AquaDom
The AquaDom in Berlin, Germany, is a 25 meter tall cylindrical acrylic glass aquarium with built-in transparent elevator. It is located at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Berlin-Mitte. The DomAquarée complex also contains a hotel, offices, a restaurant, and the aquarium .The outside cylinder was manufactured on-site from five pieces; the inside cylinder for the elevator was delivered in one piece. The Aquadom is the largest acrylic cylinder in the world, with a diameter of about 11 meters, built on a 9 meters tall concrete foundation. Filled with 1,000,000 liters of seawater, it contains over 1,500 fish of 50 species. The feeding of the fish and the cleaning of the fish tank is performed daily by 3-4 full-time divers. They need 8kg fish food.
This can't be a fun time to serve as a White House economist. Almost 60 percent of Americans believe the recovery has not begun and give the president poor marks on his handling of both the economy and the deficit. A majority of independents "strongly" disapprove of the White House's efforts. To an economist, the causality is clear: people are angry about the weak recovery, and so a government that hasn't done enough to counteract the second-worst financial crisis in the last century needs to do more. But public disapproval makes doing more impossible. In fact, by empowering congressional Republicans, its made doing less -- moving prematurely to austerity -- a virtual certainty.
We may be stuck in an economic crisis, but we're long past the point of being interested in what economists have to say about ending it. Last weekend, Republicans succeeded in forcing Nobel-prize winning economist Peter Diamond to withdraw his nomination to serve on the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors. Their reasoning? He was unqualified. For two years now, economists on both sides of the political aisle have been begging Congress to cut the obvious deal: significant short-term stimulus paired with two or three or four times as much long-term deficit reduction. We're nowhere near cutting that deal. About half of official Washington is now pretending that tax cuts have nothing to do with deficits and tax increases have no place in closing deficits, a position even conservative economists consider extreme. Is that why Austan Goolsbee is leaving? Perhaps not. The Chicago economist has been with Obama since the campaign (and in fact worked on his initial Senate campaign). That's a long time to be in the political pressure cooker. It's a long time to be away from your university, and to ask your family to accomodate a new city and new hours and new responsibility and new notoriety. But it can't have helped. If Goolsbee was spending his days crafting major economic policy to help the country dig out of this hole rather than trying to wanly explain that a slow recovery is nevertheless a recovery, the job would've been rather harder to vacate. Which suggests that the real question isn't who his replacement will be, but whether he or she will matter. The job of the CEA chair is to give the president good economic advice. That's a very important job if the president can take your advice. It's a very dispiriting job if he can't.
