> [German engineers and tech workers a]re not the kind to release half-baked products and patch issues later
What the article doesn't point out is that this is deeply ingrained not just among companies but among customers, too, and it's one of the many culture shocks I've seen my colleagues who move between US and EU markets experience.
If a European customer (adjusting for geographical variation, Europe is pretty big and diverse) runs into some weird issue and they call tech support, there's a very good chance that you've already lost them. It doesn't matter if tech support was super helpful, remedied things right away, and the customer support experience was top notch. The perception is that if they had tech support to un-break it, someone not only cut corners, but didn't even cut them very well, and now they wasted their time, too.
This isn't "just a cultural thing", it's ingrained because of how customers themselves do business, too (which makes it especially difficult to deal with in a B2B setting). The whole chain of commercial relations and norms is structured in such a way that depending on a "move fast and break things" platform is a very, very bad idea.
This is one of the most frequent things I had to explain in review meetings, and it went both ways:
- People who moved from US to EU markets didn't understand why customers had nothing but good words to say about customer support and then didn't renew contracts citing quality issues
- People who moved from EU to US markets going nuts over product release timelines getting aggressively slashed not so much because the feature sheet was too thin but because they thought there was no way to get those features tested enough
I don't know what country is it, but being in Germany I've had to interact with customer support (for internet providers, banks etc.) a lot. At the quality was not top notch at all. The companies are well alive and thriving.
"Right" is a bit of a stretch. Manicured screenshots are a tiny subset of theming requirements. People went to great lengths to theme GTK because, for the longest time, Adwaita was truly atrocious, with poor contrast in inactive windows and retina-burning acid active colours.
KDE solved 99% of the theming requirements by just allowing color customisation and shipping with a default theme that doesn't suck too badly.
> some people I see DMs from and go "well there goes my morning hand-holding them through something they should already both know and have internalized".
Pre-emptively, I'm not saying anything below applies in your case :-).
A mismatch in the threshold of "they should already both know and have internalized" is where much of the friction in high-stress organisations comes from.
I see a lot of people expecting, as the parent post put it, "a clear set of steps that can be burned down [to get to a good result]", but entirely oblivious to the fact that the people they expect it from:
1. Don't have the organisational authority to organise it -- they can do "their part" but they can't tell people on whose work they depend what to do.
2. Don't have access to the same task-specific information as the person who expects it of them, and don't know who to ask because teams are heavily compartmentalised and/or hierarchical.
3. Don't have access to the same kind of organisational information as the person who expects it of them.
Much like responsibility, deflecting blame comes from above. In my experience, what the parent poster says is true: people who are bad at what they do and try to make it someone else's problem is probably the most common source of stress. But it is also my experience that the middle leadership layers of companies where this is a chronic problem is almost entirely populated by managers who try to make everything other people's problem, and whose teams end up having to deflect everything by proxy whether they want it or not.
I think this is part of the nuance that's lacking in the parent post. It's very hard for someone to work significantly above their organisation's level.
Agree - initiative is not innate, it is trained and built with experience (of rewards for taking initiative), just as waiting for direction is trained and built with experience (of micromanagement and threats to safety).
The worst of the worst in my experience is the person who ignores the existance of 1, 2, and 3, assumes their coworkers who have been conditioned to not stick their neck out are incompetent and are trying to "get one over" on everyone else, and uses that as moral justification to backstab people who would be happy to work with them. The sad part is that the result will only reinforce their belief system.
You will always be surrounded by people, and how you regard them will inform your experience of them. If you allow yourself to force a false dichotomy on others, it will eventually be forced back on you.
> user names and passwords for logging in to various accounts belonging to Schutt have been published at least four times since 2023 in logs from stealer malware.
So this isn't from website dumps with plaintext passwords.
If I did highly secure work (which I don’t), I’d set up a few honeypot machines and input my “secure credentials” (with a bogus password) into that repeatedly.
Yeah, inputing "secure credentials" traceable directly to you with what you'd hope is a bogus password is a very bad idea, especially if you're doing highly secure work.
These aren't local credentials, these are credentials from various third-party websites that made their way into stealer logs. Garbled or not, using your personal email address for both legitimate purposes (e.g. Google Calendar, as the article points out) and honeypots isn't the best idea.
