Comments by "Peter Lund" (@peterfireflylund) on "TLDR News EU" channel.

  1. Liberum votum was the bane of Poland. It’s also incredibly bad for the EU.
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  2. And that was largely true when you were a child — if you are old enough. Are you in your fifties?
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  3. Lots of Moroccans are in trouble with the law…
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  4.  @wabalaladabdab  They were neutral long before they became rich. They happen to be (mostly) in the Alps so most of their territory is very hard to invade. They also happen to have powerful neighbours which serve as a protective barrier (in good times) or as a serious cause of problems (in bad times). The latter point is made much worse by the fact that there aren't really any truly Swiss -- there are French-Swiss, German-Swiss, and Italian-Swiss (I'm ignoring the Romansh). If they weren't neutral, a large conflict in Europe (back in the day) could easily escalate to a Swiss civil war. They have very good reasons for being neutral and they are lucky enough to have the geography to get away with it. On the other hand, there is no risk of this war turning into a Swiss civil war so they have zero excuse for being neutral in this particular case.
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  5. AfD isn’t “far right”, either.
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  6. There are French protests all the time, going back decades. Dutch and German protests are a new thing.
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  7. The word “racist” should have been in scare quotes. There are still surprisingly few racist politicians in Europe (and most of them are immigrants of the Muslim persuasion). Wanting to keep dumb, dangerous, and expensive people out is not racist in the slightest. No upvote for you.
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  8. Same as Poland’s problem with Liberum Veto. We need to go to a system where it takes two or three members for a veto.
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  9. Germany’s race to Paris in 1914 would have succeeded if Belgium hadn’t wasted their time. And that, unfortunately, is what prevented a short and almost bloodless war. One that would even have ended correctly, with a smack down of France.
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  10. That somehow never applied to Turkey. It would be nice to finally kick them out of Cyprus, too, by the way.
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  11.  @daft5670  propaganda works on a lot of people, apparently. You being one of them…
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  12. There are also several written agreements where Russia accepts NATO's expansion.
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  13.  @yyyy-uv3po there is indeed a serious integration problem… you seem to imply it’s caused by the Swedes. I can assure you it’s not, except to the extent that Sweden refused to block them at the border, refuses to punish them, refuses to stop throwing money at them, and refuses to deport them.
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  14. Not only that, but a population of 50k people is utterly incapable of defending itself. Greenland is going to need a big brother no matter what. Denmark is not the worst one they could get.
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  15. They also don’t exist yet. They do sound very nice, though.
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  16. You need much more than “stricter emigration laws”. You need massive remigration, on the scale of a hundred thousand a year. You also need to put the people who forced the immigration upon you behind bars for treason.
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  17.  @georgesdelatour  so you understand but pretend not to.
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  18. There are no NATO puppets.
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  19. A real answer? Give them less free money, preferably none at all. Send them home if they misbehave. In other words: let actions have consequences and let good actions (integration) have good consequences and bad actions (crime, Islamism) have bad consequences.
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  20.  @glendisshiko8182  It doesn't have to take 10 years or cost that much. It is mainly a question of political will -- for years, you could get cheap votes by making nuclear cumbersome and complicated. You still can, actually. There are no physical or engineering or economic reasons it should take that long and cost that much.
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  21. A really, really tall fish.
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  22. And they are not wrong, you know. And West Germany is in France and Northern “Germany” is actually Danish.
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  23. Less panic, more calm, more deliberation, less sloppy -- my kind of team :)
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  24. Soviet infiltration. It’s not complicated at all.
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  25. A rational person wouldn’t hate the AfD nor call it “right winged”. It is a normal center party in a country of leftist extremists. The AfD is also not wrong about immigration, whereas every other significant party in Germany is.
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  26.  @masrod94  Oh, alright, so by "occupying allies" you actually mean the people protecting the Greeks and Armenians against Turkish oppression? In other words, they were the good guys?
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  27.  @RT-ie2rj  we can’t ditch the gas dependency that follows from wind/solar use anytime soon as that would require absolutely enormous batteries. The more wind/solar, the more gas dependence. The right option is nuclear, which can be scaled up faster than wind/solar, doesn’t require gas, and doesn’t require batteries. We are in the current mess exactly because we got so much wind/solar…
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  28. It means Russia can sell gas to Germany without having it go through Ukraine. That means Russia can put pressure on Ukraine by shutting down the gas sent through them without hurting the gas export to Germany.
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  29. So we'll end up with 2 Germanys, 2 Greeces, 1.5 Frances, 1.5 Netherlands, 0.1 Luxemburg, 0.05 Maltas, 2 Romanias, 0.9 (and growing) Norway and some loose bits and pieces of the UK...?
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  30. The "refugees" was another one. Probably a lot bigger.
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  31. Napoleon XIV comme le Président!
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  32. The arrogance of German media at the time was astonishing to watch. That’s when I stopped watching German TV.
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  33. Anti-islamists are not the hateful ones!
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  34.  @arnewengertsmann9111 the raw uranium is not where the costs are. It is basically free in the grand scheme of things. It is also something that one can easily import years in advance — and refueling can also be postponed, if necessary. It is nothing like gas (hard to store, expensive unless pumped in pipelines) or oil (not quite as hard to store). It is more like a “super coal”: we need very little of it and it is incredibly easy to store for years (decades).
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  35.  @Thomas-iw8yd  no, the Turks have also been a burden. Just not to the degree that the Arabs have!
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  36.  @MetaHunter1  Germany is so extremely gas-dependent BECAUSE it has so much wind/solar. You cannot reduce it without also REDUCING wind/solar. What Germany should do instead is restart its nuclear power plants and start building new ones immediately. It should also build the much delayed LNG terminals that have been on the drawing board for a decade. Nuclear is artificially expensive due to dumb regulations -- due to absurdly large exclusion zones, for example. Wind/solar is artificially cheap because the cost of the gas dependency isn't included.
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  37. A lot of them didn’t actually flee from tyrants.
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  38.  @aixtom979  I don’t agree. The numbers also matter — even good people who obviously contribute can be a problem if there are too many of them. There are also already too many bad immigrants who come to Europe legally. We should talk seriously about how to make more of the bad ones illegal.
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  39.  @Gallalad1  yes, they are generally weird.
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  40. Yep. It’s a candlemakers’ protest against the Sun.
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  41.  @MickeyStartraveller I think he actually won most of them :(
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  42. To be fair, there aren’t. Those rules were (expensive) security theater.
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  43. Yep. An overview of which acquis chapters are going to be hard, which are going to be easy, where they are making progress…
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  44. Romania’s Hungarians and Germans are not really comparable to the Russians in the Baltics.
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  45.  @1997CWR  or on debt!
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  46. I would call them “long, poor cultural backgrounds” but maybe that’s just me. And they 100% SHOULD abandon them if they are bad, which they are for people from Turkey, Pakistan, the Middle East, Northern Africa, etc.
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  47. The German thing where political parties all “own” friendly foundations is a weird thing that really takes some time to get used to for us non-Germans.
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  48. But in better health, surely!
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  49.  @Hanoth  You can add a couple of decades to that.
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  50.  @IhaveBigFeet  you should spend some time looking into how WW1 started. Germany was not the aggressor there. France and Russia were. Mobilizing huge armies right next to the border was considered a declaration of war back then. And Belgium should have let the German armies pass through unhindered so they could have dealt with the French threat against Germany. Instead, almost all the fighting on the western front ended up happening in Belgium. Not the smartest move by Belgium.
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  51.  @arnewengertsmann9111  most (not all) of the building costs are artificial. They are not intrinsic to building safe nuclear power plants. And uranium is not rare!
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  52.  @davor9217  your Serbian imperialism was stopped in the 90’s. That is not exactly “Western imperialism”, is it?
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  53. Perhaps you shouldn’t be calling a normal centrist party a “Nazi party”? Edit: typo.
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  54. Long, detailed negotiations and big documents that detail everything they agree upon are very common for coalitions in Europe.
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  55. Why? Foreigners don't really have a RIGHT to immigrate to wherever they want, do they?
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  56.  @mauricewells7838 Russia is not exactly helping, Ivan.
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  57.  @synkaan2167  anything involving Mélenchon is far left.
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  58.  @nightfly4664 nothing that can’t be fixed quickly with more nuclear power, which the “greens” won’t like. The “climate problem” is a self-inflicted problem.
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  59.  @zininajid  no, you couldn’t crash the Euro and even trying would be an act of war, as would blocking the water.
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  60. She is extremely far left!
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  61. No, we are not going to play hardball in the EU. The UK is still our next door neighbour (and will remain so forever) after all. We also need to cooperate about external crises now (Ukraine) and in the future (the fall of the Russian Federation, Africa, the Greater Middle East).
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  62. Most of you didn’t vote for solutions. Sverigedemokraterne still hasn’t reached 25% and lots of people still vote very, very leftist.
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  63.  @adrianthoroughgood1191 in how many ways are you willfully ignorant?
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  64. The migrants in Italy/Spain were just passing through in order to get to Northern Europe. We got to carry the burden of them, you got to pat yourselves on the shoulder for being “humane”. We have now made it harder for them to reach us, so now you are stuck with more of them. Perhaps you should stop letting them in? As you write, “it’s easy to take the high/superior ethical position when you are far away from the issue”…
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  65.  @matt69nice Yes, it was. Do you also believe that low IQ is due to "socioeconomic status"? It isn't. Or lack of "education"? Nope, not that either.
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  66. You need to get your perception recalibrated. She is indeed very far left.
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  67.  @zininajid  somebody has been watching too much RT…
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  68. McCarthy was right, though. This is a lot like what you and most people believe about McCarthy -- but that's not who McCarthy really was. Take a closer look at what he did -- and then take a look at the Venona decrypts.
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  69.  @1337Stream  Meanwhile, Sweden has actual Communists and actual Muslim collaborators. They are apparently totally non-extreme because reasons...
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  70.  @octavianpopescu4776  East Germany was incredibly expensive for West Germany after their reunification -- and still, there was plenty of people in the East who thought they were the ones getting cheated because all their "great" factories that produced "great" products closed... and because unemployment exploded, of course, because of all the companies that had to close and all those that suddenly had to operate on market terms and therefore fired people who didn't contribute any value. No matter how you run a reunification, it will be costly for Romania and end up with disappointed Moldovans.
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  71. Also info on how much help they get behind the scenes from Poland on how to implement the acquis.
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  72. Correct. We've managed much more reform and integration within the financial area and within defence in the period after Romania and Bulgaria joined than we did in all the years before that. We are also closer to common foreign and security policies now, although we still have a long way to go.
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  73. Well, Erdogan counted the votes so I'm not sure Turkey actually voted for that...
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  74. Unification is also more likely to solve the “Turkish” problem — Moldova has a lot of trouble with its Turkish minority, which has autonomy over part of its territory + they always have a Turkish member of the government (which is a huge overrepresentation and very undemocratic).
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  75. Berlin used to have a surplus of housing and offices so the rent was dirt cheap. That surplus is almost gone so the prices have become normal. That is in no way, shape, or form a housing crisis.
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  76.  @annestovgaard681 a lot of them are “people who haven’t been deported yet”.
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  77.  @randomzocker8956  West Germany became a member while still strictly at war. The peace wasn’t negotiated until the 4+2 agreement that allowed West and Central Germany to reunify. East Germany is seemingly permanently lost to Poland and Russia.
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  78.  @raulpetrascu2696 the racism is obviously entirely on your side.
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  79. Yes it should. And perhaps stop dragging its feet on its nuclear power project. 2023 is next year and they haven't even chosen a site for its power plant yet.
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  80.  @imhassane intelligence is largely inherited. It can’t be taught in school. Some populations have a demonstrably lower average than others. It’s in the low 80’s in Northern Africa. It’s around 70 in sub Saharan Africa. We should expect exactly what you experienced: people selected for intelligence go to university and people who decidedly weren’t don’t (for generation after generation). Your kids and the kids of your uni friends will likely be reasonably bright (as long as you don’t have kids with dumb people) and will also have a bright future.
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  81. Moldova is free to liberate the area without breaking any laws or treaties. Let’s see if the crime bosses in Transnistria dare do anything.
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  82.  @n0gat No, it's a one-way streets: the immigrants have to integrate.
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  83.  @MareenaJacob-kg7ct  I expect something much less crazy, destructive, slanderous, and left extreme. Austrian and Swiss media handled it much better (as did the Danish). It was like watching something from a dictator state. I’m not saying that any large European media handled it well, but the German state media were absurd.
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  84.  @bababababababa6124  “Green” logic. Literally.
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  85. Because the centrists on the right are called “extremists” and the extremists on the left are called “center-left”...
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  86.  @리주민  it isn’t true. AfD is not extreme in the slightest. Die Linke (“The Left”, the ostensibly “former” Communists) and Die Grüne/B90 (“The Green/Association of ‘90”) are very extremist. German media is totally screwed up and a large part of the population believe the media. Witness the number of upvotes the guy who “didn’t know what I was talking about” got...
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  87. It’s how Greece worked until recently.
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  88. Why is the PKK considered a terror group and the Turkish state not? (I think it is self-evident that they both are -- but the Kurds have the right to not be ruled by Turks, whereas the Turks do not have the right to rule over the Kurds. Besides, you supported the wrong side in the recent war with Armenia. It would be good if that war ended up being very costly for Azerbaijan.)
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  89. Sane immigration policy + insane most other things, insane immigration policy + sane(ish) most other things, insane immigration policy + insane economic policy + insane(ish) most other things.
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  90.  @andybrice2711  but notice that most Eastern European countries were perfectly capable of having mostly sensible immigration policies while being EU members! The UK could have done exactly the same thing — if there had been the political will to do so inside the UK. There wasn’t and isn’t but that wasn’t - and isn’t — the fault of the EU.
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  91.  @Austrolopithe  The UK has serious demographic problems. It's not just about the age distribution but also about the IQ/skill distribution -- and the loyalty distribution. Mass immigration from the third world has been really harmful for the UK and will grow to be even more harmful in the future.
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  92. It is censorship. Obviously.
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  93.  @anderskorsback4104  Russia is also pretending that the occupied territories of Ukraine are part of sovereign Russia. That does not make it so. Latvia was absolutely, 100% occupied by the Soviet Union. Quite brutally so, actually. I think you are the Nazi (or the Commie) here...
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  94.  @comradeuro4255 Southern Europe and Germany gets away with opting out of whatever they want WITHOUT a negotiated accept from the rest of the EU. Giving Iceland a proper one on such an important policy area — and especially when the main problem is too many fishermen in Southern Europe — seems right and proper to me.
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  95.  @evilmex1962  probably not, but don’t we all expect it to be solved in short order if Putin falls and Russia gets weak enough? Same with South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Probably the Kuril Islands as well. Karelia and Königsberg will be harder to solve.
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  96.  @soundscape26 not only that: Parliament can also fire the whole Commission (and in practice also individual commissioners).
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  97. PASOK recovering, Syriza still exists, Varoufakis still not in jail. No, Greece is still the sick man of Europe :(
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  98. It need not be an actual, formal, unified EU army. It could remain as 27(+?) national armies with a common command superstructure -- which is pretty much what the EU has been slowly creating and testing out. The German Empire did not have a unified army, either. It had dozens of bigger and smaller armies under the control of its member states but with a common superstructure. It worked pretty well. In some sense, it's a pity that Trump didn't follow through on his threat to withdraw from NATO. If he had, we would pretty much instantly have turned the EU into a real, full-scale defense union. And it would have happened with public support even in member states whose population currently is on the fence or who have opt-outs (Denmark, Sweden, others).
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  99.  @_o..o_1871  Please read up on the EU Civil Protection Mechanism.
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  100. They still have pretty big money reserves so they hope they can limp on for longer than the European politicians can ignore their angry voters. Trouble is, the European voters are not as angry as Putin hoped... and they are mostly angry at him rather than their politicians.
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  101. Remember that the AfD is not actually crazy or extremist.
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  102.  @willhudson5625 plenty of politicians were outright Communists when they were young. José Barroso, for example. Or Federico Mogherini. Or my own former PM in Denmark, Helle Thorning-Schmidt. I don’t remember any smear campaigns against them, even though that should obviously have kept them out of politics for life.
