Every now and then in Spain we have to suffer threats from this or that small group of workers from different sectors of paralyzing the country (or a given city). Transporters, workers in Metro de Madrid, the Madrid subway cleaners, pilots and air traffic controllers are examples of such elements. These small groups manage to impose their claims (rarely fair, and often capricious) thanks to: (a) the monopoly of the company employing them, and the resulting lack of competition, and (b) collective agreements.

These days of summer of 2010 air traffic controllers are once again pressing for new benefits (as they did also in 2009). In view of the situation of last year (2009), and in the face of what is already happening in 2010, José Blanco, the Minister of …

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Several European states and European companies seem to be planning a host of measures to curb the business of Google. The excuse is that Google makes too much money. Not a bad excuse, as lame excuses go.

Governments and companies around Europe are “unhappy” that Google is here to compete. Publishers in Germany complain that they only earn €100m per year in advertisement, while Google earns €1.2bn (in Germany). In Spain, the main telecom operator is considering charging Google for the use of its network. In Italy, privacy protection advocates are calling for making Google liable for the content of its Youtube service (despite it all being provided by Youtube users, not Youtube itself). In the U.S. Google has faced opposition …

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Scotland freed one of the Lockerbie bombing terrorists a couple of days ago, on ‘humanitarian’ grounds. The Scottish authorities are dumb. If the guy was jailed for killing over 200 people, he wasn’t very ‘humanitarian’ to others, was he?. Then, why free him on ‘humanitarian’ grounds? Why treat humanely someone who showed no humanity? Healthy or ill, the criminal is a criminal, and if he was senteced to life in jail, it is wrong to release him just because he is ill.

This is just another sign of the weakness of modern democracies.

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The regional government of Galicia distributed a questionnaire among parents of schooled children. The goal is to find out parents’ preferences about which language (Spanish or Galician, or a mix) to use for teaching in school, to later design the “future language policies for elementary and secondary education in Galicia.”

The questionnaire had to reach parents directly, but a group called “galician coalition of linguistic normalization and dynamization” (CGENDL in Galician) has attached a letter (in Galician) to the questionnaire to mold responses in favor of one option (Galician). While this is bad enough (the questionnaire was supposed to be neutral), the letter rests on ludicrous claims:

1) “Galician is Galicia’s own language; it belongs to us all and we cannot play with its future”

This is irrelevant: …

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In the context of the abortion debate, agitated by the government of Rodríguez Zapatero with its new “Law of Reproductive and Sexual Health and of Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancies”, the Minister of Equality (yes… we have such a idiotic Ministry in Spain), Bibiana Aído, has marked the age limit for the human fetus to be considered human or not.

That is, the socialist government has turned itself into official philosopher and dictates who is human and who is not. This government must really have magical properties, because despite all absurdity they utter, they manage to keep considerable popular support.

What’s that about a 13-week fetus not being human? Is a one week fetus something other than human? What else is it? Possibly up until 13 weeks …

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While walking around Prague last week, I ran into the following banner on a street wall:

Very nice.

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I usually condemn from this blog the Spanish penal code and the Spanish judicial system and its practices when they impose weak and slim sentences, but this time I have to applaud them (to some extent).

A bar owner in Barcelona has been sentenced to 5 years in jail for disrupting the lives of neighbors with the noise from the bar. The bar lacked operating permits, and did not comply with any regulation on soundproofing. Neighbors had to stand one year of loud noises at night, despite several formal complaints from neighbors to authorities about the noise.

Offenders like this bar owner know that the judicial system is slow and that sentences are rarely tough on them, so they risk skipping compliance with regulations, with their …

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Finland’s Parliament passed a law allowing companies to track workers’ e-mail messages, but not to read the messages themselves. With this law in effect, companies will be able to retain information about the e-mails, such as the sender, recipient, the sent and received time and date, and whether the email contained attachments [ref].

Even with such a weak law (it does not permit reading the content of messages), some opposed it arguing it “gives employers more powers than the police, and could lead to an erosion of Finland’s proud heritage as a world leader in human rights” [ref].

It is rumoured that Nokia was pushing for such a law to pass (for it was dubbed “Lex Nokia”). If it were so, they should be applauded for …

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Life imprisonment: yes or no. This debate has briefly appeared on Spanish media in the last few days, after a young woman was murdered in Sevilla. The Spanish penal code does not consider life imprisonment for any type of crime.

Those against this type of sentence argue that the Spanish Constitution does not admin life imprisonment, but in fact the Constitution does not mention it at all. It is absolutely untrue that life imprisonment is incompatible with the Constitution. They argue that such sentence would be “degrading”, and this is not allowed by the Constitution. However, this is merely a matter of opinion: is a 30 or 40 year jail sentence “decent”? is life imprisonment “degrading”?. They can both be …

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In a friend’s blog I see a critic of a statement by a representative of the Spanish Ministry of Culture: “Without intellectual property, there is no free thought”.

Well… this sentence is not untrue: Let us imagine a world without intellectual property. Anything created by an individual would be nobody’s, not even the individual’s own property. There is no recognition for that individual for all the work that led to the production of that idea, of that new thing. Without acknowledgement there is no incentive to put effort into anything, and without that effort there is no thought: not free, and not captive. There is nothing.

Part of the very nature of humans is to associate ideas with people who published them. Such …

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