randform

Right now and for the upcoming weeks I am without internet access at home, so basically without internet. Here thus fast a blog post related to the financial crisis.

About 2 weeks ago the Group of 20 finance ministers and central bankers of the biggest developped economies had met in southern England in order to prepare for the upcoming G20 summit. A “sustained effort” was pledged to end the global recession and to cleanse banks of toxic assets. In particular according to Bloomberg

“Our key priority now is to address the value of assets held on banks’ balance sheets, which are constraining banks’ lending” and damaging economies, the G-20 statement said.
Banks are still hoarding cash after being stung by more than $1.2 trillion of writedowns and losses.”

Meanwhile governments -in particular the US government- are pumping money into the market. For example in Europe the total amount of money has almost doubled within the last 6 years (money supply wikipedia, the Berliner zeitung march 28, 2009 Tagesthema diagram is including 2008 but unfortunately not visible)

And still inflation is low – as if the money would disappear!

And even more mysterious: the pumped-in money meanwhile exceeded the amount of one or two trillion dollars, which were acclaimed as possible losses. And still the money is been hoarded.

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It’s frosty in munich today.

a short personal note: We will leave the above beautiful garden sight by the end of the month. We were lucky to find a smaller appartment where the kids can still reach their school by bus. It is not easy to find an appartment for rent in munich without spending 2000-3000 Euros for a real estate agent. The appartment is at a rather big road. Unfortunately there is no traffic light in the vicinity and the traffic on that road is blowing too heavily for letting the kids cross that road by themselves. The architecture of the building and some buildings around it are similar to the one in the suburb of Neuaubing. We are on the forth floor so sometimes one can see the Alps.

I just came across these funny videos from the mission of Man System Integration Standards which were mostly shot at skylab. See e.g. this video about how to use paper.

The videos and documents display the problems of finding a well-adapted architecture for space travel. For that the Skylab investigations into anthropometry and biomechanics were apparently necessary.
Similar investigations were also undertaken in Australia. In particular the australian government was recently seeking 2000 volunteers for the ADF Aircrew and Crewstation Anthropometry Project which was organized by the Centre for Applied Anthropometry.

I recently wanted to send a package and went to the next post office, but apart from the fact that it was already closed (see image) I had to acknowledge the remarkable fact that at the office there was no post box where I could dump my little package! Neither was there a note where I could find the next box.

Besides this astonishing changes in snail mail communication one should remark that it was also of no help to hear that the former boss of the german post Mr. Zumwinkel (who was recently sentenced for tax dodging of almost 1 million euros) just received more than 20 million euros as pension and boni etc.. (This is in part also an answer to this comment).

A reader called baxter asked about my current stove.

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A reader called Hein Kleist wrote:

I find it a little dangerous that you suggest to let problematic banks go bankrupt! Don’t you know that the collapse of Lehman Brothers almost destroyed the world financial system? There could be a chain reaktion of an unknown size!

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