"I only replied to the guy saying that "metal detectors stop weapons". Which is false."
Taken in a strict boolean sense, yes, but real-world policy is rarely boolean, and mostly about tradeoffs and how many nines of reliability you want to spend on.
Metal detectors will catch the vast, vast majority of guns ever produced, which is their whole point of existence.
I am almost sure that every single person who plotted the 1953 coup is dead. Maybe one of them survives somewhere aged 103 and no longer knowing their name.
Should Macron be judged by what Napoleon III. (or for that matter, I.) did? Surely there is some kind of continuity between those French heads of state, they even fly the some colors and sit in the same palace.
Because of the sheer incompetence and cruelty of the islamic regime I wonder if Mossad even need to do anything at this point. Islamic regime is doing their work for them to upset the population and destabilize the country.
Did you think that running a dictatorship is a stable endeavor? No foreign intervention even needed when you build your house on sand.
It matters less than before. The US is no longer the dominant force it used to be in the 1950s, and the UK (which was part of the anti-Mossadegh plot) is completely gone from the world stage.
The world of 2026 cannot be reduced to a CIA/Mossad theatre where everyone else is a NPC and must suffer whatever they cook up there. Other people have agency and do their things. EU, India, China, Iran, Russia, Qatar, all influential players.
When it comes to value for money/size, Qatar alone has a lot more influence than the US. Recently it forced the EU to relax its ESG standards in exchange for gas imports.
Sure some people love to live in the past, but it is not the past anymore, of course.
Trump chickening out of every world confrontation is a nice example of the diminishing capability of the US to bend the rest of the world to its will. US can probably keep its influence in Latin America, but in the Old World, the balance of power has shifted.
Is Trump de facto more powerful than Mohammad bin Salman? IDK.
I never understood why some people get so fixated on one event in 1953, as if nothing else mattered after that.
Sure, it had a nontrivial effect. But it also happened in a time when Stalin and Churchill were still alive, there were 6 billion people fewer on the planet and the first antibiotics and transistors barely entered production. Korea was poorer than Ghana etc.
It is 2026, three generations have passed, and not everything can be explained and excused by a 1953 event forever. But it is convenient for autocracy advocates in general.
It reminds me of the worship of the Great Patriotic War in Russia. Again, as if nothing that happened later matters.
They wouldn't struggle, even before the gassing systems were built. In Babiy Jar (September 1941), about 33 thousand Jews from Kyiv were shot in two days by SS Einsatztruppen.
This is about what dedicated murderous goverments can pull off using conventional means.
Functional doesn't mean "more democratic". What matters is institutions, jurisprudence, and norms.
And after having dealt with the experience of opening a large foreign office in Czechia, there absolutely is a democratic deficit (sure it's extremely efficient, but we just needed to keep a handful of decisionmakers and "phone a (now deceased) friend" in a non-democratic manner).
The index you just cited is calculated out of five sub-numbers, one of whom is literally "functional government", and Czechia for some reason gets rather low 6.4 on this, less than Greece.
First, this is not my experience, and second, much like you I don't think that this is particularly relevant to the democratic character of the country.
I also would like to hear more about the democratic deficit you describe. Most problems around opening anything are caused by bureaucracy, which is obliged to follow norms produced by the lawmakers. Some of these norms are stupid, but that does not mean that they are undemocratic. Voters have the right to be stupid and to elect stupid representatives who produce stupid norms.
The core crux of "democratic character" is providing an even playing field as much as possible institutionally, organizationally, and politically. If functioning is subpar or requires "hacks" or misaligned institutions, it undermines democratic character itself.
Chest-thumping while ignoring the real degradation of institutions in a large portion of Europe is only going to put you back in the same position as the US.
> I also would like to hear more about the democratic deficit you describe
I'd rather not given the incumbent in power and how small the Cybersecurity FDI community in Czechia is. Maybe Vsquare, just not you.
I'd expect a degradation to start in Civil Liberties scores with ANO's plan to abolition of the license fee; merge CT and CRo; and then move to a fully state funded operating model for the NewCo.
I also expect the political culture score to start steadily dropping as SPD and AUTO's competition to "own" the far-right leads to the intensification of culture war discourse, and potentially forces ANO to start opportunistically shifting right as well.
