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

  1. 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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  2. Poland stronk. Poland can into space!
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  3. I don’t think democracy is bad. It’s just universal suffrage that is bad.
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  4. Pakistan had a cricket player.
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  5. 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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  6. 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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  7. And all the typical mussels.
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  8. Elsaß…
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  9. Perhaps Germany's publication laws are not quite in accordance with basic human rights and EU law. Just a thought...
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  10. @@Anothertakeonthis have you talked to a psychiatrist about your paranoia?
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  11. 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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  12. You should be fine! If you already speak English (and German?), learning another Germanic language shouldn’t be a problem.
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  13.  @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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  14. 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".
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  15. 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.
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  16. Lay Havray.
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  17. 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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  18. No, it rests with the Council (the member states).
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  19. It raises clear doubts about the quality of said education. Perhaps it’s merely long (and expensive) and not particularly high…
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  20. > 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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  21.  @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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  22. 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).
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  23. 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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  24.  @gediminaskucinskas6952  the Germans there were largely Germanized Balts… and the ancestors of those Balts might very well have been Goths.
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  25.  @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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  26.  @neodym5809  There’s a hell of a difference between kidnapping and keeping criminals out. And you know that.
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  27. 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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  28.  @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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  29.  @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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  30.  @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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  31.  @The_Great_Game_Begins  India stole Pondicherry.
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  32. Not having much nuclear power leaves you at the mercy of energy prices… that’s what you meant, right?
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  33. 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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  34.  @oncaphillis  yes, not only is it brilliant, it is also correct.
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  35. The European flag is not really an EU symbol.
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  36.  @pedromoura1446 ”you’ll never shall be missed.”
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  37. No, Scholz is right on that one. And it is extremely obvious why (Greece, Italy)…
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  38.  @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.
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  39. 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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  40.  @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”.
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  41.  @lennywatchesstuff that’s so cheap that it’s like a huge gift of free money. You have no idea how expensive those people are.
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  42.  @thornelderfin  no, France never left NATO. France left the command structure of NATO. Not at all the same.
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  43. 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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  44. Generating electricity with that gas and then running heat pumps at the consumer end would burn a lot less gas…
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  45.  @rolandnegrei1427  we are talking about Bulgaria and Romania. Austria very much has a point.
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  46. 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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  47. 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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  48. 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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  49. It absolutely is EU's business if Hungary is an EU member.
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  50.  @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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