Ijburg is a relatively new speculative development that's having trouble breaking even because of the crisis and it's pumping some cash into marketing creatives to prop up its appeal.

You should check out "Creativity And The Capitalist City" http://vimeo.com/49254956 it paints a fairly credible picture (although you Americans will start screaming "soclalism" before the title screen fades out...) Smart City my ass... go check Eindhoven if you want to see some potential in a de-gentrified area; Amsterdam is mostly Sales, Marketing and Advertisement.

Ah, the Trouw - one of the best Clubs in Europe - has just shuttered its doors to make space for a "Student Hotel"... pathetic

[quote] French idea of relief is a bottle of wine and watching women walking by the café. [/quote]

and what's wrong with that?

I take offense... being Italian.

Nope, that wasn't the problem. The issue was that a bunch of corrupt politicos were fed up of the clamor that a "quack" (Giampaolo Gioacchino Giuliani) was making about his Radon monitoring stations and the coming of a big quake, so they summoned these scientists and organized a media blitz to discredit and call out the guy.

People heaved a sigh of relief, stopped sleeping in their cars and went back to their homes. Many died under the rubble a couple days later.

Sane geologists still have no good reason to remain in Italy, unless you're ok to be commanded and manipulated by filthy politicos.

In the phone conversation between Bertolaso (head of the italian "FEMA") and Daniela Stasi (councilor of the Abbruzo regional government) of 3.30.2009 recorded by the investigators: "... we have decided to hold a meeting there in L'Aquila... in order to shut up any idiot, appease... I send them to L'Aquila, it's a media stunt... these guys who are the maximum authorities in earthquakes will say: business as usual, these phenomena happen, better to have one hundred tremors at Richert scale 4 that nothing, because one hundred quakes remove energy, and there will never be a big one, the one that hurts, you understand !?..."

Nobody ever accused these scientists of having failed to do the rain dance, but of having prostituted themselves.

German beer - surprisingly - doesn't hold a candle against british, belgian and lately dutch craft beers. Seriously...

It's not automation that's making us "less capable". It's the incessant expectation that we - (software) engineers - be senior, mono-maniacal, obsessive-compulsive, experts in whatever the bloody fad du jour is. That's because darn management and HR dolts have no clue how to assess an engineer, yet expect to make the decision.

Therefore yes: we're "less capable" because we can't keep up with their fads... go fuck yourself. Seriously.

Oh not exactly... but Socialist, hell yes!

private property and contract law... ha, I knew it! Typical libertarian, anarco-capitalist...

Roman, you should put that Ayn Rand pulp where it belongs... the trashcan.

[quote]
How do I produce more land? What do I make it from? Who made it in the first place? How did they make it? Who is the original owner of the land?
[/quote]

Beside, the value of the land is entirely dependent of the surrounding infrastructure and the amount that another individual is willing to pay for it, which is commonly known as "price" and developed by societal consensus.

You do, after all, just own your body and nothing else... everything else is provided by general consensus.

You seem to confuse a "civilized and democratic consensus over a certain amount of societal solidarity" with "dictatorial, totalitarian, inhuman regimes"

Note: according to the last employment contract I signed I was basically my company's bitch: do as told, think as told, thoughts belong to them. That's totalitarian in my book...

"private property stolen from them"... "government shouldn't be in any business"... "stealing property and destroying individual rights"

I smell a little Aynrand fundamentalist here...

That's the whole point... there are different perspectives to this problem and they're not limited to binary: fuck all vs. nazi fahrenheit 451 book-burning thugs. Besides, we humans, as a social species need to adapt and evolve new behavioral patterns to manage this very recent extreme progress in information storage and retrieval.

Takes time...

You seem to not understand that the McDonald vouchers are pork for the fast-food corps rather than a sincere effort to help these folks in need.