Open Password – Tuesday, November 30, 2021
#1004
WTI – Insolvency – Insolvency proceedings – Insolvency due to lack of assets – Hans-Peter Halstenbach – Jan Halstenbach – Insolvency administrator
Corona pandemic – Compulsory vaccination – Lockdown – Vaccination centers – Incidence values – Healthcare – Intensive care units – Triage – Vaccination breakthroughs – Ugur Sahin – BionTec – Moderna – AstraZeneca – Immunization – Fundamental rights – Politics – Lateral thinkers – Nudging – Italy – Spain – Portugal – Moral obligations – Recklessness – Hospitalization rates – Media – FDP – Ability to act – Coalition negotiations – SPD – Greens – Epidemic emergency – Media competence – Uniformity – New government – False start – Populist movements – Autocratic regimes – AfD – Donald Trump – Jair Bolsonaro – Recep Tayyip Erdogan – Vladimir Putin – Narendra Modi – China – CCP – Success Stories – Omicron – South Africa – Humanity’s Task Vaccination – Vaccine for Children – USA – Israel – Vaccination Campaign for Children
Messe Frankfurt – Messe Friedrichshafen – fairnamic – LIUC-Università Carlo Cattaneo – ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global – Trendline Interactive – LeadMD – Shift Paradigm – Thomson Reuters – Tax Determination Anywhere – OAG – Flight Info Alerts – Lucid Green – LeafLink – LucidIDs – Outsell
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WTI-Frankfurt digital: Bankruptcy opened on November 25, 2021
II. Title
On the corona pandemic: Before the general vaccination requirement and the third lockdown –
By Willi Bredemeier
III.
International News
WTI-Frankfurt digital
Bankruptcy opened on November 25, 2021
The WTI-Frankfurt digital insolvency proceedings were opened on November 25th.
This is an important date in that the owners of WTI-Frankfurt digital, Hans-Peter Halstenbach and his son Jan Halstenbach, largely destroyed WTI’s human capital by terminating the entire workforce and, according to Jan Halstenbach, all of WTI’s data lost in a data crash. If the latter were also clearly the case, insolvency proceedings could not have been opened due to a lack of assets and all of WTI’s creditors would have come away empty-handed.
However, there is a suspicion that all data from the Frankfurt WTI have been transferred to the Swiss WTI AG, which is owned by Hans-Peter Halstenbach. This suspicion must have come to the attention of the insolvency administrator before the proceedings were opened. It’s good that there is an industry publicity and WTI’s major customers are trying to get to the bottom of the matter.
See in detail:
WTI-Frankfurt digital: All data from the Frankfurt WTI transferred to the Swiss WTI AG? – The business purpose of WTI AG was already aligned with the business model of Frankfurt-based WTI in June, in: Open Password, October 22, 2021
WTI-Frankfurt digital: A data crash that destroyed all data in a non-recoverable way? – Who owns the WTI databases if WTI has gone out of business?, ibn. Open Password, October 20, 2021
On the corona pandemic
Before the general vaccination requirement
and the third lockdown
By Willi Bredemeier
Willi Bredemeier
When the vaccination centers closed in the summer and the “orgies of relaxation” (loosely based on our outgoing Chancellor) continued to spread, most German citizens believed that the worst was behind them and that the pandemic had been brought under control. Today the situation seems worse than ever and is getting worse every day. The number of infections and the incidence values are reaching new highs every day and even their growth rates are not declining. Parts of our healthcare system have reached or exceeded their limits. The first transfers from intensive care units to other federal states and to northern Italy have begun. The images of transports with ambulances and Bundeswehr machines are burned into our collective memory, just like the images of dark trucks driving with the dead from Bergamo at the beginning of the pandemic. Preliminary forms of triage – decisions about which patient to save and which treatment to defer to a patient, even if this reduces the likelihood of their survival and their quality of survival – have been introduced, even if no one likes to talk about them.
The worse the situation, the greater the likelihood that you will be personally affected. In the first summer of the pandemic, I learned about patients who had coronavirus almost exclusively from the newspapers and television. Four people from my three-generation family are currently suffering from Corona. Corona illnesses from extended relatives, from friendships and acquaintances also occur. There are several vaccination breakthroughs among those so ill, so that the protection provided by two vaccinations can last less than six months. We are lucky, if you can put it like that, not to have to speak of deaths or transfers to intensive care units in our personal environment. We continue to hope for mild cases. As we face the second, even worse Corona winter, nerves are on edge and fear and despair are spreading.
