Next time, I’m bringing my Fez.  Fezzes are awesome.  Especially when they’re little mini-fezzes being worn by monkeys, but even sans monkey, the Fez is probably the ultimate gentleman’s accessory, whether you’re an English colonial gentleman in a dinner jacket, or a hooka-smoking Syrian trader.

The Fezzes (does one capitalize the name of the hat?) in the Yahabibi seem like the real thing, though.  Along with the swords and plates and rugs (take off your shoes and sit around a low table, with tons of cushions, for extra goodness) and belly-dancing videos featuring seductively gyrating Russians constantly distracting you from your dinner and conversation.  In fact, that was the only downside of this restaurant – the lack of a real flesh-and-blood bellydancer, but I guess they don’t do that on Tuesday nights.  And the name of the restaurant just runs off the tongue.  Yahabibi.  Say it.  It makes you happy and want to wear a Fez.

Fare is the standard “Arab” food, for those of us ignoramuses who can’t tell the difference between a Moroccan falafel and a Lebanese burek, and done well, with cute and attentive service to bring the stuff.  The wine list’s not bad either, with the first restaurant serving Kefraya – Lebanese red that we used to really like back at our favorite Lebanese place in Zurich, despite the fact that, at some point, they decided that they were a gourmet vintage and that they’d start charging obscene prices.  I guess someone realized the silliness of that, and brought the cost back down to normal levels.  Also, we were served the wrong wine, which doesn’t matter, because it was pretty good.  That says something for the quality of a wine list, when a waitress screws up your order and you’re still happy.

Go there, sit down, take off your shoes, pig out, have a shisha for dessert – have two, I couldn’t because of a miserable two-week cold.  But I’m going back, dammit.  The food’s just so good.  And I’m wearing my Fez.

Sömmeringstr. 48
50832 Köln
+49 (0) 221 510 7162
yadaary-orienthaus.de

If you’re tired of hearing about it, good.  If you’re not, you haven’t heard enough about it.  If you’re not yet sick to the heart of the vile, cynical idiocy and greed of it all, you don’t understand it.

This is not about the oppressive, cynical, corrupt nature of SOPA – a bill paid for by an industry that has consistently managed to blame everyone but itself for its failed, obsolete business model.  Nor is it about broken lobbying and media industry interference in government, defective intellectual property laws, disproportionate enforcement, undemocratic and secret trade negotiations, or lack of respect for other nations’ sovereignty when pushing your own broken laws on others.

It’s about the inevitability of pointless and restrictive laws that may have, at some point, had their roots in some well-meaning idiot’s mind, but which serve only to advance the agenda of some fringe.  Blackouts, petitions, and logical arguments won’t stop them, because the forces of greed, fanaticism, and stupidity are an inexorable force that gnaw at liberty, free markets, prosperity and common sense.   And yes, it’s a rant, and a fairly discouraged one at that.  Because I feel like ranting.

A great comment, thieved from here, about “the MPAA’s SOPA backup plan”.  I’ll copy it in its entirety:

It’s not a waiting game, it’s a game of poker. Lamar Smith has a royal flush and few people know it.

SOPA may pass. It may not. He doesn’t care, and it doesn’t matter. The MPAA and RIAA started working on their legislative strategy to pass a new anti-piracy bill in late 2010. SOPA was designed to raise the noise. Everyone is playing right into the entertainment industries hand. The lobbyists are laughing manically at the ignorance of the mob. Even Wikipedia and reddit have played into it.

What people don’t know about is the ace: H.R.1981, the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 which is lying in wait. It’s not complete. You see, PCIP is not contestable because it’s about protecting children. They can, and very well might, copy and paste the full text of SOPA to the end of PCIP. That’s the backup. That’s the deal that was struck with entertainment industry lobbyists. We will try to push this anti-piracy bill. It probably won’t work. Don’t worry, we can pass it under an anti-child pornography bill.

