be_kul

This is from January and already made the rounds …

any facts? No!

You got it wrong. What I listed is NOT what church goers pay for with their "church tax". It is paid by the State from the tax paid by ALL tax payers in the country, be their religious or not (like me). AND: The entire sum (e.g. for tax evations granted to the churches by the state) is 20.6 billion (yes, 20,600,000,000) €/year! But … they take care of our children in Kindergartens (2% paid by the church, the rest by the tax payers) with so much love and devotion, you know … maybe I should think: It's worth it. But I can't.

PS: We, every tax payer, even pay for the "frankincense" in catholic church rituals and for many more persons in the church hierarchy, not only bishops. These do not only get "near 10,000" as I wrote, but 13,000 €/month = > 14,300$. Per Month! And: They don't pay into the state's pension system (~19% per month), only pay 50% for health insurance, and the free car they get is usually a S-class mercedes now (used to be an E-class some 10 years ago). So, all in all (including their appartements in best locations), these persons cost ALL tax payers some 20-30,000 €/month! Back in 2010 the tax payers paid some 442,000,000 €/year. That should now be close to 500,000,000…

But don't worry: Catholic and Protestant Churches will get your tax money anyway: Since Napoleon – yes: THE Napoleon! – Germans pay a "compensation" for the riches taken from the churches then (which they, of course, had taken first from the people…). It is still paid today by the state, even though already the German constitution of the "Republic of Weimar" (i.e. 1919-1933) demanded that these payments should be stopped. The money coming from all tax payers (yes, muslims, buddhists, atheists … too!) is taken, e.g., to pay the bishops of the two major churches and the cardinals. They get a free appartement, a free car with a driver and a salary near 10,000 €/Month. Go figure that!!

(signed by an angry German)

Just one thing: In the 50s and 60s working weeks were 6 days in Germany (east and west). In the 70s this was reduced to 5 days (40 hours), and later, in the early 80s, in West Germany even to 35 hours/week. All this was possible without reduction of wages because working productivity had grown fast enough to compensate companies for the "lost" working time. Can anyone really imagine that working productivity grew significantly LESS than it had between c. 1945 and 1980 during the last 40 years? So, where did all the extra gain go in the mean time? Higher wages? Nope. Higher pensions? Nope. longer holidays? Nope. Lower prices? Nope. They all developed over the last 40 years in a speed that kept them more or less on the same relative level than in the 1970s/80s. The only thing that grew MUCH faster was the income of the rich… So, we should not ask, IF we wanted to work 1 day less per week, but WHY we are not doing so already? Would the rich be or at least feel much poorer than now? Does anyone of these people really know the difference between 100000000000 and 10000000000 (given, they could even pronounce these numbers correctly ;-))?

all data. ;-) No, seriously, in the projects I have in mind that are usually several tens of thousands of images, texts and sound files etc. Mostly "cultural heritage" stuff for which we still have the originals (hundreds to thousands of years old). A typical database size, therefore, could be one or a few Terabyte. But, I agree with Vint Cerf, that the problem is a general one, effecting all digital data produced. Of course, we do not have to save all of them – archives, libraries, museums… never did –, but for those we regard as valuable, we need a solution. And I don't see one – except, maybe, for a complete new, very well thought-out system of free and open hard- and software [designs], and maintained by an institution that would need to have some "eternal" status like national archives/libraries/museums. This would also be a chance to avoid all the pitfalls of the wildly-grown jungle we're in with all those security problems caused by complexity and solved (we believe) by even more complexity. Or caused by just simply stupid decisions – A20 gate anyone? ;-)