A train into the greener countryside.
Some wonderful person has carefully filmed, edited and posted online videos of the Stuttgart Stadtbahn light rail routes. These videos take you into the green twice, because the streetcar lines start and end in the city’s green outer periphery; they also document and share other ways of building and living.
In the video for the U2 line, you can hear kids discussing with their father while practicing multiple languages.
(TSOOG ins GROON ah.)
“New S.E.P.A. payment transfer system.”
A new bank transfer system for making payments is scheduled to go into effect in 33 European countries on 01 Feb 2014 for companies and associations and at a later date for individual people. S.E.P.A. transfers will use new 22-digit I.B.A.N. bank account numbers. There were concerns that some businesses hadn’t updated their forms in time to fit in the extra digits. On 24 Oct 2013 the Bundesbank warned that some firms were starting late and their mistakes could hurt their employees.
The new transfers between accounts in any of the 33 countries are supposed to cost no more than a domestic transfer and arrive no later than the next business day.
(NOY ess ZAY pah TSOLL oongs iss taym.)
Competition advantages.
The E.U. Commission said they are going to file complaints with the European Court of Justice against Deutsche Bahn, the German rail system, and Deutsche Post, the German post office, for competition violations.
Deutsche Bahn is accused of an unclear accounting system without “eindeutig geregelt,” unambiguously regulated, procedures for keeping separate money for the rails network and and for traffic [“Schienennetz und Verkehr“]; E.U. law requires separation between the ownership and operation of rails networks. The Commission said money paid by D.B.’s competitors to use its rail networks might have been “alienated from its purpose” for improper “cross-subventions.” Also, taxpayers’ money which the government must contribute to the maintenance of the rails network infrastructure might have been diverted into Deutsche Bahn’s passenger and freight traffic. Such redirection might have enabled the company to establish unfair advantages over its competitors, thus the complaint from the E.U. competition authority, though the E.U. transportation commissioner Siim Kallas (libertarianesque Estonian Reform Party) who approved the C.S.U.’s car toll on foreigners entering Bavaria also said he wants new legislation to create more competition between European railroad companies. Generally, the German government is accused of not having adequately blocked D.B. from such repurposing and unclear accounting, and if the court agrees it appears Germany may be fined.
At issue for the Post is old government aid payments for which, the E.U. said, the German government did not adequately require reimbursement. The Deutsche Post paid back ~300 million euros plus interest of the 500 million to 1000 million euros the E.U. accused it in 2012 of receiving improperly in the form of high regulated postage prices and “Zuschüsse” [grants, subsidies, subventions, extra payments, benefits] to bureaucrats’ pension plans. Calculating how much the Post had improperly received was left to German authorities.
Süddeutsche.de reported the E.U. had allowed the Post’s unusual subventions in 2012 in principle but felt they were too high. There was also disagreement about how many divisions of the Post were involved: Germany argued only Postal Services should have to pay back the subventions, while the E.U. said Postal Services and Business Customers.
(VET bev airbz FOR tie leh.)
In 2011 a Goldman Sachs study apparently stated that market speculation had indeed helped drive up the price of oil for consumers. In 2012 U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commissioner Bart Chilton said, “Using the Goldman Sachs research figure, and multiplying 10 cents times 233.9 million, would mean that theoretically there’s a ‘speculative premium’ of as much as $23.39 a barrel in the price of NYMEX crude oil.” Mr. Chilton has also said that the commodities business is a possible loophole for banks in the U.S.’s new frequently-postponed “Volcker rule” intended to reseparate banking from investment gambling.
