It is sort of depressing really, but when we were back in Ireland people kept asking us did Rosemary have an Austria passport. Our response:

Eh, no. Why would she?

The principle that you automatically become a citizen of the country of your birth is called Jus Soli. It isn’t that widely followed. If the wikipedia list is right, only 16% of countries follow this, none of them in Europe. It certainly isn’t followed here in Austria, where the principle is Jus Sanguinis or having an ancestor who is Austrian.

I said I was depressed by this situation, as we went through a referendum on all this in 2004. I was surprised that people have so rapidly forgotten the substance of the debate at the time. Or, more likely, they didn’t even bother to inform themselves back then.

Anyway, the exact rules here in Austria, like everything else in this country, are very conservative. To get Austrian citizenship requires 10 years residence, a German language test and you have to renounce any other citizenship. For a person born in Austria they do shorten the residence period, I think to 2 years.

Not that it matters. As a child of Irish parents Rosemary is entitled to an Irish passport. That process was pretty much the same as applying for an infant one in Ireland. There were two complications. First the strike in Dublin which meant it took 2 months to get the passport. Though the excellent staff in the embassy said if we had been stuck they would have provided a temporary one.

The other problem was the requirement to get an upstanding member of the community to sign her forms. Someone respectable like a priest, or a bank manager – no seriously. There are other categories of people like headmaster, and policeman, but we don’t know any of the former, and the latter don’t want anything to do with Irish passport forms (the embassy warned us there). In the end the company doctor helped us out. She told me later she got a call from someone in Dublin to confirm Rosemary’s bonafides, so I at least they are being thorough.

We got the passport in the end. And now let there be no doubt, Rosemary is 100% Irish.

Of course to the end of her days she will always be a “blow in”, but somethings you can’t do anything about.

Going on holidays helps you to put your things into perspective. Take RSS feeds. I was checking a computer only every few days when I was on holiday, so Google Reader soon was registering 1000+ unread items. I had to prioritise my reading and “Mary all as Unread” the rest. Now I am back I decided to take stock and cull a few feeds. Who is getting the chop on this round of sliabh downsizing? Two big ones to be told to put their stuff in a cardboard box are BoingBoing and Wired.

BoingBoing just bores me. Too much is just promo material for Cory Doctorow’s books, I really don’t like some of their guest bloggers (like the guy raving about crop circles recently), and most of what remains I can get from other sites. So for that reason **chop** BoingBoing gets pink slipped.

Then there is Wired. A lot of people believe if you are in the tech business you have to follow what is coming up in Wired. They spot the trends, they shape people’s minds. Maybe, but it’s just a shame they are almost totally blind to what is happening outside the US, they seem to be on Steve Jobs payroll when it comes to promoting Apple products, and frankly their correspondents don’t know their arses from their elbows when it comes to mobile technology.

Take this article on “Why you can’t get a good phone with Verizon“. Their take:

“Verizon’s extremely conservative approach to new handsets, the company’s long and rigorous testing procedures, and its emphasis on the network rather than the phone have created a portfolio that’s a complete buzzkill, say experts.”

The author then rambles off about handsets without mentioning the elephant in the room (obvious to anyone who actually works in the mobile industry) – Verizon’s network is CDMA. This is the runner up technology for mobiles. Back in 2008 it was down to 0.8% of handsets globally. That creates an economy of scale problem for manufacturers. Why spend money porting your fancy new handsets to a niche technology when you will never make the money back? That’s the real reason phone choice is poor with Verizon. It’s also why US Apple fans can wish for it all they want, but the iPhone is highly unlikely to ever work with the current Sprint or Verizon networks (both of which are CDMA).

That is not the only poor Wired example though. Take this one – “Why isn’t wireless net Access available everywhere” which credits the iPhone with driving the build out of mobile data networks. Bzzzzt. Wrong. The volume of data traffic due to mobile broadband is 5 times that from smart phones. That more than anything else is what is driving the growth in this area.

So wired raises my blood pressure regularly, and the rest of the time I only see something to interest me about once a week. For that reason they are “Tired” and take the drop into the pit full of snakes as well.

I don’t think I will miss either of them. And slashdot, you are on probation.

Right, I have finished updating all my South American photos. Sorry about the small size. They were scanned from 6×4′s a long time ago. I must redo this in a higher res some day.

I made two trips. In 1999 through Peru and Bolivia, and in 2001 through Chile and Peru. I am afraid all the Peruvian photos are together.

Peru, 1999 and 2001:

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Bolivia 1999:

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Chile 2001:

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Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book

Edward Gibbon

Nice to see someone taking responsibility for their part in the Irish economic meltdown.

Part 1 where are we spending the money, Part 2 what are we spending it on.

For the last part of my whistle stop budget analysis I am looking at where the money is coming from, the €35Bn in income we are using to pay for €50Bn in spending. This is the estimated income for 2010.

You can see income tax, VAT and excise duty are all that is keeping the country afloat, with a chunk from corporation tax. Interestingly there already is over €1Bn due back from the banks as they pay back the bailouts the received.

