Russia on Michael’s Domain

Germany's responsibility

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It is difficult to spend vacation in Poland without coming across a concentration camp from Nazi-Germany. It happens to me every single time.Last time it was Stutthof , this week Płaszów. In Cracow, during my daily running, I suddenly saw the sign shown in the image next to the trail.,Remembering is one thing, but more important is to fight today’s fascism in all of its incarnations . Germany’s government should remember that Hitler’s expansionism was only stopped by concerted military action.

Putin wants you to drive fast and much!

Tue, 19 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I drive rarely, and these days, I rent when I need a car. This summer we decided to spend a two-week vacation in a cottage at a lake in the middle of the Finnish forest. You need a car if you want to get around in the Finnish countryside. Public transport might be working well in the Finnish capital Helsinki, but it is for all practical purposes absent from the Finnish countryside. Filling up the tank of our rental car cost me more than 150€.Given that I could fill up the same tank for less than 75€ still a year ago, I expected that people adjusted their driving habits to save energy, the planet, and their wallets. But I was mostly wrong.Driving slower and driving lessEverybody, who has not been living under a stone, knows that the most efficient driving speed is somewhere between 50 and 90 km/h. The air resistance increases with the speed. This increase is not linear, but exponential. By speeding, you save a minimal amount of time by wasting an incredible amount of energy. Even though most drivers complain about the horrific gas prices, hardly anybody seems to adjust their behavior either by driving slower or by driving less. I would like to know what the reason is for this paradoxical behavior, it’s inexplicable to me. I know that some drivers like to drive fast (I belonged to this category when I was 18). But hey: then you should shut up and just pay for the “fun”!Infantile requests for state subsidiesSuddenly, people who usually defend our market economy are calling for state intervention to lower gas prices. WTF? Just because for the first time you realize that you yourself are subjected to the powers of demand and supply you forget your free market values and call for state intervention. The only way to solve the problem of rising gas prices is to trust the market. Unfortunately, in many countries, the governments are exactly acting against all experts’ advice and are artificially trying to lower gas prices, e.g. by lowering taxation (e.g. France, Austria, Netherlands). That keeps the demand artificially high, further widening the gap between supply and demand, which was causing the high prices in the first place.

Where the Soviet Union was conceived

Wed, 11 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We did a bit of historic sightseeing in summer. In July we went for a city vacation to Tampere, the third biggest city in Finland and the biggest Scandinavian inland city. Tampere has a very industrial history and some important decisions influencing world history have been made here, such as the decision to found the Soviet Union. The latter took place when Lenin and Stalin met each other for the first time in 1905 in the Tampere Worker’s Hall, which today hosts the perhaps (?) only Lenin Museum in the world. Finland was an autonomous part of the Russian Empire at the time and enjoyed more freedom than perhaps any other part of the Empire. For that reason, many of the early communist leaders operated out of the Grand Duchy of Finland.