[thechat] Economics

[Eike Pierstorff]

> A GERMAN CORPORATION
> You have two cows. You reengineer them so they live for 100 years, eat
> once a month, and milk themselves.


Not quite. Here in German economics work this way:

A GERMAN CORPORATION

You have two cows. You discover that two cows won't get you any
subsidies, so you buy another 400 cows and demand successfully money
from the government. The government retaliates by telling you that your
cow-keeping-license has expired. The president of the Society of German
Cow-Owners bribes someone at the ministry of agriculture and they go and
bother someone else. Meanwhile, a group of so called "pure-blooded
germans" claims that one of your cows is indeed foreign/gay/jewish and
beat it nearly to death in the middle of the night. A german court
decides that, while violence isn't acceptable behaviour, it's really the
cow that is to blame and that it has to be forcefully removed from the
country. State secretary Otto Schily claims that cows are a danger to
society and demands a DNA-analysis from cows and cow-like beings (e.g.
arabs). A german corporation says that it invented a cow that lives for
a hundred years, eats once a month an milks itself. A closer look
reveals that the cow is powered by a nuclear power plant, gives no milk
and lives for 24 hours, but is shipped in a cardboard-box that can be
recycled to toilet paper and thus complies with European Union
regulation 2093892a (§6, regulations concerning nuclear-driven-mammal
storage). Two days later the papers tell you that Minister of Defense
Rudolf Scharping bought 500 cows without having a budget and sent them
to a close-combat mission in Afghanistan without telling the parliament.
Minister of Defense Rudolf Scharping sues the papers for revealing
classified information.

Finally, a frightend cow tries to emigrate from germany and gets
arrested for suspicious behaviour. And people abroad never hear a word
about all this.

-- eike




---------------------------------------
Eike Pierstorff
inhabitant1 at davenant.net
eike.p at t-online.de

 "They talked, as human beings do, about things they didn't know"
  (U.K. LeGuin, "The Shobies' Story")