Information – Page 4 – understand-culture

Bavarians

Bavarians (Bavarian: Boarn, Standard German: Baiern) are an ethnographic group of Germans of the Bavaria region, a state within Germany. The group’s dialect or speech is known as the Bavarian language, native to Altbayern (“Old Bavaria”), roughly the territory of the Electorate of Bavaria in the 17th century.

Like the neighboring Austrians, Bavarians are traditionally Catholic. In much of Altbayern, membership in the Catholic Church remains above 70%, and the center-right Christian Social Union in Bavaria (successor of the Bavarian People’s Party of 1919–1933) has traditionally been the strongest party in the Landtag, and also the party of all Ministers-President of Bavaria since 1946, with the single exception of Wilhelm Hoegner, 1954–1957.

Bavaria: tradition in danger

Günther Hochhäuser is a passionate marksman who fights to maintain the traditions of his homeland, Upper Bavaria. The Christian Social Union, who has been in power here for decades, could get a drubbing in upcoming elections — to Hochhäuser’s dismay.

Marksmen’s clubs stand for everything Bavaria is famous for: folk costumes, cultural lore and tradition. Their chairmen include illustrious public figures, such as former Pope Benedict and Prince Max, Duke in Bavaria.

Marksman Günther Hochhäuser says “We are a pillar of strength.” But that pillar looks to be on increasingly shaky ground. Bavaria and even the seemingly timeless Inn-Chiemgau shooting club are being overtaken by the tides of change. Until recently, voting for the conservative CSU party was a given.

But recent polls say that the CSU will suffer big losses in the upcoming state elections. Many Bavarians are angry that German interior minister Horst Seehofer, a member of the CSU, recently came close to bringing down the country’s governing coalition. Axel Rowohlt reports.

Overcoming Knowledge Hoarding in the Workplace

Knowledge hoarding — when employees purposely keep critical knowledge to themselves — is a fairly common phenomenon found in companies of all sizes. It’s an uphill battle to create a culture of knowledge sharing if you don’t address knowledge hoarding head-on.

As our team grows from our initial product and engineering teams to content, marketing, customer support, and beyond, we’ve looked for ways to prevent knowledge hoarding from finding its way into our own company culture. To do this, we first had to identify why employees hoard knowledge.

How the Thirty Years war affected Germany

The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) was a brutal conflict that saw most major European powers use Germany as a battleground to sort out their assorted dynastic, religious, economic and territorial issues. The toll this took on the country was massive, and reverberated for long after; let’s take a look at some of the damage it did.

The Thirty Years War has earned a reputation for being a particularly nasty conflict: unlike most wars of the day, and arguably no wars until the 20th century, it saw massive civilian casualties, with parts of Germany losing more than half of their population. It’s estimated that of a German population of about 20 million in 1600, by 1650 only about 13 million were alive.

The Data Vice No One Talks About: Data Hoarding

One of the more peculiar subreddits (on a site full of them) is r/DataHoarder. The subreddit’s moderators describe the community as a forum for those suffering from the ‘digital disease’ of data hoarding, the practice of retaining, to an extreme degree, all forms of data.

With more than half a million members, the community prides itself on enabling those who suffer from an inclination to hoard data. One of the top posts is from a verified user who claims to have 87 TB of storage, at a cost of approximately 5,000 dollars.

The Data Vice No One Talks About: Data Hoarding.

What Can Germans Teach Us About Privacy?

Asking delicate questions in Berlin, the capital of personal data protection

In Berlin this week, I’ll be trying to better understand how Germans are thinking about the surveillance debate that has roiled the free world in recent months. Conventional wisdom has it that citizens of this country are particularly attuned to the importance of privacy due to Stasi excesses during Communist rule.

Has the resonance of the issue been overstated, as some observers suggested after the recent parliamentary election, when Chancellor Angela Merkel triumphed even as privacy advocates in the Pirate Party seemed to lose ground?

Against the German pettiness in data protection!

High time to start the argument for changes – the topic must not remain taboo.

Criticism of the US would be more credible if we, at least in Europe, had the same understanding of privacy and data protection. But that is by no means the case, as not only surveys show.

If all EU members had converted the 1995 data protection directive into national law in the same way and if all national supervisory authorities had interpreted the regulations in the same way, then most American “data octopuses” would hardly have settled in Ireland. 28 member states of the European Union, that also meant: 28 different views of data protection! So there was no question of Europe speaking with one voice to the US.

German Philosophers

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary German Philosophers of all time. This list of famous German philosophers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

Police Have Too Much Access to People’s Data, German Court Rules

The Constitutional Court said that the current laws did not do enough to protect personal privacy in the digital realm.

July 2020. BERLIN — The German police and intelligence agencies have excessive access to citizens’ mobile and internet communications, the country’s Constitutional Court said on Friday, ordering the existing laws to be tightened.

It was the latest decision by the court to support personal privacy over public security concerns in the digital sphere, which, taken together, have made the country a world leader in protecting personal privacy.

Critics charge that the string of court decisions could hinder the ability of security services to prevent crimes and terrorist attacks.

Germany and the Love of Privacy

This unwillingness to discuss private time with colleagues reveals both the German distaste for small talk, but also the German desire for privacy.

Germans have a clear and robust sense of what should be in the public domain and what should not, and although there are exceptions for good friends, finding out what your colleagues get up to outside of work requires military grade interrogation techniques.

With waterboarding out of the question, I am left with little recourse other than to linguistically trap colleagues into giving away small details of their lives. The excruciating process of trial and error can last for years, until one day a colleague feels comfortable enough to actually tell you directly what they get up to when not at work.