One of the problems with governments spending our money is that it’s easier for them to start than it is for them to stop. The spending budget then is closely tied to the predictions for future tax revenues. I went back to the 2006 to see the predictions being made just before the bubble burst, and compared that with what actually happened:

The green is the prediction, and the orange is the actual. In the last full year of the gravy train as the good times rolled, the prediction was that government income would grow by a stonking 7% per year. It actually dropped by an average of 10% per annum (and oddly spending has gone up by 10% since 2008). I guess that means that no-one in the department of finance saw the bust coming?

The prediction was for income of €55Bn, the reality is closer to €35Bn. So where are the gaps? This is the breakdown of the 2007 estimated income for 2010, and what is now predicted in the 2010 budget.

The difference is 40% i.e. government income this year is 40% less than predicted 3 years ago. Most areas are down 30-40% on these estimates, but three significant ones are down by more:

• -50% Corporation tax, €7.7Bn to €3.8Bn.
• -79% Stamp duty, €4.3Bn to €900m.
• -90% Capital Gains Tax, €3.9Bn to €385m.

The difference being over €10Bn. It is scary to think that the government had expected that the property market would still have been booming, to a degree that Stamp Duty receipts would have continued to climb by 5% per year for another 3 years! Not only did the government do little to slow the boom, they probably didn’t want to either. It drove about 10% of the tax take, and that money was paying for handouts and giveaways everywhere. They couldn’t do without that money.

What have I learned? When the economy was booming no one planned for a bust. Spending is generally on the areas I would prioritise (health, education and social welfare), but we probably spend too much on the delivery (salaries and the cost of running government). And now that things have turned sour we have no choice but to cut into those important services.

One final word. Much as the country may want an election, I don’t think we need it now. Whatever government is in power will have to make the same unpopular choices despite what some may say. Better then that the clowns who made this mess are the ones to fix it, and then they pay the electoral price when the time comes.

Here are some more pictures. These have been moved from my Flickr account (which I will close when I have moved everything). They were taken on my two trips to Thailand on business, back when I used to travel all the time. The first trip was in May 2007, and I was back again in January 2008.

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I have been slowly moving my pictures from Flickr and older sliabh.net galleries to the new NextGen gallery implementation. You can see the full list of those that are ready on the Pictures page.

I will flag new additions here as they get done. First up these few shots of Dun Laoghaire and environs:

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I need a little help from you all. It’s raining here in Vienna this morning (after having some great thunderstorms last night about 1am) and I had a discussion with a local about how I must feel at home in the rain. I had to point out that just as the Inuit are supposed to have 30 words for snow Irish people have loads for describing how water falls from the sky, and technically what we were experiencing was not “rain” as such to me (more like “light rain”).

But for completeness I told him I would share a list of all the terms that we have for rain. I have started to build a little list. But I would like of people could add others below in the comments. I have a little idea for how I am going to present them later.

For now I have

• Rain
• drizzle
• Mist
• Spitting
• Pouring
• Spilling
• Heavy rain
• Houring down
• Hammering
• Pissing
• Light rain
• Monsoon
• Downpour
• Shower

And then there are the euphemisms:

• Grand soft day thank god
• Fine weather for ducks
• Time to build an ark

Please let me know of others that you might have!

A few weeks ago brother and I went to “Flowers for Kim” an exhibition of North Korean paintings and architecture. This is the first time such an exhibit has been held, and it is a little controversial. There was a noticeable security presence, with ropes keeping people back from any portraits of the two Kims.

Art in North Korea is very tightly controlled. Artists learn in a state school, and are vetted for ideological orthodoxy before they are allowed produce material. For the most part their work is commissioned by the state as well. There is no room for spontaneous creativity.

The picture of North Korea that you get from the exhibition is of a society where they must be putting Prozac in the water supply as EVERYONE smiles all the time. It’s such a happy place I don’t know why I found it so creepy. There wasn’t much overt propaganda in the pictures, but there were plenty of less than subtle images, like happy school children walking in front of a ruined American tank after the Korean war, or happy office workers going to assist a public project of reinforcing a river embankment on a Friday. Some were less subtle like the one of the nasty Japanese “scoundrel” violently attacking a young Korean girl for wearing her national costume. The artist depicted the Japanese man in pretty much the same way US WW2 propaganda posters did, with milk bottle glasses and bucked teeth.

There was one representative of the North Korean embassy there, he also smiled all the time as befits a member of their happy race. He was handing out photocopied sheets giving explanatory notes for the paintings. It was interesting to read the “official” take on the paintings.

As the official word has it (verbatim):

The painting depicts President Kim Il Sung, who came to the forefront to visit the Korean People’s Army soldiers during the Korean war (1950-1953), thus revealing his lofty characters and bold heart, as well as the strong desire of the Koreans for the safety of their leader.

A young girl soldier is wholeheartedly asking the supreme commander not to go further on, saying, “Leader, you are near at the forefront”. She was very much worried for his safety. Notwithstanding her request, however, the supreme commander is going to the forefront, answering that he came to the forefront to see the brave KPA soldiers and they are waiting for him. The depiction of the girl soldier gives a true expression of the entire Korean army and people who sincerely desire the safety of their leader.

The painter tried to express the severity of the war through the surrounding hills and the muddy, ragged road to the front, as well as the confidence in the future victory in the war thru the bright smile of Kim Il Sung.

No mention of a nation of racist dwarfs there then so.