Over at Le Figaro, a business banker says that, instead of imposing sanctions on Russia and supporting Ukraine, we should democratically discuss the costs of doing so and then probably not do it.
Does "salle de shoot" mean here a (legal) bunker for addicts? Do they already exist anywhere in Belgium already? Are they more like clinics, sobering cells or more like underground clubs?
I believe that in English it's called a supervised injection site.
I think we just call it addict care, and (addict) treatment centers.
If the law only "requires employers to consider" it, then it's not a right.
This article or at least your quote is incorrect or misleading, though of course it's a limited right nonetheless. That employers are required to consider it is the current (well, past) situation. They could just say no. The new situation is that they are required to grant the request if it's "reasonable and fair".
What that means exactly is up to the courts. As an example, an employer might try to refuse all requests by saying going to the office is a requirement for "social cohesion". A judge will then follow through by asking whether it wouldn't suffice for social cohesion to be at the office two days a week.
So no, there's no right to hybrid work, but there's also no employer's right to refuse working from home to grant hybrid work as it's always been until yesterday.
The initial proposal went further, namely that employers would only be able to refuse with weighty arguments. It took a year of negotiations to come up with the final form. Employer's organizations were afraid they wouldn't be able to make people come to the office now and then.
But in essence, employer and employee organizations were both in favor. No one was seriously opposed to some form of solidifying hybrid work as a limited right.
The end values and framing of the topic matters a lot. His end values are governance and socio-economic indicators as defined and measured by World Bank and the like, which is perfectly scientific as far as economics and economic history goes. His framing is "colonial legitimation", i.e. the more natives become employed by the colonial institutions and receive its services such as healthcare and education, the more it counts as (legitimate) colonialism, whereas mere slave trade will not count as colonialism insofar as slave traders are mobile between trade posts and do not govern a colony.
Unfortunately I can't remember who wrote it (perhaps the minister of colonies?), but as I said that was almost exactly the argument for why Indonesia shouldn't be independent.
The first few pages I thought it was tongue in cheek, but it's not.
It seems to be riffing on things people wrote back in the 1920s and 1930s, that we read in history class. The gist of it being self-governance is a lofty goal, but these people aren't ready for it yet.
I find it somewhat amusing that within the internal logic of the article, most of the "anti-colonialism is bad, actually" shtick reads to me like Russian colonialism is a lot worse than Belgian/British/Portuguese colonialism, rather than an actual absence of colonialism.
Put another way, it's not so much the case for colonialism, but the case for 1930s style Western European colonialism.
A random thought:
Quote
“Since gaining independence, Congo has never had at its disposal an army comparable in efficiency and discipline to the former [Belgian colonial] Force Publique,” was Van Reybrouck’s sad conclusion.77 Maybe the Belgians should come back.
The army was there to fight Germany and the locals. It's unclear why we should assume there's some inherent good in it?
Now, GDPR in particular is such that it better not be different anywhere, if it is to have any point at all. And it isn't. It has a uniform global effect. Namely, the cookie popups are pretty much global. Another reaction from many American websites is to just block European visitors. The cookie popups and visitor-blocks are global effects of GDPR, but definitely not good effects.
But if you are not experiencing cookie popups globally, then again we have a difference...
The technically legal in some circumstances cookie popups already existed prior to GDPR. The ePR was supposed to come into effect at the same time as GDPR in 2018, but is largely separate except for where the handling of personal data part overlaps.
There is indeed a failure of sorts there being fueled largely by France if I'm not mistaken.
Overall, the video is from an EU-positive British perspective. Brits and Western Europeans have in common a denial of their colonial attitude.
I'm not sure if it's helpful to analyze certain types of at best unhelpful protectionism as colonialism, but yes, it's unfortunately all too present in recent years.
while the Eastern EU tries to follow the regulation to the letter with rather adverse results to the common citizen.
Your example above doesn't seem to show that. Crudely paraphrased, the situation regarding direct neighbors hasn't changed substantially, therefore the EU is useless. In practical terms that'll be true much of the time because of course you deal with Finland and Latvia more than with Belgium or Spain. In this limited sense the EU is useless for the entire EU. But when you deal with France or Greece, you're also treated the same way as an EU citizen. The fact that this will often be invisible to a big minority or small majority of the population hardly makes it a net negative. I don't know why you would expect the EU to have much of an impact on relations with your neighbors whom you already had good relations with. When an Estonian peat company ships peat to the Netherlands, it can do so without having to deal with all manner of complex customs nonsense due to common peat standards. The Estonian government would have had to negotiate an individual peat agreement with every country it wants to export peat to. Instead it can just export peat to all of the EU, and outside of the EU on the basis of EU peat trade negotiations with for example the United States.[1]
But I wonder if people younger than you would even agree that it's all that invisible unless you look. Universities are full of Erasmus students from Estonia (and from all over the EU) for example.
