152 Madeira Consorcio meeting 28.6.2025

Jun 30, 2025 at 1:10 pm | Posted in Posts | Leave a comment
Tags: , , , , , , ,

We met with in the Gallery and saw this video:

Angus Hervey: then good news you might have missed:

The speaker, at TED for the second time, brings good news on the affairs of the world.

His résumé: each person has to decide of he/she wants to listen to good news and restrict the intake of bad news, and to either believe in the collapse or the renewal of our human life on Earth.

It’s all about positive and negative news, how are the reactions?

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are fighting in the US for a positive view of the situation, in order to sway the Americans away from “bad” Trump.

We agreed that altogether, the western world is moving toward the right.

Albuquerque seems to be listening too much to the Trump diatribes. He says the bus drivers are trying to blackmail him to get a higher salary. He has forgotten that the bus drivers are his employees/partners and that he is responsible for their wellbeing . Now, has he hasn’t relented to their demands, they might strike on July 20, the day many bus drivers are needed to carry up the PSD fans to the Chao da Lagoa party…

There are protest in Venice against the Bezos event, people are starting to protest against the rich people.

IN East Germany, there was a “schwarzer Kanal”,a satire broadcast tolerated by the regime, criticizing the West German lifestyle. (the Eats German still coveted the West German achievements.)


“Dinner for One” a satire on an very nice old British lady, famous in Germany, wasn’t even known in the UK until recently although the sketch plays in the UK. In the UK, a lot of the life circumstances remained unchanged, seen from outside, that is bad news. The UK has a lot of artists, and many good musicians and movies come from there. But life is the UK seems to be stagnant. Class is still a system the average Briton accepts as a given.

We also spoke about the universities. In the UK, education is a good product, sold to foreigners (around 70% of the student body is from abroad.)

Universities are places of innovation, scientific advances, and networking. A title obtained from Oxford or Cambridge is a sound base for a successful career in life. Trump is destroying this system in the US.

K. spoke of her two granddaughters. One is growing up in the US and at five years, under pressure to succeed in school. The other one is growing up in Hamburg, and at this age, is allowed to have a more playful time. Her parents say that the learning of the alphabet etc. will come along in due time.

Youngsters are growing up in a more cosmopolitan ways, automatically with several languages, they move around in the world with more ease and are tolerant of others. Chinese students are often sent abroad by their parents, to a get a good education and maybe, stay abroad to have a better lifestyle than in China. Or they may be pressured to return there and use their education for the homeland.

The US may fall apart soon, in the Western + Eastern seaboard states, and the middle which is pro-Trump. Sad…

Trump wants to have his faced added to Mount Rushmore. Question: will he want them to remove the other faces first??

The résumé. Each of of us has to decide wether to deliberately look on the bright side or to be led by bad news to a negative view of the world.

The Guardian has The Upside:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/series/the-upside

The SPIEGEL has a regular newsletter with good news:

https://www.spiegel.de/thema/alles-gute-vom-spiegel/

Ursula

144 Madeira Consorcio Meeting 22.6.2024

Jun 23, 2024 at 2:53 pm | Posted in Posts | Leave a comment
Tags: , , , , , ,

We met in the Gallery as usual and saw an uplifting Talk on new ways to store electricity as heat: “Can a simple brick be the next great battery?”

The Speaker (https://www.ted.com/speakers/john_o_donnell) introduced his company’s idea to store electricity in form of bricks and as heat. This could help to de-carbonize the industry which is responsible for about a quarter of CO2 emissions.

The group was a bit sceptical about the bricks (not like in construction work, strangely shaped and in sealed containers). If and once oil producers and other big industries get the idea that they can make money with this new way of energy storage, and switch from fossil fuels, this would be very positive for the environment and humankind’s survival.

There is also an interesting Spiegel article this week (“The fight for clean energy”) by a German reporter that we are on a good way to lower CO2 emission a great deal (hydropower, geothermal energy, biomass, with wave and current power plants, with green hydrogen, with e- and recycled fuels). Many such initiatives are not being seen and reported on, but they exist.

We also talked about our non-existing ferry and the political cha-cha going on behind the curtains, and decided to go to dinner early.

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.
Entries and Comments feeds.