The nuclear debate of the 1980s was also a sticker war. The smiling sun with the slogan “Nuclear power? No thank you”. Sedans from the Opel Rekord upwards countered with: “Opponents of nuclear power hibernate in the dark with a cold butt.”
A saying that suddenly sounds scary up-to-date again. Germany the will of the traffic light negotiators should get out of coal earlier than planned, at the same time the expansion of wind and solar power is not progressing fast enough. Natural gas is not CO2-free, moreover by Putin’s grace. And the last German nuclear power plants will go offline in just over a year. In view of the climate crisis, if one couldn’t perhaps consider keeping nuclear power plants a little longer … Stop! Anyone who thinks ahead here is leaving the politically correct sector and in Germany only finds support from the AfD.
Internationally, on the other hand, the nuclear debate is just gaining momentum. A few weeks ago ten EU member states, led by France, campaigned in Brussels for a strong role for nuclear energy in climate protection. Bill Gates is an important driver of this trend. Terrapower, a company financed by Gates, is building a sodium-cooled reactor together with GE Hitachi in the US state of Wyoming for a billion dollars.
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Gates also takes a stand in the inner-European nuclear debate: “I am pleased that the French have ambitious goals to make nuclear power cheaper and safer. This is a path that we have to pursue in order to find a solution, ”said the Microsoft founder in an interview with my colleagues Thomas Jahn and Moritz Koch.
Conclusion: There are still very good reasons to oppose longer running times or even new nuclear power plants in Germany. But it would be fatal to leave the debate on this subject to the right-wing extremists alone.
Delivery bottlenecks and a lack of manpower are putting pressure on the numbers at Amazon. In the current fourth quarter, revenues between 130 and 140 billion dollars are expected, announced the world’s largest online retailer on Thursday after the US market closed. Amazon thus fell short of analysts’ expectations. The Amazon share fell after hours three percent.
In line with the Amazon figures, my colleague Ulf Sommer predicts a “comeback of the profit warning”. At first glance, this seems paradoxical: global demand is booming, and many companies are able to enforce higher prices on the market. The profits should actually bubble up instead of drying up. But what good is the best demand without supply – that’s a problem at the moment. Disrupted supply chains, too few semiconductors and rising costs for energy, logistics and production cloud the prospects.
Knaus Tabbert and Continental will not remain the only companies with profit warnings. Photo: Reuters / Bloomberg / Getty Images
Anyone who has read Ulf Sommer’s analysis is at least no longer surprised why prices are rising across the board. The inflation rate in Germany climbed to its highest level since 1993 in October. Goods and services rose by an average of 4.5 percent. The inflation figures for the euro area follow today.
Christine Lagarde also admitted yesterdaythat the period of high inflation will likely last longer than originally expected. The President of the European Central Bank (ECB) continues to assume that the price trend will normalize in the course of the coming year. At the same time, this means that, according to Lagarde, “nowhere near” the prospect of higher interest rates.
Hand on heart: Can you name the “purpose”, the formulated purpose of existence, of your employer off the cuff? If not, you are in the good company of 59 percent of all specialists and executives who, according to a Kienbaum survey, are also unable to do so. Which is probably also due to the grandiose arbitrariness of most of the purpose slogans.
My tip: If you have any doubts, you are right with a random combination of the terms “human”, “future” and “together”.
It is one of the perfidious volts of the so-called New Work movement that all work should suddenly have a purpose and be fun. In this Kumbaya mentality, those who get up in the morning mainly to feed themselves and their families are considered to be an emotional underperformance. Active enthusiasm is now a duty where it was previously sufficient. Anyone who does not regularly distribute small smileys and clapping hands in the chat bar during the countless team and zoom meetings will quickly have a reputation for not being “encouraging” enough. Thoughtfulness, on the other hand – especially critical – does not seem to be very popular. The thinker smiley only comes in ninth place among the most popular emojis in the new work software Slack.
In addition to purpose phrases and emoji terror, our colleagues on our career team have compiled many other excesses of the New Work movement in our Friday title. And of course they also reveal how to use the meaningful elements of New Work in the company in such a way that the work is actually more fun in the end – without the need for a smiley face.
Do you still want to know what the purpose of the Handelsblatt is? I have no idea if we even spelled one out. But on dull days I like to tell myself that we at Handelsblatt – together with many thousands of other journalists in the country – make democracy and a market economy possible day after day. And no, I don’t mean that in a bit ironic.
Then there is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who paid homage to the Bauhaus motto of “less is more” that evening. His company is to be called “Meta” in the future, and it really doesn’t get any more minimalistic. The Silicon Valley colleagues from Alphabet, formerly known as Google, seem downright chatty with their eight letters against Zuckerberg’s four. And there is also a message behind Meta: Zuckerberg may no longer be the boss of a grayed-out social network with a dubious reputation. He and his group are striving for what is known as the “metaverse”.
Zuckerberg’s vision: Life as a perpetual holodeck made of virtual reality equipment, computers and suitable software – all powered by Face .. uh, Meta.
I warmly greet you
you
Christian Rickens
Head of Text Handelsblatt
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