While the economic crisis might be over in The Netherlands and abroad, it seems that the mood crisis has only started “to rear its ugly head”. Perhaps exactly that is what emphasizes the real depression that we are all in.

At this moment, I am coping with having seen the picture of a life-threateningly wounded motor agent in The Netherlands.

This police agent was (seemingly deliberately) run over by a rogue truck driver, who obviously did not want to stop, when he was ordered to do so by the agent [the picture was so shocking that I simply can’t put a link towards it in this article - EL]. While the agent will fortunately live to tell the tale, his right arm was so badly hurt that it had to be largely amputated.

Uninformed readers might perhaps think that the agent had acted like one of those testosteron-laden, overly aggressive ‘coppers’ that they know from ‘reality-series’ like C.O.P.S, but that is by all means not the modus operandi of Dutch police agents. In general, the Dutch police agents are the friendliest, calmest and politest police agents that one could encounter: always looking for a dialogue first with traffic violators and (petty) crime suspects and extremely restrained in their usage of power and (lethal) force.

While people always have the unintentional habit of  softening up their past – so do I undoubtedly – I can still hardly remember individuals and small groups having used so much brutal and murderous violence against police agents and other officials in function, as sometimes happens nowadays.

Only in the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties, I can recall longer periods of intense, mindless aggression against officials; for instance when squatters and football hooligans used very brutal violence against police agents, in respectively their “struggle for housing freedom” or their battles for the sake of their football club. However, those were often more or less “organized” battles between such groups and the police and hardly on-the-spot actions of individuals or very small groups of unorganized people.

Unfortunately, I did not manage to find long-term statistics about the subject of violence against government officials (for instance 50 year data), and ‘hunches’ and emotional feelings are notoriously unreliable sources of information. The following chart with data over the last three years paints a picture of slightly rising violence against officials, of which I truly can’t say that the level is strongly elevated, in comparison with ten years ago.

The number of  incidents against government officials
Picture courtesy of: De Correspondent.
Click to enlarge

Nevertheless, I would be surprised when the level would NOT be elevated, in comparison with f.i. 1995 or 2005. Can I be wrong? I can be wrong!

Too often since the great economic crisis started in 2008, police agents, traffic controllers and ambulance staff have turned into targets for overly aggressive people, who use these civil servants to vent their excessive frustrations upon.

Woe to the traffic controller or police agent, who stands in the way of the frustrated businessman in his German luxury car, the testosteron-laden youngster or the delayed truck driver on his way to an angry customer. He can become the target of a murderous attack, without even noticing it.

And that is not all...

Next to these outbursts of on-the-spot violence by individuals, the unhealthy nationalism as well as the anger against moderate politicians, other countries and the whole European Union seem still very much on the rise.

Although among professional politicians the political debate about the soaring influx of refugees is mostly held on a quite civilized level – especially when you leave the parties at the outer rims of the political spectrum out of the equasion –  this is definitely not true in other parts of society.

The expressions of disapproval, contempt and even utter indifference,  straightforward rejection or disgust about these refugees are very widespread: in the open spaces (f.i. swastikas and utterly insulting punchlines on walls of refuge centres), as well as among writers on public, online news media forums.

The opinions of many respondents to these forums are so injured, bleak and gloomy, that such respondents are nowadays known as `reaguurders’. A bad translation of this untranslatable, Dutch expression would be “bleakspondents”. And that is only in The Netherlands: one of the most tranquil, safe, wealthy and peace-loving countries in the world. Everybody who has followed the discussions and events in some East-European countries, like Hungary for instance, knows that things can be far worse overthere.

In only 10-12 years, the open, globalized and optimistical society of the end of last century has been replaced for a closed, regionalized, gloomy and introverted society. A society in which refugees are discarded like human trash by many people and in which the European Union is seen as a burden for the development of the own country or region, instead of the stabilizing and hope-bringing institution that is traditionally has been.

Extremist politicians speak with such disdain about other people and countries that one sometimes feels back in the 1930’s, while one popular pop-star cries ‘wolf’ about the – still very moderate – flow of refugees that reached Dutch shores. Populists and demagogues rule and the moderate opinion is discarded as weak and dishonest.

