Germany: Ifo think tank optimistic about German growth

Germany's Ifo economic institute has said the German economy will pick up steam next year and beyond. In its 2015 outlook, the think tank argued growth would be based on increased domestic consumption.

Germany's gross domestic product will expand by 1.5 percent next year, the Munich-based Ifo institute said Thursday as it presented ts 2015 outlook, revising an earlier estimate of just 1.2 percent growth.

The think tank appeared more optimistic than most of the country's other leading economic institutes, which predicted the German economy would grow by no more than 1.3 percent next year.

Ifo, for its part, argued the stronger pickup would ride on a wave of consumer confidence that had fueled domestic consumption.

Read more: Ifo think tank optimistic about German growth | Business | DW.DE | 11.12.2014

Nederland in onstuimig weer: Als Nederland een bedrijf was zouden we al lang failliet zijn - door: Robert Jan Blom

Het gaat niet al te best met Nederland

Het is om kriegelig van te worden: we zitten nu op zo’n 750.000 werklozen oftewel  8,5 procent van de beroepsbevolking. Bekendebedrijven als Halfords en Mexx worden failliet verklaard, met vele werklozen tot gevolg.

De ene na de andere bank laat weten afscheid te nemen van nog eens enkele duizenden werknemers. KPN kondigt  alweer een afslankingsoperatie aan. En de politici? Zij houden stug vol dat de crisis voorbij is.

Waarom? Omdat u op achttien maart 2015 naar de stembus moet voor de provinciale statenverkiezingen.

Wie alert is, weet dat het pover gesteld is met de financiële gezondheid van ons land. Natuurlijk: een land kan niet echt failliet gaan.

Maar als je een koele cijferaar op onze statistieken zou loslaten, laten we zeggen een private equity aasgier die een vijandig bod op de bv Nederland overweegt, tot welke conclusie zou hij dan komen? Ten eerste zou hij vaststellen dat Nederland Inc. onder een torenhoge schuldenlast zucht. Ten tweede zou hij bijkans worden bedolven onder uit allerlei kasten tuimelende lijken.

Tot zijn verbazing zou hij concluderen dat Nederland overeind wordt gehouden door vrijwilligers die eigenlijk normaal betaald zouden moeten krijgen.

Klik hier voor volledig artikel: Als Nederland een bedrijf was zouden we al lang failliet zijn - FaillissementsDossier.nl

The Internet: Europe vs. U.S. tech companies - by Levi Sumagaysay

“We recognize that innovation improves our lives, but we want a level playing field.” says Ramon Tremosa i Balcells, a European Parliament lawmaker from Spain who backed the resolution calling for a breakup of Google.

The Wall Street Journal writes that as Europe feels increasingly threatened by the success — or dominance — of American tech companies, it is causing bigger and bigger headaches for those companies.

The call for the breakup of Google is just one example. There’s also the U.K.’s proposed “Google tax,” a 25 percent tax on profit made in the U.K. but then is shifted elsewhere. Another high-profile issue: Europe’s “right to be forgotten” ruling, which centers on Europeans’ strong views on the right to privacy and requires Google and other search engines to scrub search results on a case-by-case basis.

(Recently, there have even been calls to extend that ruling to the companies’ search websites outside Europe.) And the revelations about American government spying using Internet giants’ technology hasn’t helped, either.

Quartz notes that in France, the term GAFA, which is an acronym for Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, is sometimes used to express resentment over these companies’ influence.

Besides Europe’s concern about American tech companies’ effect on its economy, the Journal cites two other big themes that surround the Europeans’ discontent: The region’s proclivity for regulation vs. Silicon Valley’s disdain for it, and what is effectively a tug of war for control of the Internet.

Read more: Quoted: on Europe vs. U.S. tech companies | SiliconBeat

Torture USA - Poll : Despite Report, US Voters Still (sadly) See Value in CIA Interrogation Tactics

On the heels of the Senate’s scathing report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation practices, nearly half of U.S. voters are in favor of the harsh tactics used and think they elicited valuable information that helped the United States.

