How the country is secretly run by the young (that’s the UK. Not Italy.)

This week’s Economist has a very interesting piece on the political establishment in today’s United Kingdom. George Osborne, shadow chancellor, is 38. In his inner circle, advisers Rohan Silva and Rupert Harrison are 28 and 30; his chief of staff, Matthew Hancock, is 31; his speechwriter, Ameet Gill, 27. On the Labour side, Torsten Henricson-Bell, adviser to chancellor Alistair Darling, is 27. Gordon Brown’s speechwriter is said to be 29, and some of Mr. Brown’s policy unit members are reportedly “boyish”. And so on.

Greenness has its drawbacks, sure. Yet, as Bagehot remarks, “lack of personal experience does not disqualify someone from holding valid opinions, if curiosity and hard work compensate.” So, how about freshening up Italy’s gerontocracy? We don’t have enough fresh-faced UK-style policy wonks of our own: let’s just import them. They may perceive as “distant and hypothetical” some of the “grimly adult” “substance of politics — pensions, child-rearing and so on”; yet, they can hardly do worse at these topics than our septuagenarian leaders, can they?

Top 7 signs you no longer work at a high-tech company

1. The demographics of the place more closely reflect the outside world. You feel young again. Unfortunately, it is advisable to adopt a more conservative dress code.
2. There is no WiFi in the building.
3. You are issued a Blackberry in an older version than the one you had before.
4. You are issued a large and sturdy laptop that is heavier than the one you had before. I mean, a couple of pounds heavier. That’s a lot heavier, for something you want to take home at the end of the day.
5. Your laptop carries an operating system and applications in the local language, and there is no way to get them in English. You have to relearn most of your keyboard shortcuts. CTRL+p? forget about it, now it’s CTRL+SHIFT+F12. CTRL+s? it’s become SHIFT+F12. CTRL+f? start getting used to CTRL+SHIFT+t. CTRL+a? You still haven’t figured out where that one has gone. You fear serious losses in your productivity.
6. They don’t use Skype. In fact, Skype is blocked. They don’t use any other instant messaging application, actually. When they need to chat, they write emails back and forth to each other. You fear even more serious losses in your productivity. You ask for an exception to the Skype block.
7. Every morning, a thick bundle of newspapers is delivered to your desk. Some Web-only dailies are printed out and delivered to your desk. Little by little, one piece at a time, you start trying to stop the madness.
8. [Bonus] You wrap up a meeting with a colleague. You say “OK, I’ll send you a list of those items in a spreadsheet or something.” He says “That’s OK. As long as you don’t send me an Excel. I don’t do Excel.”

Sent back

We sent them back. We put them on a motorboat and delivered them back to Libya.

We lied to them. We told them they were being escorted to Lampedusa. Instead, we dumped them on a dock in Libya – one of the few countries that have not even signed the Geneva Convention on Refugees (see map).

According to Italian news reports, we intercepted 227 people who thought the had ended their long trek to escape from Niger, Chad, Mali, Sudan and who knows where else. We did not bother verifying if any of them might qualify for asylum under the Geneva convention. We sent them back to be locked up in Libyan detention centers, beaten and raped by police officers.  Eight-five per cent of the women who get this far, says a spokesperson for Catholic NGO Caritas, have already been raped on their way to Italy.

And all of this for a handful of votes.

Italy tries to outlaw anonymity on the Internet

The latest bill introduced by Representative Gabriella Carlucci would ban uploading any type of content on the Internet anonymously (text, video, sound, etc.) and enabling such use.

More info in Quintarelli’s blog (sorry, for now in Italian only).

Italian law turns increasingly illiberal. For bloggers too

The Italian Senate has passed a law-and-order bill that, pandering to fears about immigration-related crime, would severely restrict human and civil rights for immigrants, for the homeless, and possibly for Internet users. (The bill, sponsored by the Northern League,  now goes to the House).

If the bill becomes law in its current form:

• Doctors will be allowed to breach professional secrecy and may report to the authorities any foreigners who seek treatment and do not appear to be legally in the country. Both doctor’s groups and the Catholic church have spoken out against the measure.
• Vigilante groups will be allowed to start street patrols to monitor and report “events that can cause harm to public security, or situations of environmental distress”.
• Foreigners who marry an Italian citizen will have to wait two years before obtaining Italian citizenship.
• Homeless people will have to be registered as such in a database to be maintained by the Interior Ministry.

Finally, in a move that caused much outcry in the Internet community, the Christian Democrats’ UDC centrist party introduced an amendment that shows how little our politicians understand the Internet – not merely how online social dynamics work, but even what is technically feasible and what isn’t. If the bill becomes law, any time someone is suspected of instigating criminal behavior via the Internet, the Interior Ministry may request ISPs to put in place “filtering tools” so that the offending content is blocked from public view; ISPs who do not comply within 24 hours would be fined by €50-250,000. The amendment has apparently been introduced in response to the senseless noise created by some Facebook groups celebrating rapists and the Mafia. Yet, internet experts point out that there is no way to block a single offending piece of content: Italy’s government would then require ISPs to block entire domains. Star blogger Beppe Grillo has called for civil disobedience.

