Caller ID "spoofing" 2970

The work ethic was repressed. Ideology trumps common sense. It was the grand struggle to mediocrity. There were no financial rewards for doing well unless it was for work within the party.

The hangover of that repression is still evident more than a decade after the people were again allowed to strive to do better. The tax and social security systems don't help advertise the benefits of people being at their best.

It's very easy for people to just sit back and cash in on their laziness and whine about how bad things have become since the wall came down.

Fortunately an increasing proportion are realizing that the future is what they make it. They have the freedom to make choices, to take advantage of opportunities and to strive to fulfill their wishes.

Anybody who imagined that "converting" the GDR would take anything less than a generation was kidding only themselves; or running for re-election. They virtually bankrupted the Federal Republic in order to repair the GDR's decrepid infrastructure to make it look like the West.

That didn't in itself change the mindset of the people subjected to 4 decades of "dis-motivation". e.g. Many of the former GDR's people expected to be "given jobs". That in a region where prior to the wall coming down, were chronically under-employed; largely due to pervasive mis-management resulting in lack of resources, inflexible product lines and no customers for goods that could be produced for export using cheap labour. -- "Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia ASCII ribbon campaign "Laws do not persuade just because X against HTML mail they threaten." and postings Lucius Annaeus Seneca, c. 4BC - 65AD.