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  103.  @FilAnd01  it was far beyond naïveté. Of course they belong in jail. I fear you might belong there with them…
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  104. Austria? What on Earth did they do wrong? I thought you would mention Hungary, Poland and the South!?
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  105. @@captainplanet483do you think the Communists would have done better?
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  106. "outside", not "behind".
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  107.  @English_Dawn  The Council? The voters in the member states, sometimes directly (for some of the Presidents), usually indirectly (for Prime Ministers). The EU Commission? The Commissioners are proposed by the member states + the Commission President (designate) has to accept that person + the European Parliament has to accept that person. Several candidates were rejected by the European Parliament in 2019. The Council President? The Council, that is, the Presidents/Prime Ministers of the member states. The Commission President? Proposed by the Council and confirmed ("elected") by the European Parliament. But you already knew that, didn't you?
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  108. Why!? It’s obviously nothing but mad dreams and Communism!
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  109.  @Leo-ok3uj he started a media production company with some of his uni mates while he was still at uni. He was never just an actor.
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  110.  @neodym5809 not really (and they could have been refueled)and no. Old fuel still works, it is just less efficient. There was plenty of life left in the reactors. The initial approved lifetime was running out but they still worked fine. We do the same thing with bridges: design for a given lifetime, certify them for a shorter lifetime, continuously maintain and inspect them, and extend the certification if the bridges are still fine. Take your “green” propaganda elsewhere, please.
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  111.  @handle_unknown  Because Bornholm managed to liberate itself… besides, you should have handed the rest of Scania back centuries ago. You were only supposed to hold onto it until we paid our “debt” (war reparations owed after you invaded *us*) or until 50 years had passed. The real reason you got Scania (but not all of Denmark) is that the Great Powers of the day wanted the two Øresund coasts to be owned by different countries.
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  112. I think you are saving that for the endgame — and the objective would be to demilitarize a buffer zone around the border.
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  113. Because they are wrong?
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  114. Didn’t you watch too much RT?
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  115. "build more solar and wind power" doesn't really work without gas power plants -- so it is actually NOT ok.
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  116.  @rizkyadiyanto7922 I think so, yes.
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  117. And all the French speakers who live in Flemish suburbs around Brussels...
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  118.  @seneca983 Americans also have crazy opinions about European citizenship laws and be very loud about it :(
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  119. some people insist that they buy exactly the right ones -- because it would be a waste of money if they don't. Such people can easily delay things 5 years or more -- especially if it's just an excuse because they don't like the military in the first place.
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  120.  @georgethompson1460  yes, on a good day (and with many more PV panels and wind turbines) they can definitely provide enough output. The problem is just that sometimes they can’t. Well, most of the time they can’t. The gap between best case and median case is huge for wind/solar so you would need to massively overprovision. And the gap between best case and worst case is of course even worse. This is of course never accounted for when the “greens” boast about the cheapness of renewables.
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  121. Don't forget the Russian general supply issue -- as in "issues with supplying enough generals to replace the dead ones".
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  122. The biggest container shipping company is Danish.
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  123.  @ckokloong  Nuclear energy, heat pumps for heating instead of gas... plus a better attitude towards fracking. The EU could easily be entirely energy-independent.
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  124.  @nickybutt4117  Hopefully some of them will end up in Belarus and Russia and cause problems for Lukashenko/Putin.
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  125. ​ @Diabolo0011  Yes it will. There are lots of places to get Uranium from. It is also extremely easy to store which makes it impossible for rogue nations to use a "Uranium embargo" to pressure us into compliance.
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  126.  @nanucit  you only need to buy (or make) the heaters once. They’ll last decades.
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  127. Timmermans is leaving Brussels? Fantastic news for Europe!
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  128.  @hectorvega621  Bollocks. Sweden has treated its Muslim immigrants better than its natives.
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  129. “Refugees” (and a smattering of actual refugees).
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  130.  @wookie2222  I pronounce it Breslau... 1) it is correct, 2) it pisses off the Poles...
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  131.  @andreagenovesePhD  How about if the Italians fixed the Italian economy? And the Spaniards fixed the Spanish economy? And the Greeks fixed the Greek economy? People in Northern Europe are very willing to help. We are not willing to be taken advantage of decade after decade.
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  132.  @Veritas-66  genetic studies say you are wrong. The language changed from Celtic to Germanic (several types) and later got a huge chunk of Romance added to it, but the DNA stated mostly the same. Of course there are traces of Saxon, Frisian, Danish, and Norwegian DNA, but most of it didn’t change.
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  133. Berkcan Ulu It’s not too late to implement the Treaty of Sèvres. It is still legally binding, after all.
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  134.  @igorlopes7589 we could easily control our borders with a little political will. We have really good weapons, really good navies, really good armies…
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  135. You make a good case for workhouses. You don’t make a good apology for mass immigration or Islam or weak punishments or the welfare state.
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  136. Due to a silly demand from a bunch of Former Ottoman Provinces…
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  137. "Victim of colonialism"?! We were there first. They live on our land and we pay them for it.
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  138.  @neodym5809  invading migrants, you mean? Violent invading migrants? After trying teargas and rubber balls? When they are so many and so violent that you have no other option? Hungarian border guards can do that now, btw. I wish German border guards could, too. This was btw considered obvious and sane until very, very recently. It was consensus everywhere except on the extreme left in countries where they didn’t (yet) run a dictatorship. Nothing extremist about it. Nothing.
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  139.  @notfunny3397  African and middle eastern countries are fully capable of waging wars themselves. Ever heard of Rwanda? Or the “African World War”? Or Saudi Arabia and Iran’s proxy wars in Yemen? Or the civil war in Lebanon after the explosive population growth among the Sunni underclass?
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  140. They absolutely could, they are just not allowed to. Lots of European voters are pie in the sky socialists who believe in a “better world” instead of the actual world we are living in and they fully believe the migrants are refugees and good people and willing to work and totally not terrorists, criminals, or lazy. Democracy doesn’t work when most voters are that dumb.
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  141.  @pep-qew  Piss. Same as in many other European languages.
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  142. Not true. There was lots of immigrant crime long before you moved there. You just didn’t (want to) know because it was still possible to deceive those who wanted to be deceived.
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  143. Because long term it leads to lower supply.
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  144.  @keyboarddancers7751  don’t trust me. Read the Canadian immigration statistics. Prepare to be shocked.
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  145.  @CroatianUltraNationalist no, the EU forced (almost) none of it upon the member states. They did it to themselves.
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  146. That only works with a small welfare state (which the US no longer has) and strong punishments. Europe has neither.
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  147. or youtube keeps deleting their comments...
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  148. Mainly because they are extremely expensive and slow to build (and insure)... which is mainly due to the regulatory climate and not at all intrinsic to nuclear power.
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  149. Turkey maintains an occupation of an EU member state. As long as it does so, I don’t want any further alliances with them. A lot of us would also like to make Smyrna Greek again and liberate Constantinople.
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  150.  @certaindeath7776  No, Switzerland won't allow Germany to do that, either.
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  151. Portugal mostly needs better labour laws -- with less protection. It must be easier to fire people -- because that's the only way companies will take more chances hiring people. It must be easier to pay people based on merit instead of seniority -- because that's the only way to get good people from the outside AND to encourage people to move between companies, for example from a badly led one to a better led one. The EU should push for reforms like that all over Southern Europe. The EU should also finally create an EU-wide company type for small companies -- it was proposed under the name Societas privata Europaea but was blocked by Germany.
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  152. Poland stronk. Poland can into space!
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  153. I don’t think democracy is bad. It’s just universal suffrage that is bad.
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  154. Pakistan had a cricket player.
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  155. Nathan Guava the US constitution lets the electors vote however they will, but many states have laws against that. Whether those laws are constitutional is doubtful, though.
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  156. The way an economy works can be rapidly improved in just a few years. Getting rid of undesired migrants will take decades or will require things the German voters don’t have the stomach for yet. At least making sure the problem doesn’t get worse quite as fast as before is very, very important!
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  157. And all the typical mussels.
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  158. Elsaß…
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  159. Perhaps Germany's publication laws are not quite in accordance with basic human rights and EU law. Just a thought...
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  160. @@Anothertakeonthis have you talked to a psychiatrist about your paranoia?
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  161. The Treaty of Sèvres is still valid -- so if we really wanted to, we could dismember Turkey without breaking international law or needing a UN mandate. This won't happen as long as we in Europe still need NATO and as long as the US plays such a large role in our security. It might happen once we get a stronger and more coordinated EU military.
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  162. You should be fine! If you already speak English (and German?), learning another Germanic language shouldn’t be a problem.
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  163.  @mr.p215  no, not all. Some things I don’t like, I call Islam. Some things I don’t like, I call plutocracy. Some things I don’t like, I call oligarchy. Some things I don’t like, I call incompetence. This, however, is clearly Communism.
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  164. If you do, please remember that Italy always wants to borrow more money that Northern Europe will be on the hook for. Southern Europe also always wants a bigger EU budget with more regional development funds, more farming subsidies, more God know what -- that Northern Europe should pay for. The negotiations for the coming MFF (multi-year financial framework = EU's long-term budget) are no exception. They have wanted that every time. They also wanted it before SARS-2. This is really just another case of "never wasting a crisis" and "blaming someone else for your own problems".
    4
  165. The EU indirectly did, back when the union/community was a lot smaller and most things were handled on an ad hoc basis in the Council. We had to formalize things as the Union grew in size and began to resemble a federation more.
    4
  166. Lay Havray.
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  167. Nuclear doesn’t have to output a constant baseline. You can build reactors that can track the normal diurnal variations with no trouble at all — the French did that. Yes, you would still need some extra flexibility on top of that but not much. It’s nothing compared to introducing low-quality energy sources like wind and solar and pretending they are worth as much as or more than reliable sources.
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  168. No, it rests with the Council (the member states).
    4
  169. It raises clear doubts about the quality of said education. Perhaps it’s merely long (and expensive) and not particularly high…
    3
  170. > very likely speed up the EU green movement. Would it? Or would it become blindingly obvious, even to the obtuse, that they are the main cause of the mess? I think it would discredit the Greens instead of help them.
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  171.  @baha3alshamari152 we don’t want want to be dominated by a member state soon to have 100 million people (and 10-20 in the diaspora in other member states). On top of that, there are all the myriad other problems with Turkey.
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  172. Turkey stopped doing its part so, yes, Turkey did suspend the process. We just formalized the suspension after we got tired of waiting (after a couple of decades).
    3
  173. Why should Ukraine allow Russia to have a Black Sea fleet? Black Sea ports? Military bases closer than 100km to the border? Any kind of air defense systems or radar installations any closer than 100km? Ukraine won’t do anything about this now but I expect it to be their endgame.
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  174.  @gediminaskucinskas6952  the Germans there were largely Germanized Balts… and the ancestors of those Balts might very well have been Goths.
    3
  175.  @prkp7248  almost all the nuclear power plants in the Warsaw Pact were “Soviet-like” and unsafe. Western Europe paid a lot of money in the nineties to make them safer... The design of the reactor matters a lot: nuclear isn’t just nuclear. There are light water reactors, heavy water reactors, boiling water reactors, graphite moderated reactors, etc., just like a bridge isn’t just a bridge, a house isn’t just a house, and food isn’t just food.
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  176.  @neodym5809  There’s a hell of a difference between kidnapping and keeping criminals out. And you know that.
    3
  177. We in Western Europe have that problem with our not-really-invited Muslims as well. Many of them never bothered to learn the local language. Most of them don't behave like a master race towards us, but depressingly many of the Arabs do :(
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  178.  @Srbenda126  I don’t think it affects the credibility at all in this case. We know he has trouble pronouncing (and spelling) stuff.
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  179.  @FarfettilLejl  Because almost none of the production (and almost none of the labour) in a modern society is land based. Georgism made a lot of sense when agriculture was everything. It makes zero sense today.
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  180.  @NGC1433  we have plenty of uranium. We could also use fracking for gas on the European continent. We could also get a lot more oil and gas from the North Sea. Even if we got our uranium and coal from abroad, we would still be ok because both can easily be stored for years. Being dependent on gas is completely different: it is hard to store and quite expensive unless we get it in pipelines.
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  181.  @The_Great_Game_Begins  India stole Pondicherry.
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  182. Not having much nuclear power leaves you at the mercy of energy prices… that’s what you meant, right?
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  183. That won’t happen as long as you have a first past the post system for electing presidents :( The number of parties is a function of the election system. Having two election rounds where the two top candidates from the first round continue to the second round is enough to fix it.
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  184.  @oncaphillis  yes, not only is it brilliant, it is also correct.
    3
  185. The European flag is not really an EU symbol.
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  186.  @pedromoura1446 ”you’ll never shall be missed.”
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  187. No, Scholz is right on that one. And it is extremely obvious why (Greece, Italy)…
    3
  188.  @hjjh46  but the problem is that there are differences between men and women, there are differences between young and old, there are differences between religions, and there are differences between ethnicities. These facts are really very, very basic. That means that there are really good reasons why different groups end up with different outcomes. Some people want to use “anti discrimination” to give gifts of other people’s money to certain “discriminated against” groups and as a weapon against people they don’t like. It really is that simple.
    3
  189. But climate change actually isn't a big deal for anybody yet. We haven't seen much of it yet. It's also not something we can do much about in Europe because there is no way to have "negative CO2 emissions" to counter the huge emissions from China. It's even more crazy when most of Europe -- especially the "greens" -- are so against nuclear power, which is actually emissions free and much safer than hydropower and rooftop solar (the installers sometimes fall of the roofs and die). And the nitrogen issue isn't about climate change, anyway. It's about choosing what kind of plant life (and microbial life) we want in our springs and rivers.
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  190.  @WilliamThoren95 nothing “far right” about Sverigedemokratarna. They are not quite as crazy in their economic policies as most parties but still very left-leaning compared to what economic research shows is the correct course. Same with the AfD. They are centrist who are to the left of all sensible economic politics but to the right of almost all current parties. Both are against importing hordes of violent and stupid people. I’d consider that common sense — it’s neither left or right, it’s just “not stupid” and “not evil”.
    3
  191.  @lennywatchesstuff that’s so cheap that it’s like a huge gift of free money. You have no idea how expensive those people are.
    3
  192.  @thornelderfin  no, France never left NATO. France left the command structure of NATO. Not at all the same.
    3
  193. Slovenia, according to his LinkedIn (which would match the Slavic last name). He does list "Limited working proficiency" for Dutch, though. I have no idea how and why.
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  194. Generating electricity with that gas and then running heat pumps at the consumer end would burn a lot less gas…
    3
  195.  @rolandnegrei1427  we are talking about Bulgaria and Romania. Austria very much has a point.
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  196. The veto shouldn’t be removed, it should just require more than one country (two or three) and those countries should represent 5-10% of the EU population. There are lots of stupid Southern European ideas that absolutely must stay blocked!
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  197. Gewreid there were plenty of strings attached to the Marshall plan money! Interestingly, that money benefited frugal countries like Germany much more than spendthrift countries like France. And the economic policies mattered far more than the marshal aid — Germany benefited first and foremost from Ludwig Erhard’s reforms.
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  198. Nope. Denmark (still) has an abrogation, for example. Furthermore, things like PESCO are voluntary. We have many areas where there is a minimum level of cooperation for all EU members and a deeper, tighter integration for those members who want it. PESCO is one of them.
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  199. It absolutely is EU's business if Hungary is an EU member.
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  200.  @grenade416  sure, no doubt about that. They could move their base from Sevastopol to Novorussiysk, though, where they already have a submarine base.
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  201. Actually, we had plenty of time to build nuclear power plants before winter -- we just unfortunately chose not to. It doesn't take a year to physically build a nuclear power plant IF it becomes a matter of national priority. It would also have been extremely simple (and cheap) to reopen the German nuclear power plants that had been closed only months earlier. It is also an extreme no-brainer to NOT close the last few German nuclear power plants. Building a million electric space heaters (or buying them from China or whatever) is also pretty damn easy when you have months to prepare. Heat pumps are slightly more complicated so they likely can't be produces at such scales that quickly -- but Germany could have started the production and started a real Energiewende instead of the current fake one.
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  202. The EU is also a mutual self-defense union. It’s not just NATO that is.
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  203. Germany just recently finished paying off its WW1 Versailles debt — for a war they didn’t even start.
