Fórum Pirátské strany

This Website Exposes the Truth About Soaring Food Prices

A developer in Austria created a comparison website that helped open up the opaque world of food costs as regulators investigate the food industry.

It didn't take long for Mario Zechner to prove the government wrong. In May, the independent software developer was listening to a radio interview with Austria’s labor minister, Martin Kocher, who said the government would build a new database that will help people find the cheapest milk, eggs, and other supermarket products to help fight soaring food prices. However, the planned system would take months to build and cover only a handful of food types. Zechner decided to take action.

Two hours after hearing the interview, Zechner had built the first prototype of a comparison system, pulling the cost of 22,000 items from the websites of Austria’s biggest two supermarket chains. “I decided to just sit down in the afternoon and see how hard it really can be,” Zechner says. The result was Heisse Preise (which translates as “Hot Prices”), with Zechner open-sourcing the project on GitHub. “From then on, it kind of escalated,” he says.

Months later, Heisse Preise has grown enormously, demonstrating the power of citizen-developed tools and what can be achieved when data is opened up to everyone. The comparison site now lists prices from 10 Austrian supermarket chains, plus four in neighboring Germany and Slovenia. Heisse Preise includes more than 177,000 items. Thanks to data provided by an anonymous contributor and local press, item pricing history goes back to 2017. Zechner’s creation of the tool came as Europe’s food retailers and governments have clashed over rising prices and the cost of living.

Perhaps most significantly, Zechner’s tool has shone a light on the opaque world of price changes by supermarkets, allowing price increases and decreases to be tracked. The transparency, Zechner and others say, shows there can be little difference in prices at some major supermarkets, and within days of an item changing price, competitors can mirror the change.

Data gathered by Heisse Preise and other newly-emerged DIY comparison sites has fed into the investigations of Bundeswettbewerbsbehörde, the Austrian Federal Competition Authority, which has been probing the food industry since October 2022. The authority, which is due to present its full findings later this month, has already suggested the government should introduce new laws to make shops publish their price data. The authority also says it “can be assumed” that supermarkets themselves crawl the websites of competitors and use that information to set their own prices.

“This data is enormously useful for anyone interested in serious competition policies,” says Leonhard Dobusch, the academic director at the Momentum Institute, an Austrian progressive think tank. “It really allows a peek into pricing strategies [and] price coordination tactics.”

…

Conducting what he calls “layperson” analysis, he looked at chains’ own-brand, low-cost goods. “If one store changes the price, up or down, the other store will follow within a week or less,” he says. Prices for some goods in Germany were significantly lower than in Austria. Zechner sent data to the competition authority.

…

“With the rise of grocery retail digitalization, supermarkets are becoming tech companies,” says Catalina Goanta, an ​​associate professor of private law and technology at Utrecht University. Increasingly, shops are collecting customer behavioral data, personalizing offers, implementing dynamic pricing, selling data to advertising networks, and automating certain services. This can all lead to less understanding about the things we buy. Goanta highlights how the website Inside Airbnb uses its data to scrutinize how the rental firm has disrupted cities, and says in 2020, Romanian officials launched a price monitor that included foods.

“I don’t think this has become a standard process for Romanian consumers: ‘Let’s go to this website and check it before we buy food items,’” Goanta says. “Of course, this website can also send an important signal to supermarkets. We are watching you, and our inspectors are not just doing mystery shopping, but we also have access to your APIs.”

Spokespeople for the retailers Billa and Hofer declined WIRED’s request to comment. Nicole Berkmann, a spokesperson for Spar, says the grocery store has supported the Austrian competition regulator with “detailed information” about its prices. However, Berkmann says that “price comparison is a tricky thing” and claims that there are mistakes in “nearly every single price comparison” because there are “thousands of products with different shapes, packages, fillings, qualities, mixtures, and so on.”

