That’s a bad interpretation of the law. The law defines a max walking speed as 6 km/h. That’s a definition, not a speed limit. It will be used to clarify existing laws that already prescribe the movement of bicycles or scoters “at walking speed” on footpaths. Slovakia isn’t the first country to do that, either.
One thing to recognise here is that neither governmental party was able to field a viable candidate against her. FF, the major government partner, had their candidate quit the race after the first debate. FG, the junior partner, nominated a candidate who clearly didn’t want to run, due to all the skeletons in her closet the media are now dragging out.
To be fair, however, the government always faces an uphill battle. Our President, despite being largery powerless, had been viewed in the past two decades or so as the moral counterweight to the immoral government. Nominating a former government minister was thus a very tone-deaf decision.
I sincerely hope that this is not to troll Trump, but that she genuinely deserves the prize. The world isn’t revolving around Trump. We should have our own lives, joys and worries, without caring what Trump would think of them.
I grew up in a country with a large Roma minority. Before WW2 they were travellers. They roamed the country in search of odd jobs. My grandma told me that they always paid them to cut their grass into hay bales, or to fix their pots and crockery.
Then communism came, and they were forced to settle dowwn and hold jobs. The vast majority never adjusted, and they treated their housing as temporary camp sites, devastating everything and then demanding new housing. This, naturally, created discontent that was aimed against the Roma, instead the authorities who forced them to change their way of life.
I now live in Ireland, which sees the same kind of “racism”, even though they are white: the Travellers. As the name suggests, they also come from the roaming background. They are also forced to settle, and they are treating their halting sites as temporary camp sites. I have one nearby. I pay some people from there to clean my driveway or gutters. They do a better and cheaper job than professional contractors. I know that it’s impossible to live a nomadic life in a civilised society, but sometimes I think how nice it would have been to let them roam again, and not care about them anymore.
It’s more about not buying services from companies that profit from providing services in the occupied territories, such as Airbnb and Booking.com. The Irish government is bending over backwards for the hospitality sector, so this is in line with their policies.
Can anyone actually think of a case where governments acted on what they promised Trump? To me it looks like everyone’s humoring him with “sure, whatever you say,” and then going on with their daily business. I would trust promises made to Trump about as much as I’d trust Trump himself.
Kimmel would have been okay, but by some estimates there are as many as 200 staff members out of their job, and he’d never be able to take all of them with him. As cathartic it would have been to see him levave Disney, staying was the best option for his team.
Smith is an awesome ensemble actor. He has great chemistry with his co-stars in buddy movies, be it MIB, Bad Boys, Hitch or even Independence Day. As Fresh Prince, he had a whole cast to play off. But he can’t carry a movie where he’s the only star. It becomes evident that he doesn’t have the range, and his attempts to act come across as forced. I think people already realised it and are avoiding such movies. The Bad Boys franchise proves that he’s still a bankable co-star, and hopefully he’ll accept that position in his future work, rather than soloing vanity movies.
Only a nominated candidate can run for President, and nominations are given by a minimum of 20 sitting members of parliament (both chambers) or at least 4 city or county councils. Backing McGregor’s candidature would be a political suicide, so he won’t even get to run.
I’m currently vacationing in a country where pedestrians are required to wear reflexive elements when it’s dark, and I really like that. However, putying all onus on pedestrians while not even analyzing the causes of crashes (including hit pedestrians and cyclists), which would lead to improved road infrastructure, signage and enforcement, will lead to more deaths. As long as you’re allowed to drive 80 km/h on a winding road where two cars can’t even pass each other, no amount of lights or reflective vests will save the pedestrians.
Very common in Ireland. The main contribution of the RSA (Road Safety Authority) over the past few years seems to be handing out high-vis elements to pedestrians and cyclists. The media is antropomorphising cars instead of blaming drivers, to the extent that statistics on the causes of crashes aren’t being collected.
It’s for domestic consumption. Iran is the Big Bad in Israel, due to its support of Hamas, so the Israeli PM is chasing after brownie points from the electorate by hitting Iran over and over again.
Fico faces an EU probe after journalists and opposition politicians found dozens of mansions built or purchased by Fico and his cohort through misappropriated EU funds. He’s desperately trying to change the subject.
How are you dealing with tax returns? I have a coworker who’s a dual citizen, and she tells me that she has to file through an accounting service that costs her an arm and a leg. If she weren’t close to retirement, she’d renounce her US citizenship.
Not OP, but I did the same, when I first realized the US was on a slippery slope towards idiocracy (and, in fairness, I realized it three decades after many intellectuals already warned about it). In my case, I was fortunate to work for a multinational, which agreed to transfer me to a country within the EU, and to take care of the paperwork. Over a decade later, I have citizenship here, my own house, and I feel fully integrated into the local society. And I don’t need to worry about college tuition for my kids. They’ll have a choice of free education anywhere within the EU, and by the time they’re old enough, they may have access to a wide variety of educators who left he US.
I was permabanned from r/worldnews for this, due to racism, so I’m risking the same here. But there is a theory among armchair historians–which I tend to agree with–that Russians had been targets of regressive selective breeding for the past 450 years. Those who display any kind of individualism or independence (mainly educated, intellectuals, etc) have been selectively eliminated from the gene pool: via exile (best case scenario), or through prisons, labour camps or executions. After centuries of this, the share of independently thinking Russians in Russia is far lower than that of native population in Western European countries.
This is very prominent in science and technology: many of the top inventors weren’t ethnic Russians, but were born or had ancestry in countries that have been under Russian dictate (and regressive evolution) for a much shorter time period. Sergei Korolev, the father of Russian space program was ethnic Hungarian. Russia “boasts” only 15 Nobel laureates in STEM fields since 1917, and only one of them (Nikolay Semyonov) was an ethnic Russian who wasn’t in exile.
All this helps to explain why Russians are so passive in the face of authority. It also points at the fallacy of thinking that we can push them towards accepting western civilization and democracy in the short term. It will take a very long time and a lot of effort to bring them to the moral ideal of Western Europe.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
There were people warning against the glorification of ignorance in the US nearly half a century ago. It’s nothing new; it just reached critical mass (also thanks to social media where ignorant people can self-organise).
I’m personally not sure how it works. But when we were upgrading our bathroom, the tile shop added the VAT to the quoted sale price. I then asked a friend of mine who is VAT-registeted to buy it for us, and he got it from the same warehouse for the non-VAT price.
I agree overall, but VAT is not all that difficult to evade, at least in the service industry. Paying handymen in cash is common in many countries, and that’s a means to evade VAT. Hell, even using them to buy the building or landscaping materials for you (being a registered business they purchase for prices without VAT) saves you on most of the tax. Then there’s service barter. I did it only once, a long time ago, but it can serve as an example: I did family portraits (photography) for my physio, in exchange for a number of physio sessions. If we charged each other, it would have cost each of us, say, 250 Euros, but we’d only see 200 each, and the state would get 100. So, savings of 50 for each of us.
This rule is legacy from Reddit, where r/news got dominated by US-centric news. r/worldnews was created to allow non-US news to be seen.
That said, I agree that this is a world news event. If nothing else, this may distract the Trump administration from international bullying for a while. Perhaps even redirect the Venezuelan invasion force to the NYC harbour…