I don't expect "functioning of government" scores to shift significantly either, as the same issues that persisted when I helped my former employer enter Czechia still remain.
Our PortCos will still continue to remain in CZ because once you build that network it makes everything so much easier (and because Israeli founders and operators continue to have a soft spot for CZ), but the manner if which we need to operate in Czechia and maintain closeness with the right people isn't that different from emerging markets.
And that I feel is the crux of the issue in Czechia and much of the CEE - once you know the right 20-30 people or their friends or colleagues, you get the red carpet. Otherwise, it's an uneven playing field.
The model that is being discussed for the public broadcasters is that they will be financed by a certain fixed percentage of the country's GDP, and I don't think that there will be any merging of CT and CRo; there is no agreement on that in the coalition.
"intensification of culture war discourse" Compared to what? There isn't much space left to increase the heat.
"potentially forces ANO to start opportunistically shifting right as well."
ANO is a pensioner's party and given our fertility rate, this is their goldmine. They don't really have to expand their electorate, it expands on its own.
"once you know the right 20-30 people or their friends or colleagues"
Isn't that why people fight to get into Ivy League universities or Ecole Normale Superieure? I am not sure if there is any single nation on Earth where personal connections are unimportant.
> Isn't that why people fight to get into Ivy League universities or Ecole Normale Superieure
Going to Harvard or Yale doesn't mean I have the ability to call a couple people who can pressure someone at the SEC to speed up the review of an S-1 or can pressure a city council to re-zone agricultural land to residential land to build a housing complex, or (using your earlier Eton example) find a SpAd who can put pressure at the SFO to get them off my back.
And more critically, if I find someone to do that, then my competitor will find out and take me to court, and 2-3 years are burnt in negotiating a settlement.
On the other hand, if someone even finds out that I do something like that in CZ, they have no choice but to roll with it because otherwise they will be frozen out from dealflow or ignored when asking for a favor.
And this is why institutions matter, and degradation of institutions are worrisome, becuase they increase the risk profile of opportunities and incentivize zero-sum thinking.
> The model that is being discussed for the public broadcasters is that they will be financed by a certain fixed percentage of the country's GDP
Yet the power of the purse will be removed from the media and given to the state, thus reducing CT and CRo's independence. This disincentivizes the publication of politically controversial statements.
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Just becuase the US is seeing degradation of institutions does not mean much of Europe is not facing similar problems.
Let us use an analogy. Many (most?) people can tell a well-written book or story from a mediocre or a terrible one, even though the vast majority of the readers hasn't written any in their lives.
To distinguish good from bad doesn't necessarily require the ability to create.
This analogy serves my argument, as in it, just like "most people" are mere readers (not just they're not writers, they're also nowhere near the level of a competent book editor or a critic), the programmer becomes a mere user of the end program.
Not only would this be a bad way of running a publishing business regarding writing and editing (working on the level of understanding of "most people"), but even in the best case of it being workable, the publisher (or software company) can just fire the specialist and get some average readers/users to give a thumbs up or down to whatever it churns.
I'm not actually sure that's true. Theres plenty of controversy now that books that are popular and beloved now are actually not very well written. I mean I've been hearing this complaint since Twilight was popular.
I haven't read Twilight, but I've read a few beloved and popular books that are atrociously written from a literary standpoint. That does not mean they are not popular for a reason.
One I did read, out of morbid curiosity, is 50 Shades. It's utter dreck in terms of writing quality. It's trite, it's full of clichees, and formulaic to the extreme (and incidentally a repurposed Twilight fanfic; if you wonder about the weird references to hunger, there's the reason), but if you look at why it became popular, you might notice that it is extremely well crafted for its niche.
If you don't want a "billionaire romance" (yes, this is a well defined niche; there's a reason Grey is described as one) melded with the "danger" of vampire-transformed-into-traumatised-man-with-a-dark-side, it's easy to tear it apart (I couldn't get all the way through it - it was awful along the axes I care about), but as a study in flawlessly merging two niches popular with one of the biggest book-buying demographics that have extremely predictable and rigid expectations, it's really well executed.