And on top of that, there is the suffocating influence of intolerant believers from various religions: people who judge others from their own misplaced feelings of superiority (or is it inferiority) and threaten them with fire and brimstone or, even worse, with death... Sometimes this desire is even turned into reality.

While at one hand the churches and other religious buildings run more and more vacant, the claim for power and influence –  and especially the power to judge others – of the intolerant believers is mounting to untolerable levels. Most of these people seem to long for a ‘fata morganish’ situation that has never existed in reality: their private Utopia of homogenous groups of strong, undoubting believers without adversaries and without people that just don’t buy their kind of religion. Tolerance for people with other habits and opinions is out, while ‘live and let die’ seems in fashion.

And then I always wonder: how can a depression-like crisis be over, when so many people world-wide still seem to suffer from a depression?! When there is so much distrust in society?! So little trust in our politicians and our most sacred institutions... And most important: in ourselves!

Why do governments think that almost the whole world population should be tracked and traced on the internet?! Why is The Netherlands the country with arguably the most phone and internet taps in the world, when it is also such a tranquil and peaceful country?! Why do representatives of the Dutch government make 3 billion(!!!) license plate scans per year, when the whole Dutch population is about 8 million cars (plus incoming tourists)?

What did I do wrong that my government is allegedly treating me like a suspect of hideous crimes, by tracking everything that I do and say?! These days that same government is boasting about having solved the economic crisis with their policy of mindless austerity, as well as kicking the can down the road at most national and supranational occasions. And it is bragging that we should start to spend again, as the crisis is over now.

Is it then too much to ask from my government that they simply start to trust me again?! And my fellow citizens,  of which probably around 99,99% are decent, honest and hardworking citizens? Or people that don’t have a job, but are just as honest and decent anyway?! Almost nobody of these people deserves to land in the enormous dragnet of the evermore curious and distrustful government, but yet, they do. 

And so the economic crisis might be over in The Netherlands and abroad, but the crisis in our heads certainly isn’t!

Update 5 October 2015: 

This morning I learned that the truck driver mentioned in the first paragraphs of this article had not hit the motor agent on purpose. 

According to the district attorney in charge, it had been proven by footage from dashboard cameras of other drivers that the incident happened unintentionally and thus indeed by accident. Although this does not change anything about the gravity of the accident and the grave consequences of it for the agent himself, it felt like a relief for me personally to learn this.

Of course, this means that my paragraphs about aggression against government officials and traffic regulators do NOT apply to this particular accident. As far as that is concerned, I am sorry for stating such in the opening lines of my article.

Yet, this does not change much about the tenor of my article, which dealt with the mood in The Netherlands being still well below par in many, many ways.

Why I abolished my Facebook account…

“If you’re not paying for it; You’re the Product”

Famous quote regarding Social Media

In a little more than ten years, everyday life of almost every middle class adolescent and adult person under fifty in the Western Hemisphere has been partially taken over by the social media. Twitter, Whatsapp, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, you name it. Oh yeah, and of course Facebook…

It hardly matters at which moment of the day or at which location one meets strangers. There is always a well above average chance that these people are totally absorbed by their mobile phones, iPads and Notebooks. In the bus, in the metro, just before or during meetings, during lunch or during a cigarette break and even in the discotheque... people are staring at their cellphones and iPads.

And no, people are probably not watching their phones or other wireless appliances to read their business emails, to make some last minute changes to their university paper or to send an invitation to their colleagues to let them visit an important meeting.

No, most people use their cellphones mostly for fun and leisure, by reading and posting items on the social media of their choice.

I understand that very well… Personally, I am an avid user of Twitter (for fun and hobby) and LinkedIn (for business).

For me it is much fun to react to the opinions of politicians, experts, journalists and pundits on Twitter or to share my own thoughts regarding things that happened on the news or in real life. Twitter is always topical, and a “short, sharp shock” when it comes to opinions and events. Some of the people there come close to being a ´kind of friend´, without ever really becoming one.