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The shared responsibility of anti-vaccination activists for today’s crisis.
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The extremely annoying thing about the situation that has arisen is that it could have been avoided. When I read last summer that Ugur Sahin from BionTec had announced a vaccine for the end of the year, I thought: Another typical company presentation. But Sahin was true to his word in everything he said, as far as I could verify. Additional vaccines such as Moderna and AstraZaneca have now been developed, and there are sufficient quantities of vaccine available in Germany for the third (“booster”) vaccination.
Nevertheless, we have not achieved sufficient immunization of the citizenry by far. This is because too few people were vaccinated. 1 ½ years ago, when I last wrote about Corona in Open Password, I recommended a general vaccination requirement and justified it in a simple way: the freedom of the individual ends where he endangers or harms others.
This opinion and its reasons were shared by many people in personal conversations with me. I also encountered anti-vaxxers, some of whom denigrated me personally (or came close to doing so), and learned that many of them are unavailable to exchange arguments. For the most part, however, these anti-vaccination activists are very susceptible to political measures, as we are currently learning, for example if they are locked out of public spaces, if their wages are cut off because they would endanger others if they were allowed to do their job, or if In the event of a corona illness, they would contribute to the hospital costs.
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Lack of courage, stubbornness and bottomless recklessness in politics.
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The opponents of vaccination and those who encouraged them to protest share responsibility for today’s situation. But politicians also share responsibility across countries and parties. Initially, the politicians announced, out of fear of a possible protest movement, that there would be no compulsory vaccination under any circumstances. They then received exactly what they wanted to avoid, namely a “lateral thinker” movement.
If one had taken a clear stance from the start and, if one did not want to introduce compulsory vaccination, one had made the opponents of vaccination aware of their moral duties from the outset and at the same time announced measures to give them an initial push (“nudging”) in the right direction, then that would be the case A broad public followed this opinion and most “lateral thinkers” would not have developed into such thinkers in the first place or they would have stayed at home. I base this thesis on the corresponding experiences of Italy, Spain and Portugal (which, however, only took drastic measures when Corona got out of control in their country).
Politicians are now moving step by step towards drastic measures here too. We are in the midst of partial lockdowns and are about to decide on a general vaccination requirement for the healthcare system. Given the already dramatic situation that is getting worse every day, further drastic measures cannot be avoided. But what detours and complicated contortions were required to distance oneself step by step from the promise that there would be no compulsory vaccination, while the incidence rates rose day by day.
The lack of courage and pressure in the political sphere was coupled with the tendency of individual politicians and parties to have to make a name for themselves personally and collectively in the fight against Corona. This resulted in different and complicated regulations. This tendency was reinforced by the federal system with its sovereigns and distributed powers.
This was accompanied by bottomless recklessness: while the incidence values rose again at the end of July, the vaccination centers were closed and the “orgies of openings” continued. A simple extension of the existing trend of increasing incidences and hospitalization rates would have enabled almost everyone to predict a harsh winter by continuing the trend. Such predictions were also published by scientists about how research and science and political advice from science proved useful in the crisis. The forecasts were simply not sufficiently taken up and not adequately implemented into political action.
Not that we should only criticize anti-vaxxers and politicians: most of the media only raised the alarm after the child fell into the well, no longer remembering their stories and comments from yesterday.
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False start for the new government under Corona conditions.
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Unfortunately, our soon-to-be new government has retained its bottomless recklessness after the FDP had already argued against citizens’ basic rights in the previous months against an appropriate fight against the pandemic. For them, as for other politics, there is a second recommendation that is easy to justify: civil rights are there to defend against an overreaching state. In the pandemic, it is not the state that is the enemy, but the virus that is the enemy. In order to adequately combat Corona, a strong state capable of acting is required. Or to put it another way: In order to exercise their basic rights, citizens must first stay healthy and, above all, not die.
According to media reports, the coalition negotiators rejected the further lockdown she proposed in a meeting with the outgoing Chancellor. In a draft law that the SPD, Greens and FDP had agreed on and which was passed by the Bundestag shortly afterwards, they abolished the “epidemic emergency of national scope” and thereby limited the state’s ability to act in the fight against Corona. Now it may be that these loss of action can be more than compensated for by allowing other options for action. Nevertheless, the abolition of an “emergency situation” through a majority decision was bound to leave a catastrophic impression on the public, especially since the current, de facto emergency situation is visible to everyone.
