Photographs of Bureaucracy
Über Jan Bannings – Anarchist, Soziologe und Fotograf – brillante Fotoserie Bureaucratics habe ich schonmal vor vier Jahren gebloggt, die geht aber grade mal wieder rum und ich finde die immer noch superfantastisch, also was solls. Banning hat von 2003 bis 2008 Bürokraten auf der ganzen Welt abgelichtet, dazu ist er einfach unangemeldet auf’s Amt gelatscht und hat geknippst. Heraus kam eine soziologische Studie von einem Anarchisten über den Typus Bürokrat. Ganz, ganz groß!
Bureaucratics is a project consisting of a book and exhibition containing 50 photographs, the product of an anarchist’s heart, a historian’s mind and an artist’s eye. It is a comparative photographic study of the culture, rituals and symbols of state civil administrations and its servants in eight countries on five continents, selected on the basis of polical, historical and cultural considerations: Bolivia, China, France, India, Liberia, Russia, the United States, and Yemen.
In each country, I visited up to hundreds of offices of members of the executive in different services and at different levels. The visits were unannounced and the accompanying writer, Will Tinnemans, by interviewing kept the employees from tidying up or clearing the office. That way, the photos show what a local citizen would be confronted with when entering.
Bureaucratics (via Laughing Squid)
Loophole4All: Corporate Identity Theft as Offshoring-Art
Superspannende neue Arbeit von Paolo Cirio (Google Will Eat Itself, Ghosts of Streetview, Face 2 Facebook), der angeblich die Datenbank der Unternehmensregistratur der Kaimaninseln gehackt hat und auf der Website Loophole4all.com quasi Steuernummern der Unternehmen zwecks Corporate Identity Theft für ‘nen Dollar pro Stück anbietet. Wenn das alles so stimmt, ist das selbst für einen Künstler wie Cirio, der die Grenzen der Legalität für seine Arbeiten gerne mal dehnt, ein ziemlicher Hammer.
Obendrauf dokumentiert er auf der Seite zum Projekt in mehreren Interview mit Steuerflucht-Fuzzis Hintergrundinfos zum Thema, unter anderem mit so tollen Sätzen wie: „Figures show that, in 2010, Barbados, Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands received more foreign direct investment than Germany or Japan“. Grandiose Aktion, die hoffentlich ohne Folgen für den Mann bleibt.
Offshore centers are considered legal abroad. However, the services that they provide are unaffordable for the normal citizens onshore, whose instead have to pay more taxes and legal obligations, while facing cuts to public services and increasing national debt.
Loophole for All democratizes the use of offshore centers. It provides a service to the middle class and small businesses who don’t want to pay more taxes than they should.
The service of Loophole for All acquires the lists of companies incorporated in the offshore centers and armed with as little as a company name and a number, lets people hijack those companies and utilize them for public advantage.
This corporate identity theft benefits from the anonymous nature of those offshore companies. Everyone can pretend to be them because of their real owners’ secrecy. And even if it’s illegal to steal an identity of a company, the courts of offshoring centers don’t have any power or credibility onshore. And meanwhile, onshore authorities don’t have the resources to verify the real owners of companies offshore — even less to chase everybody down.
Loophole4All (via Rebelart)
Postman busted for working too fast
Was passiert in Deutschland, wenn ein Briefträger zu schnell arbeitet und die Distribution optimiert? Er landet vor’m Amtsgericht, natürlich:
A dedicated German postman who figured out the quickest routes between postal depots to speed up his work has escaped criminal charges and managed to keep his job with just a reprimand for not working to rule.
Zugegeben: Die Meldung kann ich mir in jeder Bürokratie der Welt vorstellen, aber hierzulande passt das einfach hervorragend: Fastest postie charged for being too quick, hier die Meldung im Münchner Merkur. (via Arbroath)
Dude officially asskicked for excessive Farting at Work
Ein Beamter aus Baltimore hat sich eine offizielle Abmahnung von seinem Arbeitgeber eingehandelt, weil er im Job zu viel gefurzt hat. Zusammen mit der Abmahnung haben sie ihm gleich noch eine detailierte, tabellarische Aufstellung der Extrem-Flatulenzen zukommen lassen. Lustig genug, aber noch witziger finde ich die Vorstellung, dass das erstmal jemandem aufgefallen sein muss und der war dann nach einer Weile so dermaßen genervt, dass er oder sie tatsächlich peinlich genau Buch geführt hat über die Ausdünstungen des Kollegen. Flatulenz-Bürokratie. Toll!
