Statistician Nic Marks gave a really interesting talk on happiness at TED. Starting from the observation that at the moment we focus too much on the problems and apocalyptic scenarios, we are constantly turning Martin Luther King's famous quote »I have a dream« into »I have a nightmare«.

Trying to shift the focus towards solutions, Nic Marks suggests that using the GDP as an index for human progress is not a very good instrument any more, since all around the globe happiness, love, and health are rated significantly higher than wealth when people are asked what matters in life. Thus, he tries to find out what makes life worthwhile and use that for an index of progress: the happy planet index.

Three interesting things I got along the way:

1. Costa Rica

Not only is Costa Rica the happiest country in the world, they also have the best happiness – resources ratio of them all. And they have no military since 1948!

2. Target Visibility

Humans care a lot about the present, the future is always somewhat blurred. Thus, one should make progress (or setbacks) visible immediately. Two measures he mentions are smart meters displaying the cost of energy consumption all the time and reading national carbon emissions over the radio along with Dow Jones and Nasdaq.

3. Increase Happiness

Five very easy things to do to tremendously increase happiness in everyday life are:

1. Connect
2. Be active
3. Tak notice
4. Keep learning
5. Give

Some interesting links:

• Five ways to wellbeing
• Wellbeing at work
• nef – New Economics Foundation (»economics as if people and the planet mattered«)

Nic Marks' talk at TED

I've been told: 

While in relative figures less people worldwide suffer from hunger than ever before, in absolute numbers more people do.

Discuss.

When one leaves a camera in the passenger seat of a locked car, a thug breaks into the vehicle and steals the camera, my insurance guy tells me one gets: zip. It's called »invitation to theft«.

When the various agencies of the United States of America leave their secret data unprotected in data bases readily accessible from a London flat on a 56k connection, a Briton breaks into their system and leaves a message, the guardian tells me they want: him in the can for 60 years.

But apparently spending money on inmates is a lot more convenient than turning that flat line into a decent learning curve: 

Since his exploits were exposed [in 2002], consecutive government reports have confirmed that the US military's computer systems remain poorly protected.

I currently work for a company where 99% of my colleagues come from a walk of life that is completely different from mine.

Their alphabet soup of existence seems to be cooked from a big chunk of work, several liters of alcohol, different flavours of online gaming, a good few inches of plasma tv, and a pinch of porn. With all my believes, pass times and things I care about, I sometimes feel I stick out like a broken nose.

I hear Africans have no use for education but what they really need and want is just being fed by the West. They let you know that the European Union is bad, bad, bad because of the poor farmers in Carinthia. It is argued that something can't be pornographic simply because similar things are on display on advertisements all over the metro. Damage to environment comes from huge oil carriers but not from taking a plastic bag five times a week when shopping the two to three lunch items. They believe that sexism is the funnier the cheaper it comes, and as they munch they tell the male colleague who made a cake for them that men do not bake. They think that women have better peripheral vision – with »it really is true« being the only scientific evidence they can produce. When you want to do it right, I am told, a meal should not see you eating for more than 20 minutes – the reason behind this is of course »common knowledge«. They just know that a word from Austrian dialect can never, under no circumstances share its root with a standard German word. Why not? Because of the sheer impossibility, how could I miss it. When I tried to share my linguistic and etymological expertise with them, telling them of suffixes, roots and prefixes, they fire back that »language just is not logical fullstop« backed by a randomly googled Husserl quote (what difference does it make that it really is Frege writing to Husserl?); terminating the discussion with »well, you certainly can talk anything to death«.

An hour long lecture series on colonial history or the food chain that requires African and South American farming to feed the animals that in turn feed us, on the system of wars that ensures we get our commodities cheap, on EU farm subsidies, on sexism, feminism, patriarchy, etymology, logic and what else have you is not an option: I want to keep my job for now and nobody would care anyway.

All that aside, they honestly are the nicest, friendliest and most helpful people and I really like them. But since the etymological incident it slowly dawns on me, why I fail relating to them through means other than small talk or connect on a more profound level: They already seem to know how the world works. Anything that questions this knowledge, anything that remotely paints the necessity of change (how could, by the way, Obama win an election with »Change«?) is dangerous and unwanted. They are not interested in questioning the way things work, and get aggressive at the mere possibility of challenging the world as they know it – which must come pretty convenient for good ol' capitalism.

I travelled a fair bit recently, mostly by rail. From Edinburgh to Inverness, from Vienna to Zurich, and from Alpiglen to Grindelwald.

The mad railway series started end of May. I had a notification in the mail that an item was waiting for me at the local post office and that I had to sign personally to receive said item. The item turned out to be a letter from Scot Rail, thanking me for thanking Sally. On my way from Edinburgh to Inverness I forgot my suit when I changed trains in Stirling. Sally was a very friendly conductor who managed to arrange for my suit to be ready and waiting for me one stop after Stirling. So when she asked me to fill in a feedback form describing the incident, I most happily complied – not knowing that this would invoke a letter worth £ 4.25 in postage and several times this amount in man hours (customer service agent writing the letter, me collecting the letter, me writing this post and me writing an email telling them that it's a waste of my money and an email to me plus a free pint for Sally would have been sufficient).