To summarise, the most visible effects of GDPR are outright evil. The less visible effects, such as fines on some companies and institutions who treat your data and credentials badly, are incremental. Historically the situation used to be better long before GDPR.
That's not true at all. The situation was significantly worse before GDPR. If it didn't improve in Estonia, then you've disproved your earlier statement that it's just for new members that EU rules make a difference, although obviously any prospective new member will have to align with the EU rather than the reverse. No matter the subject, the situation won't improve in some member states because the EU enforces a certain minimum and any member state is free to go beyond. GDPR makes it so that all of Europe is now similar to how it already was in Germany with regard to personal data, and that's a great improvement pretty much anywhere except for Germany and Estonia.
Without the full story, it is more plausible that bans or threats of bans on imports of raw materials, playing with tariffs etc. is a game of colonialism by the EU. Some countries occasionally lash back against European colonial attitude.
Switzerland isn't in the EU last I checked.
1 I mention peat because it's the most visible Estonian product that can be found in every store, but of course the same applies to Estonia's IT industry and all other imports and exports. The fact that you pay at least 6-10% less than you otherwise would is invisible.↵
“The fact that the funds have not been transferred to the recipients is not our problem,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
Not our problem seems very cavalier, but afaik the basic tenet of it is true? That is, if you phrased it as "not our fault" instead of "not our problem" it would be accurate. Because no matter whose fault it is, it is their problem.
But I'm not talking about shared Dutch or French[1] Requesting the translation aid is a non-issue in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Italy in my experience. There's no need for any kind of certified translation because of that piece of paper. It does indeed make you wonder what purpose it serves at all, and some of the authorities involved might eye it suspiciously[2] but your description is simply not how it has worked for me with birth, marriage and residence certificates — I couldn't tell you about death ones, but I have no reason to assume it's any different.
1 NB The language is possibly the least shared in archaic officialese.↵
In my experience the problems you describe don't really exist (in that form) in the Benelux/ECSC. Perhaps it's a mistake not to be more forceful on the matter to the newer members, but I don't think it's a weakness to err on the side of caution when it comes to acting like the Soviet Union would.
As I said (and you ignored?), the so-called Committee abrogates the rules of the House of Representatives
If I ignored it, it's because you didn't say it. Which rules are abrogated by whom? I can trivially find some random hearing from 1995 or from 1946 because these things are almost always open to the public.[1] A quick search suggests the first televised broadcast of American congressional hearings was in 1951 and I know for a fact they've been a mainstay ever since. I assume you've heard of some highlights like McCarthy and Watergate.
I'm not commenting on whether it's desirable to treat politics as a soap opera, but it's a tradition dating back 50 years, arguably 70. What is it that the Democrats are doing other than not being Republicans?
1 Would you really quibble that a hearing from 1946 or from 1879 wasn't televised? But if so, that's what the next few sentences are for.↵
Of course capitalism spreads easily, because the average joe is greedy.
I'm not convinced it spreads all that easily. If you look at it historically it's quite a top-down forced proposition. As you also retell yourself from a very different perspective:
have not learned any lessons from a number of earlier civilisations fallen due to disregard of ecology.
Note that the Easter Island for example was a completely made up hoax. Its civilization never fell (or at least not until Peruvian slave raiders captured most of the population).
the gun-rightists suggest things like having just one door to schools (how does this jibe with fire security?)
While I'm not sure how many doors we had exactly at my high school, I think only three or so were generally used as regular doors. There were more fire doors, as in the kind of door you can only open from the inside with some kind of door-wide handle.
Having only a single normal door sounds very annoying at best of course, but as such it seems perfectly compatible with fire safety, at least in theory.
I don't like to drag either, not even in continuous mode.
I explicitly renamed it from its prior name "scroll mode" because I strongly dislike the suggestion that there should be any scrolling/dragging involved. In extremely rare circumstances I might reposition.
Anyway, it means it's somewhat unlikely to come from me, but of course anybody who's interested is free to try their hand at an implementation.
Free dragging isn't that hard in principle, but what I like most is not having to do it. That is, I'm not overly interested in spending time implementing it at this time, and apparently other people aren't either.
I find it a bit surprising that YT isn't treating this more as a business opportunity trying to sell the rights to a track on the spot. Do you suppose the big record companies don't want that?
