POLAND MENTION!!!!!
Poland is now among the 20 largest economies
811–820 of 944 posts
Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies
#812Earlier quoted context omitted.
Romania?
Romania is still occupied by Russia. Unlike with Germany, where the East and West reunited, Romania failed to reunite with Eastern Moldova (Western Moldova is in Romania) because of Russian interference in the 1990s. The Russians invaded Transnistria (which was never Romanian) and expanded a bit west. So the Russians still occupy part of the land that is by right Romanian and still have political influence in R. Mold…
To those who do not know about this subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_of_Moldova_and_Rom...
(My external barely informed understanding is that proponents of unification are largely right wing nationalist, pro-Russians call for a unification with Bessarabia while ceding Transsinistria to Russia; Moldovans are largely against union in polls.)
Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies
#813Earlier quoted context omitted.
Poland's first partly free election was on 4 June 1989, preceded by the roundtable negotiations. The protests in Czechoslovakia came later, called the Velvet Revolution, from 17 to 28 November 1989. In June 1990, Czechoslovakia held its first democratic elections, a year after Poland. Poland paved the way for the whole of central and eastern Europe. The Round Table produced the negotiated-exit template that Hungary b…
I'm curious what this means in real terms from the perspective of a Pole. GDP/capita is often a relatively useless metric in modern times. For instance Ireland has one of the highest GDP/capitas in the world -- around 50% higher than the US. But that's because of economic games with their working as a tax haven to enable corporations to avoid paying taxes to their home countries. It doesn't translate to anything for…
I'm Irish. Well northern Irish. The Republic Ireland seems a lot richer than when I was growing up in n. Ireland. Ireland is the second biggest exporter of software in the world now. I'm pretty certain the tax paid by both corporations and their well paid staff definitely translate to something for the average Irish man. Even if he thinks it doesn't.
Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies
#814Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1956_Pozna%C5%84_protests
Even earlier in Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_German_uprising_of_1953 Here in Germany they very often talk about the importance of what happened in Poland for the reunification
I'm enjoying the way this dispute reflects on the USSR. We were the first to try to escape! No, we were the first, years before that! No, you're both wrong, it was us!
Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies
#815Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Those IQ charts look very different depending on who is doing the sampling. One of the famous ones is from a self described "scientific racist". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn
I suspect accuracy of any IQ test falls off the further you get from 100 in either direction, so I’m not married to any global IQ dataset in particular. But they all show the same trend.
All the politically and economically prosperous countries show as high and the basket cases show as low. And if you sit in on their political discourse it increasingly sounds like you’re in an open air mental institution. (Though regrettably that model has been losing a lot of predictive power in the democratic West lately).
Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies
#816I live in Poland. This headline is misleading. Poland didn't build a top-20 economy. Western Europe and the US built their economy in Poland, because the labor is educated and cheap. There are almost no globally competitive Polish companies. The "growth" is branch offices of German and American corporations taking advantage of engineers who'll work for 40% of Berlin rates. Remove the foreign-owned sector and you're l…
> It's a great place to live, genuinely. But calling this "Poland's economy" is like calling a McDonald's franchise "your restaurant"
Economically? Yes, if you ignore the fact that we're one of the most overworked populations in the first world and pretty much all low-level jobs(restaurant/call office/etc) have abysmally poor working conditions.
Culturally? Developed cities in Western/Northern Poland and Warsaw, sure. But everywhere else is shades of shitty and if you're LGBT+ a third of the country has legislation against your very existence.
Poland has made a lot of progress but calling it a great place to live is - while not altogether untrue - a statement of privilege more than universal reality.
Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies
#817Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to forget tens of billions in EU subsidies. Not trying to diminish the polish efforts, but not every country gets this opportunity of massive, predictable transfers without much conditionality. I wonder how far Poland would be without the years of PiS corruption.
I think you got it backwards. Over the last 20 years, the SLD govt used to literally sell new legislation for bribes, PO (currently in charge of Poland) literally has right now a guy in their ranks who has likely stolen 100s of millions PLN from a public company, but is the prime minister’s BFF so the prosecutor canceled the investigation. The stuff PiS has done is nothing compared to those. I actually think that the…
Yes. Piss is holier than holy and didnt run Justice Fund as its own private piggy bank stealing for PIS election campaigns and surveillance software to intercept PO politicians private communications. There is no reason whatsoever for former PIS prosecutor general last 7 months hiding in Hungary together with his co criminal deputy Marcin Romanowski who has been hiding there for almost two years. Former state-owned Oil giant Orlen CEO also spend some time hiding from prosecution in Hungary, what a coincidence.
Did we forget about pushing for illegal mail elections? Using state-owned companies filled with PIS politicians to finance bribes and promoting PIS? $25 billion pumped out straight to PIS coffers.
Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies
#818I live in Poland. This headline is misleading. Poland didn't build a top-20 economy. Western Europe and the US built their economy in Poland, because the labor is educated and cheap. There are almost no globally competitive Polish companies. The "growth" is branch offices of German and American corporations taking advantage of engineers who'll work for 40% of Berlin rates. Remove the foreign-owned sector and you're l…
First: if you compare rates (salary, wages,...) you also always must consider rents, cost of living etc.
Second: You can't just pick Berlin for comparison.
Third: Take away foreign owend companies from Berlin, you get a cheap, dirty poor capital.
Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies
#819I love the polish, but credit where credit is due: „Poland is the largest beneficiary of EU funds 2014-2020, with one in four euro going to Poland“ https://www.gov.pl/web/funds-regional-policy/poland-at-the-f... Update: The comments below this are strange. I ment: „Poland gets money, Poland transforms it into more money”. Is Poland more efficient in it than other countries? I do not know. Would Poland have generated…
Think of it as an investment. The rest of the EU also benefits from their hard work, and economic prosperity. Other countries in the EU have also enjoyed economic growth and support over the years. I'm old enough to remember internal borders with passport checks in Europe, before the wall fell and Poland was still on the other side of that. Nice to see them moving on from that. Thanks to the EU free movement of peopl…
> I'm old enough to remember internal borders with passport checks in Europe, before the wall fell and Poland was still on the other side of that. Nice to see them moving on from that.
Europe is the outlier here. The rest of the world checks your passport when you come in their country because they like to know who comes and who goes for a lot of reasons including public safety, biosecurity and so on.
The fact that Europe has basically given up on trying to filter who comes in is not necessarily a model that is desirable for the rest of the world.
> Thanks to the EU free movement of people, I've now studied, worked and lived in four different countries.
You can do that without Europe as well. Do you think people did not move to another country or studied in another country before the European countries decided to remove borders? What about now with all the students moving to the US/UK/Australia/Canada?
Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies
#820Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Think of it as an investment. The rest of the EU also benefits from their hard work, and economic prosperity. Other countries in the EU have also enjoyed economic growth and support over the years. It is for as long, as the EU exists in its current form. The rise of anti-EU parties in both Poland and Germany makes it a risky investment.
There is pretty common trend of people complaining about X being bad coz EU but most of the time it turns into one of * It was pretty sensible EU directive implemented badly by national govt * It was pretty sensible EU directive implemented okay but communicated badly * Outright lie about the problem and the scope of it. One example: The people complained that "EU will force them to pay to scrap solar panels" The tru…
I a sure it's Russian propaganda that the EU has basically tried for the last 3 years to ban encryption so that it can access all your personal messages without a warrant?
Or is it also Russia propaganda that it wants to force VPNs to collect data on their users or force everyone to use their real identities online so that it makes it easy to prosecute anyone for wrong speech?
https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/the-eu-pr...
Nah, you are right the EU is good for us. No issues there at all.