There are two things which no Congressman will risk supporting: terrorism and child pornography. There can be no opposition, no discussion. Any anti-piracy law can ALWAYS be reframed as an anti-child pornography bill and it will pass, without even discussion. It will have the full support of the House (minus Ron Paul), the full support of the Senate, and most importantly the full support of the American people. NO ONE wants to risk being called a pedophile.

The entertainment industry has finally caught up with technology. They understand how it works. It took them 15 years, but they know what DNS is. They are going to exploit a fundamental problem with the way DNS is centralized and there is nothing that can be done to stop it. They have found an error in the very architecture of the Internet. The solution, from a free speech standpoint is not to fight it politically. The solution is the fix the error.

We must move to a decentralized system of DNS. It is not impossible. It requires some new thinking and a re-architecture of some web services, but it must be done if we want the Internet, as we know it today, to exist in 5 or 10 years.

Or, put graphically:

The same goes for all laws that seek to limit, ban, violate, and infringe.  PIPA (PROTECT IP), DMCA, CDA (thankfully struck down), Sonny Bony copyright act, Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, ACTA (international treaty), Sinde (ES), HADOPI (FR), LOPPSI (FR), you name it.  Further afield, you’ll find the same things happening in the name of “security – NDAA, the PATRIOT Act, RIPA (UK), PTA (UK) and others.  Phrase something in terms of wanting to “protect the vulnerable” or “prevent evil”, get enough money in the game from those who would benefit materially from your ham-handed assault on individual freedoms and basic intelligence, and you’re good to go.  You don’t even need to demonize your opponents – just disregard them; after all, a large enough part of your electorate can always be convinced that “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.”  Right?

Europe and Canada are not immune to this disease.  It’s in the nature of power and greed for established interests to want to foist their crap on others, in the name of democracy and goodness and fluffy bunnies.

What’s to be done, then?

Naively speaking, I’d say to lobby your elected officials, threaten to boycott companies that support such legislation, run for office yourself, speak out in the media, sign petitions, educate your peers, you name it.

It won’t work, because it’s much more work and cost and grief than any normal human being can afford to deal with over a prolonged amount of time – and the people you are fighting are paid for their efforts.  The more they fight, the better off they are.  The more you fight, the worse off they are.  And they have money – if you ever had any doubt that your supposedly democratically elected representatives are bought, corrupt, and useless, this Mother Jones article, which mistakenly postulates that SOPA is dead, has an interesting link to a Maplight list of campaign contributors to American legislators.  Surprise of surprises, the ones for SOPA got more money from the entertainment industry, the ones against it got more money from the tech industry.

What you can do:

- learn about anonymization methods like TOR and Vidalia.

- support efforts to create distributed communications, like mesh wireless networking – all well and good until you get court rulings like this one in Germany that state that it is the responsibility of the owners of wireless networks to encrypt all traffic.  Bye-bye public access networks.

- use encryption.  SSL for web traffic, TrueCrypt for files, anything and everything – all well and good until you get court rulings like this one in the United Kingdom that state it is the responsibility of the owners of encrypted files to provide decryption keys to police upon request.

- don’t buy from companies that support and lobby for restrictions.  Do buy from those who don’t, and from those who create products free of technological encumbrances to doing what you want with content that you own.  Yes, back to the naive stuff, but it can’t hurt.  Not to mention indie software/movie/music producers.  But I guess you really want to watch Transformers V, huh.

- give money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Free Software Foundation, and their local / national equivalents.  They’re usually decent and smart people, and good at hiring lawyers to fight this sort of crap.

Your elected officials are corrupt shills.  They do not care about reason or logic, they don’t care what they are destroying.  The only thing they care about is re-election and money.

Hope for the best, expect the worst.  Sound vaguely nihilistic / fatalistic?  That’s the idea.  The idiots and cynics are out there, and they’re more motivated and have more money than you.  Remember the golden rule:  he who has the gold makes the rules, and you don’t have the gold.

So there you are, in this utterly packed place, bitching about the crowd, trying to get through to the counter, hovering over some poor harried diner for one of the few standing tables (or one of the even fewer ones with barstools), until you manage to snag one that’s located strategically smack in the path of where the fresh dishes are brought out from the kitchen.