…

Wolfgang Schneider, the director of economy press and public affairs at the Austrian Federal Ministry of Labour and Economy, says the government has assessed multiple options around price transparency and has decided not to create a “state comparison tool” after all, due to the emergence of the homegrown efforts. “But it seems to be helpful to provide a general legal framework for the operation of the private tools,” Schneider says. The new “framework” would require supermarkets above a certain size to “make a selection of basic food products’ sales prices available,” Schneider adds, and that “further details will be regulated, as the tool should not merely allow a price comparison, but also give information on quality … to ensure comparability of prices.”

It is unlikely that such a framework would go as far as the number of products already listed by the DIY comparison websites. Zechner, who, along with other comparison site creators, has met with politicians, is rewriting the website’s code but says he doesn’t have any specific plans for it. He will help others who want to use his open source code to build their own comparison systems for other countries, he says.

In recent days, as an indication of how useful the data is to broader society, the Austrian National Library has told Zechner it plans to archive Heisse Preise and its data. “It allows startups to potentially exploit the data commercially,” Zechner says of the website. “It allows scientific institutions to perform macro- and microeconomic studies that hadn’t been possible before, because the data was simply not available. And it would increase competition between grocery stores, as there’s more transparency in terms of price change strategies.”

Matt Burgess
October 3, 2023
Wired

Israel Responds to Hamas Crimes by Ordering Mass War Crimes in Gaza. Years of impunity for Israeli crimes against civilians have bred a culture of disregard for international law.

Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant used genocidal language and ordered mass war crimes in the occupied Gaza Strip on Monday in response to Hamas’s weekend assault and massacre of Israeli civilians, setting the stage for a large-scale escalation of the violence that has already led to the killing of at least 800 Israelis and more than 500 Palestinians.

Gallant said that he had ordered “a complete siege of the Gaza Strip,” which is home to 2.2 million Palestinians, nearly half of them children. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” he said. “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.”

What Gallant ordered — the collective punishment of a civilian population — amounts to a war crime under international law, as well as potentially a crime against humanity and the crime of genocide, some international law experts have pointed out. Hamas’s massacre of civilians and taking of at least 150 hostages, whom it has reportedly threatened to execute in response to the targeting of civilians in Gaza, are also war crimes.

…

War crimes fall under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, which, in 2021, opened an investigation on war crimes and crimes against humanity in the occupied Palestinian territories. The investigation prompted fierce opposition by Israel and the United States — neither of which are members of the court — and it has largely stalled.

Human rights advocates quickly pointed to Gallant’s words as an “admission of intent” to commit crimes, calling on ICC prosecutor Karim Khan to take notice. But international officials’ responses to his comments were largely muted. The Biden administration has repeatedly stated its support for Israel since Saturday’s attack, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken pledging the U.S.’s “unwavering focus on halting the attacks by Hamas” but offering no immediate comment on Israel’s declared retaliation against Palestinian civilians. The ICC’s prosecutor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Intercept.

As human rights advocates and international law experts have long warned, impunity for war crimes only leads to more. Last year, as Russia staged a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many pointed to the impunity for war crimes it committed in Syria and elsewhere and argued that the lack of accountability directly enabled similar crimes to be committed in Ukraine. The ICC, for its part, responded to Russian crimes in Ukraine by immediately dispatching investigators there, leading to charges implicating Russian leadership all the way up to President Vladimir Putin earlier this year. But there was no such response following Israeli crimes in Gaza, including after military campaigns in 2018, 2021, and 2022 that left hundreds of Palestinian civilians dead.

“If we’ve learned anything through prior escalations, it is that so long as there is impunity for serious abuses, we will continue to see more repression and shedding of civilian blood,” said Shakir. Human Rights Watch called on the ICC “to accelerate its investigation into serious crimes committed by all parties in Palestine.”

