Lurker Day  

According to Crooked Timber it is (or was) "Lurker Day", the day where "readers who usually never make comments tell us what they like about our blog, what they don’t like, who they are etc etc. Sounds like a good idea – we have no idea who y’all are, but would like to find out."

I feel the same way - so leave a comment if you never have before and let me know what you think.

Crooked Timber also has an amusing post on the German election (which has nothing to do with peak oil).

Jeffrey Gedmin, director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin, writes a quite jawdropping reductio ad absurdum of this trope for the Financial Times.

Germans know [that they face a fundamental choice over their economy]. But they still love their “social-market” economy and have not yet decided whether allowing more market forces can be in tune with their values. Until now, it has been too easy for Germans to defer painful choices. The country has been doing – simply put – too well. In Berlin, a city with 19 per cent unemployment, the cafes are packed with people ­drinking over-priced café lattes, the employed and unemployed alike happily indulging themselves. Will economic circumstances soon hurt enough to give people the swift kick they apparently need?

I had to read this paragraph twice to be sure that my eyes weren’t deceiving me. The problem with the German economy is that it’s doing too well for people to, like, actually want the cleansing winds of free-market reforms? That the unemployed can sip their café lattes too?

Strangely enough Germany overtook the US as the world's largest exporter recently. And they are way ahead on the move to renewable energy too. Maybe the Germans could actually be doing some things right ?