The Euskal Etxea bills you based on an honor system of how many toothpicks or little spoons you have on your plate at the end of the evening, so you’re free to snag more goodies off the big plates of sausages, grilled stuff, cheese, you name it, constantly streaming out to the crowd jostling for a space at the bar.  Silly people, would that they were as smart as you, you big sexy beast you.

Right, I’m not talking about us, sure.  But at least the process of trying to flag down one of the (really friendly) waiters to get a refill (just fill the damn wine glass up all the way and bill me for three, save us both a lot of effort, buddy) is democratic enough.

And the food’s good, much much better than I would have expected of this weird mixture of bar, basque cultural center full of hoardings for strange ethnic bands full of the very dedicated, serious young people, seriously dedicated to the pursuit of popularizing basque culture, and restaurant.  I don’t quite get that part, a somewhat forlorn set of very elegant tables at the back of the joint, with lost-looking diners who must have decided against the near-combat of the tapas bar section in front.  But hey, my own theory is that tapas are the evolution of little reward snacks given to ancient Basque gladiators when they achieve success in the giant oily wrestling pits of San Sebastian.

I’d rather not think about oily wrestlers while eating.  But the tapas here are very very good.

Placeta Montcada 1-3
E-08003 Barcelona, Spain
+39 93 310 2185
www.euskaletxea.cat (guys, it’s kind of cool that you’re using a regional domain suffix, but if the Catalans can get one, so can you…)

I don’t mean these:

I’m talking about real hats.  Fedora, porkpie, flat cap, Panama, bowler, trilby, etc., or if you want to get a bit more in the direction of awesome, ushanka, deerstalker, fez, or even the 19th century blue forage cap I saw on a gentleman on Barcelona, combined with a nice navy peacoat.  Looked pretty damn manly.

There’s this thing that, with certain kinds of functional / regional / traditional clothing which one shouldn’t wear unless you perform that function / are of that region / tradition.  So, unless you’re a cowboy or in Texas, don’t wear cowboy hats and boots.  Unless you’re a Scot, don’t wear kilts, Malay fisherman/sarong, baseball player/baseball cap.  To hell with that.  I may personally think you look silly, but wear whatever the hell you want.  That’s the whole point of this.  Pull up your pants anyway.

But we were talking about hats.  Men’s hats.

A fair number of officious self-proclaimed fashion experts seem to think that anyone who dares to wear a fedora in public in 2012 is trying to look like

Well guess what, Sparky?  Don Draper is a fictional character.  Same goes for

How about mocking people for wanting to look like

True, not a fictional character, but a movie star with a whole battery of wardrobe experts surrounding him.

You might as well expect all men these days to look like Brad Pitt, or to dress like

(And to carry a 9mm everywhere they go, of course, because that wouldn’t ruin the line of a nicely tailored suit.)

5 will get you 10 that the reasonably well-dressed average slob in the 1950s and 1960s looked more like this

or this

Notice anything?

Hint:  hats.  And yes, don’t wear hats a table.

There’s nothing wrong with hats, any more than there is anything wrong with trying to dress nicely like Leonardo di Caprio in Inception (great movie, by the way).  Or Don Draper.  Or Cary Grant.  After all, aren’t movies all about giving us something to aspire to?

Well, some of them more than others, I suppose.  But nonetheless, nice hats are great.

They keep the sun out of your eyes, they keep your head warm and your hair dry.  They give you something to wave at people with, to take off when you enter a room (as an obvious overblown show of courtesy) and to fiddle with when playing with your cell phone may not be appropriate.  And they set you apart from the  idiot making stupid comments about “hipsters” or “ha ha Don Draper”.