While both parties committed heinous crimes, Gallant’s call for a complete siege on Gaza revealed the underlying imbalance at play: While Hamas’s attack shocked Israelis and the world and amounted to the most serious attack on Israel in five decades, it paled in comparison to Gallant’s threat to starve 2 million trapped civilians. “This is why this never was and never will be a ‘war’ of equals,” media critic Sana Saeed noted on Monday. “Because one side has the power to entirely eliminate an entire population, to control whether they live or die.”

Gallant wasn’t the only Israeli leader to tap into genocidal rhetoric in response to Hamas’s attack, with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declaring, “It’s time to be cruel,” and Knesset member Ariel Kallner calling for a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48,” a reference to the massacre and expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians upon Israel’s founding.

Other observers denounced efforts by either party to use crimes committed by the other as justification for committing more crimes.

“Failure of one party to a conflict to abide by the laws of war does not absolve the other party from complying with the laws of war,” noted Sarah Leah Whitson, director of Democracy for the Arab World Now.

“Israel certainly cannot claim the upper moral hand. Israeli government ministers now calling to kill, destroy, crush and even starve the residents of Gaza forget that this is already Israeli policy,” the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem echoed in a statement. “Intentional attacks on civilians are prohibited and unacceptable. There is no justification for such crimes, whether they are committed as part of a struggle for freedom from oppression or cited as part of a war against terror.”

…

Alice Speri
October 9, 2023
The Intercept

Editorial: Netanyahu Bears Responsibility for This Israel-Gaza War (archive.ph)

The disaster that befell Israel on the holiday of Simchat Torah is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister, who has prided himself on his vast political experience and irreplaceable wisdom in security matters, completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession, when appointing Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir to key positions, while embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.

Netanyahu will certainly try to evade his responsibility and cast the blame on the heads of the army, Military Intelligence and the Shin Bet security service who, like their predecessors on the eve of the Yom Kippur War, saw a low probability of war with their preparations for a Hamas attack proving flawed.

They scorned the enemy and its offensive military capabilities. Over the next days and weeks, when the depth of Israel Defense Forces and intelligence failures come to light, a justified demand to replace them and take stock will surely arise.

However, the military and intelligence failure does not absolve Netanyahu of his overall responsibility for the crisis, as he is the ultimate arbiter of Israeli foreign and security affairs. Netanyahu is no novice in this role, like Ehud Olmert was in the Second Lebanon War. Nor is he ignorant in military matters, as Golda Meir in 1973 and Menachem Begin in 1982 claimed to be.

Netanyahu also shaped the policy embraced by the short-lived “government of change” led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid: a multidimensional effort to crush the Palestinian national movement in both its wings, in Gaza and the West Bank, at a price that would seem acceptable to the Israeli public.

In the past, Netanyahu marketed himself as a cautious leader who eschewed wars and multiple casualties on Israel’s side. After his victory in the last election, he replaced this caution with the policy of a “fully-right government,” with overt steps taken to annex the West Bank, to carry out ethnic cleansing in parts of the Oslo-defined Area C, including the Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley.

This also included a massive expansion of settlements and bolstering of the Jewish presence on Temple Mount, near the Al-Aqsa Mosque, as well as boasts of an impending peace deal with the Saudis in which the Palestinians would get nothing, with open talk of a “second Nakba” in his governing coalition. As expected, signs of an outbreak of hostilities began in the West Bank, where Palestinians started feeling the heavier hand of the Israeli occupier. Hamas exploited the opportunity in order to launch its surprise attack on Saturday.

Above all, the danger looming over Israel in recent years has been fully realized. A prime minister indicted in three corruption cases cannot look after state affairs, as national interests will necessarily be subordinate to extricating him from a possible conviction and jail time.

This was the reason for establishing this horrific coalition and the judicial coup advanced by Netanyahu, and for the enfeeblement of top army and intelligence officers, who were perceived as political opponents. The price was paid by the victims of the invasion in the Western Negev.

The above article is Haaretz’s lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel.

