Totally works as intended: Buy yourself yellow shoes, and people will look at you differently.

Being otherwise dressed conservatively helps, though.

I can’t believe how severely I overconsume information.

I take it in from when I get up, eating my breakfast in front of my feeds, until I go to bed, checking my emails one last time before I switch off the light.

Guess I need to get one of these “lives” one day.

I just read a headline in a major German newspaper: “Lack of communication in families threatens childrens’ development”.
They described the trend that families spend more time in front of computers and TV, and less time talking to each other.

That reminded me of a feeling that I’ve had for a long time. In both school and university I had the feeling that most of the time was wasted by being fed or memorizing information.

In my opinion, it should not the most important goal of any educative institution to transfer knowledge. I mean, any kid with internet can learn quite accurately about anything these days!

What we need, children and adults alike, is a platform to talk to other people about this information. We want to learn about other people’s ideas and views, criticize them and build on them.

The main purpose of a school should be to facilitate this process. It seems to be very few that do that enough.

The German Constitutional Court declared the German telecommunication data retention (“Vorratsdatenspeicherung”) unlawful this morning. All laws are null and void, saved data has to be deleted.

They didn’t challenge the concept or the EU guideline in general, but found that the German legal framework needs more judiciary oversight, clear definitions of when to use it, and safer data storage.

They also iterated that the data is only to be used for crimes of a certain severity.

Once again my trust in the Constitutional Court is affirmed. They save our butts against bad or incomplete laws every time.

As much as I welcome this verdict, I do feel for the police. Even though it doesn’t seem like the now obsolete laws saw much use (yet), I understand that it’s hard to properly prosecute criminals if the laws are so uncertain.

As it was established before, German people quickly feel uncomfortable when there is nothing to be offended or worried about. If they currently have no personal reason to be offended or worried about anything, they will go to a bookstore to buy a book written by what they consider to be a much more intelligent person, who happens to be altruistic and kind enough to lecture them about recent developments that they should better be offended or worried about [...]

Man, is that a great blog!