megaspora » 2007 » September

Archive for September, 2007

Quality demagoguery

By: psr, 2007-09-19

Several recent announcements in Spain provide for some amusing and saddening analysis:

The Government of Spanish PM RodrÃguez Zapatero announced state aid for young people (under certain income level) to pay the rent on their house or apartment.
Some time ago, they announced that landlords would be protected against defaulting tenants, by a state agency that would pay the landlord the amount owed by the tenant.
The Andalusian regional government (ruled by the same party as RodrÃguez Zapateroâ€™s) has also recently announced they would â€œgive awayâ€ flats for free to people earning less than â‚¬3,000 per month.

Aside from the fact that these are purely populist announcements, just in time for upcoming elections, they are yet another proof of the downright ineptitude of RodrÃguez Zapatero:

1) and 2): The …

2007-09-19 | Braindead - Economy - Spain | Trackback | 2 Comments »

Exaggerated protection for privacy

By: psr, 2007-09-15

Today I read on the news that Google promotes a global standard of privacy legislation across countries. A Google representative has met with the UNESCO to discuss the issue.

Clearly, for Google, privacy laws can represent a barrier for their business model. This is true for several similar organizations: Yahoo, Altavista, LinkedIn, Facebook and so many others whose business is to handle information, promote targeted advertisement or collect personal information to customize services for customers.

These companies are often criticized for paying little to no attention to privacy concerns of their customers and users. However, such criticism is flawed, as this article will show.

People and businesses alike have benefited immensely from the Internet, and some of the key Internet “utilities” making Internet extremely useful and attractive are precisely …

2007-09-15 | Rights - World | Trackback | No Comments »

Bravo for Rosa DÃez

By: psr, 2007-09-02

Rosa DÃez, a politician in the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE), shares the opinion that terrorism must be defeated, and negotiation with criminals is not acceptable. This was also the official position of PSOE until recently. Some PSOE politicians, like other parties’ politicians, have been killed by ETA (the criminals band called “basque separatists” by the BBC calls, otherwise denominated as “terrorist” by the Spanish Government, the UN, the USA, and the EU).

This woman, Ms. DÃez, has been the target of an assassination attempt as well, but was luckily uninjured. She has fought from and with the PSOE to end the lack of freedom in the Basque Country, imposed by ETA terrorists and their friends (Batasuna and others). That task requires that the source of …