A US federal employee was formally reprimanded this month for excessive workplace flatulence, a sanction that was delivered to him in a five-page letter that actually included a log of representative dates and times when he was recorded “releasing the awful and unpleasant odour” in his Baltimore office. In a letter sent on Decenber 1oth accusing him of “conduct unbecoming a federal officer,” the Social Security Administration employee was informed that his “uncontrollable flatulence” had created an “intolerable” and “hostile” environment for coworkers, several of whom have lodged complaints with supervisors. The worker, a 38-year-old Maryland resident, reportedly submitted evidence that he suffered from “some medical conditions” that, at times, caused him to be unable to work full days. But a SSA manager noted in the reprimand letter that, “nothing that you have submitted has indicated that you would have uncontrollable flatulence. It is my belief that you can control this condition.”
Kafkaesque Telekom-Kündigung
Dominik zieht in die Schweiz und versucht, bei der Telekom zu kündigen, seit einem halben Jahr. Bei der gleichzeitig eingetroffenen Kündigungsbestätigung und Aufhebung der Kündigung lag ich unter’m Tisch, Bürokratie at its best. Hilarious!
Deconstructing TOS with Math
Schönes Feature beim Register, der sich detailiert an den absurden Details in Terms of Service abarbeitet und mal ausrechnet, wieviel Lebenszeit die Menschheit verlieren würde, wenn Leute den Scheiß tatsächlich lesen würden.
Adobe Flash anyone? In recent years, the company has claimed it had eight million downloads a day and, before we get on to the maths, have you ever followed that link that took you a second to ignore as you ticked the “I have read and agree…” box? […] Why don’t they just have a box that says, “Whatever, dude” or “I have read and understood… You’re kidding, right?”
Yet the tickbox convenience provided serves to reinforce the user attitude that, I’ll never read or understand any of this… can we just get on with it now?
So eight million people a day lie to Adobe. Or put it another way, 8 million honest people who all took at least ten minutes to read this licence agreement and, oh lordy, understood it, would, in terms of total time, eat up over 1,522 years in just one day. If we put that into man-hours: an 8hr day, 240 working days in a year, that becomes 6944 years in a day. Turn that into a 50-year working life and that’s 138 lifetimes a day… How about a year of Adobe Flash downloads with the licence agreement being read each time… that’s 50,694 working lifetimes per annum… Equivalent to populations of Macclesfield or Staines.
Adobe demands 7,000 years a day from humankind – It’s all in the EULA fine print (via /.)
Legal Implications of the Undead and Taxes in the Zombie Apocalypse
Professor Adam Chodorow von der Arizona State University hat ein Paper über “Death and Taxes and Zombies” eingereicht, ‘ne Zusammenfassung davon gibt’s bei Law and the Multiverse. Das Teil ist so ziemlich genau das, was man sich darunter vorstellt: Zombie Science aus der absurden Perspektive von Bürokraten und Buchhaltern:
The most pressing tax issue raised by a zombie apocalypse is the application of the so-called “death tax,” which imposes a tax on the transfer of the estate of a “decedent.” Zombies have been described variously as the “walking dead,” the “undead,” and the “living dead,” raising the question whether the estate tax should apply when a taxpayer becomes a zombie or, in the alternative, after a person’s zombie has been dispatched.
The definition of death, and therefore of a decedent, has generally been left to the states, each of which has its own definition. That said, there has been a recent trend away from a definition that focuses on heart function to one that focuses on brain function. Whether people who become zombies would be considered dead for state law purposes depends both on the definition used and the type of zombie involved.
It seems a stretch to conclude that those who transform seamlessly into zombies should be considered dead. They never lose heart or brain function, though they now function quite differently from before. While it might be tempting to declare them dead, significant line-drawing problems would arise as one tried to distinguish between zombies and those who have suffered some mental or physical breakdown. Declaring such zombies dead would open the door to declaring dead a wide range of people currently considered to be alive.
Cobras in the Tax Office
Youtube Direktsnakes, via Boing Boing
Ein angepisster Schlangenbeschwörer namens Subhash Mani Tripathi hat in einer Steuerbehörde in Indien seine Cobras auf die Beamten losgelassen, weil die ihm das versprochene Land nicht zugewiesen hatten, auf dem er seine Giftschlangen halten wollte.
Local bureaucrats leapt onto their desks or ran out of the building in the Northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh when Hakkul let his snakes, including some poisonous cobras, out of their bags.
“He had applied for a plot of land to keep his snakes,” Subhash Mani Tripathi, the head of land revenue administration, told AFP news agency. “But there is no provision for such a business. Instead of seeking a written reply, which we would have issued, Hakkul created panic by letting loose a bunch of snakes all over the office.”
