i.want.world

Location: Orlando di Castello

Situated within Vienna’s historical center, Karl Wlaschek Junior’s stylish café delivers a new approach to gastronomy within the city, accentuating his flair for hospitality and promoting a culinary concept built upon quirky design, quality ingredients and stellar service.

Universal dishes thread throughout the menu such as a Caesar salad, steaks, handmade ravioli and burgers, each one spruced up courtesy of quality ingredients and expert preparation. Pastry chef Pierre Reboul’s artful creations are a beacon, outshining many a competitor in this the Habsburg city of sweets, shunning traditional Viennese treats for thoughtful designs such as the dazzling Tarte Tropezienne.

The drinks menu offers an exotic selection of foreign wines, excellent Belgian beers and a coffee from Galapagos islands that will have you here on a daily basis.

That microscopic attention detail doesn’t just end in the kitchen. Everything about this place has been thought out to the nth degree, from the surreal interior design (inspired by the trinity of a Tyrolean girl, Queen Elizabeth and 50 Cent), to the attire of the enthusiastic, well-informed staff and time-appropriate music: soft and relxing in the morning to more revved up at night, when it all crescendoes into a dinner and dance scene.

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Freyung 1, 1010 Vienna, Austria

fine crappy foods

This video deftly skewers the food industry's current fixations, including This-Is-Why-You're-Fat-grade hamburgers, fancy TV dinners, and junk food masquerading as wholesome:

We take the finest ingredients and put them in a bowl with salt and butter.

And "hide your salad" describes my salad dressing technique perfectly...it ends up more like ranch soup, really.

Efficient Markets Hypothesis is thoughtfully Disproved

Daniel Gross writes:

This afternoon, while walking into the Congress Center, the main hub of Davos, I noticed a piece of gray paper on the floor. It looked like it might be currency of some sort—certainly not a dollar, but perhaps Swiss francs or something else. I started to bend over to pick it up, but then I caught myself. This is the World Economic Forum. It is populated by hundreds of economists and by thousands of business people schooled in the tenets of economics. This is possibly the most rational, profit-maximizing concentration of human capital in the world. These are the actors who make up an efficient market. And of course adherents to the efficient market hypothesis famously don't believe in the concept of found money or found savings...

But I'm a connoisseur of economic irrationality. And so I bent down and picked up the paper. On one side, the grim visage of Queen Elizabeth. On the other, Charles Darwin. It was a 10 pound note, worth about $16.25. Just lying on the floor, unmolested by Nobel Prize-winning economists, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and financial journalists.

Gross concludes the efficient markets hypothesis must be false.

I've managed to lose a 100 Euro note before and as I read this, I can think of this irrational transaction as one of many that occurs daily. Then again, EMH describes the market as a whole whereby all actors can theoretically be wrong - in this sense - throw away cash.

Wish I knew Kafka

"Kafka was a slightly strange man," Sommer recalls. "He used to come to our house, sit and talk with my mother, mainly about his writing. He did not talk a lot, but rather loved quiet and nature.

Alice Herz-Sommer, who recently celebrated her 103rd birthday, is a pianist and a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps; she recalls her time in Prague:

We frequently went on trips together. I remember that Kafka took us to a very nice place outside Prague. We sat on a bench and he told us stories. I remember the atmosphere and his unusual stories. He was an excellent writer, with a lovely style, the kind that you read effortlessly," she says, and then grows silent. "And now, hundreds of people all over the world research and write doctorates about him."

She says she knows about the ongoing trial in Israel, at the center of which is the question of who owns the rights to Kafka's estate. "Kafka would have been against this.

Don't forget that he asked his friend Max Brod not to publish his writings. That much I know," says Sommer - she is the last person alive who knew Kafka personally.

More here.

The USDA Tries to Come Clean

I’m sure they’ll quickly correct this, but as I post this, the USDA’s blog currently reads:

…the USDA is making every effort to make sure that today’s children are the first American generation to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

Link.

House in Haiti

My family house looks ok but with a hole on the roof. Still no contact.

Update:  Fine for now, but with an aunt missing. They've moved out of the city.

18.01

Kolelinia / Martin Angelov

Martin Angelov shared his funky concept for a new urban way of transportation dubbed “Kolelinia” with us .  Kolelinia proposes that we ride our bicycles on a steel wire as a new type of bicycle lane.  The idea was awarded first for the international “Line of Site” competition.

More about Kolelinia after the break.

“The first crazy idea which came to my mind was to make flying bicycle-lanes, using steel wire, something like ski lift but working on the opposite principle in which the wire is static and it doesn’t need electricity,” explained Angelov, who presented a more developed version of Kolelinia on Sofia’s TEDX conference a few days ago.

Working off the idea that transportation has to “not only be a transport, it has to be an experience,” Angelov has turned an initial idea into a developed possibility (especially with the addition of his safety features).   Angelov’s ideas make us question whether it is possible to achieve a completely new level of transportation with minimum resources.

All images courtesy of Angelov.

Fair Trade - Just Another Scam

Nestlé has just announced that KitKat – Britain's biggest-selling chocolate bar – will carry the Fairtrade logo from next month. But how much do consumers really know about the Fairtrade movement? Is it, as some say, an essential safety net that helps poor farmers earn a better living or, as others say, an example of western feel-good tokenism that holds back modernisation and entrenches agrarian poverty?  

We might think of sub-Saharan subsistence economies when we think of Fairtrade, but the biggest recipient of Fairtrade subsidy is actually Mexico. Mexico is the biggest producer of Fairtrade coffee with about 23% market share. Indeed, as of 2002, 181 of the 300 Fairtrade coffee producers were located in South America and the Caribbean. As Marc Sidwell points out, while Mexico has 51 Fairtrade producers, Burundi has none, Ethiopia four and Rwanda just 10 – meaning that "Fairtrade pays to support relatively wealthy Mexican coffee farmers at the expense of poorer nations".

The article additionally points out:

Another criticism is over institutional inefficiencies. The vast majority of the money from Fairtrade sales remains in the west – with only about 5% of the Fairtrade sale price actually making it back to the farmers. As Philip Oppenheim says, "any intelligent person will ask why I should pay 80p more for my bananas when only 5p will end up with the producer". Fundamental to the failure of wealth transfer are issues such as the fact that while 90% of the world's cocoa is produced in the developing world, only 4% of the chocolate is produced there. Developing countries remain locked in the primary sector commodities market, while the west cashes in on their value-added conversion.

Today's 'wow' Momment

"Globalisation allowed the US to suck up the savings of the rest of the world and consume more than it produced." George Soros, FT.com January 23 2008.

Seismograph. The line indicates the daily volatility of the Dow Jones index, between 1901 and 2009.

The bottom line

Isn't this what the global warming debate is actually all about?