It is true that we have to live with the upcoming new government and hope that it learns quickly and comes up with better and more uniform regulations in the fight against Corona than the previous government. A third recommendation is easy to justify: If you want to take citizens and the public with you in the fight against the pandemic, you have to be clear in your decisions and act uniformly. Citizens do not understand increasingly complex and inconsistent regulations, even if they would otherwise be media literate. If this is not possible centrally, there must be a body that acts uniformly.
Nevertheless, the new government is already talking about a false start in the fight against Corona, even before it has formally started work.
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The Corona policy of Germany and the democracies in an international comparison.
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If we take the current and soon-to-be government together (which may be obvious, since the key personnel in the SPD and the federal states have remained the same), German politics and administration are currently not doing well compared to the southern European countries. At least the democracies are doing better than populist movements and autocratic regimes, since politics and administration are somehow linked to the well-being of the citizens through free and fair elections, while both the AfD and the USA are Donald Trump, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and India’s Narendra Modi don’t give a damn about the well-being of their citizens.
However, there is one important exception here, namely China. The Chinese Communist Party has made economic prosperity for all a top policy priority, having achieved the greatest economic development success story of any developing country and enabled the rise of a strong economic middle class. We should ask ourselves whether China, while not creating and spreading the virus, is a success story we can learn from in combating the virus.
A few days ago, a new corona virus was discovered in South Africa, which was given the name Omicron and which may be even more contagious than the Delta variant. It will probably only be a matter of time before this virus spreads worldwide. But politics can’t do anything for Omicron, can it? The South African vaccination rate is currently 23%. In other black African countries it drops to less than 1%. If almost all people worldwide have not been vaccinated, it is to be expected that more and more dangerous corona mutants will emerge to plague humanity. So far it doesn’t look like the nation states are doing justice to humanity’s task of vaccinating everyone.
A vaccine for children was also released at European level a few days ago. I am worried that the Germans do not see any urgent need for action while the vaccination campaign for children is underway in the USA and Israel. It is probably reassured that the course of corona diseases in children is almost always mild. Aside from the fact that the long-term consequences of Corona may be underestimated, adults also need to be protected from infections by their children.
International News
Messe Frankfurt and Messe Friedrichshafen launch fairnamic joint venture
Messe Frankfurt and Messe Friedrichshafen officially signed off on their new partnership, which is primarily concerned with innovative mobility. Messe Frankfurt is taking a stake in fairnamic GmbH, a joint venture that combines the expertise of both partners in the fields of urban mobility and general aviation.
Entrepreneurship-Focused Italian University Adds Its Doctoral Works to the ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global Database
Business and economics-focused LIUC-Università Carlo Cattaneo will become the first Italian university to formally include its graduate research in ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global, a curated database of dissertations and theses.
Trendline Interactive and LeadMD Form Shift Paradigm
Trendline Interactive together with LeadMD announced their unification under the brand Shift Paradigm. After a series of strategic acquisitions, most recently involving Data Insight Group and then LeadMD, Trendline Interactive has been focused on bringing together teams to help clients break down silos that prevent buyer engagement across B2B and B2C go-to-market models.
Thomson Reuters Launches First Edge-Computing Tax Engine on the Market
Thomson Reuters announced the launch of the Indirect Tax Determination Anywhere platform. Determination Anywhere is a new cloud-based tax technology platform that sits on top of existing infrastructure enabling simplified deployment for the fastest, most accurate, and most secure tax calculations.
OAG Launches New Flight Info Alerts Platform
OAG announced the launch of Flight Info Alerts, its new detection and notification product that delivers changes to flight schedules in real-time. It is the only product on the market that enables customers to get instant updates on carrier flight schedules so they can handle data volatility in real-time.
Lucid Green Partners with LeafLink
Lucid Green announced a partnership with LeafLink. This partnership allows cannabis retailers to have all their cannabis inventory be “pre-ticketed” with LucidIDs. The partnership means that cannabis retailers save between 20-30 person hours/week per store as well as reducing working capital requirements as retailers can hold less stock on hand.
Source: Outsell
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