Forty-seven percent (47%) of Likely U.S. Voters believe waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques should be used to gain information from suspected terrorists. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 33% do not think such methods should be used, but another 20% are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Note EU-Digest::  the above Rasmussen poll  also shows,  that on  average, US voters are not  capable of being able to make intelligentand realistic judgements on moral issues. 

This sad state of affairs was also proven by a recent Pew Research report on "gun control" versus "gun rights", which stated: 

"For the first time in more than two decades of Pew Research Center surveys, there is more support for gun rights than gun control. Currently, 52% say it is more important to protect the right of Americans to own guns, while 46% say it is more important to control gun ownership. Support for gun rights has edged up from earlier this year, and marks a substantial shift in attitudes since shortly after the Newtown school shootings, which occurred two years ago this Sunday….Nearly six-in-ten Americans (57%) say gun ownership does more to protect people from becoming victims of crime, while 38% say it does more to endanger personal safety. In the days after Newtown, 48% said guns do more to protect people and 37% said they placed people at risk."

Read more: Despite Report, Voters Still See Value in CIA Interrogation Tactics - Rasmussen Reports™

Torture USA: “Corrupt, toxic and sociopathic”: Glenn Greenwald unloads on torture, CIA and Washington’s rotten soul - by Elias Isquith

It took years until the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report — which shows not only that the CIA’s torture regime was larger and more vicious than understood, but that the agency repeatedly lied about it to the White House and Congress — was finally released to the public.

But it only took hours before President Obama was once again urging the nation to look forward, not back. “Rather than another reason to refight old arguments,” read a White House statement, “I hope that today’s report can help us leave these techniques where they belong — in the past.” When members of the media asked whether that meant the White House considered torture to be ineffective, as the report claims, an anonymous official said Obama would not “engage” in the ongoing “debate.” On the issues of rape, waterboarding and induced hypothermia, apparently, reasonable minds can differ.

Glenn Greenwald, the Intercept’s Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and longtime critic of the war on terror, disagrees. “There’s no debate,” he told Salon. “Everything that we did,” he continued, “in terms of how we treated detainees, has [long] been viewed as morally vile and inexcusable and criminal.”

Greenwald has little doubt, however, that Washington will turn torture into yet another partisan squabble. It’s the go-to move, he says, when America’s political and media elite decide they’d rather look the other way. “That’s just the ritual Washington engages in,” Greenwald said.

Speaking with Salon from his home in Brazil (or at least we assumed as much, given the barking in the background) Greenwald discussed what surprised him about the summary, what we still don’t know, why expressions of shock and horror from Congress are disingenuous, how President Obama is culpable, too, and why America’s leaders are “sociopathic.” Our conversation is below(click on link below)  and has been edited for clarity and length.

Read more: EXCLUSIVE: “Corrupt, toxic and sociopathic”: Glenn Greenwald unloads on torture, CIA and Washington’s rotten soul - Salon.com

The Netherlands - Russia: Competition for Google? Yandex opens B2B big data division in Amsterdam and Moscow

Yandex - finally a Google Competitor?

Yandex, the Russian Google competitor, has for a while been quietly offering its MatrixNet machine learning technology to other organizations – CERN, for example, has used it to establish statistical relevance in its floods of physics data. On Tuesday, Yandex announced a more formal push into offering big data services to corporate and enterprise clients.

The company revealed Yandex Data Factory at the Le Web conference in Paris. Yandex said its technologies can be used for the personalization of recommendations, natural language processing, image and speech recognition, credit scoring, logistics optimization, demographic profiling and so on.

According to Yandex, these services have already been used by a leading European bank to crunch behavioral data, so as to match products to specific marketing channels in a personalized way. The firm’s machine learning and geolocation services were also used by a road management agency to boost accident prediction accuracy. All in all, Yandex is already providing big data services for 20 projects.

