COVID 19? Just Whip It!

As we move out of the shutdown here in Austria, people are turning facemasks into fashion statements. I couldn’t find a mask to fit my style until I found the DEVO – Energy Dome Personal Protection Equipment Kit. Devo already knew back in 1980 what to do when a problem comes along: You must whip …

359.640.000 tons of porn

Thinking about all that corn yesterday got me pondering another really big number. In an earlier post we noted that 3,7% of all CO2 emissions are caused by on-line video streaming (BTW a pre-corona statistic). We also mentioned that 27% of that streaming is porn and that this would be a topic for a future …

How Corny

Everyday I do the NYT crossword puzzle – a great source for factoids like clue 57 across. After completing today’s puzzle, I started thinking – just how much corn is that and how much land is needed to grow it? In 2018, the 142.86 billion gallons of finished motor gasoline consumed in the United States contained about …

What really matters in life

The corona shutdown eliminated our primary source of income, so we have turned to ghost writing to compensate for our shortfall – a natural option for a novelist and a philosophy student. Ghost writers are paid by the word. You receive a short briefing and an expected word count. Today, Astrid is writing a 3.600 …

There’s a storm coming, Mr. Bezos…

While small businesses, restaurants, or stores struggle to survive the corona crisis and unemployment has reached new heights, the fortune of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has grown by 24 billion dollars since the beginning of 2020. Tesla founder Elon Musk has had to make do with a little over 10 billion. While the fortune of …

We don’t need a fear pandemic

Astrid wrote a great op-ed piece (in German) about the dangers of gloomy economic forecasts turning into self-fulfilling prophecies. Read it on Page 30 of the Friday April 24th print edition of Die Presse or on-line. Photo credit: Gerd Altmann on Pixabay

Lesestoff für die Corona-Krise

Während der IWF für die Post-Corona-Zeit mit düsteren Wachstumsprognosen aufwartet, überschlagen sich Politiker mit Beruhigungsversuchen und Rettungsfonds. Da drängt sich die Frage auf, wie diese Milliarden-Hilfspakete finanziert werden, vor allem unter dem Gesichtspunkt, dass den Staaten aufgrund zu erwartender Unternehmenspleiten und hoher Arbeitslosigkeit einiges an Steuereinnahmen wegbrechen wird? Für mich stellt sich zunehmend auch die Frage, …