[Quote:]

De Nederlandse economie heeft geprofiteerd van de goedkope gulden eind jaren negentig. Zowel voor de export als voor de werkgelegenheid was de onderwaardering van de gulden positief, zei minister Zalm van Financiën zondag in het Radio 1 Journaal.

Directeur H. Brouwer van De Nederlandse Bank zei dit weekeinde in een gesprek met Het Parool dat de gulden 5 tot 10 procent te laag is ingeruild voor de euro. De invoering van de eenheidsmunt leidde daardoor tot prijsstijgingen.

Zalm gaf toe dat Nederland na de komst van de euro min of meer de rekening heeft betaald van de eerdere onderwaardering. Dat de prijzen stegen, wil hij daar echter niet enkel en alleen aan toeschrijven. “De prijsstijging was al ingezet voor de euro”, stelde de minister.

Volgens de bewindsman is de onderwaardering van de gulden “oud nieuws”. Destijds is volgens hem besloten geen actie te ondernemen, omdat de onderwaardering positief voor de concurrentiepositie van Nederland en de werkgelegenheid was.

Jarenlang hebben ze geroepen dat de Euro niet voor prijsstijgingen heeft gezorgd, en dat iedereen die dat beweerde niet goed bij z’n hoofd was.

Vraag: Hoe weet je of een politicus liegt?
Antwoord: Z’n lippen bewegen.

(via slashdot)
[Quote:]

In March, U.S. troops in Iraq shot to death Nicola Calipari, the Italian intelligence agent that rescued the kidnapped journalist Giuliana Sgrena. U.S. commission on the incident produced a report which public version was censored for more than one third. Now Italian press is reporting that all confidential information in the report is available to the public, just by copying “hidden” text from the PDF and pasting it in a word processor. The uncensored report can now be directly downloaded.

The italian press is going batshit over this, but none of them is mentioning a weblog reported it first.

[Quote:]

Changing the subject, a very interesting news story came out this week. Steve Jobs of Apple is reportedly furious about an unauthorized biography of him that has been published by John Wiley. iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business by Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon bothered Jobs so much, we’re told, that he ordered all Wiley books (notably the For Dummies series) pulled from Apple’s more than 100 stores.

Nonsense.

I have written things about Steve Jobs that are far worse than anything in this book, which is in many ways just a refresh of an earlier Jobs biography by Young. Steve hasn’t black-listed me. In fact he rather likes his bad-boy image and loves to hear the nasty things that people have said about him.

So what is this all about? As always, I have a theory.

I think this episode with Wiley and Apple’s earlier legal attacks on people who it accused of leaking product information are part of a campaign to look tough to movie studios and record companies. As I’ve surmised before, Apple is trying to put together a high definition movie download service that requires content from all the major movie studios. If Steve looks soft on IP theft or unwilling to flex his corporate legal muscles, the studios may think he won’t adequately protect their corporate jewels.

And that’s all it is. Steve couldn’t care less about this book.

Nor is Wiley unhappy. Here’s word from a breathless reader inside the Wiley machine: “The news broke everywhere from the NY Times to Forbes. And the book shot up to #144 on Amazon, which is unheard of. Everyone is running around like crazy.