According to my table here, which in contrast to most of my blog is actually somewhat supported by factual material, the available operating hours for a shop in Germany run about 50%. In other words, of 168 hours in a week, you're allowed to be open for 84. That isn't much time to earn money, and it effectively halves the number people you can employ.

After doing minimal research today, in respect to this particular table, I felt restricted, somehow. We live here in a culture that, for some inscrutable reason, denies its folk the freedom to open their stores when they want to, or to shop when and where they want. This is probably because said shopping is, at best, a distasteful, capitalistic pastime, a danse macabre done to the music of the cash register bell and the cracking whip of the cigar-smoking, leering industrialist with the curiously bent nose. The one who, also for reasons unknown, still wears a towering stovepipe hat. As an American, that sounds like paradise, of course, but the more socially concerned Europeans see it differently. To each their own.

Tonight, on German state-run television, there was a documentary on the north-German city of Bremerhaven, which is apparently in some difficulty, of late. There were the usual whiners and beggers which, honestly, one sees enough of just walking down the street. The documentarists drumming up sympathy for the poor, starving Sozialempfänger (welfare recipients) of this down-and-out city, hit on many themes. Most of their points were rather unnuanced, centering on young men with large families, living in a city with no future, trying to get by on a mere 300€ or so in the bank. A good documentarist would have asked, "So, how are you going to provide for your family?" But these are not the kind of artists who want to change the world by making people think. These kind want to change the world by making people feel. The human heart is a remarkable creation*, but it's nothing compared to the human mind. This dipshit probably gets 1000 to 2000 Euros a month shoved up his ass, and has nothing better to do than go down to the unemployment office once a week to see if some bureaucrat, himself incapable of finding honest work, has gotten around to filling out the correct form 1088B-25/33234 so that maybe this weak sap can get a job interview. All that, you understand, in a city that even the doe-eyed mayor declared devoid of prospects. The question shouldn't be, "What can Deutschland do to ease his suffering". It should be, "Why doesn't this asshole do more to provide for his family?" At some point, it actually came out that the dude had 15,000€ in cell-phone bills to pay, on top of being unemployable. I worked this out, in an admittedly drunken fashion, to somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 beers a night for 13 years. Just for perspective, you understand.

Shops are the osmosis point of modern civilization. Money, which is pure, abstracted power, is exchanged between the classes, without the barriers of class or prejudice. You'll be just as likely to buy that shoe from a rich salesman as a poor one, a Turk or German, it doesn't matter. Your money goes back into the system, and taxes are paid; the salesman makes money for being in the store to greet you, and gets maybe even a commission on the sale; the shop owner makes his money by way of markup, and keeps the shop open, closing the circle. Everybody's happy. But restricting the hours that a shop can be open restricts the amount that everyone can be happy, doesn't it? And that's supposed to be a good thing?

Following the debate about shop opening times, you'll see a remarkable set of loyalties come to light. Speeches by politicians who dare breach the subject seek to find a middle point between the Church, which believes in Sundays being holy and therefore commercially not viable I guess, and the big trade unions, who would shit in the soup of the last person with a job, all the while asking for his money, you know, for a new tie or perhaps a papier-machier head of Dale Carnegie or something. That the German politicians are beholden to such scum is, of course, common knowledge. In the States, it's Halliburton and Diebold, so fair is fair. Having your entire media controlled by the Bundestag does have its benefits. Not only is every TV owned in Germany worth 18€ to the ruling party, all that money goes to finance the perpetuation of the hopeless, powerless, and, worst of all, shameless dependency of the German people on the government's looting abilities.

The disgusting merchants of human suffering over at verdi.de, who, by the way, run the corrupt unions in Germany, have an article on shop closings that has to be read to be believed. (English translation here).

I give it about 5 years.

* - Or evolved, if that's your thing

I declared myself done with the desktop metaphor 10 years ago. It bores me, almost as much as the browser metaphor.

For my younger readers, let me explain. "Folders" are those bizarre little yellow things that are depicted next to the plus/minus sign in Windows Explorer. The whole "Folder" thing was invented 30 years ago, by a company called Xerox, to ease the transition from the paper-oriented office, which was at that time the dominant type, to that of the digital variety. They decided that normal office workers could never be expected to visualize the arrangement of bits of data on a hard drive in any meaningful way, so they figured they'd represent them with little pictures of "folders". Folders were, at the time, the way people organized their pieces of "paper", which is a sort of thin film made out of "tree", upon which things used to get "typed".

The "Folder/Document" metaphor has no meaning nowadays, of course. People born after 1980 will have no idea what a "folder" is used for in the real world. When confronted with such a beast, they'll no doubt grope around for 7 or 8 manila folders, label them "To Sort," "Unsorted", and "Stuff", then try to find a way to nest them, as users do. Nor will they have any conception of the "typewriter", or why such fonts exist as American Typewriter, other than making films like Seven. So isn't it time, at last, to ditch the 1970s metaphor that controls computers today? It broke down long ago.

Hilariously, the Apple Macintosh, which is widely considered the ideal user experience, actually has a metaphor for the Computer inside the computer itself:

That first link, "ericbook", is an icon on my computer representing, you guessed it, my computer. A recursive metaphor? The mind boggles. I realize that noone's perfect. Windows 95+ also has a "My Computer" link, for example, presented, strangely, on the same logical level as the "My Documents" link.

"To xerox", in my youth, was a synonym for "to copy." 30 years later, it seems that everyone has forgotten what the original point of the whole thing was, and has settled on copying Xerox. Recursion, squared.

If you were wondering what a great blog looks like, look ne further. My ne, that gut.

I haven't lived in the States for a while, now. I moved out in the late '90s; sometime in 1997, I think, but I don't really remember anymore. I do have vague memories of childhood, though, where we were scared to death with stories of The Future. The Future would be a rocky place, we were told in the '70s, where the twin dangers of explosive overpopulation and International Communism would conspire to destroy our freedoms, and deny us access to the things we held dear, like Kristy McNichol movies and The Band.

This, of course, stood in blatant contrast to the earlier optimism of Star Trek, which taught us that not only was the International Communist Conspiracy bound to win, they were also in no way planning to ban the mini-skirt in military uniforms, as we'd been told. In fact, it would bring unending peace to our troubled race, except for a spate of conflict in the late 90s, when a gang of genetically-engineered Supermen with shaved pecs would try to bend mankind to their will with the crack of their rich, corinthian leather whips.

Luckily, Star Trek never happened. The population bomb was a dud, and now we're even faced with the dreadful specter of underpopulation. The Earth will be a fiery ball of superheated carbon-dioxide and sulfuric acid by the end of lunchtime, and there, at the end, will be Dick Cheney, laughing maniacally while poking the buttocks of human history with a trident made of iron.

So, then. And what did you guys dream last night?