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  204.  @Luis_Domingos  I didn’t know it until my German was good enough for watching Tagesschau.
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  205. Other Inuits. The current ones are descended from Canadian immigrants.
    3
  206. Several mini Italies might work better.
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  207. "Hate speech" laws always have that problem. Always.
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  208.  @CoNteMpTone  Sparén is a Swedish name. Ola is (mostly) a Norwegian name.
    3
  209. 1) There was a single mass immigration incident under Merkel but apart from that, nothing had really changed since Schröder. And Schröder mostly continued Kohl’s immigration policies… 2) Russia (and the Soviet Union before it) has deeply infiltrated German politics (and journalism). All the crazy sustainable energy stuff (wind/solar) is really just an expensive way of making the country much more dependent on (foreign) gas. Merkel just continued Schröder’s policies… and Schröder was rewarded with a highly paid sinecure in the Russian gas industry!
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  210. By “invest” you mean “spend”. Investments have expected returns.
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  211. 1) A lot of them can be switched to resistive heating or inductive heating powered by electricity. 2) depends on how you design your nuclear power plant. Some plants are good at it, some are not.
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  212.  @ciarz_  it’s the cleanest one that works at large scales. A tiny amount of wind/solar is cleaner. Large-scale wind/solar is worse (because it will always need to be backed by something else that is nasty). The only non-clean thing about nuclear is the processing of spent fuel rods, which historically created a lot of pollution. I think that has pretty much been fixed decades ago in the West.
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  213.  @Burito-tj5ry RN is actually quite leftist, unfortunately. It’s just that they also have reasonable policies on immigration and crime.
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  214.  @WhichDoctor1 and the police/military/courts (and private citizens!) in Turkey and Lebanon are allowed to use much harsher methods to keep the refugees from becoming too problematic. They also largely have the religion in common and for Lebanon also the language. Those countries don’t have nearly as high taxes and as much redistribution to the refugees. They also have lower-skilled labour markets. But you knew all that, didn’t you?
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  215.  @yyyy-uv3po it would reduce the spillover into Denmark while Sweden maybe, slowly, comes to its senses.
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  216.  @Jakolo121  switch to the much more sensible media in Austria and Switzerland for a year and see if you still feel the same…
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  217.  @irtakus  seen from the outside (I speak German but I am not German), Germany is a crazy place with the most extreme state media I’ve seen outside of the DDR, the Soviet Union, Russia, China (I speak and read some Chinese), and North Korea. Switch to Austrian and Swiss media for a year and you’ll probably be able to see it, too. The courts aren’t exactly normal, neutral, or law abiding, either. I don’t believe any of the judges are directly controlled or bought puppets. I believe most of them are as crazy as your journalists.
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  218. Or a not so “little percentage”.
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  219. Huh? What about the Santer Commission and Edith Cresson?
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  220. So, 1) you are saying the Muslim/African/Arab immigrants are starving and go without shelter and clothes and 2) you are saying they rape and kill out of poverty? Get a grip!
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  221. Mustache looks. Let’s keep it at that.
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  222.  @thetaomega7816  some of them are likely being trained in Belarus — they might become a problem later. The rest are just used as cannon fodder to protect the other soldiers a little.
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  223. Found the Serb.
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  224. Nothing "ish" about. It is legal, always was, no matter what any of the courts may say.
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  225.  「 Deadpoppin 」  communication will not be a problem. We can handle air traffic control in English all over the world, for example, and Iranians and Pakistanis rip off the same English language textbooks on the internet as everybody else. And as the weabo (*the* Weabo?) said, even the French and Germans are getting decent at English these days. No, the problems are with the support of the populations of the member states and with agreeing on who to attack and who to protect us and our allies against.
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  226. Some people would. People did that back in ‘99 to fix the Y2K problem.
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  227.  @mdsfhs  The "Dane" is actually half Swedish.
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  228. That "electoral college" is called the European Parliament. It did exactly that for von der Leyen, Borrell Fontelles, and the entire rest of the Commission. Every country does not have the same number of "electoral votes", nor should they. Do you really want Malta/Cyprus/Luxemburg to have the same number of votes as Germany/France/Italy/Poland/Spain? (Ok, if the votes were weighted by quality I suppose Luxemburg should have 5 times as many votes as Spain and 50 times as many as Greece...)
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  229. Why are you evil?
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  230. Furthermore, we don’t have anything like the FBI. All we have are the European prosecutors, which are prosecutors in many EU countries that are appointed by the EU and which can initiate court cases at the normal courts inside those countries. The idea is to get around corrupt/captured police/prosecutors in member states but they only work if the courts are clean.
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  231. LED light consumes a lot less power than old-skool light bulbs. Often 20x less or more.
    2
  232. Ukraine is prepared for winter. Russian soldiers are not…
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  233.  @amd.amdamd no, it didn’t work. There are simply too many now for it to ever work.
    2
  234. Let’s ruin the entire country instead of just a small part?
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  235. Poland should definitely have stayed out of Danzig.
    2
  236.  @1337Stream  you sound like a Communist apologist to me. Or maybe someone with severe delusions. SD is not fascist in the slightest, Sweden has at least a million Muslims who shouldn’t be there, Sweden also has nasty gang wars between the Muslims. And you complain about the SD? Seriously, what’s wrong with you?
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  237.  @31173  Is it really all that uncommon? I bet you know "syndaflod", right?
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  238.  @RainerSpielberg  and you are definitely politically illiterate :)
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  239.  @mab9614  no, the anti-nuclear movements all over Western Europe were communist and remote controlled from Moscow.
    2
  240.  @HungaryBased  Yes, a tiny minority. Not the masses of colonizers from the Soviet occupation. Please learn your history.
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  241.  @widmawod  No, you clearly don't know much. They can move to Russia if their life as occupiers and descendants of occupiers doesn't suit them.
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  242. Finland was an unofficial member of the Frugal Four (Five). The PM is a Social Democrat and she is heading a coalition government that includes two radical leftist parties + the Social Democrats, a center party, and the party for the Swedish minority (also center). There is broad agreement in Northern Europe on this matter, across party lines from left to right.
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  243. @Feloogleno, but he was very clearly on the far left.
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  244.  @宋教仁-b4i also seen in many Arab names. Former French colonies use ‘ou’, the rest use ‘u’. The sound is the same.
    2
  245.  @pnkwds  I think that tells us how much weight we should give his "well informed" opinion...
    2
  246. Maybe it is already too hard to get fresh loans to feed the French state? A better pension system => (much) more sustainable economy and state finances => lower interest rates for government bonds?
    2
  247. The farmers get most of their income from direct and indirect subsidies. How would they do without the rest of us?
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  248. Bias*ED*. One can be bias*ed* or one can have bias. One cannot be "bias".
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  249. That would be the best possible outcome for the Flemish and the worst possible outcome for the Waloonies. And of course also deeply unfair for the minority in the South that are sensible. Maybe they can move up North? ;)
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  250. Resistive heating (as in your toaster) works. Heat pumps work even better — it’s better to burn gas at the power plant, boil water to super-heated steam, push it through turbines, turn some dynamos, send electricity through the grid (with resistive losses + losses during transformation to 230V) and then power heat pumps…. Than it is to burn the gas directly at the consumer for heat. If you want to save energy, you want heat pumps and electricity. (But you knew that already, right? As a “green” party support, right? Who knows high school physics, right?)
    2
  251. Smog is usually due to weather patterns and mountains which can trap the pollution. You can’t change the weather patterns or move the mountains but you can stop polluting...
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  252. And those seismic “risks” were essentially zero…
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  253.  @monkeydank7842 does she still live in the Palace of Social Justice?
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  254. My impression is that Switzerland wants the right to do continuous “Rosinenpickerei” regarding any part of the agreement at any point in the future as often as they like and with next to no warning. Because “muh referenda”. The EU quite sensibly says no. Then Switzerland thought they could take their ball and go home and that would get them a better deal. It won’t. I guess the Swiss think they are holding all the cards...
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  255. We will probably draw the line so Georgia and Armenia are in and Azerbaijan is out. And then we hope Turkey never starts negotiating in earnest…
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  256. Matthias Bouquet is it the “economic motor” or is it just where a lot of the tax money (and EU money) ends up?
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  257. He is unusually tall and she is a bit short.
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  258. Turkey has been almost nothing but trouble — and Erdogan stopped the reforms to make Turkey more European/civilized ages ago. The Turks know that. Our long-term hope is that Turkey disintegrates… maybe we should start planning for it?
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  259.  @wessel6491 I think it is completely fair to call anti-scientists dumb.
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  260.  @nonameguy1427  Australia? Sweden? There are plenty of places to get Uranium from -- but you knew that, didn't you, botski? How's the weather in Saint Petersburg? (Wind/solar is completely dependent on gas -- but you also knew that, didn't you?)
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  261. Huh?
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  262. Southern Europe has for decades refused to police its borders properly AND to process asylum seekers properly AND they have done would they could to ship them to Northern Europe on the down low. We paid almost all the costs of the asylum seekers for decades. We finally made it harder for them to move from Southern Europe to Northern Europe and now that Southern Europe is stuck with them, it is suddenly a problem. How about Southern Europe instead pays for all the "refugees" it sent Northwards and starts policing its borders properly?
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  263. Almost all state expenditures are (inefficient) consumption, not investment.
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  264.  @bertrambolsingbruel3829  forgot to add: we also have problems with some immigrants who tend to be very nationalistic on behalf of the Old Country or their tribe. Russians, for example. Turks, too. Not so much Arabs or Somalis... our problems with those are of a different kind. It doesn’t even have to be nation-based. It could be tribal, as it is with Kurds versus Arabs or Turks (depending on where the Kurds come from) or Serbs versus all the other ex-Yugos. Or it could be one Somali clan versus another Somali clan (some of them genocided the others a couple of decades ago). When we import people, we sadly also import their conflicts.
    2
  265. There is a train straight from Copenhagen Airport to Helsingborg (where the 5 pointer is)...
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  266.  @NoctLightCloud  it’s that or the end of Western Europe.
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  267. What is Iratxe García’s reputation in Spain? Does she came across as stupid, ignorant, and utterly fossilized in her Socialist (Communist) views, the way she does to me in Denmark? If I were a Social Democrat, which I am not, I would hate to have my views represented by her!
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  268.  @FairyCRat  At least it's not Marseilles now...
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  269.  @filipposartori7197  How long does it take to fire an above board employee in Italy? What does it cost? Can the firing be tested in court by the employee and/or labour union? Does the employer have to prove to be in economic trouble or that the employee stole/cheated/lied? And the same questions for an off-the-books employee? And the same questions again for a single-person "company" on a short-term contract? The result of rigid labour laws is not full employment and nice jobs for everybody. It is a two-speed labour market, high unemployment, and low economic performance (because people are incredibly poorly matched to jobs + are incentivized to be lazy). That has been the result all over Southern Europe. When is the Italian labour market going to be reformed?
    2
  270.  @koschmx Germany has an immigration problem, not a right-wing problem.
    2
  271. Do we think one can be the leader of a one-party state for so long without becoming crooked? I certainly don't.
    2
  272.  @superfranky8054  since when did statistics become racism?
    2
  273. No, Macron’s pension reforms (too little, too late) are good for the French.
    2
  274.  @benjaminlamey3591 ha, no, they are getting richer. Capitalism is what saved most of Europe from starvation and abject poverty.
    2
  275. And has now apparently replaced the FSB guy with his bodyguard!
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  276. I think there are ample opportunities to renege on the deal after you’ve joined the NATO club. Also plenty of time to make this a very, very expensive move for Turkey in the years to come.
    2
  277. We are going ahead with the formal process towards sanctioning Hungary -- and we are very quiet about Poland's transgressions at the moment. We pretend they never existed for as long as the Russia mess is going on. After that, we'll see if the Piss Party is out or not. If not, we will probably restart the formal process for Poland. If it is, we'll pretend Poland was always doing the right thing.
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  278. You don't have a higher percentage of refugees than we do Muslim immigrants/refugees in Northern Europe. But now that you have seen the trouble they bring, perhaps you should think nice thoughts to the host countries in Northern Europe of many an uninvited Turkish family?
    2
  279.  @ozercap624  no, read again.
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  280. Once all this is over, Ukraine is going to need a large buffer zone around its borders. I wonder if 100km is enough or if they will need 200km. In any case, Russia's days as a Black Sea power are probably over soon.
    2
  281.  @danielefabbro822 have you heard of the “black zero”? Germany is already fiscally responsible whereas it is a very new thing for Italy and Greece.
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  282.  @danielefabbro822  you are not entitled to your own facts.
    2
  283.  @HikakuGR  that was when things stopped getting worse. They even got better the more Greece complied with its agreements with the EU.
    2
  284. He is obviously dyslexic and can barely read English -- there's no chance in hell he'll be able to read IPA... not even the stress marks.
    2
  285. Intermarium is a stupid dream that only Polish nationalists are interested in.
    2
  286.  @tomhermens7698  Wishing he was flying a plane instead. He was an undercover pilot for KLM for years before becoming king. Yes, really.
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  287. The problem with that is that idiots like Timmermans and Vestager are likely to win. Von der Leyen is much better than those two. Dombrovskis would likely be even better — I hope to seem him lead the Commission after von der Leyen.
    2
  288. No, Germany’s dependence on Russian gas is. That’s one of the reasons why Putin (correctly) thought he could get away with it. Thank you, Gerhard. Thank you, Mutti.
    2
  289. One of his female college is Serbian, I believe. Her English is native but I bet she’s still fluent in Serbian.
    2
  290. Sounds like Spain is a dumb place to do business.
    2
  291.  @Armadeus  and they all have “big brothers”, usually the US. Not a single one is actually independent in practice.
    2
  292. Because "racism".
    2
  293. No, the thing about needing new fuel rods is false. They can continue to run just fine with the old fuel rods, the efficiency will just be a little lower. The obvious thing to do is to run with the old ones until they can get new ones in 2023… and then just continue with nuclear power indefinitely. (And then lock up Schröder, Merkel, Scholz, and the “Greens” for treason. Making one’s country so dependent on the local neighborhood dictator when there was a literally perfect alternative is treason.)
    2
  294. @TheGhostKillz... remember that you are from a former Communist country so the propaganda your parents were exposed to was entirely different to the propaganda people in Western Europe were exposed to. It is extremely clear that nuclear power is a good idea, which is why it was used all over the Soviet Union and its occupied vassal states. And that is also exactly why all the remote controlled Communist parties in Western Europe worked so hard to discredit nuclear power. The Communists in the West were never discredited, they were never banned, they were never imprisoned, they were never barred from running for political offices, they were never removed from their jobs as teachers or journalists...
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  295. Should we tell them that there is a train from Helsingborg down along the coast and then across the bridge to Copenhagen Airport? There was no need to take the ferry back and then take a taxi or train to the airport (and certainly no need to stop at Copenhagen Central!)... It takes between 1h04 and 1h30.
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  296.  @jokuvaan5175  The solution is to start those reforms now*. Or even better: yesterday. Or last year. Or a decade or three ago. Italy is not in trouble because of COVID-19 but because of corruption, nepotism, tax evasion, selective enforcement of laws, far too many and far too complicated laws, absurdly rigid labour laws (which unfortunately has led to a two-speed labour market in which many have too *few rights), and irresponsible economic behaviour through decades. Declare a state of emergency and get it done.
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  297.  @jessicamarie8299  no, they are not as bad. Still pretty bad, though. (And there are good people from all countries — they just tend to be a lot rarer in some places…)
    2
  298. What a disgrace those "human rights" activists have become :(
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  299.  @VFAHSN  It's a bit dishonest to leave some important information out... This is a very new rule, from Jan 2019. And not everybody has to wait until the age of 67. You could have mentioned Opzione Donna, APE Sociale, and Quota 100. You could also have mentioned the ability to retire (regardless of age) after roughly 42-43 years of social security payments. You could also have provided some information on the average retirement age which is far from 67. Because of the existence of various early retirement schemes in many countries, the average retirement age is usually a bit lower than the official retirement age. There are spreadsheets available here with average retirement age for OECD countries from 1970-2018: https://www.oecd.org/els/emp/average-effective-age-of-retirement.htm The current averages for Austria, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, The Netherlands: 63.5, 65.1, 64.3, 65.2, 66.4 (averages of 2013-18). The current average for Italy: 62.4 (average of 2012-17), 63.3 (average of 2013-18). I'd say the Frugal Four (+ Finland) have a point...