Ah, I thought you meant what sites list the stolen credentials. The exact overlap of websites across four separate stealer logs is enough to leak an email address pretty reliably. The only thing that's "telling" for is that they're not willing to dox this person.
> While Ukraine unquestionably put up a hell of a fight, the fact that the numerically superior army with the better and more numerical equipment, backed by the multiple times bigger and richer country failed is a failure. Especially when you consider that Ukraine doesn't have a navy and barely had an air force and anti-air, yet Russia failed at establishing air or naval control, let alone dominance.
That's certainly true, but much of this failure can be ascribed to:
1. Lack of co-ordination (both inter-force and within each unit) and basic best-practices in terms of logistics. The Russian armed forces are still far from anything NATO has in this regard but are also a lot better than when the war began.
2. Poor mobilisation and insufficient initial forces. Most of this was based on the obviously misguided notion that Russian forces would be welcome as liberators (which, haha, no, 40+ years of Soviet or Soviet-backed regimes in Eastern Europe have ensured this would not happen for generations), and is unlikely to be repeated.
3. Considerable strategic depth, which further compounded #1 and #2, which the Baltics don't have.
4. Considerable development of expertise on the Ukrainian side, which has been fighting in Donetsk and Luhansk since the first Russian invasion in 2014, whereas neither Poland nor the Baltics armed forces have had much exposure to real-life war outside the GWOT.
5. A smaller mismatch in terms of equipment than media coverage makes it sound, certainly far smaller than that of the Baltics.
The odds varjag puts forward aren't at all outlandish, especially with NATO commitment so uncertain at this time.
While US commitment to NATO is uncertain, the rest of NATO still seems certain. Russia might be able to take the Baltic and/or Poland - but they won't be able to keep it. Soon as they cross the border (or more likely start building up) the rest of Europe will start building up their army to attack back.
A country attacks another one only if it doesn't have political control of it feels that never will. For example Russia doesn't have to attack Belarus and won't have to attack Hungary, and probably not Slovakia. They'll be part of the next Warsaw Pact without any bullet flying if their leaders will get guarantees that they can be leaders forever. Poland looked like it was going that way before the current administration. Ukraine itself have been pro Russia or pro NATO at different times in the last 25 years. No need to attack it when it was pro Russia. So let's see who that "rest of Europe" will be if and when there will be the need to defend some country in the East.
I am sure they will be, I'm just saying that a Western front will be extremely different from the Ukrainian front, especially in the Baltics, where #3 is particularly salient. So I would recommend caution when applying over-arching lessons from Ukraine to these situations, that's all.
Except this has nothing to do with some monopoly on the smartphone market, but with Apple not allowing application developers to enable their users to vote with their wallets on payment methods. From the press release:
> Under the DMA, app developers distributing their apps via Apple's App Store should be able to inform customers, free of charge, of alternative offers outside the App Store, steer them to those offers and allow them to make purchases.
>
> The Commission found that Apple fails to comply with this obligation. Due to a number of restrictions imposed by Apple, app developers cannot fully benefit from the advantages of alternative distribution channels outside the App Store. Similarly, consumers cannot fully benefit from alternative and cheaper offers as Apple prevents app developers from directly informing consumers of such offers. The company has failed to demonstrate that these restrictions are objectively necessary and proportionate.
This has nothing to do with smartphones specifically, it applies equally well to anything in the AppStore ecosystem.
1. Not about any monopoly (in fact the word "monopoly" does not appear in the press release at all).
2. Nothing like McDonalds, whose business model is completely different from an app store's.
3. Not about Apple can do to consumers who aren't in the Apple ecosystem but about what it can do to developers who wish to sell their applications and services for Apple devices.
If you really insist on making an analogy that involves McDonalds: that's like arguing that McDonalds should not be allowed to prevent Coca-Cola from telling Coca-Cola customers that they can buy Coca-Cola in places other than McDonalds. Which, yeah, they're not allowed to.
> If you really insist on making an analogy that involves McDonalds: that's like arguing that McDonalds should not be allowed to prevent Coca-Cola from telling Coca-Cola customers that they can buy Coca-Cola in places other than McDonalds. Which, yeah, they're not allowed to.
Neither the App Stores or McDonalds have any control over what you do outside of them. That's your problem, individually and collectively.