Potential oil bottleneck points persist in privately held and/or operated oil infrastructure. Oil traders now own oil refineries. Pipelines are included in the infrastructure large banks have somehow acquired part ownership of. U.S. bank Morgan Stanley invested in the “global oil tanker operator” Heidmar in addition to “fuel chain supply manager” TransMontaigne. An F.A.Z. article described how the world’s three largest oil trading firms, Switzerland-based Gunvor, Vitol and Glencore—”prescient” commodity markets pioneer Marc Rich’s old firm—work today, supposedly on the basis of fast-computer-based price arbitrage rather than speculation. Moving into production, Glencore is now invested in oil wells, coal mines and metals mines, after its late-2012 fusion with Swiss competitor Xstrata.
Apparently a landmark 2003 U.S. Federal Reserve decision allowed U.S. investment banks to start “trading oil cargoes.” In July 2013 the Fed announced it was “reviewing” that decision. Though Fed deregulation may have unleashed the Wall Street side of recent international commodities speculation problems, the Fed probably cannot fix it now without simultaneous coordinated reforms from other regulators around the world.
(ILL prize.)
“Overflow areas,” deliberately designed flood zones along a river, in wilderness or agricultural regions outside towns. Post-Enlightenment romantic poetry’s rivers of plashing brooks, bosky dapple, und so weiter, were dredged and dug in the nineteenth century into straight deep channels that could be used for peacetime and wartime shipping. In the late twentieth century, amid concerns about global climate change and drowning poor Holland, they started rewilding sections of German rivers by bulldozer into broad serpentine environments with polders that are intended to flood after heavy rains and will hold more water than the old Wilhelmine channels. The ecological results should be interesting, as species move through the new riparian habitat amid lands that have been Feld-Wald-und-Wiesen, fields forests and meadows, for a very long time, possibly centuries in some places.
Jerome K. Jerome’s pre-WWI descriptions of the channelization might be based on actual observation:
“Your German is not averse even to wild scenery, provided it be not too wild. But if he consider it too savage, he sets to work to tame it. I remember, in the neighbourhood of Dresden, discovering a picturesque and narrow valley leading down towards the Elbe. The winding roadway ran beside a mountain torrent, which for a mile or so fretted and foamed over rocks and boulders between wood-covered banks. I followed it enchanted until, turning a corner, I suddenly came across a gang of eighty or a hundred workmen. They were busy tidying up that valley, and making that stream respectable. All the stones that were impeding the course of the water they were carefully picking out and carting away. The bank on either side they were bricking up and cementing. The overhanging trees and bushes, the tangled vines and creepers they were rooting up and trimming down. A little further I came upon the finished work—the mountain valley as it ought to be, according to German ideas. The water, now a broad, sluggish stream, flowed over a level, gravelly bed, between two walls crowned with stone coping. At every hundred yards it gently descended down three shallow wooden platforms. For a space on either side the ground had been cleared, and at regular intervals young poplars planted. Each sapling was protected by a shield of wickerwork and bossed by an iron rod. In the course of a couple of years it is the hope of the local council to have “finished” that valley throughout its entire length, and made it fit for a tidy-minded lover of German nature to walk in. There will be a seat every fifty yards, a police notice every hundred, and a restaurant every half-mile.
“They are doing the same from the Memel to the Rhine. They are just tidying up the country. I remember well the Wehrthal. It was once the most romantic ravine to be found in the Black Forest. The last time I walked down it some hundreds of Italian workmen were encamped there hard at work, training the wild little Wehr the way it should go, bricking the banks for it here, blasting the rocks for it there, making cement steps for it down which it can travel soberly and without fuss.” —From Three Men on the Bummel (1900)
(Ü bah FLEW toongs flechh hen.)
“Bicycle wanderer red-wine route.” Paths that not only take you from town to town the pretty way, through medieval villages and farmers’ fields and along rivers, but past restaurants offering, in this case, red wines. Just follow the signs. Maps are unnecessary.
(ROTE vine ROD vonder ah ROUTE ah.)