Sure, every time there’s a rise in some sort of niche fashion, the silly comments come boiling out of the sewer grates.  Sometimes they’re justified.  But while it’s not entirely my bag of tricks, I don’t understand the ridicule leveled at people who try to bring back certain pretty cool vintage styles (the bartender at the Comstock Saloon in San Francisco sported a nifty handlebar mustache and sleeve garters, like someone straight out of an old Western – he carried it off brilliantly).  You might as well bash cuff links, even though they are much more comfortable for typing, keep your wrists cool, look nice, and give you an excuse to wear Mickey Mouse jewelry with a suit.

In particular, though, I don’t get the vitriol aimed at hats.

I own a beautiful tweed deerstalker I found in a shop in Edinburgh.  It’s cold here, and very wet.  I love that hat.  Yes, I know it’s a hunting cap, and you’re technically not supposed to wear it in the city, but my only response to that is “bite me, my head is warm”.  The same response, incidentally, goes out to every single “oh look, it’s Sherlock Holmes” comment I overhear.  In fact, I think “bite me, my head is warm” makes a pretty good mantra – most of the haters look cold and wet.

The same goes for my muskrat ushanka (found with great difficulty in St. Petersburg, on a sweltering July day, in a shop run by an incredulous Russian woman who spoke about as much English as I spoke Russian, although she had much more of an excuse than I did).  In the words of a former English colleague, “you look like an idiot.  You look like a very warm idiot.”  I actually think it’s pretty snazzy.

If you want to conform and be one of the uniform, dull, black-clad hordes every winter (or jeans-and-t-shirt wearing masses in summer), go ahead, nobody’s stopping you.  I once a statement in some generic men’s fashion magazine that “if you wear a tuxedo to the movie theater, you’re not overdressed, everyone else is underdressed”.  The same goes for nice men’s hats.

I like nice suits, but I don’t feel like wearing one most of the time.  But lay the fuck off of my hats.  They’re good hats.  You should try one sometime.  I’ll be wearing my fez.

Where indeed?

It’ll be a big banquet, the meat will be overdone, dinner will be expensive, your table will suck, and you’ll be surrounded by a bunch of drunks frantically trying to have fun before stumbling home for the night.

Well, the last bit was true.

Kudos to Murmuri for an outstanding meal – serving large numbers of people at the same time must be a daunting task, especially when you manage to maintain top-notch food quality and keep the (good) booze flowing.

They were a bit confused on the service, but thus a bank error in our favor, as they totally forgot to bill us for the massive vodka martini they served me as what I had thought was a welcome drink.  The combination of great cocktails (quality and quantity great) and neglecting to put them on the bill is what keeps me coming back for more…

Decor was tasteful, seafood fresh and cooked just lightly enough, and everything was good, solid gourmet food – nothing chichi, nothing too simple, just right.

Despite the large number of tables in a compact space, nothing felt packed – even when they turned out to be a bit clueless about how to arrange people for dinner and ended up putting some poor souls in the bar area.  Hey, all the better if you’re close to the source of all the goodness – until the very drunken Nicaraguan woman a few tables down from ours started trying to hump the table of an extremely puzzled-looking English couple still finishing their dessert.

I also hope, for the sake of the incredibly bored 8-year-old boy torn between falling asleep and watching his parents get dirty on the dance floor, that he had his own room in the hotel upstairs.

Rambla de Catalunya, 104
08008 · Barcelona, Spain
T +34 935 500 600
www.murmuri.com

Elia was the result of our search for neighborhood joints in our new German digs – and having decent Greek, Italian, and many other kinds of non-French food is one of the perks of having moved out of Paris.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Paris.  I will always love Paris.  I miss Paris.  Paris is the best place in the world, despite the high cost of living, the noise, the overcrowding, the road rage, the corruption, the bums, the tourists, and and and.  I don’t care it’s awesome.  But it’s, well, Paris – Lutetia, the city of lights, whereas we now inhabit humble Colonia Agrippina, former bastion of freezing Roman legionnaires against dark forests full of angry Teutonic tribes.

So all things considered, the food was a pleasant surprise, although I’m still stunned at the fact so many Greeks and Italians would be willing to freeze their asses off up here with the rest of us.  Power to them, though.