> [the App Stores does not] any control over what you do outside of them
Well, we are talking about Apple's App Store, not just an App Store, and in that case, it's Apple. So, Apple wants to exert control over what you as an app developer do outside of the App Store. That's the problem. The fact that you think that's not happening means you know it's wrong.
They did the equivalent of saying to Coca Cola if you discover a customer via the App Store then we get a cut of it, which is a very normal and common arrangement, even if disagreeable.
No, they did the equivalent of saying to Coca-Cola if you discover a customer via the App Store then you cannot tell them they can buy Coca-Cola from outside the App Store, too, a decidedly anti-competitive practice that also happens to be illegal in just about every European country, even without EU intervention.
> Do you expect Amazon marketplace sellers to be able to link to their items being on ebay or shopify from the actual Amazon website?
From the Amazon website? No. From the products they're selling? Yes, absolutely, and lots of them do, I get one of those business cards with "Find us on Amazon/Ebay/Shopify/whatever" in the box with almost every purchase.
Same with apps. I obviously don't expect them to link to items from other stores from their App Store description pages. But from their application? Yes, I totally expect that.
That's how marketplaces everywhere work, including IRL. Go to any farmer's market and most sellers will give you a business card with their website or phone number so you can also order from them directly, or from their Amazon/Shopify/whatever page.
Edit: not to mention that this is 2025, the distinction between "within the app" and "via your website" is pretty meaningless in a bunch of cases.
A major detail you are ignoring here is Apple are the merchant of sale for everything via the App Store (Google at least were not for the Play Store at launch, I do not know if this has changed) so your comparisons do not make sense. The native app universe on iOS is closest to being an Apple run Costco.
I would be very surprised if a fulfilled by Amazon order for a third party seller contained any extra promo materials in the box for similar reasons.
> not to mention that this is 2025, the distinction between "within the app" and "via your website" is pretty meaningless in a bunch of cases.
To you. Not to your end users, and most definitely not to the platform owners.
It's not my comparison. It's yours, and just as meaningless as your previous one about McDonald's.
This one's no better, either, as Costco's terms for its wholesale suppliers aren't anywhere close to Apple's, even though the agreement is structured more or less similarly -- but sure, let's entertain it: Costco's terms for its suppliers aren't public, but at least the ones that are on public record (via the SEC: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1940372/000149315222... ) make no restrictions on the choice of payment processors for digital products, which is what Apple got fined for.
There is a restriction on promotional material enclosed with the product (as in it needs prior written approval from Costco, not as in it's completely banned) and an explicit mention that it applies to digital products as well. But there is no requirement that digital products sold by Costco as merchant of sale for the supplier enable purchases only via Costco.
The root of yours is that you keep trying to make this about McDonalds, Amazon, Ebay, Costco or some other contraption instead of the App Store, which is what this is actually is about. Not that the argument matters, because the exact moment when you leave Costco has no bearing on the fact that Costco doesn't restrict what payment processor are used in the digital goods that it sells.
But even if it did, Apple's ToS clearly distinguish between the App Store and the licensed application, and between interactions in the App Store and interactions from within the application. You may not want to make the same distinction in order to be right about some imaginary system that you're thinking about, but this is about the actual App Store, not whatever iMcCostco-Amazon marketplace you've dreamed up.
All the metaphors I've used are yours, Ivan. Why would they anger me? I'm not the one who came up with them :-).
What you've pointed out has no bearing whatsoever on what's being discussed here. This isn't about some stretched out definition of "payment system" that applies to those services that happen to have both iOS and Android client applications. It's strictly about what works in applications available on Apple's App Store. For many of them your point 4 doesn't even apply because they don't have an Android variant in the first place.
Let me know when you'd like to go back to discussing the actual issue from the linked article. Bye!
You're making a lot of noise to distract from the fact it is entirely possible to use other payment mechanisms for digital goods to consume in apps, and that from comparison to stores for physical goods we established that promoting other means for purchasing from the app on a given platform is an unreasonable expectation, exactly like expecting Coca Cola served in McDonalds to be allowed to be labelled "available for 1 euro less at Burger King!"
Arguably their entire position with Meta is even more unreasonable than your positions here. No wonder the EU struggles in business.
And with that miss Ivan has forgotten that it was he himself that brought up his own disastrous Coca Cola metaphor, cause of so much angst and frustration.