Haaretz Editorial
October 8, 2023
Haaretz

Settlers take advantage of Gaza war to launch West Bank pogroms

Israeli settlers and soldiers have killed 51 Palestinians in the West Bank this past week, with two villages entirely depopulated after attacks.

…

A Palestinian in At-Tuwani, a village in the Masafer Yatta region of the South Hebron Hills, is in critical condition after a settler, accompanied by an Israeli soldier, invaded the community on Friday and shot him at point blank range. The attack was documented by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

Israeli soldiers are establishing new checkpoints to block the movement of Palestinian villagers. On Thursday evening, near Yabrud, northeast of Ramallah, solders shot at a vehicle carrying a Palestinian family, according to members of the family. Randa Abdullah Abdul Aziz Ajaj, 37, was killed, and her son, Ismail Ajaj, was hit in the foot and shoulder. Her husband and another child were also in the vehicle but were not injured. An IDF spokesperson claimed soldiers opened fire because the car was “driving wildly” and the soldiers felt threatened.

…

Settlers in Esh Kodesh and the surrounding area had sent warning messages to Qusra’s residents in the previous two days, in which they threatened to take revenge in response to Hamas’ assault in southern Israel. In one photo, which was sent to the residents few days ago, a group of masked men can be seen holding fuel tanks, an electric saw, and axes, with a caption in Hebrew and Arabic: “To all the rats in the sewers of Qusra village, we are waiting for you and we will not feel sorry for you. The day of revenge is coming.”

According to a Qusra resident who asked to be identified by just his first name, Abed, “It started at noon, when 20 masked men invaded the village and stoned the houses of families living on the edge of the village. They came from the direction of the Esh Kodesh outpost. We ran there to get the families out of their homes, because settlers tried to set fire to one of the houses. A mother, father, and a girl were inside. While we were trying to get the little girl out of the house, they started shooting at us, hitting the girl. They killed three people.”

According to eyewitnesses, at least 15 Palestinians were wounded by gunfire. Medical personnel who treated the wounded said that the condition of some of them was critical.

…

Along with the incident in Qusra, settlers have attacked at least 18 Palestinian villages throughout the West Bank since Hamas’ assault on Saturday, according to Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights group. The army announced that, due to the security situation, the police will distribute M-16 rifles to settlers in the West Bank. Media organizations affiliated with extremist settler groups in the area called on settlers to prepare to “conquer the villages near you” and to “destroy anyone who joins the enemy.”

On Monday, settler violence led to the expulsion of every resident of Al-Qanub, a small village north of Hebron comprising eight families, and which is located near the settlements of Ma’ale Amos and Asfar. The village residents said that settlers burned three houses — made of iron rods covered with thick cloth — with all their belongings inside.

…

Families living on the outskirts of Turmus Ayya, near the Shiloh settlement, said that eight armed settlers, partially dressed in military uniforms, ordered them to leave their homes; they also set up a sort of checkpoint, which they have been operating ever since. “On the first day of the war, a group of settlers built a room a few meters from our houses, closed our access road to the houses, and since then have been there all the time,” said Abdullah, a local resident. “We are 25 people, many children and women, who cannot leave or enter the village. We reach our homes through the olive groves. Anyone who leaves their house, including women, is stopped and searched.”

In a mountainous area in southern Hebron, settlers on Tuesday violently attacked residents of two tiny villages, and settlers bulldozed two houses in the village of Simri, whose residents had previously left due to settler violence.

…

Yuval Abraham
October 13, 2023
+972 Magazine

A Textbook Case of Genocide: Israel has been explicit about what it’s carrying out in Gaza. Why isn’t the world listening?