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  300. Greece actually relented in the end and implemented some of the economic reforms it had promised to as a condition for economic aid. And lo and behold! They actually work! Imagine how much better things could have been for Greece if they had implemented all the economic reforms they had promised. And if they had promised to implement all the ones the EU wanted. And had done it immediately. Why did Greece stop fighting? Because the country had run out of money. What would have happened if we had just given more money to Greece instead...?
    2
  301.  @cultural-and-historical  The EU has a military aspect, too. It’s all been negotiated in advance and it’s all there in the treaties, waiting to be activated. We are also allowed to use the NATO command structure for EU operations… that has also been negotiated in advance. We are working hard behind the scenes to reduce our dependency on US equipment (from certain weapons to troop transport planes)… take a look at PESCO and Thierry Breton’s DG DEGIS for the public details.
    2
  302. Is there something wrong with normal money so it can’t be used to pay for infrastructure? Must infrastructure be paid for with debt? Or have you fallen for someone’s propaganda?
    2
  303. Yes, because the UK was never in the Schengen Zone. Even if it had been, they would still need some form of photo id -- doesn't have to be a passport, could be a driving license for example. Electricity bills and gas bills don't count ;)
    2
  304.  @karthago1469  Hah! No, it isn't.
    2
  305. Finland will join, with or without Sweden. They would prefer to join together with Sweden, of course, but they won’t be held back by Swedish indecisiveness. Sweden will most likely join if Finland joins. The Swedish PM’s problem is her own party and her parliamentary support of small and absurd Communist parties. The Swedish Left was massively infiltrated by the Soviet Union and a lot of people are still swayed by modern Russian propaganda (about “peace” and “deescalation” and how “eeevil” NATO and the US are).
    2
  306.  @holgerandersengrn3457  > In Greenland, a few families hold the power Motzfeldt, Kleist, Egede... ?
    2
  307.  @reginaldcampos5762 not all religions are equal — and some of them are already illegal, strictly speaking. We are just all too lame to uphold the rule of law.
    2
  308.  @herrensaar1989  Rare earth minerals are abundant pretty much everywhere. They are not rare at all. It’s just old fashioned terminology for lanthanoids and actinoids in the periodic table. They are quite similar chemically, which means they are difficult to separate. That means expensive or polluting separation. China chose to go for pollution, which is why we can get reasonably cheap rare earth elements from them. There are plenty of other mines that can be restarted if the Chinese increase their prices too much. Of course, the higher the concentration of these elements in the ores, the easier it is to get pure elements out. Maybe that would work out in Greenland, maybe it won’t.
    2
  309. Higher interest rates would strangle the Southern European economies — because they still haven’t fixed their problems down there (rigid labour market due to dumb labour laws, rampant tax evasion, and tax laws that would kill all honest businesses).
    2
  310. "Green" hydrogen is a really dumb idea, actually. More HVDC power lines between countries/regions is a much better idea. More nuclear is an even better idea. Heat pumps instead of gas heating is also a brilliant idea.
    2
  311. Cem Özdemir's name is pronounced "Chem".
    2
  312.  @scifino1  that region was much larger than it needed to be. At least it turned into a wonderful nature park. (People could have stayed in most of it. People could move back to most of it today. And this was due to a really “special” two-of-a-kind stupid reactor design with no containment vessel. That is not how any of the other reactors were built, not even the older ones at the same power plant. The reactor was literally built to be unsafe just to make it slightly cheaper AND was literally built without the containment vessel that was standard everywhere else. That it blew up has zero relevance for any other reactors. It’s like saying that a homebuilt rocket car that runs on hydrogen peroxide to set a speed record in an American desert tells you anything about the general safety of cars.)
    2
  313. Greenland would benefit much, much more from less Socialism, less nepotism, and a smaller state that wasn't modelled on the worst Scandinavian Socialist ideas of the 1970's. And sobering up wouldn't hurt, either...
    2
  314. @Izahealyou don’t know what left and right mean.
    2
  315.  @irtakus  practically zero people knew that that particular slogan — which had also been used by other political parties — had ever been used by the SA. It is something as neutral as “Alles für Deutschland”. That does not actually make anybody “far right” or “Nazi”.
    2
  316. Germany’s Energiewende is going really, really well :(
    2
  317. Frank, nuclear is artificially expensive due to a harsh regulatory climate, not because it is actually expensive.
    2
  318.  @noorschoices977  Africa is lucky to have had Europeans. Africans are far richer and safer today because of us.
    2
  319.  @matthewburrow3089  Hi, Ivan Notavitch Botskivich.
    2
  320. Bias*ED*. Come on!
    2
  321.  @Veritas-66  no, just sloppiness.
    2
  322. They already see us as both.
    2
  323.  @danielefabbro822  this failure has many fathers, Italy being one of them. Italy has imported many illegal “refugees” and sent them up north (without registering them first) with fresh mobile phones, some clothes, and phone numbers of friendly lawyers.
    2
  324. Merkel is not up for re-election. That means she is ok with wasting more of her voters’ money in order to make the rest of her term easier. Germany was actually expected to be one of the frugal until she got lazy and made a u-turn.
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  325. ⁠ @gamps2771 stop behaving like an evil barbaric tribe, then. Stop fellating Russia. Admit your blame for the Yugoslav wars. Be thankful you were bombed. Admit your blame for WW1. Be grateful to Germany and Austria-Hungary. Be civilized.
    2
  326. Perhaps do a video on labour markets? Why is it so risky to hire people in the South (they are impossible to fire) and why do people down there think that's a good thing even though it is the cause of their high unemployment and one of the causes of their bad economies?
    2
  327. Can Çakıroğlu take a closer look. The signatories to the treaty of Sèvres were not all signatories to the treaty of Lausanne. Therefore, the Treaty of Lausanne does not replace the Treaty of Sèvres in international law. I think the final solution to the problem of Turkey will involve a split into smaller states (most of which probably won’t be independent for a loooong time) and the easiest way is to simply use the Treaty of Sèvres, as it is still legally binding. Would be nice to liberate Constantinople as well.
    2
  328. Listening to too much Communist propaganda is bad for your brain.
    2
  329. Ah, but should the Schengen Area also be open to gypsies?
    2
  330.  @FunBotan  by “still” you mean “always will be”, right? I mean, since you work in the energy sector and know stuff, right?
    2
  331. Not paranoia. Calm calculations regarding possible future conquest of Kaliningrad. Kicking Russia out would be wonderful but it is actually German and not Polish, like all the Polish nationalists believe.
    2
  332. He’s da boss. Probably busy bossing.
    2
  333. The fascists weren’t far right, either. They were far out and bad for Italy, but that doesn’t by itself make anybody far right. “Super Populist in a way that the Super Populists on the far left don’t like” is what they really mean.
    1
  334.  @chunkykong1976  people who need crutches like that to pick a party shouldn’t really vote, should they?
    1
  335.  @peperminth7236  No, not really. The research actually shows that being less intelligent at 11 means you are likely to die a lot sooner. You can look up the Lothian Birth Cohort research group on the net. They have used really old IQ tests that were used to decide whether the kids should have go to longer and more theoretical school or a shorter and more practical school. They then followed up on these people late in their lives. Turns out that how long they lived had very little to do with what kind of job they had or what kind of school they went to -- it had much more to do with their childhood IQ. This was a big surprise. (Some bright kids didn't go to the fancy school either because they didn't want to or because their families didn't want them them to. And some families paid for a fancy school for their not-so-bright kids. Turns out the test scores were more predictive of the kids' income, social status, health, and life span than the socio-economic status of their parents or what schools the kids went to...) It's all out there -- the leader of the group is Ian J. Deary. They published regular reports + the occasional research paper.
    1
  336. No, it is much older than Fukushima. The Soviets were always good at infiltration — it is largely their invention.
    1
  337.  @TLDRnewsEU  I hope someone got fayered for that!
    1
  338. I agree -- but I want those rules applied to Germany as well.
    1
  339. Don’t be daft! The Hartz reforms saved Germany. Merkel was a disaster and the “Greens” and their unscientific policies have been very bad.
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  340. The immigration problem has no nice solutions once they are already here. It is, however, extremely easy and cheap to solve before they arrive. It is also a very fast growing problem so it might not be the biggest problem but it is in the top 5 or top 10 in most of Europe and it is one of the most important problems to solve (while we still can).
    1
  341.  @pixelboy7654 no, legal immigration is also a problem. There are too many people coming in and they haven’t been vetted properly. That doesn’t get solved magically by passing laws and creating official documents that make it legal.
    1
  342. Over 80% of the French population is economically illiterate.
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  343.  @Personoflordlycalibur and Germany paid reparations for a war it didn’t start to the countries that started it (WW1, Versailles).
    1
  344. Perhaps Greece should fix its labour laws? And have you created that land register yet? And cut the public sector down to something reasonable? No? Have you started paying your taxes?
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  345.  @kaanaslan3003  Turkey will only make us poorer, weaker, and more unstable. Your numbers are NOT a good argument in FAVOUR of Turkey — they are a good argument AGAINST it. Even if you got rid of Erdogan and his AKP crazies (I really hope you do!), Turkey will remain a basket case due to the extreme fertility of stupid, religious people in Anatolia. Education might fix the religiosity one day, but it can’t fix stupid. Intelligence is mostly genetic… In fact, the best thing that could happen for the normal people in Turkey (they are the minority), is for Turkey to break up into smaller countries with the normal people in one or two of them and all the dumb people in the others.
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  346. "Wir schaffen das"?
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  347. The type of migrants that Western Europe has taken in -- and that Poland tries to avoid -- actually cost money. That means there is a right answer: don't let that type in.
    1
  348. Greenland will never become independent. If it's lucky, it gets to choose who it depends on. Unfortunately, lots of Greenlanders have very unrealistic nationalistic dreams of "freedom", somehow with the same or higher standard of living.
    1
  349. She shouldn't have closed those nuclear power plants...
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  350. What does the Quran say about Christians? That they should be killed or taken as slaves. That is what it says. Your religion is nasty, totalitarian, against our human rights, and actually illegal if we actually upheld our laws in Europe.
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  351.  @yarpen26  2.5 million Chinese would also cause plenty of problems -- let's at least make sure that no single immigrant group gets too big. Let's also not pretend that all Chinese are the kind of people we would want as neighbours -- a lot of them are terrible, awful, no good people. The ones from Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan are generally ok, though.
    1
  352. I bet they are still vastly undercounting rapes by Muslims. (Not least because a lot of them are of other Muslims and therefore not reported to protect the "honour" of the families.)
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  353. A bit misleading to show Sweden Democrats and AfD as examples of the far right.
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  354.  @thereita1052  Switzerland is currently more or less in breach of some of its many treaties with the EU. Most of them are coupled so a breach of one of them invalidates all of them. If the EU decides it has had enough of the Swiss foolishness, Switzerland will suddenly be in a world of hurt.
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  355. ​ @someguy3766  Ah, but would do we do when the courts refuse to make decisions that follow the law? How do we overrule them? How do we replace the judges? (That is currently the case regarding immigration in many places -- the courts often prioritize the "right to a family life" of the criminals higher than the 1) the laws they broke, and 2) the actual texts of the relevant international treaties.) There is a reason why some US states have elected judges. Not that that works too well in practice, though.
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  356.  @elios4592  You are confusing things. Yes, nuclear power is a fantastic thing. No, it is not "the EU" that stopped it.
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  357.  @someguy3766  no, they often don’t have integrity. They just go with the flow and make sure not to stick out. They are herd animals.
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  358.  @doyouwanttogivemelekiss3097  I think the rest of us have a good reason to nationalize any subsidiaries of Swiss weapons manufacturers in our countries. I also think we should bar a long list of Swiss politicians from entering our countries.
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  359. So it's all Sweden's fault and not the fault of the immigrants from warmer climes, usually subscribers to the religion of peace?
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  360. Poe’s law?
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  361.  @AliothAncalagon  we would never build anything if it had to be costed the same way we (currently) cost nuclear power plants. The regulatory climate is extremely biased against nuclear at the moment, which makes them artificially expensive. (Take things like the sizes of the exclusion zones that are far too big.)
    1
  362.  @egggge4752  no, that’s not what went wrong in Fukushima. The tsunami combined with a stupid placement of the emergency generators was what went wrong.
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  363.  @adalata  yes, they did. Merkel’s decision was intended to prevent a huge election victory for the “greens”.
    1
  364.  @GoDLiKeKakashi  of course there were settlers. That’s not in dispute. However, you grossly overestimate the amount of population change.
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  365.  @cubbiecollins  that would require the US to subsidize Greenland even more than Denmark does (and we are quite generous).
    1
  366. Was Serbia not part of Yugoslavia? Didn’t Serbia start a whole bunch of wars? Didn’t the West have to stop Serbia from mass murdering Albanians?
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  367. It doesn’t help that the courts make illegal rulings :(
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  368.  @weareallbornmad410  Remember that the best run parts of “Poland” were those run by Prussia and Austria. They are still, to this day, the parts with the best roads. (And a large part of the actual Poland is lost in the East... why don’t the nationalistic Poles never make any noises about that?)
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  369. This was clearly an act of war by Morocco which entitles Spain (and the EU) to hit back -- preferably with a drone strike on the top leaders of Morocco. Similarly, the recent border/refugee trouble between the EU and Turkey was a deliberate act of war by Turkey, which entitles us to hit back -- preferably with a drone strike on Erdogan. The fewer other casualties, the better. I think it's about time we start hitting back in cases like this and it sickens me that we currently don't.
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  370.  @imokay9793  yes, really. Like we are put on this earth, in our country, to serve them. That is after all what the Quran teaches, isn’t it?
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  371. I just watched the EU’s short video about vaccine passports last week. Obviously done by the Germans, despite the language in the video being English. “A software”, sigh...
    1
  372. Please start arresting Erdogan supporters and throw them in jail! Please! There are many of them in Sweden and they are obviously criminal because they support a dictatorial regime of oppression that uses terror against its enemies. Sweden can do that now without compromising a single law.
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  373. "Rule by horses"? Yes, it is. Germany has a huge influence on European politics and it hasn't always been positive -- energy and the relationship with Russia are just two examples.
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  374.  @christiantripepi9909  The majority of the Swedish minority in Finland are not the descendants of Swedish occupiers or Swedish landlords or merchants (although there are some of those). The majority are the descendants of Swedicized Finns. The overwhelming majority of Russians in the Baltics are occupiers or their descendants. I think that makes a huge difference -- don't you?
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  375.  @SS-ln9dy  umm, Portugal/Spain during Muslim rule? Centuries of piracy and raids of the Mediterranean shores for slaves? Millions of Europeans enslaved? You do know that that is the reason why Northern Africa ended up as European colonies, right? To stop them from doing that? And it worked?
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  376. Steinbach is not the Chancellor candidate.
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  377.  @loptater9681  Christ, I wrote Steinbach by mistake. Sorry about that. Honestly, I do know better than that.
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  378. Germany could get a lot of mileage out of respecting the very next article in its constitution, namely the one that explicitly denies the right to asylum for people coming to Germany from safe countries, including but not limited to other EU countries. That article was enough to completely prevent Merkel’s Million from entering the country… but she chose to pretend it didn’t exist. The media was quick to label anybody who mentioned it a “right extremist”, a “racist”, and someone “full of hate”.
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  379.  @andybrice2711  the way Ukrainians are handled is pretty good — it follows the EU Civil Protection Mechanism. It’s temporary, they are mostly on their own, they have to follow the law. All the other crap about special rights and free money for “refugees” is a disaster.
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  380.  @Alejojojo6 In other words "Sweden left them no choice but to become criminals"? How about just deporting them -- maybe after a long stay in a very open prison in Lappland?
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  381. No, the UN does not have a point. We are talking about unwanted colonizers that should have been kicked out in 1992 at the latest.
    1
  382. > the US where poor people without any safety net are widespread. That's a myth. The US isn't like that anymore (and hasn't been for a long time). This is actually part of the problem the US has with its current 3rd world immigrants: no incentive to behave right.
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  383. He is dyslexic and regularly butchers even UK names ;)
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  384. @Jannie Kirsten you don’t know how dyslexia works, do you?