Elia’s proprietors are a congenial couple, who will gladly set you up with a (valuable) parking spot right outside despite the chaotic jumble of cars that clogs this part of town.  And inside, it’s a warm, welcoming place with nice decor and awesome food – all the better for occasionally being simple dishes done creatively and with a high attention to quality and detail.  There isn’t a trace of the oft-cheesy faux tavernas that dot German cities, much like Argentine steakhouses in Amsterdam (not that there’s anything wrong with either of those, but sometimes you just want something a bit more genteel).

The wine list is their star attraction – interesting Greek island vintages, well explained, perfectly paired with the dishes.  The owner even sent me several mails after the second time we’d eaten there, having done some research on different vintages as he’d promised.

Good stuff, check it out.

Bachemer Straße 236
50935 Köln, Germany
+49 221/434219 ‎

I love that word.  BACKFICKAN.

It is a restaurant.  The restaurant serves meat.  Lots of meat.  Meat is good.  This would be the ultimate low-carb eatery if their bread were not so damned good.

Djuret’s gimmick is – one animal at a time.  Each menu only serves one type of beast – in our case, this was pig.  And pretty much every part of the pig, every variation on every part of the pig, flavor of every variation on  every part of the pig, and then some.  Also, good bread.  The basic idea (of the meat) seems to be that this is a more sustainable approach to butchery, and that’s fine by me.

This is a bit of an exotic approach (the single animal thing, that is), enough so that the gentleman handling Djuret’s reservations seemed surprised that I would want to eat there.  He sent me a somewhat incredulous mail, asking “are you sure?  Do you know what we do here?”  Yes, dammit.  Meat.

Which brings us to the exchange between ladyfriend and Swedish waiter.

Ladyfriend:  ”What is the difference between pig A and pig B?”

Swedish waiter:  ”Pig A is a Swedish pig.”

LF:  ”Yes, but what it is the taste?”

SW:  ”It is a good pig.”

LF:  ”But what is the difference?”

SW:  ”They are different.”

…

And this is why you order the christmas pig – a piece of wood, at SEK 495.-, containing hot and cold pig sausage, pig paté, pig ham, more pig ham, cognac pig paste, and all the above-mentioned variations on the pig (I’m not sure whether it was a Swedish pig in the end).

I was not particularly sure about my order, though, when ladyfriend began mentioning the sausage’s lovely “anus taste”.  The waiter confirmed, “yes, anus.  Very nice.”

Guys, I know how sausages are made, but please don’t rub it in.

…

Oh, “anis”.  Right.

And it was good.  Very, very good, and plentiful – so much so that the battery of condiments suffered as a result.  Stuffed to bursting, I lay in my seat, looking about me at the meat hooks, hunting-themed paintings, and miniature taxidermy museum decorating the cozy dining room, when maliciously smirking Swedish waiter came by and asked whether I wanted more of anything.

You bastard, of course I do.  I’m going to die.  I am going to pull a Mr. Creosote all over your fine establishment, but BRING ME MORE ANIS SAUSAGE.

Not to mention that dessert was included, along with yet another offer to bring reinforcements once we were done attacking the delicious rice pudding.  Best of all, after we were done cramming vast Roman-orgy quantities of outstanding food and booze down our gullets, we could just stumble right upstairs into our waiting room at the Hotel Victory, there to ride out the night in stomach-bloated delicious agony.  But man, it was worth it.

Breakfast the next morning was out of the question.  But I was seriously tempted to go back and find out what beast they had on the menu the day following the dinner massacre.

BACKFICKAAAANNN.

Lilla Nygatan 5
111 28 Stockholm, Sweden
+46 8 506 400 84
www.djuret.se

A) build a cool hotel

B) fill it with awesome stuff

Seeing as how we are pretty much first-class experts at filling thing with awesome stuff, this concept appealed to us, and Karin asked for a room for her birthday.  Done deal.  Because it’s all for the girl, right.  And the massive amount of antique ship models, miniature cannons, brass naval stuff, and free gingerbread cookies (hooray, Sweden) are just a fringe benefit.