In a confused daze he goes to a store, buys a bottle of Coca Cola, and heads to a nearby McDonalds where he opens it and drinks it, wondering why all these suckers in McDonalds do not think to buy their soda elsewhere. If only Coca Cola could label the soda in McDonalds to let people know of their options! As the staff approach him to ask him to leave he wonders why the world does so consistently fail to match his preconceptions, and if only that evil Apple had not insisted on using their payments system then he would have been able to scam thousands of those foolish American idiots and go to live on Cyprus far away from such concerns as a metaphorical demon in the form of "Costco".
Thrown out on to the street he resorts to the tried and tested European strategy of claiming victimhood "Why are you persecuting me? It is the same soda! Why can I not drink it here?" but it is to no avail. Clearly the world, immune to reason, has not finished with his punishment, but OP has; he's done.
Oh, wow, have we come full circle -- from Apple breaking the law in a jurisdiction where they do business to, err, Cyprus, and Europe, and... Ivan the Terrible having somehow become a woman for half a sentence?
Touch some grass, mate, Apple isn't worth your energy. No company their size is, whether on this side of the Atlantic or the other.
You are perfectly free to have a website where you list your prices at one price point, and then have them different in the app because of the 30% cut, and that's very normal practice, even if everyone does complain about it.
The whole point of the DMA is clarifying that from the point of view of the European Union, operating a digital market on a platform is not actually like going to a McDonalds.
There is no argument to be made by analogy here. The DMA always was clear regarding what constitutes a digital market and what the obligations of the companies operating them would be. If Apple is unhappy about that, they are free to stop operating the App Store in the EU.
The EU would have a lot more sympathy for this if there were any non trivial digital markets that originated in the EU, with the closest being Spotify, which they somehow claim is not a gatekeeper in the music industry.
They aren't being a decent regulatory body on this one, given they have not reflected on why they are in this position, nor are they being fair with applying their rules. (The same comment can be made about the ludicrous variation in applying the GDPR).
> The EU would have a lot more sympathy for this if there were any non trivial digital markets that originated in the EU
Why should that be a prerequisite?
The EU is sovereign. They are free to do whatever they want with their law. Let's not forget we are talking about the second consumer market in the world. There will be a lot more space for homegrown solutions or companies ready to comply if the foreign companies currently profiting decide to leave.
> There will be a lot more space for homegrown solutions or companies ready to comply if the foreign companies currently profiting decide to leave.
The core of what I'm trying to communicate is this is backwards.
If you took the Europeans out of Apple and Google they'd never have been able to build the iPhone or Android, or their associated stores. (And you could say this about other regions where the staff came from too). Why did those Europeans that helped the US leave the EU to do so? Because the companies in the US rewarded them as they recognized the explosive potential as the market developed.
The underlying problem is EU regulation is shortsighted, and always fighting the previous battle when it's been lost. They had every opportunity to lead this from the start. I namedropped GetJar earlier, but there was Jamster/Jamba and various services which the phone companies would subcontract to to run their own store fronts. I know of several aborted Android app stores and subscription services from the 2010 era, including those from Switzerland, Belgium and a certain large French company, and there are almost certainly more.
The time to address this was 15 years ago. Now their only viable path forward is to effectively fork Android and encourage adoption of their fork, much as the Chinese have. Their problem is they have to leave things like WhatsApp available, or their citizens will go nuts, and they will resist rewarding anyone involved with the technical side of the work, so it won't happen. They just want to punish the americans for having had the foresight that led to their success.
As an example, just look at how the europeans have failed to come up with something equivalent to WhatsApp, Signal or even Telegram. The closest is matrix and element, but again without the associated rewards for working on them they just aren't going to get up to the standards people expect, and so they languish with absolute idealists and those forced to use them.
> Their problem is they have to leave things like WhatsApp available, or their citizens will go nuts
WhatsApp would be displaced in a matter of days if not hours if made unavailable. You are far overestimating the amount of disruption a closure would provoke.
> They just want to punish the americans for having had the foresight that led to their success.
This is not about punishment. The DMA is about setting ground rules for a level playing field in the digital market space. It is at its heart a law about competition.
Europe wants the American companies to stop abusing their dominant positions and the closed markets they built. This is a prerequisite to a competitive market as it's basically impossible to foster competition when a few players have spent a decade entrenching themselves and building barriers to entry.
