January 20, 2010

Another cold, cold day in Zürich.

The earthquake in Haiti turned out to be as disastrous as the tsunami with expectantly 200'000 dead. However, the worse seems to be yet to come with all the refugees, diseases and upcoming criminality that follows in the footsteps of the disaster. We have constantly been fed with images from the area since a week now and the more you see, the more the whole situation just feel hopeless. Obama has been very quick in sending American aid, it might be out of pure altruism but I guess it is still a great occasion for Obama to score some points on Americas behalf in the world and show the American army in a more positive light than as the invasion force it has been seen as the last decade. No matter if Obama can draw benefit or not, it is a very good thing that they got there quickly with massive help. Probably they learned something from Katrina, in contrast with the European union that has been embarrassingly slow in taking the necessary decisions to gather the forces to help the needing.

To talk about something completely different, the worse trains ever constructed must be the ICN trains in Switzerland. These horrible machines seems to be designed uniquely to make their passengers as sick as possible. According to well-informed forces this could be due to a design error, apparently simulations of the control system was made on the movement only in the lateral direction and hence ignoring the movement in the traveling direction. In order to survive your traveling in Switzerland, make sure that you avoid these trains even though it means waiting half an hour for the next train.

January 13, 2010

A rather depressing day, around Bahnhof Oerlikon, kreis 11.

There was a huge earthquake on Haiti but there is no comment to give, it is simply just terrible.

In Sweden, university educations were previously allowed to have a gender quota and to strive to have half men, half women. After a recent court case they are no longer allowed to keep this quota. Among others, this quota was to to help the men keep some places in the agricultural sector. When the quota is gone it turns out that almost all educations get dominated by women as they generally have higher grades than men. Now when the majority of newly examined doctors are women and more and more engineers are women the salaries for those professions are falling. Women are always prepared to work for lower wages, good grades obviously doesn't necessarily make them smarter. So what shall we do about it? Encourage your daughters to become investment bankers! I am sure that will add some decency into that profession and make the salaries more down to earth or in the worst case, your daughters will finish rich.

January 6, 2009

Central Zürich in the cold.

After a series of large avalanches in the alps with several dead there is a big discussion in Swiss media whether off-pist skiing should be allowed or not and what is the responsability of the people adventuring outside the prepared slopes. On this matter I must agree with what Dominique Perret said in an interview on the radio that the sea and the mountains are the last outposts of freedom and it would be an awful thing to deprive people from this. However, a justified question is whether you are allowed to put other peoples life in danger which you do when you go too close to the slopes or when you get rescued. This week end a doctor in a rescue team died due to a second avalanche during a mission. In Switzerland we are used to getting a helicopter rescue whatever we have been up to but when you consider the risks to which we are exposing the rescuers this right should really not be that obvious.

During the Christmas holidays a "failed" terrorist attack occurred on a plane between Amsterdam and Detroit. The attack might have been a failure in the sense that no one was hurt, however, when we consider the consequences it was indeed a success. Now millions have been spent on new technology so that all travellers have to expose themselves nude in the security checks. How often do you think that these images will find their way to the web? The real terror is not the act of the terrorist itself but the reaction of the acts by us.