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  385.  @forestmanzpedia  it is not the job of the government to teach “refugees” German. It is the job of the “refugees”. The government failed not by helping too little but by “helping” too much (welfare) and using the stick too little (low punishments for crime, too much tolerance for “peaceful” religions).
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  386. I disagree. The best thing that could happen for Italy would be greater fiscal responsibility. We don't help them with that by giving them more free money. A good result would have been zero transfers. And access to EU loans would be conditional on hard economic reforms, to be done before pay out of each tranche.
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  387. Ukraine couldn’t have joined earlier because some NATO countries didn’t want them. It was not the Baltics being smart and Ukraine being dumb!
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  388. Are there any e-learning options for those kids who don't live in or near Copenhagen/Århus?
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  389. True Islam, aka what ISIS did, seems worse to me.
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  390.  @nothisispatrick6528 Sure. There is plenty of anti-Swedish racism.
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  391. Australia has uranium. Sweden has uranium. Greenland has uranium. The US has uranium. Lots of places have it. It’s not exactly rare. Moreover, it is very, very easy to store and it is quite cheap. Even if we decide to buy from Russia, it won’t transfer much money to them (whereas at the moment, Europe is financing Russia’s war several times over) and it won’t give them any chance to blackmail us precisely because it is so easy to store and so easy to transport. It is different from pipelined gas in every way that counts.
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  392.  @리주민  or they could use money they have earned to buy land or stocks. For example shares in companies that own real estate ;)
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  393.  @oceanwave4502 the state treats it like a Nazi party (and it treats the Communists like good humanitarians). German TV today feels like something from East Germany and the state will punish you for talking openly about crime stats. Germany is no longer a Rechtsstaat.
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  394.  @Pichuuh  If you had said that about Die Linke, Miljöpartiet, Sinn Fein, or Syriza you would have been right. Saying that about AfD just tells me that you watch too much state TV.
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  395.  @NGC1433  we have plenty of uranium. We could also use fracking for gas on the European continent. We could also get a lot more oil and gas from the North Sea. Even if we got our uranium and coal from abroad, we would still be ok because both can easily be stored for years. Being dependent on gas is completely different: it is hard to store and quite expensive unless we get it in pipelines.
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  396.  @xenoplayz4524  you mean nuclear, right? We are in the current mess exactly because of wind and solar in Germany — we can’t store electricity and wind/solar are intermittent and somewhat unpredictable. That requires a flexible energy source to take up the slack. That’s why Germany is so dependent on gas. We need less wind/solar and much, much more nuclear. (And Germany needs heat pumps instead of burning gas for heating.)
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  397. Francesco Pirrelli for the EU, yes. For Italy, not so much.
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  398. The Nazis weren’t really right wing, though.
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  399.  @Tree_a_Boar it isn’t. It is a leftist, “green” talking point. It is actually burdened with lots of crazy and ever changing regulation that makes it at least ten times more expensive than it needs to be… all artificially, all for political benefit.
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  400. “But left wing populists — and outright Communists are fine!”
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  401. More like European/East Asian immigration vs African/Muslim/Gypsy immigration.
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  402. Not very, as they are against nuclear power.
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  403. General strikes ARE anti-democratic -- but they are used by the far left, not the far right. Go watch Austrian or Swiss television instead of German -- it's much less biased.
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  404.  @SnowWhiteArches the Ukrainians are much better people than the Arabs, Pakis, Turks, Afghans, and Africans. Plus, it’s not men of military age. They are far, far less of a problem than all the other “refugees”.
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  405. Or anywhere else in Europe, for that matter. There will be consequences.
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  406.  @MarcusCactus  Communism is always evil.
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  407.  @errormatrix4159  you sound like you would be really easy to play Risk against.
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  408.  @jurejs006  sounds to me like cheap electricity would be a really good idea, then. Go “nukular”! (And for God’s sake, start insulating your houses properly. Look at how Denmark did it!)
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  409.  @MrHodoAstartes  which is crazy, because Germany actually has an ideal waste storage in Görleben! The “Greens” have been truly toxic for Germany...
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  410. They CANT’T join the Euro until their economy is strong enough.
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  411.  @diabeticalien3584  How about Spain fixed its labour laws? Northern Europe doesn't have a two-speed labour market because our labour laws are reasonable.
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  412. Let me tell you about bronze. Bronze is Brilliant!
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  413. How much off if I use "offaltube"?
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  414. It’s a common myth in the UK.
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  415. They moved recently. I think Jack’s part was recorded before the move.
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  416.  @RLelling I’m in favour of free and open access for Slovenians but I’m willing to make an exception just for you.
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  417. Yes. It is just like how Greece was pissed about having to back loans.
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  418.  @ljacobs357 Houston's crimes are mostly perpetrated by native blacks. They aren't immigrants but they are definitely part of the "diversity".
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  419.  @Gmx92 They really like the colour black?
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  420. Perhaps that’s where the more informed people hang out?
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  421. Once you learn how horrifically bad Communism is, you start to cheer the US on every time it prevents someone from being “too friendly towards Communism”.
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  422. It isn’t. Germany is just a sick country dominated by communists who are still fighting the “good” fight against “Nazis” (anyone they don’t like).
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  423.  @NLTops  all the other members need to agree before much can be done. That includes Poland, which will likely continue to protect Hungary until the Piss Party loses power.
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  424.  @johnvanjohn825 a good thing the “greens” and the Socialists never lie about anything and never receive any kind of shady money! They have always been as clean as a Tour de France cyclist :)
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  425. And Sweden’s geography (and northern position => the Northern part is almost devoid of people) is the only reason why you have so much hydropower. Hydropower on a large scale (as in Sweden and Norway) is currently the only viable alternative to gas-fired power plants to pick up the slack when wind/solar don’t produce much electricity. It is never going to work for the rest of Europe to go full renewable (with zero gas) unless huge batteries become viable — which might take another twenty years or more — and it likely still won’t be as good as just using nuclear.
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  426.  @tanker00v25  could you please read the end of my post again? ;)
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  427. You sound like a far-left socialist.
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  428. It should, but the Germans are strongly against it. So are leftists all over Europe.
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  429. Enough nuclear would have prevented it entirely. Enough nuclear = no need for gas + no wind/solar boondoggles. Enough nuclear = no massive foreign currency income for Russia = no stupid military adventurism. Russia would have been a nothing-at-all run by a mafia with nukes instead of a gas station run by a mafia with nukes.
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  430. Why, though? It is obviously a step backwards from the nuclear power they have now.
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  431. Do European currency unions! There are so many of them and they are just as confusing... (Why could Danske Bank issue money in the UK, for example? Why do Denmark, Norway, and Sweden use kroner? (Scandinavian currency union) why are there so many pounds? Why are there three different kinds of kroner in Denmark? Oh, and Convertible Marks! And African Francs!)
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  432. Team Sarcasm -Johannes No, there are three. Greenland and the Faroe Islands are in a currency union with Denmark proper. They all use the same coins but there are local notes.
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  433.  @teamsarcasm-redacted2032  no, Greenland has its own notes as well. Edit: No! I was wrong about that one. They fucked up the process, it took too long and cost too much money, so in the end they scrapped the project.
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  434. Unfortunately, our courts pretend that WE have the burden of proof, not the migrants. If we can't prove that they travelled through other safe countries, then they must have teleported straight to our countries and we must therefore grant them asylum (or at least process their application). And if they don't cooperate during the processing of their applications? Then that works to their benefit, not ours. If they can drag it out long enough, a lot of them end getting asylum on humanitarian grounds... or we accept that they aren't here legally but we can't kick them out. It should be extremely easy these days to prove what route you took into a European country. That practically none of them do that is a very strong indication that they all (or almost all) cheat.
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  435.  @RFXZ67966  most natives (especially the women) are also net losses. I don’t think the Poles are any worse than the native Brits.
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  436. He is dyslexic, give it a rest.
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  437. And destroying village after village to dig up lignite under them. It’s all just so senseless, all to please a number of incompetent people who were given the right to vote… and all thanks to masssive Soviet/Russian infiltration in German society :(
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  438. No, we are number two. The official numbers from China are huge lies.
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  439.  @keyboarddancers7751 it used to be very selective and tightly controlled. That was before Trudeau…
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  440. If they took “no extremism” seriously, they would kick out millions of Muslims and lock up millions of Communists. Somehow, I don’t think that’s what they intend to do….
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  441.  @marcpourecio  ever heard of Gerhard Schröder and his stupid energy policies? And his close ties to Putin?
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  442.  @PingPingO9  why couldn’t Italy convict an obvious criminal like Carole Rackete?
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  443. He is too old, though.
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  444. Slim as long as Serbs keep on Serbing. Great if the Serbian public stopped seeing Russia as a great and wonderful friend and ally. At some point they will have to come to terms with having been the bad guys for over a century.
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  445. Giacinto Boccia are you yet another Italian who find it inadequate because you have to pay it back instead of forcing the Northern European tax payers to just give it to you?
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  446. Giacinto Boccia that sounds like a shouted “yes” to me. Apply for membership in the African Union instead if you are that dissatisfied with our (quite generous) help.
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  447. Giacinto Boccia why should the strong and hardworking economies leave? We are the ones who follow our rules, not you.
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  448.  @legopenguin9 On the other hand, Sweden manipulated rape stats for many years precisely to hide the growing (real) rape problem.
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  449.  @Свободадляроссии no, it’s artificially expensive due to dumb regulations. The actual costs are quite low and they can actually be built in a year or two.
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  450. “Communist” and “Socialist” are negative... and ECR and ID do not contain any neo-Nazis and barely any neo-Fascists.
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  451.  @chacka4292 I really hope Tusk et al succeeds — and lock up most of the Piss Party and clean up all the Piss plants in education, journalism, and the administration.
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  452. Slovenia would have done well no matter what. The people there are better and more intelligent than those in other ex-Yugo countries.
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  453. Greenlanders in Denmark are indeed treated quite badly -- by our glorious Muslim immigrants. Won't Trump please take those instead of Greenland?
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  454.  @bomschhofmann1644  you sound like a science denier :) You also haven’t thought through the implications of your first argument. If we take it seriously, the correct thing to do would indeed be to discriminate against certain religions — or at the very least allow full public discourse about their deficiencies. I don’t think anybody should enjoy any kind of special rights or any kind of protection against reasonable arguments just because they are Scientologists. Do you? You probably don’t. Now, what about Muslims? Or Communists? Yes, Communism is very much a religion.
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  455.  @bertrambolsingbruel3829  some tend to have low IQs and others don’t. That’s just science. Some tend to be very criminal and others don’t. That’s just (very) basic criminology.
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  456.  @telcharthegreatsmithofthef7585  science denier! :) no, studies have not shown what you claim. They have showed a minor environmental effect such that Moroccans from Morocco have an average IQ in the low 80’s and those who were raised in the Netherlands have an average IQ in the high 80’s. That particular study is by Jan te Nijenhuis but I can’t be bothered to dig up the exact title amongst his many publications. Sorry ‘bout that, but any of his papers is worth reading if you want to actually learn about psychometric and intelligence. Just start digging and you will soon stop being a denier.
    1
  457.  @telcharthegreatsmithofthef7585  our major genetic differences (between populations with different evolutionary histories) have to do with the immune system, the brain, and digestion/metabolism. Outwards differences in appearance are minor in comparison. These differences can be huge! After all, the evolution of our species has been really fast in the last 10k years. (The larger the population, the faster the evolution. Also, we are relatively new outside of Africa, so there’s been lots of new evolutionary pressure. And farming, think of farming! And relative lack of nasty diseases and dangerous animals!)
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  458. I always trust Trotsky on Economics and nation building.
    1
  459. King Leopold II of Belgium we liked the Nordic Council so much here in scandinavia, that we have two of them! (Yes. Really. In practice, they work as a single one but there really are two. Just one of those “European things”, I guess...)
    1
  460. Serbia was always very cool and Serbia’s eyes. No, Serbia was never going to join in 2004. Everybody in the EU knew that. Either she also knew that and was lying to you or she was incompetent. Serbia was absolutely not in any way ready to join back then (rule of law w/ respect to war criminals, human rights issues, unstable politically, etc).
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  461. It was rare in that area. Floods in the Elb area are not.
    1
  462. He wanted to devote more time to teaching school children?
    1
  463.  @patriarch7237 the French President has a lot of independent say over foreign affairs but not really over domestic affairs. If the parliament is against him/her, there isn’t much he/she can do. They call it “cohabitation”.
    1
  464. @EmptyThrone What?!?! We can buy from Australia if we want. Or the US. Or get it from Sweden or Greenland. There's Uranium practically everywhere. Furthermore, it is not something we would need a lot of + it is something that is extremely easy to store for years or decades before use so there is simply no way we can get pressured by dictators. It is also a hell of a lot cheaper than gas/oil/coal so even if we bought all of it from various Nastystans, we still wouldn't be giving nearly as much money to them as we do with gas (Russia) or oil (Greater Middle-East). The cost of nuclear is in construction + disaster insurance + teardown afterwards -- all of which are artificially high due to an extremely unfavourable regulatory climate (with no scientific basis). The fuel itself costs very little.
    1
  465. We could have had lots of nuclear power plants by now. It’s the red tape that slows down their construction, it is not anything inherent to the technology. And renewable energy is never just wind or just solar… it is always wind + something else or solar + something else. That something else is usually natural gas. In other words, more wind/solar leads to more dependence on natural gas. Natural gas is really hard to store compared to oil and coal… it is also expensive to transport, except in pipelines. In other words, gas is really dumb if you don’t have a reliable and stable supplier nearby.
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  466. Many of the extreme left parties who want more immigration are also great friends of Putin… probably a lot more than the anti-immigration parties.
    1
  467. The difference is that the demands to Serbia were reasonable… after all, a terror cell controlled by Serbia had just killed the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne.
    1
  468.  @nikolakocic1523  When are you people ever going to grow up? Do we have to build a wall around your country to keep the rest of us safe?
    1
  469.  @nikolakocic1523  nope, they didn’t care one bit. They just saw it as their chance to hit Germany. In France’s case, to get revenge for the war of 1870 (which France was dumb enough to start).
    1
  470.  @faldovifendi6878 Napoleon was an utter disaster for France (and Europe). Millions died needlessly because of him. Macron has not killed millions…
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  471. The really interesting question would not be whether they (re)joined France, The Netherlands, and Germany or even the Brussels Question. No, the real question is who would be the lucky guys who got to keep all the cultural enrichment! "We have the higher GDP per capita, so you need the diversity and enrichment the most." "No, they would prefer to live with you and all the good tax payers." "No, you should get them. Their culture and political values are closer to yours." "But you need the diversity more. You don't even speak French, so you aren't diverse enough." "What are you talking about? We speak Dutch, English, French, and German. You only speak French. You need the diversity more." etc., etc. etc.
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  472.  @RichelieuUnlimited education doesn’t fix IQ. Most of the immigrants are rather stupid and there is unfortunately nothing that can be done about it.
    1
  473. @@Breakthechochamberif it gets rid of the rotten apples?
    1
  474. ​ @pythagoreanbeans7475  It kinda is. You need gas to compensate for the unreliability and intermittence of wind/solar. That's the main reason why Germany is so extremely gas dependent.
    1
  475.  @tuffandco3745  sad, when the real danger comes from the left (and the millions of Muslims).
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  476. You can’t realistically replace them with renewables because wind/solar are intermittent sources so you need something else to take up the slack. Energy storage at that level doesn’t really work. Gas fired power plants are really the only “good” way of compensating for the low quality of wind/solar at a massive scale. And the whole thing could be replaced by nuclear at a lower cost, with less pollution, fewer deaths (people fall off roofs and wind turbines), and zero energy dependency of nasty countries.
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  477.  @FilAnd01  you chose to be an idiot and talk about racism. I’m afraid you lost that one.
    1
  478.  @jadenjerries2094  there is practically zero racism among the host populations in Europe. We do indeed have racists but they are almost all imported — our not so nice immigrants are often racist towards us and towards other immigrant groups. FilAnd01 is right on that one.