Thankfully, there are no rules which say American companies should reap unlimited benefits from their market manipulations and the overall laissez-faire attitude of the American regulator.
> As an example, just look at how the europeans have failed to come up with something equivalent to WhatsApp, Signal or even Telegram.
All of them have ready to use Asian competitors which would be more than happy to work with European regulators if American companies won't.
It's admittedly popular with a certain demographic of would be app developers that either think the fees are what is stopping them being successful (they're not, although admittedly they are anachronistically high at this point) or they want to scam people.
There's no evidence that it is popular beyond that, especially among people that choose to use iOS.
This metaphor doesn't quite work because McDonalds aren't a marketplace. But the closest I can think of is if McDonalds sold the best hamburger boxes that people want to use at home, but then added a mechanism that only lets you put a burger in that box if whoever made that burger bribed MacDonalds, regardless of what's good for you as the burger consumer.
McDonalds are not responsible for what people do outside of McDonalds. If the entire potential customerbase decides to show up at McDonalds and exclusively eat there for five years bankrupting everyone else and McDonalds had behaved legally throughout then how are they the problem?
As I mentioned elsewhere, just look at the idiotic way Europe embraced WhatsApp. They genuinely believed it was free, and a huge proportion of users still don't understand it's attached to Meta and Facebook. They are so susceptible to product dumping by tech companies because they are astoundingly cheap and short sighted, and they will not pay for an alternative when the "free" version exists.
Except that there are hundreds of other food options while there are only two realistic options for smartphones, neither of which is cooking at home. The tight control has benefits - Apple’s App Store is much safer than letting your parents install stuff they find on the internet - but there’s a real downside which needs regulation to balance.
So we want to punish people that choose that option?
Europe could easily have had a homegrown alternative to the Play Store on Android. In fact at one time it had several, only the users had no interest at all, and this was before Google went through their phase of locking things down more.
The vision for what became the Play Store was born from ex GetJar, and I was told by several Googlers at the time that they were amazed by the lack of serious competing stores that people were running. Many threatened to do so (including my employer) but it was, from the business side, pure bluffing.
In China the android market does not rely on the Play Store, so we have definite proof it can be done.
> Europe could easily have had a homegrown alternative to the Play Store on Android. In fact at one time it had several, only the users had no interest at all, and this was before Google went through their phase of locking things down more.
So why should users not have the option anymore because years ago the existing options were worse than Google's?
Should you be forbidden to buy an iPhone because you used until Androids until now and passed on iPhones?
The problem is European users are too cheap, and European regulators too short sighted. It makes them hilariously prone to product dumping, where WhatsApp is "free" of course, except it isn't. They then mass adopt the "free" option and act surprised pikachu when it's not actually free.
What you are advocating is forcing a market option to change what it is, when a critical mass of their customers have chosen it precisely because of what it is.
> The problem is European users are too cheap, and European regulators too short sighted.
This seems to be a common issue for all countries, the US included.
(See the Chrome spin-off talks currently taking place.)
> What you are advocating is forcing a market option to change what it is, when a critical mass of their customers have chosen it precisely because of what it is.
Incorrect, users have chosen it for what it precisely was. After a certain size that choice does not exist anymore and the option is also very different compared to the initial choice (between the different app stores available at the time) made by users.
You're also mistaken in thinking that the hardware should automatically imply a specific software. This is not the case and we're going to slowly move to a place where the hardware is independent of the software and vice-versa for smartphones.
> This seems to be a common issue for all countries, the US included.
The US is much more resistant to it, which is a major factor in iOS share being higher and WhatsApp being an almost complete non event.
Similarly those same users bought into the iOS option entirely because of the better privacy enabled by not being "free" in the price sense. In a very real sense Apple are the regulators of their platform in that they define and execute the policies. People buy into it because they like that aspect of things, and prefer the Apple regulations to those created by their governments. The EU want to override the regulations of the platform, except being short sighted they don't appreciate the effects of their suggestions, and so they're being played particularly by Meta.
> This is not the case and we're going to slowly move to a place where the hardware is independent of the software and vice-versa for smartphones.
People have been saying this from the start, but if anything it's now diverging faster than before. If you launch a service today and have no native app presence you will not be regarded as credible in the marketplace.
