain to me, how it makes sense financially to leave this money on the table? You would still undercut the new version of the book. You would not even have to share the extra revenue with the author or the publisher (which I personally think is a shame, but that’s a different story).

Please leave a comment to get me to understand the thinking behind this!