Neoliberalism and its promotion of “freedom” is based on a logical fallacy of “false equivalence” of freedom and civil liberty. If “freedom” means the absence of laws (ie “deregulation”), this will only lead to the dominance of the ruthless and rich and oppression (ie loss of liberty) for the rest. However, “civil liberty” means that…
Big data and artificial intelligence may be useful in fighting racism, if we replace race as a (weak) predictor of future behaviour (eg past of future crime) [Reference missing] with other (sufficiently) informative predictors (eg social score?). However, this would require citizens to share personal information with public authorities, which creates new risks. However, by…
1. Introduction It is a common assumption that the global neoliberal capitalist economic system requires economic growth in terms of the gross domestic product (GDP) to avoid recession an collapse. Scientists argue that constant (exponential) growth is not possible on a finite planet and the continuing conversion of natural resources (abiotic and biotic) will deplete…
Summary The following text presents the concept of the “three modes of nature”, ie tamas (“passivity”), rajas (“activity”), and sattwa (“balance”), from Indian philosophy. The basic idea states that these conflicting modes of human nature (prakriti) creates a fundamental dilemma which does not allow humans to perform good, peaceful and powerful actions in the real…
Here, I would like to present some short reflections on negative impact of universities on the climate emergency, as pointed out by Prof Kevin Anderson [1]: international scientific collaboration most often by air travel international personal/romantic relationships locking people in high-carbon futures providing high-level education, leading to high salaries, and high consumption Ad 1) Personally,…
1. Introduction Depending on job skills and experience, employees may have a strong leverage on policies of employers. During an existing job contract, committment (eg dependence on salary, housing, job of partner, school for children) of an employee maybe rather high, giving him or her little influence. However, during an application process while committment is…
After the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in December 2019, attention has been shifted to previous research and publications on risks of pandemics to global health. Although critics argue that the pandemic was unpredictable and anyone saying so suffers from hindsight bias, I would like to argue that the risks of this “low risk-high impact”…
DE Multi-Milliardär Bill Gates gab am 2020-04-12 in der öffentlich-rechtlichen Nachrichtensendung “Tagesthemen” ein 9-minütiges (!) Interview [1], in dem er seine Sicht auf die Covid-19 Pandemie und die Verfügbarkeit von Impfstoffen darlegte. Bill Gates hat durch seine langjährige Tätigkeit im Bereich Globale Gesundheit und seinen engen Austausch mit Experten wahrscheinlich eine informierte Meinung, welche von…
Disclaimer: I am not a professional manufacturer of face shields to protect from virus infections. No warranties! Use at your own risk! In the following blog, I describe how to make a face shield (visor) to protect from droplet infections from COVID-19/SARS-COV-2 using house-hold materials. Although building a face shield comes pretty close to making…
In my view politicians avoided recommending face masks because there was a lack of them. If they would have recommended face masks, and people would have realized that, there would have been an outcry and accusations of failure of the political system. In addition, the often cited “lack of evidence” of protection from infections for…
English 
German