organization:national parliament

How to disrupt public transport and become rich in 10 steps
▻http://bettlerverlag.de/openmtr

Latest version : ▻http://openmtr.de/openmtr

Attention : the business concept and the belonging steps described below are the property of Bettlerverlag, a publishing corporation under german law soon to be transferred to a more business-friendly and sunnier environment with palm trees, big cigars and lots of tropical drinks.

Imagine you want to make big money by offering public transport
at lower rates than official MTR systems.

In the beginning you will need

– an idea (haha !)
– complete lack of scruples (no problem for an average MBA)
– a bunch of young brainless idiots to adopt your idea (hey, there are plenty of them out there)
– some basic funding (just for the start, early adaptors of your idea will soon take care of necessary financial input)

Step 1
Steal the code of an open source MTR app, add user subscription and payment modules.

Step 2
Buy half a dozen ladders or better find half a dozen idiots who own a ladder.

Step 3
Find first round investor and create a Cayman Islands Ltd. to collect your new riches.

Step 4
Start marketing your app by calling it “The perfect free MTR app” or something more creative.
Offer free rides for the first week.

Step 5
Place your ladder-owning idiots on the platforms of the most important MTR stations of the first city to disrupt (Make sure they have a season ticket allowing them to stay on the platform there for some time)

Step 6
Use your app to route first week offer users

Step 7
Use your ladder-owning idiots to help users climb on the roof of trains

Step 8
Produce some video of enthusiast reactions of happy customers who use MTR for 30 per cent of the official price, let them praise the adventurous feeling of the innovative way to use the MTR

Step 9
Introduce a basic monthly subscription at 30 per cent the official MTR rate and find more ladder-owning idiots and customers willing to pay less.

Step 10
Blackmail public transport system operators into accepting your service (invite official journalists to MTR party with lots of drugs, alcohol and girls, have them write stuff about bad old fashioned public MTR, let them praise your consumer liberating app, bribe some city council members into criticising public MTR, they sure will find some stuff which is not working)

After having succeded these steps use second round financing to fill up your cayman wallet and attack additional cities public MTR and transport systems. Repeat the necessary steps until you have conquered the world.

Optional steps

optional step 1
Join forces with the universal basic income movement. They will provide lots of weird an fascinating reasons why your app is the solution to all and any transport problem in the world. Use the terms “free”, “grassroot” and “bottom up”)

optional step 2
Introduce agility. You will make more money through total control of even the smallest step towards completion of your product backlog.

Optional step 3
Refine your brand name. Make your initial errors / crimes forgotten and polish the image of your brand.

Optional step 4
Have the city council or the national parliament adopt a law to legalize and foster your business concept. Follow the example of german Gesetz zur Bevorrechtigung des Carsharing (Carsharinggesetz - CsgG).
▻https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/csgg/CsgG.pdf

Optional step 5
Pay no taxes.
In fact this is not optional but it did not fit into the official concept.

Inquire about investment opportunities at
investorrelations@openmtr.de

#transport_public #startup #disruption

New parties with old faces perform well in local elections
▻http://www.kyivpost.com/content/politics/new-parties-with-old-faces-perform-well-in-local-elections-401684.html

Ukraine’s local elections on Oct. 25 saw a whole range of new parties gain seats across the country. Yet, behind the new facade, there were plenty of old faces.

The 94 percent of election results available on Nov. 9 show that three new political parties — Our Land (Nash Kray), Revival (Vidrodzhennia) and UKROP (Dill) — made it into top 10 country-wide in popularity.

Our Land already received more than 4,100 seats in the regional and local councils, becoming the third among party lists after the Bloc of President Petro Poroshenko and ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna Party. UKROP took seventh place among the parties with more than 1,800 seats in councils, following by Revival with more than 1,500 seats.

The experts say that Our Land and Revival have been largely formed to shelter the escapees from ousted President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, while UKROP is a political project of billionaire oligarch and former Dnipropetrovsk governor Ihor Kolomoisky.