Twitter is a very volatile medium and that’s what I like about it. Last week´s discussions are “old news from the dark ages” and today’s hypes and scandals are the hottest thing around. If you ever watched a national football match or a talent show with Twitter comments on, you know what I mean.

And while many users use Twitter to spill their guts about almost anything, it are the quality of numerous discussions and the interaction with the real experts and with some of the dearer twitter users that keeps me hooked to it, And that, in spite of all the negative stories about the ´content being vulgar´ and the general chances for survival of this medium.

And LinkedIn? While this social medium bored me “beyond belief” in its early days, it has evolved into a darn good tool for networking and finding new assignments (always important for freelance professionals), as well as a service-hatch for very interesting stories from people that I respect – including my own stories. And while LinkedIn is not exactly something that I visit for fun, it nevertheless proved its quality to me.

That brings me to Facebook. From all the aforementioned social media, Facebook is by far the most popular (except perhaps for Whatsapp in sheer numbers of users) and the most successful social medium. Period!

Personally, I did not and I still don’t like it! I even disliked it so much that a few weeks ago I decided to abolish my profile on Facebook and make this medium something of the past for me.

Let’s begin with Facebook’s slogan. I take here the translated Dutch slogan, as it is so much more direct than the quite disguised English slogan:

“With Facebook you are connected and you share everything with everybody in your life” (in Dutch: “Met Facebook ben je verbonden en deel je alles met iedereen in je leven” )

Isn’t that the creepiest slogan ever? That you are cursed to “share EVERYTHING with EVERYBODY in your life”?

The heck, I won’t!

When I share information and things through social media, I do it out of my own free will and in the possession of my full mental powers.

Although I always hope to do something good with my blogs and tweets and try to make people laugh, enjoy something, (dis)agree with me and make them think about certain subjects or wonder about some marvelous things, I don’t want to receive report marks (i.e. the ‘like’ or future ‘dislike’ button) for my writings. If you like my tweets and articles, it is appreciated and if you hate my guts... be my guest! I love getting a letter from my readers, especially when they felt aided or comforted by some of my articles or want to have information about particular subjects, but that is neither my intention for writing nor my ultimate goal.

With Blogger, Twitter and LinkedIn, this is OK, but it is not with Facebook seemingly.

Facebook wants indeed to know everything from all its users and it wants its users to put their whole life on Facebook: 

• When you do something or when something happens to you, you put this on Facebook, where it in fact acts as a source for positive or negative assessments by others;
  
• When you get new lovers, friends or business relations, Facebook wants to turn them into its own relations and friends and disclose the network that is emerging behind it;
  
• When you write a tweet, you often put it on Facebook at the same time, sometimes without realizing that;
  
• When you post a picture on it, Facebook immediately considers that to be its own picture, which it can use for its own purposes, without further consent;
  
• Facebook wants you to be online as long as possible (24/7) and it wants to make you share, share, share…
  
• Facebook bombards you with long, long lists of remote acquaintances and far relatives, hoping that it can push you to expand your own (and in the process their) network;
  
• And when you react to somebody else’s posts or adverts through the ‘like’-button or through your comments, you start a whole machinery, trying to make you hand over even more personal information or buy advertized stuff eventually;
  
• Facebook wants you to use its instant messaging services, its fixed telephony and its cellphone services, so it can gather even more personal information about you, without you realizing that;
  
• And please remember that Facebook never ever forgets.

In its ways to comfort you as a user and make life easier for you – seemingly for free – Facebook seems a benevolent organization, that is created to help the human race and bring it on a higher level of interconnectedness.

Yet you have to remember that YOU are indeed the product for Facebook and that EVERYTHING you do is closely monitored by Facebook, in order to generate more information and thus eventually more cash in the process.

And in my humble opinion, Facebook has proven in the past that European and national privacy laws are nothing more than an annoying obstacle on its road towards total control of information. An obstacle that can be defeated and/or ignored.

In its modus operandi, Facebook sometimes reminds me of Hedra Carlson, the scary tenant in the film “Single White Female”, so intensely played by actress Jennifer Jason Leigh.

