Johannes Wilm - a blog on social science, activism, politics, programming, etc.

Johannes Wilm

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  • Do not kill the common market for small shops and producers!
    Image: Johannes Wilm — All rights reserved

    Do not kill the common market for small shops and producers!

    I hope I am wrong about this: the new EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation requires anyone shipping packaged goods to register with the authorities in each country they ship to. That is no problem for Amazon, which can easily register with 27 different authorities. But for small producers, it is an impossibly large bureaucratic burden. Prices in the smaller Scandinavian markets are already much higher, partly because many small shops and producers from the rest of the EU are unwilling to deal with the hassle of shipping there. This will now get even worse.

    For example, I bought this wooden music player from a German micro-producer. It is built to last, and my kids can play Swedish Pippi Longstocking stories and German public-broadcasting podcasts for children all day long without any subscription. The device even got better over time: the inventor started selling USB-C kits that let me upgrade it myself with nothing more than a drill.

    Purchases like this will now become a thing of the past. The EU single market is being reduced to a playground for Amazon and other corporate giants.

    I know that Scandinavian politics has historically included strong EU-sceptical currents on the left. But I hope someone there understands that an exception for small sellers and producers or a single European registry is desperately needed. Without one, this regulation is effectively a gift to the large-player oligopoly.

  • Norwegian anthropologist

    Wow! My Nicaragua book is listed as a publication by a Norwegian anthropologist in 2011 by the corresponding Norwegian trade association. I thought the Norsk Antropologisk Forening had decided long ago that they wouldn’t touch me with a barge-pole because I’m too dirty/activist. Maybe I should actually sign up and pay member fees.

    Norsk antropologisk forening :: Nye bøker on Antropologi

    Bangstad, Sindre, Oddbjørn Leirvik og Ingvill Thorson Plesner (red.): Sekularisme – med norske briller. Oslo: Unipub. ISBN: 9788274775367. BIBSYS: http://ask.bibsys.no/ask/action/show?kid=biblio&cmd=reload&pid=114843902 Forlagsside: http://www.uni…

  • Western media don’t like competition?

    US and UK media seem a bit envious that suddenly Russian media gets to play in the same league as them in terms of global opinion shaping. They don’t seem to be able to agree on any points of content except that they don’t like what is going on. Take the following two excerpts for example:

    (more…)

  • Can we NOW remove the name of of AP Møller?

    Danish oligarch Møller has died — and everybody from queen to leader of the social democrats feels the need to say what a great human being he was. Somehow I cannot remember anything similar happening when a labor union leader trying to organize Møller’s company was killed under mysterious circumstances in El Salvador a few years. Møller decided to sponsor a school to the Danish minority in Germany a few years ago. The school association then decided to give it the name of Møller’s father, "A.P. Møller", who had made the company big. Any criticism that Møller had made his fortune in part by selling weapons to the nazis and in more recent years by having an extra-ordinarily good deal on pumping up the Danish oil was swept under the carpet. Now that Møller Jr. is gone, can we maybe get to talk about changing the name of the school again? How much longer do the Danes of northern Germany want to be associated with nazi weapon production?

    http://www.johanneswilm.org/2008/11/23/change-the-name-of-the-apmoller-school/
    Change the name of A.P. Møller-skolen | Johannes Wilm’s World on Johanneswilm

    This is a campaign I started a little over a month ago. And yes, I happened to take the initiative, but the fact that the name wasn’t very well chosen was something many people had been thinking about before. Basically, it’s this Danish company t…

  • Swung by the Plaza de la Revolución tonight to listen to Da

    Swung by the Plaza de la Revolución tonight to listen to Daniel Ortega’s interpretation of the Cartagena meeting of American states: He is angry at Canada and USA for voting against Cuban participation in future summits. He believes the governments of those countries don’t really speak for their populations and challenges them to hold referendas to determine what the people really want. He also accused the governments of those countries of thinking they are privileged to determine who is democratic, while repressing the Occupy protests violently.

  • Ah, så flott. da har jeg noe å glede meg til når jeg blir

    Ah, så flott. da har jeg noe å glede meg til når jeg blir 80! Men hvorfor stoppe med planene der? Hvorfor ikke sette opp en plan om å utvide Oslos trikkesystem til månen rundt år 2334 og til mars i år 3872?

    "…I Ruters strategidokument er det lagt opp til egne buss- og trikketraseer i indre by fra 2060. …"

    http://oslopuls.aftenposten.no/byliv/article712902.ece

  • Grass “poem”?

    To me the writings of Günter Grass look like nothing special. It’s a rehash of things that were known already and opinions that most people in the world would agree with anyway. I don’t see the controversy. Why does this get so much attention just because it comes from a certain person? Are the thoughts of one person so much more important than those of everybody else, no matter how simple they are? Here is the poem translated.

  • Goldsmiths — radical?

    It’s funny to think about that our student "riots" of fall 2010 have been made part of the Goldsmiths marketing strategy (selling buttons, etc.) while at the time they tried everything possible to stop us from organizing or occupying anything at the time. That winter I needed to get away in order to get the space and time to write my thesis. Conclusion: Choosing between defending the university while getting attacked for precisely that by it’s management, or be geographically far away in order to do what one set out to academically do there. The conflict still has not been resolved. There is still no future for us in British academia. And 1.5 years have gone by already. 🙁
    http://hutnyk.wordpress.com/2012/04/06/education/

  • OLPC not all that great anyways?

    I have wondered about this a bit — in a world where a tiny part of the world can potentially produce the electronics for everybody and large parts of the world will never be industrialized (or even deindustrialize) — could it be set up for the underdeveloped parts of the world to develop right into a culture of (coffe drinkin, all-day) web users? Given a socialist, worldwide allocation of resources? Or is this not taking sufficiently into considerations the expectations and cultures of the world? Most certainly OLPC did not consider sufficiently having locals on the ground who could give tech support.

    http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/04/07/1247250/olpc-project-disappoints-in-peru

  • blog restarted

    Finally my blog should show my posts again. If everything works out right, my blog http://johanneswilm.org should be connected with my FB account through the Friendica powered site http://polyglot.me . Hopefully this is the beginning of an exit strategy from the FB universe.