Heatwave
A strange time. Like things are happening and yet they aren't. Like we are frozen in time in this summer heatwave.
Last weekend I didn’t write, not out of laziness, but rather a genuine feeling that I have nothing to say. Nothing important to add to the conversation of the moment. Is there even a conversation? I have been reading about the horrible heatwave across much of the U.S. while here in central Europe we have been experiencing one of our own. This is the time of year when local news outlets come up with ridiculous stories “how to beat the heat” with all sorts of tips from airing out your apartment at night to making sure you drink enough water, while failing to mention the number one tip which central Europe stubbornly refuses to adopt: air conditioning. Here in Vienna it is actually banned to hang a unit outside of your apartment or on your balcony. If you do it anyway, you will be taken to court and your neighbors can sue you for noise polution. So even when the temps hit 90F+ in the shade and humid, many, many people are suffering in the direct sense of that word. Of course the wealthy have work-arounds, and many offices do have A/C, but I was in a public hospital earlier this week with a couple and their 7-month old baby, and the hospital didn’t have any A/C (constructed in 1985, I might add). The baby was wearing only a diaper, everyone was dripping in sweat (literally) as the doctor, facing an open window through which more afternoon sun found its way into the examination room, patiently explained about the next steps in treatment (in-patient). I imagined mom and baby experiencing a sleepless night on a higher floor, also without air conditioning.
So in this context, everyone’s brains feel a little friend, mine no exception. School only finished (finally) yesterday, but the last week was so hot that most teachers plan a week of excursions and activities, rather than subjecting all involved to sit in unbearably hot classrooms. Air conditioning has not yet reached a single Austrian school to my knowledge. One of my kids was on a trip to Budapest (also sweltering). When I asked her if she visited the synagogue, she could not remember. Some of the kids snuch out for a dip in the Danube one evening and got in trouble. The current was swift. One couldn’t really blame the for wanting to get wet. My other kid reported back from an excursion to a prison for sex-offenders (I say nothing about who comes up with these ideas), that it is “low-key really nice in prison” in Austria, and she could understand why someone might be tempted to “commit a crime because you get to play with horses and eat free food”. That just about sums up my feelings towards the socialist European experiment, which feels like a ticking time bomb, from an economic point of view. I cannot see the future. I do not understand how the math will keep mathing.
Ukrainians in Vienna are in a bit of a panic, not only as they read the news from Ukraine and worry about loved ones still there, but also because universal health insurance in Austria will become a thing of the past as of July 12. After then, the only Ukrainians with automatic health insurance in Austria will be those working at least twenty hours per week (legally), and those who have asked for government basic care payments (these come with restrictions like having to report all other sources of income and any trips abroad, and being forced to register with the job center, which usually sends you to German classes as step one). I have had some Kafka-esque conversations with the staff of said government health insurance which go something like this.
Hi, I would like to ask how much it would cost for this mother to insure herself and her child. She has only minimal online income.
I cannot tell you how much it will cost, could be anything from €130 to €500 per month.
So how does it work then?
You have to fill out two forms (points to the wall of sad blanks which have been photocopied a thousand times over), submit them, and then you will get a bill in the mail.
Ok, but what if it is too expensive, can you then say you changed your mind?
No, you have to pay for at least one month.
And what about the kid?
The kid you can only add after the mother has insurance.
The mother in this story was too nervous to hand back the forms, even after we collected three months of bank statements from her bank to prove she isn’t wealthy.
Asking people to self-insure while forcing them to say yes to a contract with a mystery price tag is not for the faint of heart.
Then again, nothing in life is free. This was all free for over three years (a giant exception was made for anyone with a Ukrainian passport), and it put a huge financial strain on the system. I must admit I know no one who so enthusiastically undergoes all sorts of voluntary and non-urgent health examinations. It must be some sort of trauma leftover from Soviet medicine, or a belief in everything “European”. That experiment will now come to an end, and it will be interesting to see how many will voluntarily pay to keep it up. Ukrainians are technically not required to have health insurance in Austria, but should they need healthcare, they will be billed for it accordingly. This scares many people, understandably.