On Friday, Israel ordered the besieged population in the northern half of the Gaza Strip to evacuate to the south, warning that it would soon intensify its attack on the Strip’s upper half. The order has left more than a million people, half of whom are children, frantically attempting to flee amid continuing airstrikes, in a walled enclave where no destination is safe. As Palestinian journalist Ruwaida Kamal Amer wrote today from Gaza, “refugees from the north are already arriving in Khan Younis, where the missiles never stop and we’re running out of food, water, and power.” The UN has warned that the flight of people from the northern part of Gaza to the south will create “devastating humanitarian consequences” and will “transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation.” Over the last week, Israel’s violence against Gaza has killed more than 1,800 Palestinians, injured thousands, and displaced more than 400,000 within the strip. And yet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised today that what we have seen is “only the beginning.”

Israel’s campaign to displace Gazans—and potentially expel them altogether into Egypt—is yet another chapter in the Nakba, in which an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes during the 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel. But the assault on Gaza can also be understood in other terms: as a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes. I say this as a scholar of genocide, who has spent many years writing about Israeli mass violence against Palestinians. I have written about settler colonialism and Jewish supremacy in Israel, the distortion of the Holocaust to boost the Israeli arms industry, the weaponization of antisemitism accusations to justify Israeli violence against Palestinians, and the racist regime of Israeli apartheid. Now, following Hamas’s attack on Saturday and the mass murder of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians, the worst of the worst is happening.

Under international law, the crime of genocide is defined by “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” as noted in the December 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In its murderous attack on Gaza, Israel has loudly proclaimed this intent. Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant declared it in no uncertain terms on October 9th: “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.” Leaders in the West reinforced this racist rhetoric by describing Hamas’s mass murder of Israeli civilians—a war crime under international law that rightly provoked horror and shock in Israel and around the world—as “an act of sheer evil,” in the words of US President Joe Biden, or as a move that reflected an “ancient evil,” in the terminology of President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen. This dehumanizing language is clearly calculated to justify the wide scale destruction of Palestinian lives; the assertion of “evil,” in its absolutism, elides distinctions between Hamas militants and Gazan civilians, and occludes the broader context of colonization and occupation.

The UN Genocide Convention lists five acts that fall under its definition. Israel is currently perpetrating three of these in Gaza: “1. Killing members of the group. 2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. 3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The Israeli Air Force, by its own account, has so far dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza, which is one of the most densely populated areas in the world—almost as many bombs as the US dropped on all of Afghanistan during record-breaking years of its war there. Human Rights Watch has confirmed that the weapons used included phosphorous bombs, which set fire to bodies and buildings, creating flames that aren’t extinguished on contact with water. This demonstrates clearly what Gallant means by “act accordingly”: not targeting individual Hamas militants, as Israel claims, but unleashing deadly violence against Palestinians in Gaza “as such,” in the language of the UN Genocide Convention. Israel has also intensified its 16-year siege of Gaza—the longest in modern history, in clear violation of international humanitarian law—to a “complete siege,” in Gallant’s words. This turn of phrase that explicitly indexes a plan to bring the siege to its final destination of systematic destruction of Palestinians and Palestinian society in Gaza, by killing them, starving them, cutting off their water supplies, and bombing their hospitals.

It’s not only Israel’s leaders who are using such language. An interviewee on the pro-Netanyahu Channel 14 called for Israel to “turn Gaza to Dresden.” Channel 12, Israel’s most-watched news station, published a report about left-leaning Israelis calling to “dance on what used to be Gaza.” Meanwhile, genocidal verbs—calls to “erase” and “flatten” Gaza—have become omnipresent on Israeli social media. In Tel Aviv, a banner reading “Zero Gazans” was seen hanging from a bridge.

Indeed, Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed. Perpetrators of genocide usually do not express their intentions so clearly, though there are exceptions. In the early 20th century, for example, German colonial occupiers perpetrated a genocide in response to an uprising by the Indigenous Herero and Nama populations in southwest Africa. In 1904, General Lothar von Trotha, the German military commander, issued an “extermination order,” justified by the rationale of a “race war.” By 1908, the German authorities had murdered 10,000 Nama, and had achieved their stated goal of “destroying the Herero,” killing 65,000 Herero, 80% of the population. Gallant’s orders on October 9th were no less explicit. Israel’s goal is to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza. And those of us watching around the world are derelict in our responsibility to prevent them from doing so.

