201–210 of 283 posts
Good to know Germany is as suggestible as other European countries to the influences of big American corporations. The longer the EU stays a loose union of countries, the longer it will stay susceptible to these kind of moves. Division isn't unity.
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> I doubt the EU will survive in its current state. A lot of people desire this to be true, but that does not mean that it is. It is a particularly weird opinion to hold in the wake of the most recent challenge to its continuity -- the Brexit fiasco, with the EU having maintained a united front for more than 4 years, while the UK emerges out of it in a terrible state -- and the worst is yet to come. The EU is not per…
I don't understand how you can look at the world and honestly think the US is closer to collapse then the EU. Also what world do you live in where the EU is doing better then most of the world? Half the EU countries are in the top 20 deaths / pop.
...because the EU was the center of the first wave, at a point where the whole world was scrambling to find and implement appropriate mitigations.
Try this chart: https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=eur&are...
In any case, the post you're replying to claimed that "we are dealing with the economic challenge[s] posed by COVID better than most of the rest of the world."
I'm not sure why the death numbers, even if they were not confounded like this, would be a meaningful measure for that.
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The EU is not a great place for innovation, period. Here are the major problems: 1. No common language 2. Incredibly high taxes, particularly sales taxes 3. Unfinished transition out of Communism in many Eastern Countries 4. Preference for cheap illegal labor instead of automation This could be solved by: 1. Formalising an 'EU English' language so that schools teaching it can open up around the continent and families…
Immigration is NOT the issue. Corrupt government and corporatocracy is. With all those subsidies going to coal, oil, cars, planes and whatnot, we could pay and educate all the immigrants a thousand fold, and make them a super producive labour force. You're gonna be a kick ass employee if you're motivated enough to risk your life and travel for years, for education and a better job.
They come into Europe to work on huge farms owned by wealthy Europeans. Here is an example - essentially all of the manual labour in these towns is illegal:
https://www.dw.com/en/spains-sea-of-plastic-where-europe-get...
Without these workers the production would be automated and picked by robots (providing jobs for European engineers, technicians, developers). When you can pay someone $2/hour, with their lives subsidies by the taxpayer, there is no justification for robots.
The most dastardly action performed by the ruling class of Europe is to bring in millions of exploitable workers and claim they are doing it on the basis of human rights.
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>> Example, families with more than two parents (that is a real possibility due to overpopulation)" For some reasons I thought Europe has an aging population issue and demographic decline not overpopulation. >> families with more than two parents I never heard of this unless you consider divorced people.
>> families with more than two parents > I never heard of this unless you consider divorced people. Look for articles concerning co-parenting, that's where its most often discussed. Wikipedia: "Co-parenting is an enterprise undertaken by two or more adults who together take on the socialization, care, and upbringing of children for whom they share equal responsibility[1] Co-parents may include a variety of configurat…
I don't think it's worth to mangle obscure/exotic issues with mainstream subjects (overpopulation).
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These patents might open the doors for legal battles that small companies might just not have the resources for. They're a perfect tool for trolls and bullies.
You don't need much in the way of resources to invalidate a patent. Proof of prior use, or published prior disclosure. The measure of proof being balance-of-probabilities. If you have that you're immune, show up with your print out, you get costs. If you lose you might have to, for example, hand over profits. The flipside is that small companies can use patents to prevent unlicensed exploitation of their own inventio…
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These patents might open the doors for legal battles that small companies might just not have the resources for. They're a perfect tool for trolls and bullies.
You don't need much in the way of resources to invalidate a patent. Proof of prior use, or published prior disclosure. The measure of proof being balance-of-probabilities. If you have that you're immune, show up with your print out, you get costs. If you lose you might have to, for example, hand over profits. The flipside is that small companies can use patents to prevent unlicensed exploitation of their own inventio…
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What did her son have to do with anything? And quite frankly, even though the optics were probably not very good, I don't know of any corruption on the part of Ursula von der Leyen that was conclusively shown.
She hired the company where her son was working using taxpayer money. And then that company paid commission for it to her son. So she indirectly paid taxpayer money to her son.
If she hired her son directly, or as part of the team, if he was lobbying her, then it's a problem.
But if her son worked at IBM and she, as Defence Minister hired IBM for some defence contract, then it's irrelevant.
