Tuesday, January 24, 2023

Five German Stories

 1.  The German public forum show....Hart Aber Fair....was on last night.  Topic?  Health stuff....mostly over how much booze is healthy to drink, and cannabis-weed legalization.

So, the Health Minister was on the panel, and he's pushing the idea that he wants cannabis legalization to be so cheap....that black-market weed won't exist anymore.  Even in Colorado where legalization occurred....the black market still survives on today.

I should note....legalization is still months and months away.  I doubt it'll even occur in 2023.  The drafting of the regulation to allow it?  Still stuck in the Health Ministry....lot of negativity about where this would lead onto.  

2.  Rheinmetal (the tank-making company in Germany) is ready to ship out 29 tanks (purchase deal) in May.  They even say that the final number (probably 2025) would be 139.  

3.  Ford in Germany is cutting 3,200 jobs in Koln.  Lot of heartburn with the employees.  Some of this restructuring is because of the approaching E-cars only period (2030), and you simply won't need so many people for the work.   This was openly discussed back in 2015 when the E-car deadline was announced.....there would a lot less people to make such cars.

Job market being able to use these people?  All of the car companies are facing the same trend, and there's limits to their sklls.  

4.  Schlager music star Florian Silbereisen in trouble?  Well...the Fulda public prosecutor is investigating the guy over copyright abuse.

For some public TV show....there's one single word sung, which conflicted with the way the actual song (going back to the 1980s) was written.  Word taken out?  'Indians'.

Reported to the authorities by the writer of the song?  Yeah.

What some believe (no facts) is that internally within the show production....they went 'political' and said singing with the word 'Indian' was 'bad'.  Sounds pretty bogus, but this is going to be dragged into court, and several production folks (including Silbereisen) will have to make a statement.   Worst case scenario?  The Schlager show folks are portrayed as 'woke' and end up paying some kind of damages to the guy who wrote the song lyrics.  

5.  The CDU Party commissioned a study to be done over ZDF, ARD, and RTL (two public TV networks, one commercial network).

End result?  The study says in most cases....the Green Party and SPD Party always comes off as fairly positive.....the CDU Party comes off less-than-positive.

The CDU folks say there's a lack of diversity.  

Generally, if you'd asked most working-class Germans....they would have said this already in the 1960s with the SPD and CDU parties.....and when the Greens finally began to arrive in the 1990s....they were slipped over to the positive image.

Odds of anything coming out of this study and whining?  Zero.  

We might see an effort by ARD and ZDF to explain the fake nature of the study and they are super-balanced with all politics....to which most Germans would just start to laugh.  

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