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This reminds me of a Dutch song that was fairly popular in the '90s (loosely translated):
And a child prodigy at forty, That is a sorry case. Who could have been so much, yet Will never leave a trace.
(The song is based on the life of the poet Halbo C. Kool. Dutch lyrics here: https://genius.com/Boudewijn-de-groot-een-wonderkind-van-50-... )
I tried Heddy with my children. It worked great at first. It's really easy to get started with. Every level, the language changes slightly to introduce more concepts. That worked great for my younger son, but it confused his brother. Code that was correct in one level, suddenly gives errors in the next. In the end, we stopped using Hedy. I now teach them Python instead. It's harder at first, but at leastthe things they learn, won't change.
Looking at this from outside the US, it is quite bizarre to see how 2 extreme positions dominate the abortion debate there. Ultimately, the question is at which point the embryo should be considered a human being, who's life deserves some form of legal protection. One extreme position is that there should be no legal protection at all until birth. The other extreme would be granting full legal protection from conception. Both positions are fringe positions in Western Europe. The way the debate is radicalized in the US as a mater of fundamental human rights, feels like it leaves little space for the kind of compromise that most Europeans would accept as the only sensible position.
It's interesting to see how the perspective on this is shifting in Iran to the point that nowadays, it became controversial to call this a coup. In the royalist version of events, it is Mosaddegh who attempted a coup. Mosaddegh had lost is parliamentary majority, but was still very popular. A held a referendum to dissolve parliament and give himself as prime minister the power to make law. The Shah responded by dismissing Mosaddegh. The Shah had the constitutional right to do this, because Parliament was not in session.
That's of course only part of the story, and it completely ignores the role of Britain and the US. But what is interesting to me is not so much what exactly happened, but how peoples' view on history changes with shifting political moods. A generation ago in Iran, basically everyone agreed that this was a coup by Western imperialist powers. Today, with growing opposition to the political system, comes a questioning of the "official" history as thought in schools. Young people are today looking for different (but equally one-sided) versions of the story in which the roles of good and bad get reversed.
The podcast of the WSJ might answer this for you (episode of june 29 https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/the-supreme-court-r... ) They say, some states already banned affirmative action. Universities in those states have tried to still recruit minority students, by going to schools with large group of minority students, and actively recruit there. The problem is, those tend to be schools with poor students. Students who cannot pay their university fee. Universities end up subsidizing those students, which is expensive. With affirmative action, they could more easily attract rich minority students.
The US has a huge internal market. But their reliance on international trade is small. Exports amount to less then 10% of their GDP [1]. As a comparison, France has the lowest amount of exports per GDP in the EU, and theirs is almost 30%. Germany's is 47%. For many smaller EU countries, it's even higher [2]. The US cares a lot about keeping international shipping lanes open (mainly because they used to rely on imported oil). But they are very protectionist, and always have been. International trade is just not that important to them. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/258779/us-exports-as-a-p... [2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS?end=2021...
That's not really what voter research shows. Yes, 18% of BBB voters come from the PVV, but also 17% come from the Prime minister's party (VVD), 14% comes from his Christian-democratic coalition partner (CDA). 9% Comes from the left-wing SP, 7% from D66. The amounts coming from other parties are even smaller https://app.nos.nl/nieuws/ps2023/
They will also have a strong position in the provinces. The government was setting a framework, but counted on the provinces to do the actual implementation. That approach will almost certainly fail since it seems likely the BBB will be able to block this in many rural provinces
These are separate issues. It's about the impact of nitrogen on biodiversity in protected habitats. Unlike carbon dioxide, the effects of nitrogen emissions are very local. Which is why this is mainly a problem in small, densely populated countries like the Netherlands and neighbouring Belgium, where areas with a lot of agriculture, also often contain a lot of small but protected nature reserves in between the farms.
Some things I noticed as a foreigner exploring the Portuguese house market for the past 6 months: Indeed, prices in Lisbon and Porto are insane. Yet, even in those cities (especially in Porto) there are quite a lot of old buildings, often in bad shape, and often empty, or sometimes inhabited by just one elderly tenant. You don't see that elsewhere in Europe in cities with similarly high prices. You would expect someone to buy these properties, renovate them and then rent them out. Clearly, the rental market desperately needs this new supply.
That this doesn't happen, could be because there is a lack of capital, but to me the actual problem seems to be over-regulation and especially an over protection of tenants. If, as the article states, foreigners buy multiple apartments, and then let them sit empty, it's because they are afraid of renting them out. Especially with elderly tenants, you can't increase the rent, and you can't terminate the contract. Once you start looking around for a house to buy, you'll almost certainly bump into some homes costing only a tenth of similar houses in the neighborhood, and any Portuguese knows what that means: there is an elderly tenant, paying only 20 euros of rent per month, and your only hope of ever getting them to leave, is wait till they pass away (and even then, their children might try to continue the lease at the same conditions).
But that's exactly what hguant explains. Flights between EU countries are international flights and are therefore tax exempt under the Chicago Convention.
Unfortunately, the article doesn't mention the motives of the artist. This isn't about politicians using their phones. It's about surveillance and license plate or facial recognition. With camera systems popping up in all public spaces at an astonishing speed, the artist wanted to make politicians feel what it is like to be constantly monitored as a suspect.
What also doesn't help, is that, at least in my experience, Americans usually mention pre-tax wages, while Europeans usually talk about their wages after tax (not sure if that is the case here, since nobody in this thread mentions taxes). $11k is roughly €9k. With Belgian tax rates, you'll have about €4.4k left after tax. (Belgium is where I live, so those are the rates I know. In Easter Europe, tax rates are lower)
The beer industry would love to use plastic bottles. But beer goes stale in plastic. Plastic is not good at keeping the oxygen out and the alcohol in. There are bottles with multiple layers in different types of plastic that work reasonably well, but they are more expensive than standard PET bottles, much harder to recycle than PET, and still not as good for storing beer as glass is.
A few months ago, someone tried to register her newborn in Brussels (which is officially a bilingual city: Dutch and French) with a name starting with IJ, and had a very hard time convincing the French speaking civil servants that both characters had to be capitalized: https://www.bruzz.be/samenleving/geboorteaangifte-brussel-st...
You left out the "by way of selling your personal data, violating your privacy,.....
Sure, the internet mammoths of today make their profit tat way, but this legislation is probably going to be around for a very long time. Platforms of the future might find other ways to make a profit. (Or they might not, because legislation of this sort makes it much harder for a new platform to rise and challenge the mammoths)
I think what dnos means by vote buying, is not that somebody bribes the people who count the votes, but that somebody bribes the voters. If a politician now approaches me and promises me to pay me if I vote for him, he can't really be sure I actually did vote for him. Nobody but me knows what happens in the voting booth. He could ask me to take a picture, but I could still change my vote after the picture was taken.
No there aren't. If you can check your vote, then your abusive spouse, your boss or somebody else who has power over you, can force you to show them your vote.