I'd struggle to accept it as art, but as a particular kind of craft, it is a masterpiece even if I dislike the craft in question.
You will undoubtedly find poorly executed dreck that is popular just because it happened to strike a chord out of sheer luck as well, but a lot of the time I tend to realise that if I look at something I dislike and ask what made it resonate with its audience, it turns out that a lot of it resonated with its audience because it was crafted to hit all the notes that specific audience likes.
At the same time, it's never been the case that great pieces of literature was assured doing well on release. Moby Dick, for example, only sold 3,000 copies during Melville's lifetime (makes me feel a lot better about the sales of my own novels, though I don't hold out any hope of posthumous popularity) and was one of his least successful novels when it was first published. A lot of the most popular media of the time is long since forgotten for good reason. And so we end up with a survivorship bias towards the past, where we see centuries of great classics that have stood the test of time and none of the dreck, and measure them up against dreck and art alike of contemporary media.
I think the maths is counterintuitive here and that 10-20-40 thousand objects, give or take, isn't that much. The volume of space around our planet is HUGE.
Let us say that you had 10 thousand people running around on Earth, including all the oceans and Antarctica, and that collision of any two would release a hail of small deadly darts into the troposphere lasting, for, at 2 years or so. Which is approximately how long debris will last on LEO, though the actual values vary.
You still wouldn't expect all those 10 thousand people to obliterate themselves like that, as the Earth's surface is pretty darn big.
The volume of the LEO-relevant space is much bigger than the volume of the entire troposphere on Earth, because a) it is further away from the Earth's center than the troposphere, b) it is much deeper.
Now, 10 million objects, that would be a different story. So would be some specific peculiar orbit which is overcrowded. But tens of thousands of objects spread all over the entire planet isn't that much. That would be like 2-5 people in total roaming the entire Czechia, how often would they come into contact? Not very often.
Mercosur took 20 years to finalize and if it wasn't for recent unhingedness of American politics, I would expect it to get vetoed by special farmer interests in the last minute. But the threat became too big for that.
But yeah, there will be some urgency now. In times of need, people find out that all the "necessary" bureaucracy isn't really that necessary. War or threat of war is the only thing stronger than red tape.
(For an analogy, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Germany put most of its regulations aside to build some infrastructure for import of liquified gas in mere 6 weeks or so. The same infrastructure, under peace conditions, would take some 10 years to litigate against every NIMBY and eco-organization out there.)
There are still farmer protests here in France every day against this deal. There will be a lot of pressure on French MEPs to vote against it when it goes to the EP for the final vote.
Everything is a trade-off. Farmers have a lot of influence in the EU. Personally, I think they are already too dominant, for historic reasons.
And yes, I get that food is important. Maybe the answer would be to unburden them from European regulations, which are pretty onerous. The few people active in agriculture I know complain about insane paper wars with authorities all the time.
One farmer I know got a hefty fine for building an impromptu shed for extra kids that were born beyond the expected count. Why are we doing this to ourselves, to 'secure our food'?
Yes. The need to feed one's self and family is pretty historically important going back since we were primordial organisms to medieval times when if peasants didn't have food they'd riot and behead the king.
>European regulations, which are pretty onerous.
Onerous regulations that seek to prevent ... checks notes ... the use of slave labor and chemicals that damage human health and the environment. But sure, let's bypass all that and import food from countries that use slave labor and toxic pesticides while the EU virtue signals on Twatter how their mission is protecting humans from racism and exploitation and saving the environment, but apparently apart from those in countries where we import our food from, there they can do whatever exploitation they want as long as they give us cheap stuff. It's not hypocritical at all.
Definitely not gonna bite us in the ass in 10+ years time when the leader of one of those countries with a shaky track record on democracy and human rights, decides to weaponize our food dependence on them to gain some advantages or just mow down some more the Amazon for profit while killing the indigenous, and all the EU is gonna do is write a sternly worded X post about "carefully monitoring the situation" at best, or at worst turn a blind eye and pretend a genocide isn't happening, just like they did with Azerbaijan's bombing of Nagorno-Karabakh because they were now dependent on Azerbaijani gas after giving up on Russian gas in 2022.