Now these parties have a local base from which to convert their electoral — and possible future governing — success into seats in the national parliament

Après les nouveaux habits du Parti des régions, un nouveau parti d’oligarques…

The success of UKROP party has absolutely different grounds.

A creation of billionaire Kolomoisky and infamous Dnipropetrovsk businessman Gennady Korban, the party positioned itself as a “patriotic force.” Party’s full name literally means “Ukrainian Union of Patriots.” UKROP (or dill) is also the way Russian-backed separatists derogatorily call the Ukrainian soldiers.

Kolomoisky and Korban were credited with preventing the separatist advancement in the summer of 2014 by financing volunteer battalions and various PR campaigns. Now the prosecutors accuse Korban of running an organized crime group.

Another factor which contributed to UKROP’s success is financial – the party had one of the most expensive campaigns with a massive number of billboards advertising the party.

… et les nouveaux micro-partis locaux.

The local elites are responsible for dozens of the new parties created this year.

This way they tried to create the illusion for the electorate that the new people and new ideas stand behind them, Fesenko of Penta said. The local elites also wanted to show the government that "they are neither for nor against Kyiv and can continue on as they always did,” he added.

One more reason — the local elites do not want to pay the unofficial fees to get on the lists of the bigger parties. Similarly, parties like Bloc Petro Poroshenko might not want these local elites for fear they could tarnish their reputations, especially if they are too close to Kyiv, Fesenko said.

Bref, #plus_ça_change_plus_c'est_la_même_chose

Un mort et de nombreux policiers blessés devant le Parlement ukrainien
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/europe/article/2015/08/31/forte-explosion-devant-le-parlement-ukrainien-apres-le-vote-d-une-reforme-co

Au moins quatre-vingt-dix policiers ont été blessés par une explosion devant le Parlement ukrainien, à Kiev, lundi 31 août. Arsen Avakov, le ministre de l’intérieur de l’Ukraine, a annoncé qu’un des policiers était mort, après avoir reçu un fragment d’un engin explosif dans le cœur. La déflagration a eu lieu alors que des affrontements avaient lieu entre la police et des manifestants, qui protestaient contre l’adoption en première lecture par les députés d’un projet de loi controversé donnant davantage d’autonomie aux territoires de l’Est prorusse.

Turkey’s Double Game in Syria
Christopher de Bellaigue
▻http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/oct/14/turkey-double-game-syria

(...)

One might wonder why the Turkish government would risk endangering a peace process with the PKK that has greatly contributed to Turkish stability, improved human rights and the rule of law, and facilitated economic development. The Turks may be calculating that the PKK cannot easily abandon a process that has brought its members new political power in some Kurdish areas and allowed Kurdish nationalist MP back into the national parliament. They also seem to believe that the Kurds are due a sharp reality check as to the impossibility of replicating Syria-style autonomy in Turkey. The ISIS advance on Kobani could serve that purpose, while the contraction of the Kurdish fief pushes the nationalists onto the tender mercies of the Turkish state—as Kobani has demonstrated. Weakened by the defeats suffered by its affiliate in Syria, the PKK may be less able to resist political demands made by the Turkish government if serious negotiations are renewed toward a final settlement.

For the United States, these calculations suggest that getting meaningful Turkish cooperation on ISIS may require a renewed US commitment toward toppling Assad. Responding to pressure from Washington, the Turkish government has agreed to join the US in training “moderate” Syrian fighters on Turkish soil. But the Turks have not approved America’s request to use their base at Incirlik in southern Turkey for US attacks on ISIS. That will only happen, the Turkish prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, has insisted, if the US removes its longstanding opposition to Turkish demands for a no-fly zone over northern Syria and for the establishment of secure humanitarian corridors for displaced Syrians close to the border.

As Turkey and the United States negotiate the minutiae of a war they are fighting for different reasons, the wider fate of the Kurds is finely poised. The vile situation in Kobani has become a case study in the ways that civil wars suck in neighbors and break down alliances as the innocent are put to the sword. It is also a powerful refutation of the trite adage that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. In this conflict there are no friends.