Edit: I should be clear, among the elite, specifically if there are central groups which exist especially within EU nations, and also 'bubbles' in the US i.e. Valley, Hollywood, NY Finance etc. it's very common for 'big contracts' to go to so-and-so, and as a 'favour' the so-and-so takes on 'sufficiently credentialed son/daughter'. For example, if you're the top Defence bureaucrat and you hire 'Bain & Co.' to do a procurement analysis ... well ... you're son with a newly minted MBA might find it much easier to get hired there. While this kind of 'soft nepotism' is arguably problematic, it's also not so bad. It's when the 'wife, niece and grandson of the French President' have 'fully paid positions in the bureaucracy' for which they literally do nothing, or when the PM hires his college buddy's law firm for a $100M boondoggle that it gets worse.
As someone that has invented novel algorithms I still feel Patents are a net negative especially for software. I just wish EU would be a better place for „startup“ innovation. My experience with the university infrastructure in that area isn’t great:
I used to live in Europe and worked with many Europeans while living in the Bay Area. It seems like lots make the jump stateside. Having universal healthcare seems like it would be a big incentive to take entrepreneurial risk vs. our situation here in the U.S.
The legal arguments, on the other hand... let's just say that they are definitely the work of a nonlawyer.
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The thing about the EU is, it's not a democratic government. It's atreaty organization that sometimes takes on responsibilities like a government. This dual identity has been a boon in some political situations in the past, but it is also a serious liability. Von der Leyen got the job in a usual way for a treaty organization, but she is much more political than some technocrat. There are factions that like it each wa…
> The thing about the EU is, it's not a democratic government. It's atreaty organization that sometimes takes on responsibilities like a government. what? This opinion seems to be highly uninformed about how the EU and it's actual bodies work. i can vote for EU elections and representatives in the european parlement. Also the european commision and the council consist of either parties elected in the national electio…
I'll try to clarify:
The EU in many ways does operate like a government, at least like a confederacy. It has a legislative process, a directly elected parliament, and a president. We get "state of the union" addresses, for crying out loud!
But its founding mission was as an independent third party to oversee coal and steal production. That kind of "referee" role between member states is central to how it is designed, and to much of its action.
Some notable dissimilarities to a democratic government:
- The EU has no constitution; it has treaties. - The EU has no sovereignty; limited powers flow upwards from individual member states. - The EU may only determine matters collectively which need to be determined collectively (principle of subsidiarity) - The only directly elected part of the EU (the EU Parliament) may not propose legislation. It gets to amend, improve, and approve/reject legislation proposed by the (unelected) EU Commission, to implement policy set by the European Council and its (unelected) president. - The "supreme executive" European Council is simply all the national leaders with an appointed head. That's the only source for new policy and leadership decisions. - The EU Commission - the partner body to the EU parliament, is a set of appointees from the EU Council, approved/rejected as a group by the parliament.
The idea behind the setup is to make it easier to propose and ratify multi-lateral treaties with many sides and fixed membership. The directly elected Parliament is a sanity check, not a source of legislation.
To use the US system as analogy because I can assume broad familiarity with it: - the executive branch is all the state governors. They appoint the President. - the senate is made of appointees from the executive branch, approved as a group by the congress. - the house of representatives is directly elected, and can only modify, approve, or reject legislation proposed by the senate.
It is not a controversial opinion to say it is a hybrid system. In fact, from the Wikipedia page on the EU:
"The EU operates through a hybrid system of supranational and intergovernmental decision-making,[132][133] and according to the principles of conferral (which says that it should act only within the limits of the competences conferred on it by the treaties) and of subsidiarity (which says that it should act only where an objective cannot be sufficiently achieved by the member states acting alone)."
"Constitutionally, the EU bears some resemblance to both a confederation and a federation, but has not formally defined itself as either... It is more integrated than a traditional confederation of states because the general level of government widely employs qualified majority voting in some decision-making among the member states... It is less integrated than a federal state because it is not a state in its own right."
Also, as evidenced by some of the other responses to my comment, my statement that we need a central political body is a controversial opinion.
Hope this helps. Thanks for the excuse for a Wikipedia dive! You may also be interested in this recent Economist article about some of the problems of the dichotomy: https://www.economist.com/europe/2020/09/03/the-contradictio...