> The US is much more resistant to it, which is a major factor in iOS share being higher and WhatsApp being an almost complete non event.
iOS has a larger market share in the US because iPhones are a status symbol in America whereas Europeans couldn't care less.
Which in turn makes iMessages market share larger in the US than in Europe.
iPhone market share is also pretty stagnant since 2023 in the US and way down worldwide since then.
If anything, I would consider the US WhatsApp user base numbers (~64M users) to be much more impressive than the iMessage user counts (~130 iPhone owners) because WhatsApp is not installed by default.
> People buy into it because they like that aspect of things, and prefer the Apple regulations to those created by their governments.
This very much has yet to be proven since "those (policies) created by their governments" has not been made possible by Apple yet. If Apple is so confident in their software quality, this additional competition should not be an issue for them.
> If you launch a service today and have no native app presence you will not be regarded as credible in the marketplace.
I meant that you'll buy the hardware but will then have the choice to install different operating systems and app market places. The same way computers have worked for the last 30 years.
> iPhones are a status symbol in America whereas Europeans couldn't care less.
Europeans absolutely could, they're just too tight fisted to actually spend money on things like protecting privacy which is a major part of the whole problem.
They are perfectly fine spending money on luxury cars.
> Europeans absolutely could, they're just too tight fisted to actually spend money on things like protecting privacy which is a major part of the whole problem.
Users in the US don't care about protecting their privacy either.
> Users in the US don't care about protecting their privacy either.
They absolutely do, you just like to dismiss it as being about status.
It was similar when RIM were on top in north america. The status came because of their association with business because they provided secure messaging. High status people care about privacy and security.
> Users have no understanding of security. High status or not.
Upper middle class americans absolutely do, or they don't stay that way for very long. The US has a culture of a lot more personal responsibility, and a lot less trust of the government to handle it.
> Why is it that iPhone users prefer GMail over iCloud Mail?
They already had it from before people realized it was a bait and switch. Work users will almost certainly be using the Exchange integration, and private messaging is done via iMessage.
> So you mean to say that they made the same mistake that the supposed European users did with the app stores?
Absolutely, and they learned from this, as did Apple, hence the rules they came up with to stop Google and Facebook from doing what they were trying to do, which the EU remain oblivious to, supposedly.
This is why new Google products and services are basically doomed to fail in the US market, almost regardless of how good they are.
> Yet they are on the same very public and absolutely no private or secure social networks (Facebook, TikTok, Instagram) as the rest of the world?
You missed a big one: Snapchat; popular mainly in the US purely because of the privacy angle. Those others you mention are used for deliberate sharing.
> There is a large distance between “removed from curriculum” and “banned”. I suspect that it’s not in the current school graduation requirements either.
Not necessarily, early on things got dropped from the curricula all the time because the GUKPiW had banned them, either specifically or by topic.
Blanket bans on general topics or activities make it extremely difficult to discuss censorship post-factum. For example, Juliusz Slowacki wasn't banned, but while some of his works could be freely published in some media they were fully or partially banned in other media (notoriously, Television Theatre got in trouble over parts from Kordian). Lots of cultural activities or works weren't banned directly, or not in all forms.
Yes, “large distance” implies that many in-between options exist. Folk dances, however, were a whole thing with Stalinists (“culture that is national in form, and socialist in content”), so an outright ban would seem out of character.
I would probably remove folk dances from school graduation requirements too, if I somehow fumbled into a position where I take those kinds of decisions.
> Folk dances, however, were a whole thing with Stalinists (“culture that is national in form, and socialist in content”), so an outright ban would seem out of character.
Folk dances and culture in general were a whole thing with Stalinists, but authorities exerted a considerable degree of influence and a ban on some specific folk dances (or cultural manifestations), or on some specific aspects of them, wouldn't have been out of character at all.
Where I'm from, a whole range of folk dances, songs and theatre were banned not by name but under either a ban of the religious denominations that prominently practiced them or a blanket ban on public celebration of major Christian holidays, especially Christmas and Easter.