I honestly have no comments on current events other than to say it is a state state of planet earth when the biggest news event is a gaudy billionaire wedding between two people too old to become parents again. It feels like the only Americans who can afford to “do Europe” anymore are doing it this summer in the most tacky ways possible. My TikTok feed reminds me of young semicelebs “discovering” Greece and Croatia, and then when I open Booking.com, I sigh in frustration because all of these Americans discovering Eurosummer is making it rather unaffordable for the rest of us. Which is sad. Europeans are not doing the same thing in return. I imagine most have stopped travelling to the U.S. entirely. So now both dollars and Euros are competing for the same limited spots, and the platinum credit cards will win out. The mega wealthy do not care about the exchange rate being particularly shitty right now. They get their Eurosummer content, the rest of us will have to pay triple what we paid ten years ago for a beach chair and umbrella.
A friend sent me this article, which just feels very on brand for 2025.
Sold to the Trump family: one of the last undeveloped islands in the Mediterranean
I heard mumblings of some conference earlier this summer in Albania featuring Trump’s investor son-in-law (also of course in Venice this weekend), and it I suppose isn’t surprising that the same team trying to develop the former ministry of defense in Belgrade bombed by NATO is also keen to turn an entire Albanian island into a resort. But I think Albania will have the last laugh, especially when I got to this paragraph:
“The trade-off is substantial: zero taxes during the construction phase and the state takes care of all infrastructure, including water, electricity and sewage, according to Kumbaro. Everything else – the sun, the sea, the monk seals and the subtropical jungle – is already there.”
The state takes care of all infrastructure.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA.
So we know how this ends.
There is an island in Montenegro in a beautiful picturesque bay, surrounded by turquoise waters and right next to a full-service, deepwater port and international airport. It once was home in the 1980s to a Club Med, camping-style. The island is still for sale, the problem being of course that no one has figured out how to bring in water or electricity. Price tag? 9 figures.
There was a shocking, even by Russian standards, report released last week about a “trend” amongst billionaires looking for fun in the bedroom. Virgins. With pimps recruiting and luring them in. Ages? 15 to 16. The Russian government even pressed charges (you can imagine how rarely sex offenses are actually prosecuted in Russia), and Austria refused to hand over one of he accused. No words. Hats off to the team of journalists for reporting this entire saga without fear, and for also immediately making an English translation available.
“They Told Me: Deripaska Is the Client. Don’t You Want To Sell Your Virginity?”
The victims (even if they willingly took money and knew what they were being asked to do, they were still kids) were so young that when they were put in front of men who used to be on the covers of newspapers, like Deripaska, they didn’t have any idea who they were.
When they say money can buy anything, it is disgusting to think of the new lows people with everything can stoop to in order to buy things which should never ever be for sale. And those enabling it — of which there were many women.
I have been trying to read an intellectual book, The Story of China, but to be honest I am several chapters in and not yet in AD times. Perhaps it would be a better winter read.
I therefore put in my bookmark and switched to a very anti-intellectual, naughty summer beach-y read, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I don’t want to spoil any of it for you, so I will simply leave the photo here. Some of you may remember James Frey as the author who famously sold zillions of copies of his “memoir” of recovering from hard drug addiction only to have to go back on Oprah and apologize to her for having made up large sections of the story. Clearly some people always bounce back, and he has a knack for fiction because even though his latest book is so OTT parts of it are unbelievable, it is also highly entertaining, and points a big giant finger at the 1% of the American 1%, which certainly feels very on-brand in this soulless moment of 2025 in which we have no more royal weddings (thank goodness) but the replacement shows that billions do not necessarily buy taste nor tact.
That’s about all I can share that I think would be interesting this week. I understand that many of you have chosen not to renew your paid subscriptions, which is compleltely fair as I have not been writing with the intensity nor frequency I once did. I feel the world is filled with “too many words”, so I choose to share them when I really have something to say, and believe brevity is often the better way. I hope it will cool off in a few days and my brain will switch back on. In any case, it does sort of force us to take pause even if we didn’t plan to. Which is perhaps a good thing.
Wishing you and yours a nice weekend. Thanks for reading.
I always enjoy your writings. Thank you
https://open.substack.com/pub/brettscott/p/the-algorithmic-holiday?r=6ba8w&utm_medium=ios