“Pump storage power stations.” Pumping water into a mountain lake when electricity is cheap, and allowing it to drain out through power-generating turbines when electricity is more expensive, is rather efficient contemporary energy storage (“80% efficiency” for short-term storage of a few hours). Excess electricity is hard to store in quantity and tends to be sold off to neighboring countries instead, so storage issues might be one reason why Germany has quadrupled electricity exports since-and-despite closing eight nuclear power plants in 2011. A more obvious reason would seem to be the success of the Energiewende, large-scale infrastructure investments Germany is making to switch to renewable power sources such as solar and wind.
Of course villagers, fish and tourists near mountain lakes don’t appreciate constant changes in water levels. But the switch to renewable energy sources has undermined the financial benefits of draining lakes every day at lunchtime. Power prices used to peak around noon, so Germany’s >30 pump storage power stations drain their lakes through turbines during daylight hours, pumping the water back up the mountain at night. That demand-driven price spike is now being offset by the daylight collected by solar panels, which private citizens have been encouraged to install on their roofs. Utility companies are starting to not expand, not build, not renovate and shut down their lake storage power stations, as they wait for new technologies.
Next-generation electricity storage options will have to store power not only for hours but also for months, to buffer seasonal fluctuations. Small storage options that, like photovoltaics, can be installed in quantity in e.g. private houses will aid the decentralization trend. Large storage options under discussion include gas chemistry and big hollow concrete spheres lowered to high-pressure depths on the ocean floor: to store energy they would be filled with air and then allowed to refill with seawater, driving turbines.
(POOMP shpy chh ah CROFT verk ah.)
“Brunsbüttel lock rails.” The world’s busiest artificial canal is said to be the Kiel Canal from Brünsbuttel to Kiel that allows ships to bypass Denmark. The canal was first built from 1887 to 1895, though many of the key components still in use were completed later, just in time for WWI. Brunsbüttel’s hundred-year-old lock gates urgently need repair, probably rapid replacement in fact, but this is difficult due to heavy traffic on the canal, the scale of the project and the fact that the work has had to be done underwater by divers at visibility of 1–2 cm. The locks’ sliding gates (Schleusentore) are hung from steel rails (Stahlschienen) and driven by toothed gears and chains on concrete and steel grooves installed on the ocean floor. These rails and grooves urgently need to be fixed and don’t always work well anyway as ship propellors and other excrescences can knock the gates out of place. The Brunsbüttel locks were closed, drained and fixed for a week this winter, forcing ships to take the 800 km-longer route around Denmark from the North Sea to the Baltic, but much more needs to be done. The canal has two locks at either end, and a fifth lock is planned to be built in Brunsbüttel to keep the canal open during repairs.
(BROONZ en bütt ellll scheh SHLOYZ en sheen en.)
“Power-heat connection.” Some German cities are using waste heat from the cities’ relatively low-pollution gas-powered electricity generators to heat private residences.
(Croft VAIR meh cup loong.)
“We don’t need a People’s Army, we need butter!” The East German uprising of 1953 will celebrate its sixtieth anniversary on 17 June 2013. To spread the word about the general strike on 16 June, people went through the streets of East Berlin the night before calling out where and when to meet, as well as slogans like this one. During the day East German protesters apparently used loudspeaker cars and bicycles to communicate between strikes in the central and outlying districts, while the strikers themselves got around on public transportation such as trams and the metro. Wikipedia says a West Berlin radio station reported about the East Berlin strike, probably helping the protests spread to other East German towns.
Bertold Brecht wrote a poem about 17 June 1953 called “The Solution.”
After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts.
Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
(Vir brow chh en k eye neh FOLKS arm ae, vir brow chh en BOO ter.)
The Jade-Weser port, which recently opened in Wilhelmshaven. Jointly built by Bremen and Lower Saxony, this is Germany’s only deep-water port (18 meters deep) and will be accessible to giant oceangoing container vessels even at low tide. This is the first entirely planned German port that didn’t grow and accrete for hundreds of years.
The true competition, Rotterdam, has a port that’s 20 meters deep.
(YAH deh VAY zerr PORT.)
German WOTD 