Stupid EU regulations or not, giving up sovereignty on energy and food supply to third parties is bad idea all of the time, because it's guaranteed to be weaponized against you at some point.
>One farmer I know got a hefty fine for building an impromptu shed for extra kids that were born beyond the expected count.
Sounds like a local council, conty or national issue to me, not an EU issue.
I don't know what you're arguing about here because the farmers in EU are aggressively fighting against regulation to curtail chemicals, environmental controls and minimum healthy food quality mandates.
Yes, and WHY are they doing that? Could it be because they can't fairly compete against imported products from countries where farmers DON'T have those regulations?
"The need to feed one's self and family is pretty historically important "
So is, say, the need to defend yourself, but would you be happy about the military holding the same amount of de-facto power in the EU as the farmers do? Or would you consider it excessive?
"the use of slave labor and chemicals that damage human health and the environment."
So, there is no unnecessary regulation in your view? All of them are very virtuous and protect us all against horrible things? And as a consequence, the more, the better?
If so, how come that their level can vary from country A to country B and yet country B doesn't suffer an epidemic of grisly deaths?
Nope, not all regulations are necessary and not every one of them is virtuous and good. Some are just a byproduct of the office needing to show some activity and keeping their budget.
"Sounds like a local council issue to me, not an EU issue."
Because you are uninformed. She wasn't fined by the local council, which DGAF about an improvised shed with no fixed foundation. She was fined by authorities overseeing agricultural regulations, because that shed meant that she exceeded the allowed extent of her facilities for goats by half a square meter. (Five square feet for USians.)
"Why are you making it sound like the issue is binary?"
Because your declaration about the regulations seeking to protect us from big evil sounded quite absolutist in itself.
A bit of a motte-and-bailey. Some of them are undoubtedly good, some less so, and we shouldn't lobotomize ourselves by immediately dragging slavery out when starting discussions about the current regulatory level.
"Were those authorities doing the inspection from the EU or the local nation?"
EU law gets transposed into national laws of the constituent nations and local authorities then enforce it, but it is still EU law.
It is very different from the US where state authorities aren't tasked by enforcing federal regulations, because the Feds have their own enforcement infrastructure.
Compared to the US, EU-own enforcement infrastructure is tiny and mostly outsourced to local governments.
>Because your declaration about the regulations seeking to protect us from big evil sounded quite absolutist in itself.
I didn't mean it to be absolutist. But then riddle me this, if the EU regulations are the problem holding us back, why not get rid of some of them to boosts domestic production, and instead kneecap our agriculture industry with regulations and make ourselves dependent on imports from potential adversaries who don't follow our regulations?
Because I don't see the logic behind this being an advantage for us. It makes the EU incompetent at best, or malicious at workst.
>EU law gets transposed into national laws of the constituent nations and local authorities then enforce it, but it is still EU law.
Yeah but enforcement is still local. A lot of countries choose to be very lax with enforcing some EU laws if the laws are stupid and nobody's getting hurt. So ultimately it's still the fault of the local nation for being overly pedantic with enforcement.
Blaming EU laws for local issues, is the ultimate cope the UK also tried, and once they left the EU, their problems persisted, because guess what, their issues were all domestically inflicted by local politics and not coming from the EU as they claimed.
20 years and counting. The Mercosur deal still needs to pass the EU Parliament, and it’s not scheduled to come up for at least a few months. The EU’s Parliament is also nearly split down the middle on the deal which means there’s still about a 50/50 it fails, maybe 51/49 or 52/48 in its favor at the moment, but it is very close and still has about as much chance of passing as not passing at this juncture.
The reason is that Trump wants to recolor the map and make the US bigger that it is, and be known as the one who did it. Nothing deeper than that.
Ironically, that will make some projects harder, especially if US laws such as NEPA start being applied on the Greenland territory. Hello environmental lawsuits from all sides.
Indeed, Trump seems to be suffering from Putin syndrome: he thinks that the best way to make the United States (and himself) glorious is through territorial expansion.
Taken in a strict boolean sense, yes, but real-world policy is rarely boolean, and mostly about tradeoffs and how many nines of reliability you want to spend on.
Metal detectors will catch the vast, vast majority of guns ever produced, which is their whole point of existence.
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