Folks dances, too, are kind of murky in this area. Perhaps one of the most widely-displayed folk dances of the Eastern Bloc in the communist era, a Romanian dance called "Căluș", retained some of its essential choreography, but was otherwise radically changed to drop its religious undertone, to the point where it was pretty much a different thing by the end of the sixties. Some of it was "recovered" in the eighties, when a peculiar for of protochronism began to permeate some official circles so doing the ancestors thing was cool again, but during the high Stalinist period the "old form" fell under a general repression of what was officially termed "religious mysticism". This led to an entirely peculiar situation where the dance was technically okay, kids learned something resembling it in school and danced it during official ceremonies at the city hall, but grown-ass adults who'd learned it from their parents (edit: not literally from their parents, the way it was taught was a whole thing and didn't help with the whole mysticism issue but anyway) and practised it outside official cultural institutions got rounded up.
> Terrible fact-checking and I doubt the good faith by Associate Press. The authors (Monika Ścisłowska and Rafał Niedzielski) claim that Polonaise was banned in USSR, which is false. Neither it was ever banned in Russian Empire.
>
> The culture.pl article mentions that > dancing the polonaise was temporarily banned in the Congress Kingdom
I'm not sure that qualifies for terrible fact checking, or in any case, none of this refutes any of it. Since the AP doesn't cite its sources, their claim could certainly be wrong, but neither of the facts you cite contradict its claims.
First, the AP piece doesn't say it was banned in the USSR, it says Poland’s post-World War II communist authorities banned it from schools, which ~~is actually supported~~ isn't refuted by culture.pl, too:
> [After 1933], the tradition of dancing the polonaise together by the students of the graduating classes returned to schools, but it disappeared again after 1948 for the duration of Stalinism.
I know culture.pl doesn't explicitly say "banned" but both the idiomatic translation and the parallel experience in virtually every country under Soviet occupation would indicate that. culture.pl unfortunately (and unforgivably) doesn't cite sources, so I can't follow the trail, and dance history is definitely not my field. But a social dance with notorious ethnic rules not being banned in that space would've been the exception, not the rule.
(Edit: If it happened, it wouldn't have had to happen by direct government dispatch, either, this would have typically been done on the "advice" of party activists at lower levels (e.g. in each school), operating under broader directives to discourage nationalist expression, not some specific dance. Each country has thousands of traditions, some of them with local names, you can't issue a document to ban each of them at central level).
Second: it not being banned in the Russian Empire has no bearing on AP's claim about it being banned in the "territories that Russia took over"
The Congress Kingdom was under Russian rule, first de facto, and then entirely de jure. It had nominal (but generally disregarded, hence "de facto" rule) autonomy until shortly after the November uprising in 1831. Then, through the Organic Statute of the Kingdom of Poland, the Kingdom's constitution, army and parliament were abolished, thus effectively making it an imperial subject, under direct rule after 1837, with a weird customs border (and, starting from 1867 IIRC, not even that).
These are "the territories that Russia took over" in the AP piece. The only way for the polonaise to be temporarily banned -- if it was actually banned, again, culture.pl doesn't cite its sources -- in the Congress Kingdom was by dispatch from St. Petersburg, unless somehow the Polish banned their own dances.
Up until 1867 (at which point the kingdom, already an administrative fiction for more than 50 years, was finally formally abolished) that could be done without it being banned in the Russian Empire proper, too. Afterwards, what was previously the Congress Kingdom retained governorate status, so the polonaise could be banned on its territory without being banned through the rest of the Empire, too.
Sure thing! News agencies could really do a better job when reporting on historical issues. This is no exception. What they're saying is plausible but it's not the sort of thing you'd expect a news outlet to casually throw around without sources. "Plausible, but unproven" shouldn't be the reporting standard. That's how false reporting gets in. For all I know (as I mentioned above, dance, and art history in general, is hardly my thing) this could be one such case, too.
More abstract arguments about taxpayer money aside, English expertise on a citizenship level is actually quite the counter-argument for this move.
A significant number, or possibly a majority of, adult native English speakers in the US actually speak English significantly below their formal education level: around 90% of them have at least graduated high school, but 54% of them read English below sixth grade level.
Standard English competency testing for the citizenship test is a joke (you have to read and write one of three sentences in a manner that demonstrates basic comprehension and familiarity with the language). But even so, there's a sizable number of native adult English speakers who would fail it.
