This is the typical question at McDonald’s employee would ask you when you are placing your order, isn’t it? well, maybe not in Japan these days. It turns out in the country of the rising Sun the common spud is in short supply. As a result, and to make sure that everyone gets at least […]
Wine and Cheese
Now I am really about to blow a fuse! And big time! What does the gathering on the photo below look like to you? A drinks reception with wine and cheese? Or a work meeting? By the way, this gathering took apparently place in May 2020, when the rest of the British population was in […]
Bitcoin City (but not where you’d expect it)
El Salvador ranks 124th among 189 countries in the Human Development Index and with a GDP of $4100 per head of its population of 6.4 million certainly ranks among the poorest countries. But that, if all goes according to the plans of its President, Nayib Bukele, could all soon change. While a law passed in […]
Satoshi Nakamoto
Nobody has ever knowingly met Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, but many techies in recent years have claimed to be him. Nakamoto-san (if he were then really Japanese and a person rather than quite possibly a group of people), is rumoured to hold some 1.1 million Bitcoins, now worth a staggering $50 billion. But […]
A stiff penalty for flouting the rules
A Chinese man in the southwestern province of Guangxi has recently been sentenced to a suspended 2-years in prison and a fine of 200’000 yuan ($31’000) for flouting the Covid-19 rules: After a business trip to Vietnam he and his fellow travellers tested positive for the Delta-variant and were quarantined. The culprit, however, sneaked out […]
Empty shelves
Interesting article in a recent edition of The Economist magazine on the availability of certain staples in British supermarkets based on data published by the Office for National Statistics: Frozen turkey was in the period from 5 to 8 November with 18% the item with no or low availability, followed by sparkling water (17%) and […]
COP26 by private jet
Of course, I wouldn’t expect heads of state to fly economy class to Glasgow to attend the COP26. Of course the billionaires and titans of industry attending the gathering have such busy schedules that only a flight by private jet at the timing of their convenience could guarantee the best use of their very precious […]
The COP26 President’s travels
Unless you follow British politics or are involved in the climate change movement you probably won’t have heard of Alok Sharma, Britain’s climate minister. And in his official role as President for COP 26, the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, he has made a major contribution – for the worse – to climate change […]
Power outage
I never thought I would be writing something like this about a prosperous country such as Switzerland, but there we go: in future winters Switzerland may be running out of electricity. Because the framework agreement with the EU has failed (well, actually the Swiss government withdrew from the talks), Europe does not want to conclude […]
09:41
Maybe you hadn’t noticed it either (I certainly hadn’t), that on all screenshots of Apple’s products whenever they show the time digitally (i.e. not on the analog face of the iWatch) the time seems to be 09:41 hours. The story behind it is quite amusing, and, as you may have guessed, it is obviously not […]
The grumpy older man 