Raz Segal
October 13, 2023
Jewish Currents

When science showed in the 1970s that gas stoves produced harmful indoor air pollution, the industry reached for tobacco’s PR playbook

…

The industry’s efforts went well beyond careful product placement, according to new research from the nonprofit Climate Investigations Center, which analyzes corporate efforts to undermine climate science and slow the ongoing transition away from fossil fuels. As the center’s study and a National Public Radio investigation show, when evidence emerged in the early 1970s about the health effects of indoor nitrogen dioxide exposure from gas stove use, the American Gas Association launched a campaign designed to manufacture doubt about the existing science.

As a researcher who has studied air pollution for many years – including gas stoves’ contribution to indoor air pollution and health effects – I am not naïve about the strategies that some industries use to avoid or delay regulations. But I was surprised to learn that the multipronged strategy related to gas stoves directly mirrored tactics that the tobacco industry used to undermine and distort scientific evidence of health risks associated with smoking starting in the 1950s.

The gas industry relied on Hill & Knowlton, the same public relations company that masterminded the tobacco industry’s playbook for responding to research linking smoking to lung cancer. Hill & Knowlton’s tactics included sponsoring research that would counter findings about gas stoves published in the scientific literature, emphasizing uncertainty in these findings to construct artificial controversy and engaging in aggressive public relations efforts.

…

This has been known for a long time. For example, a 1998 study that I co-authored showed that the presence of gas stoves was the strongest predictor of personal exposure to nitrogen dioxide. And work dating back to the 1970s showed that indoor nitrogen dioxide levels in the presence of gas stoves could be far higher than outdoor levels. Depending on ventilation levels, concentrations could reach levels known to contribute to health risks.

Despite this evidence, the gas industry’s campaign was largely successful. Industry-funded studies successfully muddied the waters, as I have seen over the course of my research career, and stalled further federal investigations or regulations addressing gas stove safety.

This issue took on new life at the end of 2022, when researchers published a new study estimating that 12.7% of U.S. cases of childhood asthma – about one case in eight – were attributable to gas stoves. The industry continues to cast doubt on gas stoves’ contribution to health effects and fund pro-gas stove media campaigns.

…

The commercial interests of many industries, including alcohol, tobacco and fossil fuels, aren’t always compatible with the public interest or human health. In my view, exposing the tactics that vested interests use to manipulate the public can make consumers and regulators savvier and help deter other industries from using their playbook.

Jonathan Levy
November 3, 2023
The Conversation

https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/arti ... 85/7457939

As Wikipedia relies solely on the efforts of its volunteer editors, its success might be particularly affected by toxic speech. In this paper, we analyze all 57 million comments made on user talk pages of 8.5 million editors across the six most active language editions of Wikipedia to study the potential impact of toxicity on editors’ behavior. We find that toxic comments are consistently associated with reduced activity of editors, equivalent to 0.5–2 active days per user in the short term. This translates to multiple human-years of lost productivity, considering the number of active contributors to Wikipedia.

Ukraine Has a Civil Rights Problem
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/12/18/uk ... -religion/

Zajímavé zahraniční video o současném dění:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OMbBpZqs88

Rumunsko přezbrojuje na moderní zbraňové systémy a mimo jiné kupuje F-35 a Patrioty.

https://www.novinky.cz/clanek/zahranicn ... i-40456765

Švédsko podobně, i po 210 létech míru chce být připraveno ke své obraně a moderně vyzbrojeno..

https://www.novinky.cz/clanek/zahranicn ... i-40456825

Česká opozice chce mír a na válku se připravovat nechce. V případě napadení ČR, podle tohohle populismu Aleny Schillerové, budou naši vlast asi bránit kombajny plechové kavalerie v bojovém svazu agroholdingu.

https://www.novinky.cz/clanek/domaci-ne ... k-40456872