Reading time Schopenhauer

Pirate chancellor makes pact & double pack - with double whammy.
A committee of inquiry on Faeser - without Faeser.
Ukraine on the offensive - must win.
The climate on the defensive - will lose.
The return of the mask - Part 27.
Find out more in our +++live tickers+++ about the end of the world.

Such headlines and the accompanying cover pictures stress me out. And yet the headlines encourage me to click on the articles. Curiosity wins out over self-discipline. I then read the body text to the end. Even if the content is not interesting. That's how I was brought up. I wasn't allowed to leave the dining table until I had finished my plate of lentil soup. It's the same with the alphabet soup from Spiegel, Welt and ARD. Always eat up! What's missing apart from the headline, cover picture and the actual text? That's right. The author. They are often called Reuters or have abbreviations such as dpa or AFP. All in all, in retrospect, reading this is a waste of time. Speaking of time. One piece of information within the art form of the article has been particularly infuriating me recently. It may be a small thing, but this small thing offends my intellect.

Reading time 1 minute.

Who came up with this nonsense? Is it a service or a warning? Are there unwritten laws in Germany's editorial offices that the text is offered as audio when it takes three minutes to read, because anything else would be too much for the reader? I don't know. What about books? I turn around and grab ten samples from my bookshelf. Reading time 7 hours 12 minutes! Not a single book spine says that. 

Enough of the nagging. In times of artificial intelligence, the measurement of reading or speaking time can certainly be put to good use. Just think of talk shows. Markus Lanz is speaking. His watch is ticking. Lanz asks a question. His watch continues to run. The guest, I'll call him Ulrich Gerrow, takes a breath and tries to answer. The Lanz clock stops, Ulrich Gerrow's clock starts ticking, but Markus Lanz intervenes after a half-sentence. So the clock changes again. Sounds unfair. At best, it should be like chess. The clocks should run backwards with a fixed time budget for each talk show participant, including the presenter. That would be fair. However. I cherish the hope that the time of political talk shows is running out forever.

Talk shows on TV not for a minute.

From the TV studio to the Bundestag. How long does a question and answer session last in the high house in Berlin? The obvious answer is one hour. In theory, during this hour the Chancellor or one of his ministers must submit to critical questioning by the opposition. Theoretically. The reality is different. Question time begins. The chess clock runs backwards. The Chancellor makes a welcoming opening statement. Minus 10 minutes. His party and traffic light colleagues ask why his own work is so outstandingly good. The Chancellor does them a favor and answers. Minus 30 minutes. That leaves 20 minutes of critical questions from the AfD, sometimes even from the CDU and the Left. But none of these questions are answered. Instead, an evasion in the form of text modules and empty phrases. It must be possible to expose this technically. After all, there's a phrase bank at soccer get-togethers. Why isn't there a phrase clock in the Bundestag? After question time, the phrase clock would show the following:

Response time zero seconds.

I come to the last paragraph. If you don't read it, I see this with one crying and one laughing eye. Crying because I have chosen a topic that is not interesting for you or - even worse - I have poorly implemented an interesting topic. Laughing because you have a competence that I would like to remember again. "The World as Will and Imagination" by Arthur Schopenhauer. That's the name of one of the ten books I'm currently putting back on the shelf. It was too difficult for me to read at the time, the content too depressing. The reading felt endless.

You don't have to spoon up every alphabet soup that is put in front of you.