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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • From what I heard from a teacher who was on exchange to China is that traditional Chinese education values the memorization and ability to rephrase or reproduce previous scholars’ work, but neglects reflection and own ideas, especially if you are just a student. Western academic traditional to the contrast values the student’s ability to evaluate, compare, and reflect on previous work. Hypothetically, a report that would give you a pass with distinction at a Chinese university would make a plagiarism checker cry at a Western university and vice versa.


  • Many arguments call countries’ names, but actually prices are dictated by companies (directly or indirectly by their behavior) that want to make a profit. Sweden’s electricity prices, as a rule of thumb, are always lower than prices in Germany, so from an economic p.o.v. it makes sense to buy as much electricity in Sweden as can be transported south. Of course, that drives prices up in Sweden to historic level (but still cheaper than in Germany). Why are prices so high in Germany? Several reasons have been discussed here, but one I would like to highlight is that operators of gas and coal power plants, which are meant as reserves in cases of high demand and low supply, do not produce sufficiently much electricity: they simply earn more by selling little electricity at high prices than by selling more electricity at lower prices. The politicians’ fault is that they have created a mostly unregulated market where under the right conditions some actors can make huge profits at the cost of everyone else. This is why more nuclear power plants won’t help: even their operators will have to pay back the huge debts left from construction and thus also will try to maximize profits from high prices via low supply.



  • Germany’s government is a three-party coalition where all three parties have lost in recent regional elections, so they try to show their profile ahead of the national election next year. Especially the party which now causes the most trouble (by appeasing an opposition party in a bid for a future coalition) got close to 0% of the vote in those regional elections. The chancellor himself has an unresolved history of being involved in a large tax evasion scheme (“cum-ex”) back when he was head of a regional government. Otherwise, he tries to do nothing wrong by not doing anything at all (ok, he does the day-to-day business, but no inspiring long-term goals or other leadership things). In contrast, the vice chancellor (from the Green party) does a noticeable better job at explaining and motivating the government’s decisions. Unfortunately, even this party has people in leading positions where they should not be …






  • Maybe the first question is what your budget is, both regarding money and time. For example, you could buy a pre-configured NAS from Synology or QNAP, which requires less technical skills but more money, or a home-made solution reusing used components (but fresh disks for reliability). Depending on your electricity costs, you may want to choose a low-power solution or something which you power off when not used. For storage, maybe a three-disk RAID5 is a good compromise. For backups, plain S3 cloud storage encrypted via restic is a good idea.