The Victory is named after Horatio Nelson‘s flagship at the battle of Trafalgar.  The history geek in me had to think for a second about this – didn’t the Swedes and the English have some unresolved historical snits that a one-armed sailor running amuck around the Baltic would have aggravated?  No such thing, quite the opposite – one wonders whether the name is at least partially a flippant gesture at Danish guests, seeing as how one of Lord Nelson’s earliest naval victories involved beating the living snot out of the fleet of the ever-beloved Danish neighbors at the battle of Copenhagen.  In fact, the only bit of Anglo-Swedish conflict I was able to dig up, the 1810-1812 Anglo-Swedish war, didn’t even see any casualties inflicted by the nefarious English.

So a tribute to Nelson it is, along with rooms named after Swedish sailing ship captains (replete with photos of their ships and unsmiling wives), heavy carpeting, lots of brass and dark wood, and very friendly, accommodating service – not to all you can eat gingerbread.  Hooray!  It is up there with the magnificent Hotel New York in Rotterdam in terms of decor, and unless you get one of the special big suites at the New York, the Victory’s rooms are cooler.  Just write down the address on a piece of paper, because while Swedish cabbies all speak pretty decent English, your hopeless attempts to pronounce even simple street names will cause you to end up in some godawful suburb – thank the stars for flat rate cab fares from the airport.

The receptionist even dug around their defunct “stuff-we-sell” closet when I realized I’d forgotten all of my cuff links at home, and sold me (at a very reasonable price) a pair of pretty spiffy Swedish “three crowns” logo ones.  I am wearing them now.  I am feeling distinctly patriotic leanings toward my cuff links, in fact.

Aside from the world’s slowest elevator (which you will be able to tolerate, because it’s a pretty nice elevator), and slightly thin doors if you have noisy, hyperactive neighbors, it was a decent place – beds were comfortable, noise levels (despite its central old-town location in the middle of Gamla Stan) were acceptable, and right, lots and lots and lots of model ships.  Enough to make you want to take the stairs instead of the elevator.  You’ll probably arrive faster anyway.

www.thecollectorshotels.se/en/victory/
Lilla Nygatan 5
111 28 Stockholm, Sweden
+46 8 506 400 00

Reason enough to skip breakfast.

Well, actually, no.  There is no good reason for skipping breakfast that does not involve angry bears loose in the hotel.  But a good all-you-can-eat pig-out is close enough.

Berns is one of the oldest eateries in Stockholm, at least if one discounts the presumably numerous little caves where grumpy bearded Nordic types dip horrible pickled fish-creations in tiny, Swedish-liquor-tax-compatible glasses of unspeakable spirits.

No such danger here, though.  Karin had originally booked us for what must be our earliest lunch ever (considering we normally have trouble even getting out of bed before noon on weekends) in the large red-themed dining hall, mainly for the decor (late 19th century glamorous chandeliers, art nouveau mirrors, great big open spaces perfect for fancy balls) but we ended up being magnificently surprised by the uniformly very high caliber of the food and service.

Whether this is always the case, I can’t tell – but for our visit, Berns managed an extensive, high quality “miscellaneous Asian stuff, also, meatballs” buffet.  There wasn’t a theme so much as a smorgasbord of “exotic foods from the faraway empires of Cathay, Corea, Siam and Nippon”.  The seafood was very fresh, the sushi – normally I would be suspicious of mass-produced raw fish product for such an event – on par with anything in a good Japanese place (they wisely limited themselves to 5-6 selections, managing to make each of them great), and everything else, from the oysters over curries to dessert, was top notch.  Buffets, like banquets, seem like one of the more challenging things to do well, and these guys succeeded brilliantly.

Props to the bartender, too, for mixing up one of the better martinis I have had recently – out of baby onions, he immediately cottoned on to the fact that someone ordering a gibson might not necessarily want olives in his vodka, so he intelligently went for a twist.  Good boy.  And a very fair wine list to boot, not to mention the fact that Berns appears to be the only place in Sweden whose tea selection extends beyond “Earl Grey, green, and rooibos”.