At first, Hedra seems to be the perfect companion and “Best Friend Forever” of landlady Allison Jones (Bridget Fonda), until she notices that Hedra is more and more involved in taking over Allison’s total life, at the expense of Allison herself. The end of this movie is very discomforting, even though the heroine of the story survives in the end…

At this moment I don’t have any tangible reasons to accuse Facebook of having more suspicious goals than earning loads of money at my and other people’s expense, through the collection of as much information as possible. Nevertheless, it is exactly this intrusive ‘nature of the beast’ and this relentless pushing to become an indispensable ‘Best Friends Forever’ that bother me very much about Facebook.

Through my writings and tweets, I chose to be a ‘public person’ and I am aware of the consequences that such things can have; positively or negatively.

However, my wife did not choose to become a public person through things that I do on the internet. And especially my three children do not own the luxury of having a real, well-considered choice yet, as they are simply too young for such a choice.

Still, Facebook would probably “die” to know everything about me, my wife and children and all my friends. Not because we are interesting as persons, but because we are interesting as marketing instruments.

I initially created my Facebook profile about three or four years ago in order to look up some data of an old school friend who I had not seen for years. Initially, it offered me a chance to look up some old acquaintances, but those Facebook contacts did hardly lead to something more interesting in real life. Since then, I just left my profile hanging on, as I was further not really interested in the contents on Facebook. Every now and then I watched my profile and pending messages – perhaps about every three months – and sometimes I posted a comment to some event. And every time when I wrote a Blogger article, I posted it on Facebook, as yet another medium to post links to my articles.

A few weeks ago, at one particular moment, I had simply had it with Facebook. I had it because Facebook still published all my tweets unasked, without me standing still with that. And I had it, because it came up with the remotest of acquaintances, gathered from all my email and other social media contacts, asking me to become friends with those people and further build up my network on Facebook’s behalf. And for no particular reason, I simply wanted to get out…

Then I was confronted with the fact that Facebook does not make it easy on a person, when he wants to get out of it. After I looked in vain for half an hour within the tool, to find a way to really abolish my profile (instead of just disabling it), I managed to do so with the help of one dedicated site. Afterwards, I found out that Facebook granted me an involuntary cool-down period of two weeks. A period, in which a person cannot make use of Facebook anymore per accident or else... (he will be reconnected again).

And now I am in the final days of my Facebook membership. Everybody who thinks that I will feel sorry for my decision to stop using it, does not know me really well.

Even though I have my public life on Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogger and some of the other social networks, I want to spend the other parts of my life in the privacy to which I am entitled. And that privacy especially stretches to my loved ones and other family.

I will not discourage people to use Facebook, when they have a good time with it and enjoy its possibilities, while taking the drawbacks for granted. I just wanted to tell you my motivation to abolish it for good. 

Do with that and think about that what you want, as I am not really interested in your opinions about my acts and motivation in such matters. However, if you need my help for a good and righteous cause, you know where to find me... 

Does the car industry lack a fundamental sense of honesty and decency? After looking at it in 2015, one might very well think so!

Volkswagen’s “Dieselgate” seems only the tip of the iceberg regarding embedded engine kernel software being rigged on purpose; many more famous car brands might have followed in their footsteps. GM, on the other hand, seemed to have proven once again that saving money is more important than saving lives!

It wears you thin

Unpacks a bag and it settles in

Ten times an hour you'll wish it dead

Ask it to leave but it stays instead

Jonathan Caulton - Fraud

It was the miracle of the (European, Far Eastern and to a lesser degree the US) car industry during the last three decades. Not only did the cars get faster and more frugal in their fuel consumption, in spite of their heavier weight and increased electricity consumption – laden with airconditioning and electronic gadgets as they were – but they also got cleaner by the year.

Especially the infamous diesel engine, in the eighties especially notorious for the clouds of black smoke that it spread in case of being poorly adjusted, turned into an “environmentally friendly” Juggernaut that crushed its gasoline-driven competition among the European corporate drivers.

In the Seventies of the last century, the European diesel was a car for patient sales agents that devoured kilometers like a box of chocolates and did not mind accelerating from nought to one hundred kilometers per hour in 27 seconds (!), as their low fuel bills made them smile the whole way.