    1
  479.  @FilAnd01  the early Iranians did integrate fairly well, sorta. The recent ones don’t. The early ones tended to be educated (sorta) and from the upper part of society, the recent ones don’t. The early Iranians also tended to be picky about jobs (lots of jobs were beneath them) and they tended to believe they were more intelligent and better educated than they really were (the average IQ in Iran is a lot lower than in Northern Europe). The younger ones had a lot more trouble at uni than they thought they would. So there are some caveats…
    1
  480. They are all de facto immigrants.
    1
  481. Or maybe a poll?
    1
  482.  @williamzk9083  We are working on it: DG DEFIS, Thierry Breton, PESCO.
    1
  483.  @TheNjordy  Nope, not even that should be provided. But having them at least takes away one stupid excuse the Left uses!
    1
  484. Time to finally enforce the Treaty of Sèvres.
    1
  485. They are not … if you think of it as a winnable war. However, they are fully capable of bombing the shit out of random civilian targets in Finland. The NATO membership (and thus the protection under the nuclear umbrella) is intended to make Russia come up with a better, more peaceful plan than that.
    1
  486. Do a video on Battle Groups and the defense aspect of the EU! Because that’s complicated...
    1
  487.  @petrograd4068  let’s hope the “greens” and the communists lose the next election.
    1
  488. The City of London is more important than most of Africa. That's the brutal truth.
    1
  489. You have to, if you are too weak. Luckily, the Ukrainians are not that weak.
    1
  490. I hope he has a plan for clearing out leftist judges. The Netherlands need fair courts!
    1
  491. ECR and ID are not going to merge and Orban’s Fidesz will not join ECR.
    1
  492.  @JaegerDreadful  No, there are always special rules for the Muslims. Not on paper, but in practice.
    1
  493. @Jonathan Kimberley You know zero history. Zero. Africans were pretty damn good at fucking up Africa before the Europeans came. Then the Europeans came and Africa became far less fucked up. Then they left and Africa became more fucked up again. Africa's main export is Africans. I think it is about bloody time we put up an effective trade barrier against that. It's the only type of protectionism that is truly healthy and necessary.
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  494. @Jonathan Kimberley How dumb are you? Neither I nor Lars did any such thing. And what particularly did Denmark do to fuck up Africa? On the other hand, it is depressingly easy to see how Africans have fucked up and are, still, fucking up Africa... Just as Africans show a depressing tendency to fuck up places outside of Africa, everywhere there are enough of them.
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  495. They’ll never get in now. It’s not just Sweden and Finland that would veto them.
    1
  496.  @balam314  which is why that opinion is literally invalid.
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  497. Dear Herr uninformierte “Grüner” Mann, please read up on high school physics before you bloviate. There is no storage problem, only a PR problem and a political problem.
    1
  498.  @falsevacuum4667  it depends on the subject being voted on. Some things are handled by qualified majority, some things require unanimity.
    1
  499.  @CeartGoLeor86  that “downfall and occupation” was a fantastic things for the people in the West and South who came under competent management (Prussia and Austria). I don’t think things improved much under Russia’s incompetent proxy rule — and most of the rabid Polish nationalism came from that part. The Prussian and Austrian parts still to this day has the better roads…
    1
  500.  @piotrkulpa8034  something about Germans?
    1
  501.  @katalinkozak9869  I have no idea which of my comments you replied to.
    1
  502. Parkinson’s does not always mean shaking. It is usually just difficulty initiating and stopping movements, which isn’t nearly as photogenic, which is why it is rarely shown on TV. A higher dose of levodopa than normal can control the symptoms quite well, which is all you need for a short televised thing. It’s easy to hide if you are the totally-elected not-at-all dictator who controls when there is a camera on and when there isn’t.
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  503.  @koschmx  there are Communists in Parliament and cryptocommunists in government. Of course Germany has a left wing problem! To be honest, you seem like you are part of that problem.
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  504.  @remrunner101  Yes, it was the Green party. CDU/CSU/SPD would likely have lost the next election if Merkel hadn't decided to close those power plants. Closing nuclear power plants has been on the "Green" Party's agenda for a long time and they would have exploited the scientific illiteracy of the median German voter.
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  505.  @Jakromha no “greens” are center-right, not even those in Belgium. There are just the less crazy ones (Belgium) and the very crazy ones (the rest).
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  506. "Jack Shirack" ;)
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  507. Brian, they both deny science and they are both owned by corporate interests... it’s just different science they deny and different companies they are owned by.
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  508. Thank you for finally calling someone on the far left “far left”. Now you just need to stop calling people “far right” when they aren’t actually on the far right.
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  509.  @TimmSmmith  The Americans did a lot to protect civilians — they even did a lot to protect Taliban members. Russia is raping and shooting civilians for fun. It would have been incredibly easy for the Americans to simply kill Taliban… I think you were defending Russia and failed spectacularly.
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  510. Moldova also has the Gaugaz…. It’s not just Transnistria.
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  511. "Renewables" are precisely the problem. Wind/solar sources vary widely in how much electricity they produce and that can only partially be predicted. Something else needs to produce electricity when they don't -- and that something else has to be cheap and ready to turn on/off at a moment's notice. That something else is gas -- via pipelines, not LNG. Gas in pipelines is cheap, LNG is not. If we had relied on nuclear instead, we wouldn't be having this problem. Or if we had allowed fracking in Europe, we wouldn't be having this problem. And if we had relied more on electricity for heating and less on gas, we would be having a much smaller problem (in the near future when winter comes). It is more energy efficient to burn gas at a power plant and drive a heat pump with it than it is to burn gas at the consumer's house to generate heat. If we had great energy storage (in terms of humongous amounts of cheap, long-lasting batteries), we wouldn't be in this mess and renewables would work really well without pipelined gas. It will unfortunately take a couple of decades before we can manufacture that many (let alone do it cheap enough). Some European countries, due to accidents of geography, have mountains and valleys of a form that don't lend themselves well to agricultural purposes (=> low population density) while lending themselves excellently to hydropower (with pumps to move water up into the reservoirs). Those countries can use their reservoirs as de facto batteries (this is called "pumped storage"). Which are those countries? Basically only really Norway, Wales, and Scotland. Small parts of other countries can do it as well -- and they often already do. Unfortunately, hydropower is pretty harsh on the local environment + cause a bigger danger to the downstream population than a nuclear power plant does.
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  512.  @filippoburattin3178  Please don't make it our problem that Italy has a problem. Perhaps it is time to listen to Lega Nord and break Italy up into smaller countries again? Not sure we would want Sicily and Apulia and the rest of the Mezzogiorno in the EU but the North would be very, very welcome.
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  513. Filippo Burattin we do not have a common currency with you. We rejected the Euro in a referendum precisely because we didn’t want to share a currency with Italy and Greece. That was twenty years ago.
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  514. Filippo Burattin how on earth can you turn it into a resource? If you can swap the people there out with better ones, yes, that could work... but that’s not what you have in mind, is it?
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  515. Filippo Burattin dream on. Northern Africa won’t amount to anything with its current population and current religion.
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  516.  @cristiandumitrescu1744  Italy has a long history of picking up illegal immigrants up a few kilometers from the African coast, sailing them to Italy, and then helping them go to Northern Europe. Austria is a bit tired of that — not only do many of them claim asylum in Austria (and not Italy as they should), the ones who only transit through Austria also cause plenty of havoc. Austria has every right to guard its border with Italy (and demand huge a compensation from Italy).
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  517.  @cristiandumitrescu1744  because Italy has lots of extremely leftist (and uninformed) voters. I don’t care if you don’t think it makes sense. It is what Italy has been doing for a long time (and still does). No, Italy/Spain/Greece shouldn’t bear all the burden themselves (and they currently don’t!) but they are supposed to stop the illegals instead of importing them. If you want to argue nonsensically, you can do that. It’s not how grownups discuss things, though.
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  518. It’s funny when Americans pretend the US is a free and open economy.
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  519.  @cg_2k72 the people who make trouble in New Caledonia look suspiciously African to me and not at all Polynesian. Why should Africans have more rights than Europeans? Just because they are violent? Just because they are brown?
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  520.  @Donknowww  No, it's not complicated at all.
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  521. People are NOT fungible!
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  522.  @tru7hhimself if only it were a solution and not an extra (big!) problem… :(
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  523. It's not about "not having the balls". It's about not having the possibility -- outside of a make-believe dream world -- to make do without both fossils and nuclear. The problem is that we can't really store all that much electricity (and when we do, we don't actually store the electricity as much as convert it into potential energy in pumped storage or chemical energy in batteries). And even if we could convert entirely to renewable energy + storage, it would make electricity prohibitively expensive, which would have a huge impact on everybody's quality of life. Things will get better, chemical storage (batteries) is making huge strides forward at the moment. At some point it will be possible to convert entirely. And some decades after that, it will be possible to do so without killing the economy. But right now? Nope. Nuclear is the only non-idiotic path forward.
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  524. Pity they never sold all those islands to Germany :(
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  525. And WW1.
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  526. There is a slight echo in the beginning… did you move the furniture around in the office?
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  527. Since never. It was always a populist left-wing party who didn’t want mass immigration (particularly not of predictably bad people).
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  528. Dyslexia. Seriously, it’s just dyslexia. He makes similar mistakes with UK subjects. It’s not because he doesn’t try.
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  529. You were doing so well right up until the last sentence.
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  530. Yet another crime by the Communists :( Imagine how much better off Turkey would have been if the smart parts didn't have the morons of Anatolia to drag them down.
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  531.  @Leicht_Sinn  Baltics, not Balkans. See also: The New Hanseatic League.
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  532. It is far-left populist.
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  533. They meant alphabetically.
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  534. Would it work if Romania was split up into smaller countries, one for each region?
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  535. @Jimmy Germany can, unfortunately, better afford to be a loose cannon :( Breaking up Germany and letting the individual states (Länder) become EU members instead, would be a large step forward for everybody.
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  536. @WHY THAT Just as European as most things that have been "Chinese since ancient times" have been Chinese.
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  537.  @questionmaker5666  the French wouldn’t have had time to move much.
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  538.  @maxdavis7722  according to international law at the time, what France and Russia did was the same as a declaration of war and Germany was entitled to defend itself, if necessary by choosing to fight inside France (and Russia). Germany asked if they could go through Belgium. Belgium refused by claiming neutrality. After ten days of diplomacy, Germany decided that defending itself was more important than the “neutrality” of a French vassal state. Germany was correct. (The coordinated threats from France and Russia were agreed upon when Président Poincarré was in Russia, because he wanted revenge for the lost war of 1870/1871.)
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  539.  @maxdavis7722  if you were aware of it, you clearly hadn’t thought it through.
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  540. What if they are much dumber (on average) than the existing population? Because most of them are…
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  541. Please don’t consider the AfD far right. That’s just Communist propaganda from Germany.
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  542.  @guitarhausdoesntknowwhatac3285  it’s really a question of whether we give them proper weapons or not. They would be busy liberating Crimea now after liberating the East if we had given them the weapons we promised back when we promised to do so. I bet they would also have had time to plant mines on any Russian ships in port in Sevastopol, Rostov, etc. around the Black Sea. And why do we sit on our hands? Not so much because of the threat of nuclear retaliation but mostly due to decades of dumb energy policies and Soviet/Russian infiltration. I fucking hate the “Greens”.
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  543. It’s actually safer than wind/solar. People fall off roofs and wind turbines, there are accidents when the monster-sized wings are transported, sometimes wind turbines run amok and the wings fall somewhere and kill people, etc. It is not something that happens often but it still kills more people than nuclear energy does.
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  544.  @lucadesanctis563 huh?
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  545.  @FraenkischeRep and we know that poverty isn’t actually the cause. Bad culture (including a certain religion), low IQ, high impulsivity, high sociopathy, etc. are actually causative. Dumb, impulsive sociopaths tend to be poorer (duh) but that is not the cause.
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  546. Kaja Kalas is not the PM of Estonia anymore. She’s now in charge of the EU’s foreign affairs and security policy.
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  547. “Left alone in the immigrant”?! No, what happened was that Italy was used to sending the non-refugees it imported up to Northern Europe — and now Northern Europe finally grew a spine and blocked some of that illegal traffic so you were left with your own fucking non-refugees.... and you have the gall to complain about our behaviour?! Please, Italy, why don’t you leave the EU and apply for membership in the AU instead?
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  548. Giuseppe Quattrocchi it doesn’t look like I am the ignorant one. It is perfectly possible to stop the non-refugees from coming: confiscate the ships that help them, arrest the people that help them, start using your navy for good instead of show.
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  549. Giuseppe Quattrocchi you persist in being rude. I am not the uninformed one here.
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  550. And that is exactly how Poland and Hungary together managed to get too much in trouble over their not-so-democratic governance… at least until now. The Ukraine war split the Visegrad group so Poland is likely to accept harsh consequences for Hungary (with the tacit assumption that Poland itself is spared for now due how crucial Poland is for the Ukraine aid).
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  551. No. How old are you?
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  552. Meanwhile, the Good And Righteous have no problems with Socialism or Islam, two actual problems and prefer to pretend that Vlaams Belang is Neo-Nazi (when did anybody last see a living Nazi?), which is obviously not true at all.
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  553.  @Darilon12  I just went through the Ahr Valley in google maps. The villages were mostly built right up to the river's edge and there were often just nowhere for the water to go before or after the villages -- because humans prevented it. The Dutch commenters here are right.
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  554.  @Darilon12  I literally do know what I’m talking about. People screwed up.
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  555. Moroccans are equally criminal all over Europe (a lot more than most Northern Africans and Middle Easterners) so it's definitely not because the Netherlands "haven't done enough to integrate them". Most of us are just lucky enough to have very few Moroccans -- a case in point is my native Denmark. Nobody here has any particular prejudice against Moroccans like we do against Palestinians and Somalis. And btw, nobody had any prejudice against Somalis before our PM (Nyrup Rasmussen, Socialist) decided to take in lots of them as refugees in the 90's. We went from a few hundred relatively unproblematic Somalis who could all read and write (Danish, English, Somali + often Arabic and/or Swahili) and who mostly had a high school education and jobs to tens of thousands of pig ignorant and lazy morons (most of them illiterate) who still often don't speak Danish or English decades later. Their manifold kids do speak Danish and some (low) degree of English but they are usually a lot less polite than their parents. The kids seem to angry at all of us whereas few of the parents are.
    1
  556. > Once Kaczyński dies they would want to take PiS's place as Poland's main right-wing party. How keen is he on flying?
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  557.  @Jajalaatmaar no, the Social Democrats in Denmark just say that. It certainly hasn’t trickled down to actual political action. And, unfortunately, lots of dumb voters believed them so they are in power now :(
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  558. Turkey comes to mind…
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  559. Actually, we don’t really need wind/solar if we have nuclear :)
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  560. The Baltics only have this problem because it was made clear to them that they wouldn't join the EU if they kicked their Russians out. I am ashamed, as a citizen of EU-12, that we forced that upon them.
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  561. Longer.
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  562.  @oioidarling9404  That was indeed unbiased expertise. Sorry you didn't like it.
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  563. @ It’s Latin, hence the b.
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  564. @ Berlin should worry you a lot more than the EU.
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  565. In fact, if we ignore the real world, I can fly. No, Italy has NOT been economically responsible since it cheated its way into the Euro.
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  566. Why would the non-crazy leftists want to ally themselves with crazy Communists like Mélenchon?
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  567.  @y.u.so.  You are a very evil person.
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  568.  @JanBruunAndersen it also has a proven history of faking the stats by not registering sex crimes by the immigrants.
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  569.  @robertdlucas7418 really? Those Kanaks sure don’t look very Polynesian to me. They do look rather (sub-Saharan) African to me, though…
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  570.  @hexasides6411  free markets are actually pretty good. Perhaps your current housing market is not as free as you think it is?
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  571. Something that has always puzzled me… why did so many Albanians fall for those damn pyramid schemes back in the 90’s?
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  572.  @vladimirrama6874  thank you. They still don’t seem like sufficient reasons for so many people to do something so dumb, so I feel like I’m still missing something. Are there still many people in Albania who associate the pyramid schemes with “Capitalism” and are against free markets for that reason? And weren’t people warned by all the Albanian expats in Italy? Or by (ex-) Yugoslavian Albanians? How did people recover from all their losses?
