Thinking of emigrating

Poland’s economy is getting worse every year. Currently the public debt to GDP ratio reaches the critical level of 55%. When it will rise above that level, the government has to re-balance the budget, and that means higher taxes, higher prices and lower salaries. It will also increase the unemployment rate. The coming parliamentary election will not solve the problem, because people – I still don’t know why – are willing to elect the currently ruling party – Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska).

I think the standard of living in Poland will decrease during the next 2-3 years. The GDP growth doesn’t cause the increase  of salaries, because most of it is being consumed by administration, and stupid money transfers, like the promotion of unemployment or earlier retirements for privileged groups. That’s why i think more often about the emigration.

However, I still don’t know which country should I chose. I’m not going to move to any country with worse perspectives than Poland. This is why I don’t consider Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia etc, despite quite warm climate. Southern Europe is also not an option due to current fiscal crisis – even bigger than Polish. I don’t like Scandinavian socialism, despite relatively high salaries there.  The best option for me would be some non-EU country, but that’s currently impossible, or at least difficult.

Personally, I thought of Czech Republic, Switzerland, Austria or Germany. Czech language is quite similar to Polish, so it would be easy for me to learn it. I was to Czech Republic last summer and I liked it – nice people, beautiful country and excellent beer Regarding German-speaking countries – I know German basics, but I can learn more. Do you think those countries are good choice? Or maybe you could recommend me something?

The story of stuff

The video presents a little leftist, but interesting point of view.

I agree with some points – for example, that consumption has dominated our lives. This is because the global overproduction, thus increased supply, of material things. The good example may be a computer games industry, which creates the demand for a new hardware. They work as a “fashion creators”, but working for IT instead of clothing I don’t play computer games, so my 2008 netbook is doing very well with most of its daily tasks, like browsing the web, watching videos or listening to music. I also bought my simple Nokia 2700 in 2008 and it’s still working (but I have to admit that I’m thinking of buying a new phone).

Some tricks that companies made on us are very cruel. There are even magazines (like this or this) which consist only on commercial articles, tests and descriptions of different – mostly electronic – stuff, targeted to typical consumers, making us want all these things.

Firefox (or Iceweasel) 5 in Debian

I used to work on Iceweasel 3.5, which was installed by default in Debian Wheezy (testing). But after I’ve read about a new release of Firefox and its advantages (mostly how fast it is), I decided to switch.

If you want to  install Iceweasel 5.0 (which is the same as Firefox 5.0) on your Debian-powered computer, there’s a simple way to do it. You just need to add:

deb http://mozilla.debian.net/ squeeze-backports iceweasel-release

to your /etc/apt/sources.list file, followed by:

wget -O- -q http://mozilla.debian.net/archive.asc | gpg --import

and then just simply do apt-get update and apt-get install iceweasel, which in fact will update your current Iceweasel installation to the latest release. (You can find more information about installation here)

I must admit that this update was a good idea – the new version of browser is much faster than the previous 3.5, which I’ve been using till now (but still not as fast as Windows version). It also uses less memory and processor. All add-ons and plugins work fine with new Iceweasel (excepting one, but it isn’t even worth to mention).