So while they may have had to learn English in school or used it to pash their citizenship test, that's no guarantee that adults still speak it well enough. That's not particularly surprising, given that there are large, non-English speaking communities in the US. Someone who's passed their citizenship test in the 1980s and has spoken English maybe once a week afterwards in a shop or a restaurant is likely to have forgotten most of it.
inb4 "but you have to know it to come here": kind of (adjusting for the barebones testing), but the largest group of low-English literacy adults is actually white, native-born Americans, and most low-English literacy adults are native-born: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp
This isn't about expecting "people" to communicate to you in a language they don't speak, it's about expecting state institutions to communicate in their citizens' language. French public institutions definitely use languages other than French where it's regionally relevant. It's not mandated (only French language is mandated) but they do it because when you take taxpayers money to function and provide services to them, you don't get to be fussy when they show up and ask that you speak their language.
France is in a league of its own in this regard, since French is not just the official state language (and has been for some time, not a few weeks like in the US), but it's also the mandated language for commercial and business use. However, the French state doesn't just mandate that, it also creates the conditions for it, for instance by providing (and requiring) free, universal French-language elementary education for all its citizens.
And even so, they're still not universally French-only, even though they're probably the most centralist of all EU countries in this regard.
> when you take taxpayers money to function and provide services to them, you don't get to be fussy when they show up and ask that you speak their language.
Citizenship and residency have both benefits, but also obligations. GP moved to France without a good grasp of the local language.
Note: I'm importantly not talking about the native minority languages in France.
> Citizenship and residency have both benefits, but also obligations. GP moved to France without a good grasp of the local language.
A good grasp of French language is not a requirement for French residency. Some visas require it, but not all, and if you can travel and reside in France without a visa, you don't have to know it. For EEA and Swiss citizens, all you need is a valid ID and a clean record.
> Note: I'm importantly not talking about the native minority languages in France.
Why not? NWS translated languages in minority languages of the US, that's exactly what this is about.
English was mentioned above the GP, which is why it was brought up, but European institutions commonly provide English translations along with regional languages in part because a lot of the EU population is bilingual. That actually helps a lot, especially since state regulation is a little slow to catch up with society at times. E.g. where I'm from we have a sizable Turkish population, and while Turkish is an officialy-recognised minority language, some local institutions are slow to catch up with population dynamics, so a lot of Turkish residents end up perusing the English version instead and they're fine with it.
>Citizenship and residency have both benefits, but also obligations. GP moved to France without a good grasp of the local language.
It's an interesting one. I guess it's a requirement to learn French to naturalize as a French citizen, but there isn't an obligation to speak it if you already are a citizen. It's pretty subtle difference.
On the other hand citizenship in question is not really French citizenship, but European citizenship. It's polite and makes total sense to learn French when living in France, but not a legal requirement. As a citizen of another member state I can just move there and have the same rights as citizens with the sole exception of not voting in the national elections.
That's where we differ. Of course, you're not obligated to speak French, but to go and expect people to communicate you in your language, not theirs, is highly entitled.
I learned fast enough it was my 4th language. I have passed the C1 level exam (advanced, I would have struggled in my mother tongue), responses below you are correct though, you can learn as you arrive. This is IMO the best of all worlds, as it brings in talent and encourages integration.
You are very right! For example, my work contract was in French and English. The French was the legally binding text. I found this an excellent balance.
What the article doesn't point out is that this is deeply ingrained not just among companies but among customers, too, and it's one of the many culture shocks I've seen my colleagues who move between US and EU markets experience.
If a European customer (adjusting for geographical variation, Europe is pretty big and diverse) runs into some weird issue and they call tech support, there's a very good chance that you've already lost them. It doesn't matter if tech support was super helpful, remedied things right away, and the customer support experience was top notch. The perception is that if they had tech support to un-break it, someone not only cut corners, but didn't even cut them very well, and now they wasted their time, too.
This isn't "just a cultural thing", it's ingrained because of how customers themselves do business, too (which makes it especially difficult to deal with in a B2B setting). The whole chain of commercial relations and norms is structured in such a way that depending on a "move fast and break things" platform is a very, very bad idea.
This is one of the most frequent things I had to explain in review meetings, and it went both ways:
- People who moved from US to EU markets didn't understand why customers had nothing but good words to say about customer support and then didn't renew contracts citing quality issues
- People who moved from EU to US markets going nuts over product release timelines getting aggressively slashed not so much because the feature sheet was too thin but because they thought there was no way to get those features tested enough