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  573.  @vladimirrama6874  Thank you! I knew about the large role remittances play in the Albanian economy but the cannabis thing was new to me :) Good luck to those plucky farmers from up here in Denmark! I know the government was in on the pyramid schemes but it surprises me that anybody would trust the government after Hoxha… and I still don’t understand why the warnings from the diaspora weren’t heeded. Too much distrust of people from other areas/clans/families? As for the EU thing, there is a lot you can do on your own, by aligning your laws with the EU acquis. You don’t have to wait for us to do that. You can also participate in many sub areas of the EU already without being a member. Norway and Iceland do that. Long term, EU membership is probably the right thing, but we’ll probably be preoccupied with Ukraine, Moldova, and even Georgia for a while, even if they never become members. (“Suffrage” = “the right to vote”. You meant “suffering”. English is a dumb language.)
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  574.  @Luking2 how much of a nation’s GDP needs to be under state control for you to consider it leftist? I’d say that 40% is more than enough to say it’s hard left… very hard left.
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  575. Should Germany start following its constitution and start jailing Communists and exclude them from politics? Yes.
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  576. > I mean maybe the EU response to the euro crisis in Greece for example will also go down as one of Merkel's failings.. I agree, she was far too soft on Greece.
    1
  577. I seem to remember an enlargement in 2004 (and another in 2007). EU-2023 (450 mil) has a bigger population than EU-1999 (385 mil) even with Brexit.
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  578. I want to see Die Linke in prison where they belong.
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  579. If you need to sign up for Dutch lessons and you need the state to help you with that, then you don’t actually want to learn Dutch and you definitely don’t belong in the Netherlands!
    1
  580.  @DaDunge  constitutions can be changed. They can also be interpreted, which is something courts love to do… but that is apparently only ok if those interpretations have the right (read: left) bias.
    1
  581.  @timonsolus  you can make an extremely good argument that Germany (or any of the pieces of Germany) wasn’t sovereign at the time — so it doesn’t count.
    1
  582. Sweden has to act fast if it wants to maintain the state monopoly on violence. It's hard to kick out the criminal immigrants if they are stronger than you...
    1
  583.  @makesnosense6304  it ought to have been the biggest party (with more than 50% of the votes) ten years ago. I have no sympathy for the “good” people who willingly closed their eyes. I have a lot of sympathy for their victims.
    1
  584.  @mx338 no, they haven’t paid taxes for that. The pensions are paid by current taxes, not by old taxes.
    1
  585. Fuck no. You are already entitled to pensions from all the EU countries you have worked in. If you, say, worked for five years in one of them then you are entitled to a fractional pension from that country corresponding to five years of work. If you worked for two years in another, then you are entitled to a fractional pension from that country corresponding to two years of work. If you have saved up for a pension then you get that, too.
    1
  586. Don’t you mean “finally no longer deeply embarrassed and ashamed”? As long as they aren’t building new nuclear power plants (and stop destroying villages to mine lignite!) there really is nothing to be proud of…
    1
  587. @jimrrussell8250 you know most of the borrowed money will be wasted. Even “free” money can turn out to be expensive… A “debt reverse gear” would be better than a “debt brake”.
    1
  588. Come on, the AfD are not far right at all, no matter what they say on TV. Meanwhile, Die Linke are in the Parliament and Die Grünen are in the government. Those people are actual Communists. We are in this mess largely due to Germany’s extreme reliance on Russian gas… which is caused largely by the “green” movement towards intermittent (unreliable) energy sources that have to be backed by gas power plants because they are the only ones that can be switched on and off as fast as necessary. The more wind and solar in the German grid, the more gas is necessary. Recently, huge industrial sized batteries have become a realistic alternative to a few of the gas plants but it is a very recent development and the batteries can’t be produced anywhere near fast enough to make a difference. Why? What was wrong with nuclear? Nothing, and that’s exactly why Putin’s minions (who had other Kremlin owners before him) spent so many decades maligning it.
    1
  589. Not really. Poland was dumb enough to take lots of Muslims from Russia and the former Soviet Union. How did the Chechnyas work out for them, huh?
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  590. You've had those debates many times before and the French people have always been angry and rioted because of it. This thing happens every few years and has happened as far back as I've had an interest in French politics (so since sometime in the 90's). Most of the time, the government backs off, kicks the can down the road and lets the problem grow bigger. I hope this time is different and France gets the pension system it deserves.
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  591.  @Langharig_Tuig I looked at European immigrant crime stats some years ago and I was surprised to see that each ethnic group was about equally criminal everywhere in Europe. For some reason, most of the Moroccans ended up the NL and the rest of us got so few that nobody outside of the NL think particularly bad thoughts about them. The few hundred we have in Denmark are just as bad as yours but they are swamped by Palestinians, Lebanese (most of them also Palestinians), Iraqis, Pakis, Turks, Somalis, etc.
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  592. "Mercursor"? Really? ;)
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  593.  @kamanashiskar9203  Yes. All 4 remaining EFTA members are de facto quasi-members of the EU, some more so than others. Norway is clearly the most.
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  594. Denmark's largest gas field is currently offline because France's Total is taking (far) too long in maintaining/building new offshore platforms. They haven't exactly showed themselves to be competent at offshore gas/oil operations in Denmark and Norway :( The Netherlands could easily pump up more gas. Many countries in the EU could easily start fracking. All countries with North Sea oil/gas could develop new fields or invest in increasing the output of existing ones. We could develop a bit more pumped storage in parts of Europe with suitable geography/population densities (not Denmark! not really Germany, either). We could build many more HVDC lines to spread the wind/solar surplus around when there is one + store as much energy as possible in pumped storage. We don't have enough capacity there yet. We could use heat pumps for heating, both large-scale per district, medium-scale per housing block, and locally at the single-family house level. We could also definitely insulate our houses better in many countries (not Denmark -- we did it back in the 70's/80's). And then there is of course the nuclear option... the one that really makes sense. There is a LOT we could do if the "Greens" would let us. Instead, they want to piss away more money on wind turbines and solar cells that look like a solution but isn't one.
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  595.  @AbuHajarAlBugatti  actually, it doesn’t destroy the environment.
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  596.  @Luis_Domingos  most journalists are depressingly uninformed. The TLDR guys are a lot better than average — probably precisely because they aren’t educated as journalists. We agree that they ought to know, but there are so many other more important things journos really ought to know…
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  597.  @TheRanguna decide to steal a car?!? What is wrong with you? No normal person just decides to steal a car! Sweden does indeed have a huge problem with criminal immigrants.
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  598. You would have had a good argument in favour of extreme Keynesianism if the loose financial policies of France had actually worked better than the strict financial policies of West Germany. We both know that wasn't the case. We also both know that "austerity" wasn't actually all that austere. Right? At least, I hope we both know that. "Wir schaffen das" was her worst policy, btw, but phasing out nuclear power was another really, really bad one. They will both have severe negative consequences for generations.
    1
  599. Germany’s SPD, CDU, Die Grüne, and Die Linke can’t be far behind.
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  600.  @dmmw125  that is indeed part of it. The rampant alcoholism is more important, though.
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  601. Blood from gays is riskier (we can’t screen them donated blood for every existing pathogen — and we don’t know all of them — and gays do statistically have a riskier lifestyle) so I’m not sure that was a good idea. It sounds nice, of course.
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  602. The Turks have to be kicked out of Cyprus first, though. NATO doesn't accept countries with border disputes (even if -- as in this case -- it is extremely clear what the border is). I, for one, would very much welcome the Turks being kicked out...
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  603.  @Burito-tj5ry  because central banks are a super easy cheat code for politicians that want to spend a lot. It works much better if the politicians are kept far, far away from the money press...
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  604.  @fuerstmetternich1997 the innumerate take great comfort in their imagined moral superiority.
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  605. It is enforced against those NOT funded by Russia.
    1
  606. Perhaps a dose of "Vergangenheitsbewältigung" is in order in Serbia? You were bombed for very, very good reasons... And you still haven't even come to terms with being the bad guys who started WW1!
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  607.  @potato_nugget the land was stolen by the Saud family.
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  608. Emma's grandfather, perhaps.
    1
  609. There is actually very little bureaucracy in the EU. Agricultural subsidies, regional development subsidies, and various economic support for Southern/Eastern Europe takes up most of the EU budgets. We are trying to make the EU more of a global player, which requires a more unified foreign policy (External Action Service) and a stronger military that is less dependent on the US (look closer at Thierry Breton’s portfolio). It also requires things like Galileo and Sentinel satellites. These very sensible things cost a lot less than the agricultural subsidies and the stuff we do to compensate for Greece’s, Spain’s, and Italy’s mismanagement of their economies.
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  610. The difference is that the Sudetenland was German (well, Austrian). If the rules that were supposed to have been followed after WW1 had actually been followed, it would have been part of Austria already. The Czechoslovaks decided to go to war to "defend" some territory they shouldn't have had. They lost. (And Czechoslovakia was not exactly well-governed at the time.)
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  611. Any failure of integration lies exclusively with the immigrants. Don’t pretend it is the fault of Norway/Sweden/Denmark/France/Germany/the UK/etc.
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  612.  @RusskiyDatchanin  so every country that defends itself from Russian aggression is a NATO puppet?
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  613. Being “against immigration” is just virtue signaling until Sweden starts deporting a hundred thousand (or more) a year. That’s what Sweden needs in order to have a decent chance of surviving.
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  614.  @fitzstv8506 she will almost certainly be re-elected. It’s this year, btw.
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  615.  @fitzstv8506  she’s a good candidate whereas the two leading candidates 5 years ago were both awful. There will also be fewer nutjob “green” MEPs after the next election and she will be the Spitzenkandidat of the EPP, which will be the party with the most votes again. I expect her to be nominated by the council and confirmed by the new European Parliament with a bigger majority than last time. I also expect less silly green (and expensive) posturing in the next 5 years… and more nuclear power (which is ACTUALLY green!).
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  616. No mention of Bandera is complete without also mentioning the Holodomor and Mannerheim.
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  617.  @advancedomega  probably New York (rent control) and San Francisco (almost impossible to build new housing + lots of Silicon Valley types who can afford to pay a lot more than ordinary people)... plus the general trend of well-connected Chinese with ill begotten money they want to place in real estate outside of China.
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  618.  @elliot4013  Why love an evil dictator who got millions of people killed and ruined most of Europe for decades after his demise? And in the same breath you believe you are anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist? That makes zero sense.
    1
  619. No, the PIIGS countries (note how I included Ireland!) were entirely to blame for the Eurozone/debt crisis. Germany is (almost) entirely to blame for the current energy crisis -- AND FOR RUSSIA HAVING ENOUGH FOREIGN CURRENCY TO EVEN ATTEMPT AN INVASION! Apportion the blame correctly... there are many ways to fuck up a country (and its neighbours).
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  620. Greece failed to patrol its borders. It used to be able to let all those young (mostly male) “refugees” of military age travel further into the EU… and then we (finally) stopped that. Is it our fault that Greece still didn’t patrol its borders and that lots of “refugees” stranded there?
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  621. Let’s not forget Queen Maud Land! :)
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  622.  @Osindileyo  Communism was famous for people not having rights. You know, camps, no private property, slave labour, forced relocations, man-made hunger, you know, that sort of thing. Are you one of those people who can’t figure out which side is left and which side is right?
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  623. What on Earth are we gonna do with Albania? Do you think Africa wants it, maybe?
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  624. Of course. He is standing only three meters away from a Communist criminal nursing home patient who is doing his very best to ruin Brazil (and the rest of the world through BRICS) and who is against everything Milei stands for.
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  625. It shouldn’t be Germany’s problem that supermarkets refuse those debit cards.
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  626. It wasn't exactly independent, either...
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  627. USB Type C is a good choice (for now) but I really like my lightning ports. The risk of premature standardization is real. Tesla had to give up their (superior) plug in Europe in favour of the CCS plug, thanks to a pretty dumb EU directive.
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  628.  @spotonnls3538 most socialists agree.
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  629. @roro4787The German “greens” have a far larger share of the blame (by being fanatically anti-nuclear and previously anti-defense) and so do the Social Democrats (Schröder, Gasprom).
    1
  630.  @hectorvega621  that has been proven to be untrue many, many times. It was proven to be untrue long before any of us were born. Please don’t spread Socialist lies!
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  631. True. But Schröder didn't phase out nuclear. Schröder also didn't invite a million Muslims into Germany (and many more into Europe). I'd say she was a lot worse than him.
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  632. Don't overestimate the intelligence of the German Green voter. Or the German Die Linke voter, for that matter.
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  633.  @Slithermotion  no, crashing the euro won’t work. I also don’t see how you could block the Rhine — where would you put the water? And, yes, it would be an act of war if you really tried. And, no, NATO has in no way “provoked” Russia. Come on, don’t listen to the Socialist and don’t watch RT!
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  634.  @mab9614  I’m all in favor of restricting voting to people who can pass a literacy, numeracy, and IQ test and who are net tax payers (and who aren’t known Communists or criminals). You?
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  635.  @marco21274  me too! ;) The problem with democracies is that they let other people influence your life. Should we let somebody who can’t read a newspaper article correctly have that right? Mind you, it takes a surprisingly high IQ before people can do that — around 120! Should we let people vote who are easily influenced by the media? About half the US population believed in the Russia hoax... and refused to believe that Brandon was getting senile. I would prefer a somewhat less universal suffrage but I don’t want to exclude everybody below 120 or everybody who isn’t a net tax payer here and now. Just enough that the crazies on all sides balance each other out. Long term, the best solution is to have a smaller state so the doofuses can’t influence others so much via the state.
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  636.  @nocivolive  blame France for that. Nobody else wants it, but it is literally in the treaties.
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  637. Let’s restart those German nuclear power plants! And then build more! We should no longer rely on unreliable Russian gas nor on unreliable wind and solar.
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  638. They haven’t done that yet, though. Wilders is a softie on everything except Muslim mass immigration.
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  639.  @TheisKrarupHansen  that means I am right and you don’t like it.
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  640. @ Mussolini was definitely on the left. Franco was fairly moderate, he was just anti-“let the Communists kill everybody”. Trump is also quite middle of the road.
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  641. The French speakers can be demigrated from Brussels. Same with the Arabs.
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  642. Bad acting from bad actors.
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  643. It is easy for most people. It’s not easy for this guy because he is dyslexic. He is actually trying quite hard.
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  644. How is the mass immigration working out for you?
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  645.  @Bayard1503  kicking all the non-dissident Turks out of Europe would be reasonable. Arresting Erdogan’s supporters in Europe would be reasonable. Complying with Turkey’s shrill demands would be UNreasonable. Remember, we are talking about a country that keeps part of an EU member under occupation and is run by a despot.
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  646. If you are actually green, you are in favour of nuclear power — so why do you want anything at all to do with the “Green” party?
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  647.  @henninghofmann2051  no, the waste itself isn’t all that expensive, either. It’s the fault of the “Greens” the whole way through. They are nasty little small-minded dumb people :(
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  648.  @RainerSpielberg  I apologize for knowing high school physics and elementary school math.
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  649.  @boarfaceswinejaw4516  and that Turkey maintains an illegal occupation of an EU country.
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  650.  @strongninjagaming9210  not likely, when Erdogan is the one doing the counting.
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  651. Chinese crime stats are violently juiced, even without taking their ethnic cleansing into account.
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  652. Did they ever? Or did they, but only during the loan boom?
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  653.  @ginojaco not that suddenly… the nasty racists were imported (and paid for) over a period of many, many years.
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  654. He is genuinely dyslexic. It's not because he doesn't care.
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  655.  @irtakus  it is unclear what you mean by “race science” and unscientific. We actually know a lot about DNA differences and there are basically one huge division: sub-Saharan Africans and everybody else. There are other divisions, for example between the most widespread modern Africans and the small peoples who have their land stolen by the Bantu Explosion. We also absolutely know that humans are animals like all other animals and as such react to evolutionary pressures (and that evolution doesn’t stop above the neck). Is this what you call “unscientific race science”? Furthermore, we know that intelligence is real, that it can be measured, that is mostly genetic (just like height) and can’t be taught (just like height). We even know many of the genes involved! We can even dig up old skeletons, sequence their DNA, and look at which genes changed and when and where. It turns out that farming (and higher population density) is a major driver of recent evolution, including for genes that make us smarter. All of this is science.