Very much the same could be said about Italy, II: Troubles in Greece

As unique as my country is, I often read about other places that are similarly stuck in the holes they’ve been digging for themselves. But in the United States, the Obama administration has already announced that they mean business when they talk about upgrading the country’s creaking infrastructure, promoting clean energy, and fixing health care (see my previous post quoting Fred Wilson). We haven’t done that – so, the parallel no longer applies.

Today, instead, the Friends of Italy Award of the day goes therefore to Greece, described in today’s Economist in the following terms.

[...] Far more important are problems that no Greek government has tackled. To find out what they are, ask any of the Greek-born scholars, entrepreneurs, artists and other talented types who flourish all over the world but recoil at working in their homeland, much as they love it.

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As any homesick Hellene can tell you, their country can be a maddening place for people with drive and flair. The world’s universities are full of Greek academics, but the country’s own campuses are dogged by poor administration, strikes and a state monopoly on higher education. In its university system Greece hews closer to the worst aspects of the Ottoman past (such as bureaucracies that block innovation) than does Turkey, with its fine range of public and private campuses.

In health, schooling and other public services, bad state provision fuels a huge under-the-counter market—creating in turn vested interests opposed to any change. Life is tough for youngsters with energy and talent but no cash or connections. To get anywhere, they spend all day in rotten state classrooms, then trek off to private night schools where the same teachers do a slightly better job in return for money. Anybody who negotiates those hurdles must then face a dismal job market—either a dreary, dysfunctional public sector or a private sector crimped by crooked tax inspectors and crazed regulators.

Tag cloud, 1972

A curiously contemporary work from 1972 in the Italics exhibition curated by Francesco Bonami at Palazzo Grassi in Venice. It seems that designers of good-looking tag clouds such as Wordle haven’t really invented anything aesthetically new. The work, “Sì alla violenza operaia” (“Yes to workers’ violence”), is by artist Nanni Balestrini, 1972.

Our newest “sin tax” and our Ministry of Culture

Our country never ceases to amaze, really. Yesterday’s papers reported that a ministerial decree is setting up an extra 25% tax (retroactive on 2008 earnings) on profits from all “literary, theatrical and cinema works [...] featuring images or scenes containing explicit and not simulated sexual acts between consenting adults.”

This starts out weirdly enough with the inclusion of literary works: if you are a comic artist writing a graphic novel, or a writer, are your characters capable of real intercourse, or are they just having simulated sexual acts?

Then there is the “consenting adults” clause: go figure the exception for depictions of rape (any educational purpose?), sex between minors, sex between adults and minors. I guess all these things have not been deemed worthy of an additional 25% tax.

And who decides whether a given sexual act is simulated or real? Details will be unveiled in a forthcoming decree by our Prime Minister, but it seems that our Minister of Culture, Sandro Bondi (picture), will get to define explicitly what works will be subject to the extra tax and what works are merely “simulating”. One wonders, with the state our cultural heritage is in, does this government department really have nothing better to do?

This “sin tax” is not a new idea; sources report that it had already been proposed a few years ago, as a tax on works containing pornography or promoting violence (of any kind, not just the sexual one). The “promoting violence” piece has been dropped; I guess sex is considered a luxury good, but you can still get a good deal on violence.

Italy and the 2008 Gender Gap Report: real or apparent progress?

Last year I commented on Italy’s deservedly low position in the rankings of relative gender equality produced by the World Economic Forum. This year, the 2008 Gender Gap Report tells us that we are no longer in position number 84: we have jumped up to number 67. We are still quite far from other European and mostly Catholic countries such as Poland (49), Spain (17), France (15) and Ireland (8).

This year’s data on Italy, states the report,

show very significant improvement in the percentage of women among legislators, senior officials and managers, members of parliament and in ministerial level positions.

One would have to look beyond the raw numbers to get a sense of the real impact of those ministerial level positions, I would guess; but we’ll leave that to the next refinement of the ranking metodology.

It is also true that we have more businesswomen in position of power this year; yet, we have no way to know where Marina Berlusconi (who recently joined the board of Mediobanca) and Emma Marcegaglia (who became head of Confindustria, and is the only Italian in the Wall Street Journal’s “50 Women to Watch“) would be today if it weren’t for their fathers’ success.

And hopefully those women legislators and members of parliament will think about crafting and passing some of those laws that the rest of us need before we can feel that Italy offers true equality of opportunity, regardless of gender.

Very much the same could be said about Italy

From Fred Wilson’s blog, A VC:

We have tax revenues that do not cover our spending. And we don’t have the will to cut our spending. And in many cases, we cannot afford to cut our spending. We should not cut our spending on infrastructure, we should increase it. We should not cut our spending on finding cleaner and smarter forms of energy, we should increase it. We should not cut our spending on education, we should increase it. We should not live with the terrible health care system we currently have, we should fix it. And we continue to spend money on things like tax breaks for oil companies and subsidies for farmers that mystify me and most Americans.  And we spend a lot of money fighting vices like drugs, prostitution, and gambling when we should simply legalize them, tax them, and regulate them and turn them into a profit center.

[...] We need to get our house in order, play in this global economy with a stable and sustainable business model. And we don’t have that now. And we must get it in place soon.