1. Good piece out of Focus today: "Pawnbroker sarcastically: “I should actually be grateful to the government.”
Just a lot of turnover in pawnbroking in Germany over past year. Fair number of Germans are barely making it.
2. Cannabis law? It passed yesterday.
Legalization will occur on 1 April. Now if you ask the experts....no one expects cities to have the process ironed-out...licenses ready to issue, or even enough legit weed to sell.
If you were asking me on local stuff (Wiesbaden)...I doubt that any shop appears until mid-summer. Frankfurt? There might be two or three open by the end of April.
Now, if you ask....how many Germans smoke cannabis occasionally (at least once a month)? The survey suggest in the 4-million range out of 84-million residents (gov't says this statistic). If you ask the cannabis associations....they say it's closer to 9-percent....meaning 7.5-million.
Explaining the difference? I think the gov't number infers something about the number of police arrests/busts, and just a wild guess. It will also differ in regions. If you went to Offenbach (Frankfurt's neighborhood)....it's probably closer to 40-percent of people between age 18 and 45. In a more rural area....it might be fewer than 3-percent.
All a shock to some Germans? This legalization has been discussed for over forty years. In cities like Hamburg or Koln...if you held some referendrum....it would have passed a dozen years ago.
3. WELT reports around 5,600 Ukrainians are on some suspect list for illegally getting social-help money. Investigation business will probably consume tens of thousands of man-hours. Whether they recover the money? I doubt it.
4. Someone asked Google Artificial Intelligence (AI) to show German Nazis....in a 'painting-like' situation.
It produced black Nazis.
The Google team is marginally explaining how this is possible (they say code is supposed to show 'diversity'), and Germans themselves are having a laugh over the production.
Historically-speaking....they might have been one or two Africans in some position...wearing a German uniform....maybe in Libya/Tunisia...during WW II.
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