I watch the documentary “Into the deep”

The Danish parliament is in the process of making it illegal to send rockets into space from the Danish airspace. Without the convicted Peter Madsen Denmark has no space industry and as sending people into space is a kind of trial-and-error process where the countries who had made it, did it with the cost of lives, which Denmark is not ready to accept, it makes sense to ban an area which is not no longer of interest to our country.

The documentary, you can find on Netflix, took very long to air. There was a first-edit of the documentary but it was not released because many of his followers would no longer have their name connected to Peter Madsen. Many people are only interested in being part of positive histories when everything works. They are not willing to put in the hard work that are needed to achieve results. They run away when the first obstacle hits them.

Of course Peter Madsens project was cancelled but also his competitors who had made use of many of his design ideas were prevented to launch rockets while they had to start all over in order to prevent him from get credits.

The documentary was hard to watch. So many jobs could have been made. Space industry is not just a question of sending people up there but also making use of the inventions you make in order to get there. In the United States jobs were created based on the learnings from the project. It is jobs we will now not see in Denmark.

Source:

Into the Deep (Internet Movie Database)

A very sad day for firms who wants to establish a department in Denmark

The supreme court in Denmark decided that the state can confiscate a car caught in a speed trap even when the driver is neither the owner or in case of a rental, the person who rented the car. In the specific case the car was leased and the husband of the person who had the car at her disposal took the car to collect food for the hungry children at home and was caught in a random speed trap in Copenhagen.

A new Danish law allows the state to confiscate cars where the driver has been caught speeding. For many years the central government in Copenhagen has tried to clamp down on people living in Jutland where they drive much more faster than the speed the politicians can see driving outside their windows in the center of Copenhagen. In the 1970’s speed limits were introduced based on the road conditions around Copenhagen which of course are totally different from the remote Jutland where you hardly encounter other people especially if you drive in the areas called “The Rotten Banana” which are rural areas outside the cities of Denmark where most people and firms are placed.

A typical car in Denmark has a 170 percent tax bill on it. It is not the case with the leasing market in Denmark where they can use loopholes in the taxation laws to secure cheaper cars. All buses you see driving for the public transport in Denmark are in fact delivered to addresses in Germany before they are put into service in Denmark due to a loophole.

The question the Supreme court in Denmark had to address was. Is it a violation of the European Human rights to confiscate property because another person took possession of it and used it to violate a law?

The court ruled no.

So now firms cannot issue cars to their employees anymore. Most employees would not be able to afford to replace a leased car and the pressure they face to meet sales numbers leave them no option but to break it. Experiences salespersons of carry a history of more than 70 tickets for speeding especially if their market is Jutland where the distances are enormous compared to the distance from one address inside Copenhagen to another. But working as sales persons is based on the ruling from the Danish Supreme court now a thing of the past.

So questions are what international firms can do now there the Danish market is basically off limit. Maybe it was too small from the very beginning with hardly 6 million Danes living in the country but the costs to pursue them and the workers willingness to take open positions is now thanks the Supreme Court ruling totally gone.

People will lose their job. Of course workers from outside Denmark can drive in and try to visit customers but the Danish police are famous for what some consider racial profiling. A person with foreign citizenship also lost his car in a Danish speedtrap not long after he bought it in Germany to drive it to Norway. Most Danes envy Germans due to their speed limits and even the police know how a foreign license plate looks, so Denmark will have to let go of the jobs and the Danish market will not be something to pursue for international business.

It is a sad thing but that is how our laws are. People in Copenhagen do not like succes-stories about people in the countryside. That is why the people in countryside now back their own political party called Danmarks-Demokraterne. Is it the the Law of Jante rewritten? I do not know but it is a sad day.

Sources:

• Beslaglæggelse hos leasingselskab på grund af vanvidskørsel var retmæssig (Homepage of the Danish supreme Court – in Danish language)
• Shakhwan skal i fængsel og han får aldrig sin Lamborghini igen (Nordjyske Tidende – In Danish language)
• Tysk momsfidus sparer danske busser for millioner (Berlingske Tidende – In Danish language)
• Law of Jante (Wikipedia)