Yandex says it’s able to create various kinds of deep neural networks with MatrixNet, which is used to train ranking formulas, boosting the effectiveness of the learning process. The firm claims the cluster management tools in its Friendly Machine Learning framework make it easier to get into big data research by allowing researchers to “avoid dealing with distributed computing problems.”

It uses proprietary technologies including Yandex MapReduce and Real Time MapReduce, and Yandex Tables, which is a big data storage and processing platform.

Yandex Data Factory has an Amsterdam office as well as one in Moscow, and also has data centers across various countries. The company also offers training programs for corporate tech teams and free masters-level courses for university graduates — it  actually had a data analysis school since 2007. 

Note EU-Digest: Competition for Google ? - The Yandex search engine which is now getting more and more popular in Europe while Google continues to struggle with privacy issues. Yandex provides all the same features Google has and is also fast. The origin and the technology are Russian.  Obviously you could  be jumping from the "frying pan in the fire" by switching, but in this case one would think Yandex has far more to lose than Google and would be more inclined not to "fiddle" with your privacy.  You can  even download Yandex for your tablet or phone at the Google Play Store. To get Yandex for your laptop or computer you can download it from the Internet. It certainly is worth a try.and good for the competition and the consumer. 

Read more: Yandex opens B2B big data division in Amsterdam and Moscow — Tech News and Analysis

Incassobureaus gaan vaak hun boekje te buiten en het wordt de hoogste tijd dat de Overheid scherper gaat optreden

De Gelderlander bericht dat sommige incassobureaus het vaak niet zo nauw met de regels. Met blafbrieven en dreigementen halen zij (vermeende) wanbetalers over snel de portemonnee te trekken.

Laat je niet intimideren en houd voet bij stuk als je in je recht staat.

Toch is het schrikken als een brief van een incassobureau op de deurmat ploft. Er blijkt nog een rekening open te staan en op dwingende toon wordt snelle betaling geëist. Zo niet, dan volgen boetes, loopt de
rente op en komen ook de kosten voor de gang naar de rechter voor jouw rekening. Onder de indruk besluit je maar snel het geld over te maken.

Jaarlijks versturen incassobureaus zo'n 3,5 miljoen brieven naar (vermeende) wanbetalers. Sommige incassobureaus schuwen daarbij dreigementen niet. In blafbrieven eigenen ze zich bevoegdheden toe die
ze helemaal niet hebben. Bijvoorbeeld om een deurwaarder op je af te sturen. Of ze zwaaien met een 'concept dagvaarding', hoewel zoiets niet bestaat.

"Helaas kan in Nederland iedereen een incassobureau beginnen", zegt Jan Franssen, voorzitter van de Nederlandse Vereniging van Gecertificeerde Incasso- ondernemingen (NVI), die 70 procent van de
markt vertegenwoordigt. "Door toename van de schuldenproblematiek ruiken malafide partijen hun kans geld te verdienen met incasso. Vaak lappen zij de regels aan hun laars."

Die regels zijn in 2012 aangeschert. Voor incassokosten gelden vaste percentages en voor rekeningen tot 250 euro mag nooit meer dan 40 euro in rekening worden gebracht. Ook moet je na een aanmaning 14 dagen de tijd krijgen om – zonder extra kosten – te betalen. "Maar het is een gemiste kans dat de wet nog altijd geen eisen stelt aan de oprichting van incassobureaus", stelt Franssen. "Bovendien wordt niet gecontroleerd en zijn er geen sancties bij overtreding." Een bijkomend probleem is dat consumenten slecht op de hoogte zijn van hun rechten, zo blijkt uit een recent onderzoek van de Consumentenbond. "We krijgen veel klachten en vragen over incasso", zegt woordvoerder Joyce Donat. "Sommige mensen laten zich alleen al door het woord incassobureau schrik aanjagen. Laat je niet intimideren en zoek rustig uit of de vordering terecht is en wat je rechten en plichten zijn."

Dat kan bijvoorbeeld op de sites van de Consumentenbond en ConsuWijzer.