Bei einer anderen Version des Clips gibt’s hübsche Kommentare (via Ronny):
We need this guy in India more than any other country….guess what???he is already in India ;)
taureauharsh vor 6 StundenWe need this guy in the Canada
ueatlund vor 9 StundenLook at us all being ethnically diverse.
GodOfTheInternets vor 10 StundenWe need this guy in South Africa.
GodOfTheInternets vor 10 StundenWe need this guy in the U.S.
MIKEGZ55 vor 16 Stundenwe need this guy in Peru.
lashermanasde vor 17 StundenWe need this guy in Chile
marcelosoto88 vor 17 Stunden
Apollo 11s Zollzettel
Für meine Space-Sammlung: Der Zollschein der Apollo 11-Astronauten. War zwar damals eher als Scherz gedacht, aber egal und ich liebe die Zeilen: „Any other conditios on board which may lead to the spread of Desease? To Be Determined.“
Just what did Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins have to declare? Moon rocks, moon dust and other lunar samples, according to the customs form filed at the Honolulu Airport in Hawaii on July 24, 1969 – the day the Apollo 11 crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean to end their historic moon landing mission.
The customs form is signed by all three Apollo 11 astronauts. They declared their cargo and listed their flight route as starting Cape Kennedy (now Cape Canaveral) in Florida with a stopover on the moon.
Back from the Moon, Apollo Astronauts Had to Go Through Customs (via Geekosystem)
Pastafarian Headgear on a flying Spaghetti Drivers-Licence
[update] Vom Standard.at: „Nudelsieb doch nicht aus religiösen Gründen genehmigt – Aussage von Niko Alm war falsch – Führerschein lag schon seit 2009 unabgeholt bei Polizei“
Ursprüngliches Posting:
Niko Alm aus Österreich hat die Beamten seines Landes davon überzeugt, dass er als Anhänger der Church of The Flying Spaghetti Monster ein Nudelsieb als Kopfbedeckung tragen und auch so auf dem Führerschein abgelichtet werden muss, wofür sie ihn zunächst zum Amtsarzt schickten, weil man davon ausging, dass der Herr Alm verrückt sei. Nun wurde sein Nudelsieb anerkannt. Grandiose Aktion, Pastafarianism FTW!
Meine religiöse Kopfbedeckung wird von der Republik Österreich als solche anerkannt.
Heute konnte ich mir auf dem Verkehrsamt Wien meinen neuen Scheckkarten-Führerschein holen. Auf dem Foto ist klar und deutlich zu erkennen, dass ich ein Nudelsieb auf dem Kopf trage, um meine Zugehörigkeit zur Kirche des FSM zu demonstrieren. Genausowenig wie muslimische Frauen zum Tragen eines Kopftuches oder einer Burka angehalten oder gar gezwungen werden, habe ich mich entschlossen als aufgeklärter Westeuropäer meine Religionsfreiheit so abzufeiern.
Heiliger Führerschein (Episode #6 – Das Finale), BBC: Austrian driver’s religious headgear strains credulity, spOnline: Führerscheinfoto mit Nudelsieb – Im Namen des Spaghetti-Monsters (via Daniel)
Fotografien eines Anarchisten von Büros der Bürokraten
Jan Banning ist selbsternannter Anarchist und hat die Büros von Bürokraten rund um den Globus fotografiert. Deutschen Aktenschubsern (das Wort habe ich grade von Pixel- und Saftschubsen weiterdekliniert) am ähnlichsten sind die Russen, wie ich finde. NPR hat ein längeres Stück über Bannings Arbeiten, er hat grade ‘ne Ausstellung im Ulmer Stadthaus. Snip:
Bureaucracy, oh bureaucracy. How easy it is to curse that amorphous force that sucks up time, binding productivity and creativity in red tape. But how do you show what it looks like?
Six years ago, photographer Jan Banning sat, stumped by this question. The self-declared anarchist had been given what seemed “the most horrible assignment of my entire life:” A magazine had asked him to illustrate decentralization of administration in Mozambique.
Then it occurred to him; “Let’s go meet the people involved.” Having spent his life carefully steering clear of government officers, he was surprised to find they were far more varied and interesting than he’d imagined. The one-time assignment morphed into a four-year project, involving “Bureaucratics” — as his clever book is titled — across the world.
A Look Into Bureaucrats’ Offices, Jan Bannings Bureaucratics (via Juxtapoz)