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  656.  @irtakus  no. You have misunderstood the Flynn effect and you have fallen for the leftist propaganda lie about education. Education does NOT increase intelligence. If you actually want to know more (which I doubt, but please prove me wrong!) you should look at Ian Deary’s research with the Lothian Birth Cohort Study. The UK used to split pupils around the age of 11. Some would get more years of schooling (and at a higher level) others fewer (and at a lower level). In order to make it fair — and to maximize the benefit to the state of the kids’ talents — this was determined by an IQ test called the “11+ exam”. Most of the test results were thrown out, but some had been preserved by accident. His study looked at the people who took those tests and remeasured their IQs, looked at their health, employment history, social status, income, etc. It turns out that they tested about the same as they did as kids, even though some got university degrees and some had almost no schooling. All the data are in the (many!) reports published by the study and the scientific papers they published. We know for a fact that intelligence can’t be taught.
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  657.  @irtakus a completely value neutral reply of mine disappeared completely. It said that you got the Flynn effect wrong (you did) and how we know for a fact that education doesn’t lead to higher intelligence (Ian Deary, Lothian Birth Cohort Study).
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  658.  @irtakus a short follow up on the Flynn effect… it is not as extreme as you portrayed it and there is zero reason to believe it will solve any of our immigration problems but the effect is indeed real. The obvious candidate reasons are better nutrition, less pollution/poison, fewer diseases/parasites, and better education/more books. We would expect the poor to be more afflicted by all four and we do in fact see a much stronger Flynn effect historically amongst the poor than among the middle class/rich. Longer schooling didn’t have much of an effect, though. It has also stopped in rich, industrialized countries. And even poor people in the Middle East and most of Africa have better nutrition and a lower disease load than middle class Europeans had a hundred years ago… There is a funny error source, though. Some IQ tests are more affected by education than others. Raven’s progressive matrices (which is nice because it is culture neutral and easy to administer) is very affected but most others show only a tiny effect or no effect at all. That means you have to be careful when you hear about a study that purports to show a strong recent Flynn effect: you need to verify what test(s) it used. We have very good data on the Flynn effect for Moroccan migrants to the Netherlands, thanks to Jan ter Nijenhuijs (which I probably misspelled). The first generation had an average IQ in the low 80’s and the second generation in the high 80’s… and I think it used Raven’s progressive matrices. So, not much hope of them reaching 100 anytime soon :(
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  659.  @irtakus  look closer. Some people with high scores got lots of education, others did not. It had no effect on their intelligence (and surprisingly little effect on their life outcomes). This is one of many studies to prove that intelligence can’t be taught (or at least that nobody teaches it and nobody even knows how to teach it). It’s just the one with the most direct evidence and cleanest arguments — it can’t be denied even if you use both hands.
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  660.  @irtakus  no, it really seems to have disappeared.
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  661.  @Solstice261 you could try to learn more about the things you “know” or you could continue to be ignorant…
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  662.  @irtakus  oh, good!
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  663.  @Solstice261  be like the people who wouldn’t look through Galileo’s telescope. Be like the people who felt justified in destroying glass factories in China because they used foreign (non-Chinese) technology. Be like the ignorant bigots you think other people are. Eppur si muove!
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  664.  @Omicon  really? They talk about the Versailles Treaty all the time?
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  665.  @Omicon  I just did. You were wrong. You know who actually used word-for-word the slogans as the Nazis and Commies in the 30’s? Die Linke…
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  666.  @Dave1507  most people believe what they are told on TV. You can verify for yourself that others used it. Go on… it’s not that hard to do.
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  667.  @Dave1507  logic is not your strong suite.
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  668.  @Dave1507  you might be autistic.
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  669. Because they were never green in the first place. The “greens” have always been a branch of Communism.
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  670. She did it to give her government a chance of being reelected. She knew the German Greens (who aren't at all environmentally friendly) would make hay after Fukushima if she didn't do something about the German nuclear power plants. So she did. And it worked: she became Chancellor again. Pity about the environment, though. And the Russian influence. And the costs of all that lignite and gas.
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  671.  @billywiththebulgingbaloonb5105  imagine still believing in 350-year-old war propaganda…
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  672. @UC69Srb7QsKxLKQvLjGx6tvA as long as you clean up the trash you brought in first.
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  673. Who is in favour of kicking Turkey out of Europe -- not just NATO, but Europe? I certainly am!
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  674. You are less productive and if you have Mediterranean retirement ages then you are lazy. And Portuguese tax payers were certainly not propping up the economies of German, French, Dutch, and Belgian economies! It’s good that you have behaved like grownups for a few years but as with dry alcoholics, we don’t quite trust you yet.
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  675.  @hadiamrane or if you had fewer Muslims. With both, you’d be debt free in twenty years! :)
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  676. Why? What if Parliament wants a new election?
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  677.  @theglanconer6463  no, the social democrats in Denmark are not at all “very tough on immigration”. They haven’t really loosened the laws put in place by more sensible parties — laws the socialists fought hard against — but they haven’t really made them tougher either. They have mostly done nothing. And our immigration laws weren’t really all that strict before the Social Democrats took over. They do talk a hard game and the (leftist) media backs them and pretends they are actually tough on immigration. We still can’t kick obvious criminals out if they don’t want to get kicked out. We still have schools that are full of badly behaved Muslims — and which all resourceful parents avoid, including resourceful Muslim parents.
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  678. Do you own any mirrors? Perhaps use them?
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  679.  @TortillasAllTheWayDown I would have if I were German and lived in Germany.
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  680.  @deathbower  learning history and economics is a better idea than running for your emergency shaver. Africa is in a much better condition because of the Europeans.
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  681.  @hzeer75 it kinda is a religious thing. Non-Muslims are inferior, according to the Muslim holy texts. Our lands exist to be conquered by the Muslims. It’s nice that you don’t think like that, but that makes you a bad Muslim — practically an infidel. It also make you a normal, decent person. It is not possible to be both a good Muslim and a good person. Maybe we should be grateful that most Muslims are bad Muslims?
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  682. Because the “greens” are morons.
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  683.  @andreagenovesePhD  We are giving you special help. We are using the ESM and te ECB for that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Stability_Mechanism What we don't want to bullied into are Eurobonds, where Italy can take up loans (with no supervision) that Northern Europe is on the hook for. No fucking way will we accept that.
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  684. As you likely already know (you are Norwegian, I presume), Norway is as close to being a full EU member without de jure being a member as is physically possible. It is not only in the EEA, it also participates in everything the EU will let it participate in, except for agriculture (long memories of England’s blockade 200 years ago and the ensuing starvation) and fisheries (mostly due to nationalism).
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  685. 20? Try 40 or 60.
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  686.  @Veritas-66  I just today watched half of a long video today by Survive the Jive from about a year ago. He talks about a recent genetic study which concludes that the Anglo-Saxon contribution is much larger. That is curious, because it contradicts earlier studies that I’ve read. I hope to get around to reading it carefully soon, maybe next week, because I’d like to know how the discrepancy can be reconciled. Maybe he is reading it wrong, maybe the paper’s conclusions aren’t supported by it’s data, maybe it’s data are rather more spotty than they seem — or maybe there’s something wrong with the earlier papers. My impression of Survive the Jive from earlier videos is that he is honest and hardworking but not terribly bright and definitely not good at math so I don’t trust him too much as a science journalist… but he is better than most official science journalists and he is at least not one of the dumb “pots not people” leftists.
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  687. A “green” economy would be a great idea and easy to get. We should just use nuclear energy. Unfortunately, it’s usually code for inefficiencies (wind, solar, imported wood pellets) and pipe dreams (hydrogen).
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  688.  @PhonologyNerd how do you manage to brush your teeth if your understanding of reality is so far off?
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  689.  @anti-emo4721 good.
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  690.  @gaborjuhasz5610  Come on, you know just as well as I do that your PM is a crook — a wannabe Erdogan/Putin like crook — who is bad for your country. You also know just as well that Hungary is violating the EU treaties. Of course, I know just as well as you do, that Hungary is right when it comes to welfare migrants from all the exotic countries. The EU had no right to try to force everybody to pay for Italy’s/Greece’s mistakes in letting them into Europe or Germany’s mistake in inviting them. We should have a mechanism to take away the votes from all 4 countries and it is a serious democratic problem that we don’t.
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  691.  @hendrikdependrik1891  isn’t it funny that the people who are most against nuclear are also the people who are most against weapons that can defend us against the Russians?
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  692. Not a single one of them is politically stable and reliable. Yes, solar in the Sahara + HVDC lines would be nice... but only as a bonus on top of a reliable electricity supply.
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  693. They sure love to vote for commies!
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  694.  @jjbell150 the vast majority of Sweden’s land is useless. It’s not just the cold and barren land in the North, it’s also all the lakes everywhere.
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  695.  @elvangulley3210 nobody cares about skin colour. We care about the quality of people and the number of eagerly offended, non-integrating, criminal, low IQ foreigners.
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  696. Oh, grow up (and learn English). There is zero real problems with the waste. There is a huge artificial PR problem, largely because dumb people can vote and because Soviet agents had mostly free reign to spread their poison in the 70’s and 80’s.
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  697.  @robertopreatoni  And it was justified the whole time. Your wife knew that. Why didn't you listen to her?
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  698.  @sempressfi  There is absolutely nothing "dumb" about saying that. They really should learn English first before they come -- but it would be better if they didn't come in the first place.
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  699.  @igorpupkinable  perhaps they should be kicked out of France…
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  700. And perhaps talk about the military and diplomatic aspects... There was broad support for a bigger EU budget in the Council even while Juncker was still President, in order to make us less dependent on the US and in order to prepare ourselves more against the threats from China. It isn't some new and crazy idea that von der Leyen and Michel have come up with on their own. It also ties into the appointment of Thierry Breton and the creation of DG Defence Industry and Space (planned under Juncker). Sylvie Goulard, the first candidate for the French Commissioner, was turned down not just for possible corruption and clear arrogance but also for being too lightweight for the post.
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  701. A personal union is not quite the same thing. It can be de facto the same (Denmark-Norway before the Napoleonic Wars) or not (Spain and Portugal for about 65 years).
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  702.  @RoScFan  Don't worry. There will be a new once-in-a-hundred-years event next year. And Italy still won't have reformed anything. Perhaps Mark Rutte had a point?
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  703.  @nenasiek where is the “far right” in Sweden?
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  704. That’s because it IS. It is the only non-idiotic thing to do. (And there is Uranium all over the world and it is easy to store, even in the case that Australia, Sweden, the US, and Greenland all go rogue at the same time.)
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  705. That would probably have happened a long time ago if not for China. North Korea is China’s pet.
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  706. Schröder does. Merkel still lives in Germany. The German "Green" politicians also still live in Germany. All of them should rot in prison -- or in a Münster-style cages outside the German Parliament building!
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  707.  @bzuidgeest  she had sixteen years to change course. And she did: towards an even dumber energy policy for Germany. The Energiewende and the Atomaufsteig was Merkel, not Schröder. (Yes, Schröder had to give the “Greens” some concessions on paper regarding nuclear phase out but the expectation was that it could be delayed indefinitely.)
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  708. Less insane than our agricultural subsidies.
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  709.  @nonyabisness6306  Yep. And there is zero technical reason why it should take that long to build nuclear power plants. It doesn't take that long for the concrete to cure. We ought to be able to get the timescale down to a year or two if we aren't in crisis mode and less than a year if we are in an acute crisis (as we are now).
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  710.  @nonyabisness6306  in crisis mode, you would start ten-twenty teams in parallel and cut all the dumb red tape. I would expect some of the teams to finish in less then a year, some to finish in two years… and some to fail completely.
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  711. So? I’m quite willing to see France die :) (When do they man up and use the military against the idiots who routinely block all traffic in France because they want more money or longer vacations?)
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  712. Actually, we don’t even need the renewables. Nuclear is enough. It’s also cheaper and safer. (How much things cost is to a large degree determined by the regulatory climate, which has been very anti-nuclear and very pro-wind/solar for decades. Fix that and nuclear will win by a huge margin.)
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  713. Fukushima is what finally made it completely clear to me that nuclear was safe. It showed without a shadow of a doubt that 40-year-old concrete containment buildings work perfectly well for containing oxyhydrogen ("Knallgas") explosions. That type of explosion is the only real danger from a half-way modern nuclear power plant, because it would spread some radioactive fission products to the environment. What is the risk of a tsunami hitting a German nuclear power plant? And what do you think happens if such a tsunami hits a German chemical plant? (Chernobyl didn't have such a containment structure -- and that was just one of many, many, many stupid design decisions of that plant. Furthermore, Fukushima didn't kill anyone and the evacuation zone was obviously many, many times too big and therefore many, many times too expensive.)
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  714.  @Skelli2  funny. Israel prepared for almost a year for that war in which they were “attacked” and the Arabs hadn’t prepared at all…
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  715. Huh? The biggest error of the Euro crisis was to put money in the hands of Southern Europe too soon and without sufficient reforms.
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  716.  @alko_xo sure… and both Putin and Erdogan were democratically elected.
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  717.  @mikel9138 no, it isn’t. The government’s job is to make it possible (or even easy) for others to provide housing… and jobs.
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  718. The “Greens” have never been green. It was always Communism with a nicer name. Look into the deeds of Cohn-Bendit, for example, or the street fights of Joschka Fischer. (Or their historical attitudes towards sex with children. Cohn-Bendit is a particularly nasty person.)
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  719. Fredrik Dunge the “refugees” did not so much arrive as they were actively imported. Italy and Greece has been importing these non-refugees for decades but they had previously managed to pawn them off on Northern Europe. They can’t send them to Northern Europe as easily these days but they haven’t stopped importing them. Somehow this is the fault of Northern Europe which again fails to show solidarity by complying with Italy and Greece’s childish wishes.
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  720. Let's hope they get tried for treason soon (together with Schröder and Merkel). If ever there was an open and shut case of treason, this is it.
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  721.  @jonathan2847 there are a lot of them in that corner of Germany because AMD/Global Foundries (and other companies) have had fans near Dresden for maybe 20 years.
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  722. Ah, but is Switzerland a federation or a confederation? (The latter de jure, the former more and more de facto.)
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  723.  @tripledigit4835  decades of Communist propaganda, remote controlled from Moscow :(
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  724.  @antyspi4466  Germany actually has a very nice place underground in Görleben. The arguments against it are purely political (and anti-scientific).
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  725.  @oubeidhajji3430  but the Arabs ARE worse than the Turks… and the Turks definitely haven’t been good for Germany. There are Turks who have, but they are a minority. There are also Arabs who have, but they are an even smaller minority.
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  726. Damián Vila why don’t you apply for membership in the African Union instead? It sounds more like your kind of place.
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  727.  Drom Assault  It made a lot of sense. Maybe you are just not all that good at reading? or thinking?
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  728.  Drom Assault  Seems like I was right.
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  729.  @javierslytherin9898  Well, I think you are an idiot.
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  730.  @paul1979uk2000 Dombrovskis would probably have been a better choice but he wasn’t a candidate.
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  731.  @Kartoffelsuppe_m_Wursteinlage  please shut up until you have learned high school physics and middle school economics.
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  732.  @tnickknight much better than PiS. The PiS party broke the constitution and other laws left and right in order to maintain one-party rule. AfD is legal and non-extremist… and will never be able to rule alone, anyway.
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  733. Ukraine is -- in spite of everything -- better and more secure now than it was during the Holodomor as part of the Soviet Union.
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  734.  @ThePanMan11  it is literally how French reactors were designed decades ago — the “greens” are flat earthers.
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  735. @The505Guys I don’t see the problem. You could still say “a fiver”, “five bob”, or “five quid”. You wouldn’t have to say “5 euro” just like you don’t say “5 pounds” right now.
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  736. Or maybe it’s the story of Africans everywhere?
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  737. He’s been reincarnated as a Russian woman.
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  738. The legal immigration, which is and was huge, is definitely also a problem.
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  739. Carlos Leon is Switzerland not a country, then?
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  740.  @tomendruweit9386  Well... we do have stuff going on in Africa (and in the sea around Somalia). We really also ought to be doing stuff in Far Eastern Europe and Asia, to be honest. There are problems with both Russia and the Turks. Would be nice to see both of them leave Ukraine, Germany, Greece, and Cyprus.
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  741.  @Tmanowns  that would be lovely, but the Americans are not going to leave the Middle East voluntarily :( They have also lobbied very, very hard against European military cooperation through decades.
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