However, the successful and ubiquitous introduction of turbo technology for diesels in the Eighties and the invention of the common rail diesel engine in the Nineties changed the diesel car from 'a gouty slug' spreading black smokescreens, into a racemonster that showed many gasoline cars its tail lights. And the diesel fuel was still sipped away at a very low pace, thus offering enormous value for money.

And the best thing was: during the last decade diesel engines became really, really clean, with respect to their exhaust of soot and nitrous oxide emissions. This was due to the introduction of better catalysts and various new technologies which reduced the harmful exhaust of especially fine-particled soot (i.e. Volkswagen's 'blue motion' and similar technologies from the other brands). At least, according to the laboratory test results of the well-respected German premium car brands, like Daimler-Benz, BMW, the Volkswagen Audi Group and Opel (GM)…

I myself – a genuine petrolhead and avid diesel car driver with at least 30,000 km per year every year – was one of those suckers that believed in the fairytale of the ever-cleaner diesel engine; probably because I wanted to believe it…  And also because I consider electric cars to be “sewing machines on steroids”, with in general the charisma of a pile of concrete mortar.

Fortunately, a bunch of European and American researchers did not take the cheerful stories of the large car brands for granted regarding the exhaust, but decided instead to take the bull by the horns. Their curiosity and perserverance led to one of the biggest scandals in the contemporary car industry. The following snippets are from Bloomberg.

VW's Emissions Cheating Found by Curious Clean-Air Group

It didn’t add up. The Volkswagens were spewing harmful exhaust when testers drove them on the road. In the lab, they were fine.

Discrepancies in the European tests on the diesel models of the VW Passat, the VW Jetta and the BMW X5 last year gave Peter Mock an idea.

Mock, European managing director of a little-known clean-air group, suggested replicating the tests in the U.S. The U.S. has higher emissions standards than the rest of the world and a history of enforcing them, so Mock and his American counterpart, John German, were sure the U.S. versions of the vehicles would pass the emissions tests, German said. That way, they reasoned, they could show Europeans it was possible for diesel cars to run clean.

 “We had no cause for suspicion,” German, U.S. co-lead of the International Council on Clean Transportation, said in an interview. “We thought the vehicles would be clean.”

So began a series of events that resulted in Volkswagen AG admitting that it built “defeat device” software into a half-million of its diesel cars from 2009 to 2015 that automatically cheated on U.S. air-pollution tests. The world’s second-biggest carmaker now faces billions in fines, possible jail time for its executives and the undoing of its U.S. expansion plans.

“I personally am deeply sorry that we have broken the trust of our customers and the public,” Volkswagen Chief Executive Officer Martin Winterkorn said in a statement on Sunday. “We will do everything necessary in order to reverse the damage this has caused.”

The whole Bloomberg story reads like a detective novel and I deeply admire these researchers and testers for their astonishing results. While these days a host of people are shouting from every corner `I have already been telling this for years…`, it is an undeniable fact that no car brand had been caught earlier with its hands in the cookie jar.

And as an ICT consultant and software tester, I have to reluctantly admire – against all my instincts and sense of fairness and justice – the cunningness of the VW scheme, to embed software in their engine kernels that yields a perfectly clean engine in the laboratory and a very quick one in the field.

But now, while VW has been firmly put in the pillory, with its CEO Martin Winterkorn as the first one in a presumably long, long line of VW executive managers to hit the road, the suspicion mounts that this rigging of engine kernel software has been common practice among many renowned brands in the car industry: “if you can’t beat them, join them”.

I suspect that the combination of a very powerful road car under all circumstances and an extremely clean diesel engine at the same time, was just ‘too big a bite to chew’ for many car brands. And if a car brand can’t win the battle against the competition and the (supra)national authorities fair and square, then they try to win it while cheating: hence the rigged software...  

Just like CERA, EPO, steroids and other specialized doping drugs forced non-users in the bicycle racing sport to become users after all, if they ever wanted to win a bicycle race again, so might it probably have been in the car industry too with the international requirements regarding clean engines.