At the beginning of June I travelled from Vienna to Zurich. Everybody knows that trains in Switzerland are always on time. My train approached the Swiss border later than it should have. A lot later. I imagine what happened was this: a Swiss rail official repeatedly glanced at his watch and then at the little red dot on his screen signifying my train coming closer. The poor official kept sighing sadly and shaking his head in disbelieve. He could see it coming. He sighed again when he knew the desaster could not be avoided any more. He then slowly picked up his red telephone, which he only ever used to call foreign railway companies. He then dialed the number of his Austrian counterpart to patiently explain that 100 minutes would have to be considered as rather severe and that thus the train would unfortunately not be able to cross the border, mércivielmals, Ade. That's how trains in Switzerland are always on time: either they are or they are annihilated.

While in Switzerland (a Swiss train finally brought me from the border to Zurich) I went for a hike and after a day of walking in the heat and dust decided to let the Jungfraubahn take me down the last couple hundred meters of altitude from Alpiglen to Grindelwald. The trip cost 16 Francs something and you can see my »ticket« here. The poor conductor had to tear every single coupon.

How is it that whenever I see somebody jumping the queue I am immediately at the brink of a Blutsturz?

In the morning at the bakery:

Today Vienna experienced a brief but heavy outage of gravity. Christian luckily had his camera at hand to document this rare phenomenon of acute dimension V (click image for more):

All images © by Christian Bazant

My new job includes attending the odd job interview now and again. Today we had an applicant scheduled for 11 a.m. It turned eleven and it turned five past and ten past until at quarter past eleven the front desk finally rang to tell us the applicant had just cancelld the appointment. When asked why she waited until after the scheduled start time to let us know she wasn't coming, she said that she had actually been there on time but then found it was too windy and she couldn't see herself going to work through that kind of weather each day.

As promised, VIC eary in the morning...

Internet Service Provider

If you're looking for an ISP I can recommend domain factory and all-inkl. I used to be with domain factory for several years and was very happy with everything all the time except their dynamic prices for extra data bases (something like EUR 3 per month per database on myhome Dynamic). That's why I started looking for a new provider and tried 1blu.

I cannot recommend 1blu for a number of reasons: their telephone support was unfriendly, they don't provide mysqli on shared servers and when I cancelled my contract they immediately disconnected my domain without even notifying me. They then required a fax to reconnect it until the end of the contract (another three months).

all-inkl (my new ISP) provides a free test account, they were very quick on taking over my domain after 1blu had disconnected it (from sending my request to receiving the success report it took them exactly 1 hour) and everything was just very straight forward.

Household Insurance

If you're looking to insure your household goods in Austria I cannot recommend Generali Versicherungen. After the second burglary in 18 months and a total amount claimed of approx. EUR 8.000 (which I didn't think was that much in insurance business), they just kicked a friend of mine out of his contract because he was not being profitable for them any more. Nice move.

I talked to my neighbour this morning when he tried to open our door from the yard to the back lane in order to get his BMX out:

Always nice to have a good chat.

On my way home from town this afternoon, I had to use some of the skills one has to maintain sharpened at all times as a Brasseur.

Passing one of the most hideous and darkest places in Newcastle on my bike, I noticed from the corner of my eye how a young man held on to a struggling and obviously non-consenting young woman at the intersection of John Dobson and Lisle St. I did a Chicago turn, watched the situation for a wee bit longer until I was sure it wasn't right, said »Yankee-Tango-Lima for Foxtrott-X-Ray-Zulu, I have a 2-1-0 here, going in now!« into my imaginary radio and intervened.

When I asked if everything was all right he said »yes« (oh really?) and she said »take him away from me«. I probably could have used reasonable force on him at that point, but both were crying and I established that he had been cheating on her (her story) or rather that he fancied another woman and when she learned, she came to him to tell him she was going to kill herself (his story). So I made her promise not to run off and kill herself for the moment while I would take him away from her. He didn't object when I told him to let go of her. Only she didn't really keep her promise, and each time she tried to run away he wouldn't let her. But as he wasn't aggressive and seemed genuinely worried about her, I did not interfere too much.

My suggestion that she'd call a friend and I would stick around until he or she arrived was instantly approved by him but not by her. He even tried to call a friend for her, which earned him considerable abuse in a south-east Asian language.

Being at my wits' end I thought about calling the crime stoppers but wasn't sure if there really was a crime to stop here, and somehow the number of the Ethics Squad had slipped my mind. While I was still pondering, somebody else had already decided to call 999 for me and two police turned up in their Ford. They separated the couple, questioned each, and asked me to stick around for a minute.

After I had told one of them my story, he asked me to write down my name and telephone number. Now one would think they'd have fancy notebooks (someone said the notebook was the most important tool of a police officer in some film, which makes good sense to me), but I was very surprised when the officer handed me some old receipt which I saw some random guy with cropped hair give him shortly after they arrived. So apparently the most important tool of a police officer is the receipt he receives from random people. Maybe there even is a secret anonymous receipt suppliers programme going?

Anyway, by the time I had written down my contact details a second police car had arrived, so after I bade adieu to the sad and confused (ex-)couple, I left them in the caring hands of four cops.

I do seriously hope fate will bring them through the doors of the Brasserie one day (either together or each on their own), because both seemed like nice enough people and I would really be a great deal more comfortable if I knew they had resolved the issue one way or another without too much harm involved.