I was a bit suspicious about a help-yourself deal; I’d assumed we’d encounter a herd of overly social, determinedly wholesome Swedish matrons muscling their way to what they saw as their fair place by the dumpling baskets.  Not so – while most diners were fairly nicely dressed for what appears to have been a very civilized Sunday eating-out tradition, they were also accordingly well behaved.  And even better, the staff, bless them, were good enough to not only let disappointed diners staring sadly at an empty plate of stuff know that refills might be a while coming and you might as well wait sitting down – but they actually remembered your table and came to let you know when reinforcements had arrived.  Awesome.

Näckströmsgatan 8,
111 47 Stockholm, Sweden
+46 8 566 322 00 ‎
www.berns.se

Over the past 16 years since moving back from the US, I’ve noticed that run-of-the-mill consumer articles (clothes, electronics, auto parts, tools, etc.) – as opposed to luxury (stuff like brand purses) or specialist items, are regularly priced much, much higher in Western Europe than their equivalents in the U.S.

For example, today I tried to buy a small camera replacement battery. A 5-pack of these costs ca. US $5 on amazon.com, plus $3 shipping.

Amazon.fr sells this for €4, with shipping. Amazon.de sells a single battery for €5, with shipping. A specialty camera shop in Germany sells it for €13 (!). A top quality Cree LED torch I recently ordered from China came for $25. I’ve seen the same thing in shops in the Netherlands, France and Germany for 3-4 times that amount, online, and even more than that retail!

The same goes for computer monitors, clothes, cameras, and pretty much anything “routine” I’ve bought recently.

So I spent a few minutes looking at examples – this is totally unscientific and the result of a few bored minutes putzing around Amazon and other online merchants in various countries, as well as my own experience.

Cars: a new base model BMW 335i in Germany (since they’re made there) starts at ca. €36k before tax. The same car in the US starts at $42k – fully €4k less. And let’s not start with iTunes, Steam games, and other digital content that in no way incurs any different manufacturing, handling, or shipping costs for us Europeans than the Americans. Another random one: vitamine C supplements – ca. $15 for 500 capsules in the US, ca, £15 for half that in the UK, around €15 for a fifth of the US amount in France.

In fairness, I’ve noted a drop in online retail computer component prices in the past five years, to the point that some products are priced about the same. But these seem to be exceptions. For every example of “costs as much or more in the US”, I’ll find you five examples to the contrary.

15-25% VAT (as opposed to US state/local sales taxes from 4-10%) does not explain this massive price differential, nor does shipping – most of this stuff is made in Asia. European salaries are not, on the whole, that much higher than American ones (according to wikipedia, the US is actually in second place for median household income worldwide).

I understand that a place like Switzerland would have a high Big Mac Index position – it’s always been expensive, still suffers from stupid customs rules and weird regulations, has high salaries and a culture that historically equates expensive with “good”, and still has fairly limited competition in a lot of areas. But why would this be the same for, for example, a pair of Levi’s in the UK, which are up to 50% cheaper in the US?

It can’t be because of regulation – the Americans are easily on a par with the worst the EU can come up with in things like environmental and product safety restrictions. So that can’t be adding extra cost. And in the EU’s defense, they have agreed on a lot of standardization, like for power plugs, so the cost of adaptation to local markets also can’t explain it (not to mention removal of customs borders and the common currency, while it lasts). Nor rent and such overhead – shops in American city centers face occasionally even higher rent costs than those in any random European city outside of maybe Paris, London, Zurich, Munich, etc. It’s also not market size – while European countries are of course smaller than the US as a whole, you’re not going to gain that much economy of scale from selling to 300 million people as opposed to, say, 80 million Germans or 65 million French.

The only possible theory I can come up with is increased labor costs due to social contributions that employers have to pay, but that by itself can’t be driving up prices so much.

So, what the fuck? Is this just “fuck you because we can” price gouging by merchants, along the lines of what our friends in Australia experience?

tl;dr YOORP PRICES, Y U SO HI?