Summarized, the whole story is probably: 

“Yes, we can build an engine as clean as international regulators require, but it will drive like a ninety year-old lady. Our drivers don’t want such an engine and they will cry for their mothers if we give them one anyway. 

Instead, we rig the engine kernel software, so it will run like the old lady in the laboratory, while being clean as a whistle. On the road, we turn the software into Ayrton Senna mode, in order to make our drivers enthusiastic. And then the engine will be a teeny weeny bit less clean. Nobody knows and everybody is happy, right?! Who cares anyway?!”

Yet, the increasingly painful question remains for me, after Volkswagen’s ordeal and (probably) just before a much broader scandal regarding rigged engine software rocks the whole car industry on its feet, is whether this industry totally lacks a fundamental sense of honesty and decency?!

A little bit older news and now being snowed under in the tidal wave of VW news is the fact that GM established a multi million dollar compensation fund for the damages caused by “ignition key-gate”: a scandal in which built-in flaws in various ignition key types caused GM cars to stop running, as well as power steering and brake assisters to stop working, at the most undesirable and dangerous moments. The sad balance: hundreds of dead drivers and passengers and probably much more dangerously injured drivers and passengers.

And that all for the purpose of saving a few cents on the price of a flawlessly working ignition key. The following story is also from Bloomberg. Here are a few snippets:

Hurt or Killed in Cars With Switch Flaw

Last year, GM agreed to compensate victims killed or hurt when an ignition switch shut off accidentally and cut power to the brakes and steering, a defect hidden from the public for more than a decade. But the compensation fund covers only 2.59 million vehicles with that specific flaw. GM says a similar defect subsequently detected in an additional 10 million vehicles, including the model Pillars’s wife was driving, is ineligible for compensation because the company recalled the cars immediately after discovering the flaw and because employees made no efforts to keep it under wraps.

After recalling the original 2.59 million vehicles last year, GM checked all models for ignition-related issues, GM spokesman Alan Adler said in an e-mail. If a model failed one of eight tests it was recalled, he said. By the end of June 2014, GM had recalled an additional 10 million vehicles for defective ignition switches.

In comparison with the United States, cars in Europe (especially the `challenged`German ones, but also cars from the other EU countries, the Far East and the US) are extremely expensive. This is partially caused by the generally much higher purchase taxes and conveyance duties, but first and foremost due to the higher building standards and building costs of especially European cars.

The American car market, however, is – in my humble opinion – rather a dog-eat-dog market, with in comparison very low purchase prices for cars and a much more limited number of national suppliers. This fierce competition for the sheer sales numbers probably forces the most important US car brands to fight for the last cent in order to keep their prices competitive. Therefore cheaper parts and materials are mounted in US cars, to keep prices as low as possible.

The aforementioned higher European purchase prices, on the other hand, offer the leeway for European brands to user structurally better materials and parts for the interior, exterior, cockpit and electronics of the cars. A €20 key ignition switch makes a Mercedes or a BMW not much more expensive, in comparison with the already very high purchase price, so these brands mount the expensive ones that do not cause any problems. 

Although European cars – even the premium brands – also had their share of recall actions of late, it is therefore hard to believe that such a clumsy and yet extremely dangerous flaw, like the one in the ignition key switch, could hang in there for more than ten years in the European market, without being put into the open. Yet, that is exactly what happened in the US domestic market with GM cars.

I believe that 2015 must become a turning point for the largest car brands as we know them and that the whole car industry must go through a paradigm shift, in which the environment, the abolishment of fossile fuels and the safety of cars become centralized issues.

Car brands should stop cheating with their exhaust emissions and they should stop keeping silent about possibly deadly problems in their cars, or else the competition from other countries and other sources might wipe them away within a few years.

When a guy like Elon Musk could establish Tesla Motors and bring it to fame within little more than ten years, so can others. And the more scandals surround the classic car fuels, like gasoline, lpg and diesel oil, the bigger the chance is that modern “fuels” like hydrogen and electricity will win the rat race within the car industry. 

Engines using these energy sources might do so, being mounted in car brands of which nobody has heard yet… and with ignition switches that work flawlessly… every time all the time.