Slashdot Mirror

Nobody is forcing anyone in Eastern Europe to be criminal, that's a ridiculous claim. So many Gypsies in Eastern Europe live in poverty because those countries are, by European Union standards, quite poor themselves. A lot of people there live in poverty - some of them are Gypsies.

Poverty IS the major cause of crime.
There's no better proof of that than observing exact same practices as done by the poor and by the rich.
In the case of the poor it's a crime.
In the case of the rich, at worst it's a "legal issue". At best it's "aggressive and shrewd business practice".

And that's disregarding the epigenetic burden of generations of poverty (all them fun diseases that weren't really a burden on poor people before all food became cheap processed carbs and fats), inherited psychological trauma and downright segregational injury one might "luck into" by choosing to be born poor.
Particularly when choosing to be born into a poor country where such health issues will tend to be ignored, untreated or too expensive to treat - for much longer than in the rich countries.

Which is where you should look for that "forcing".
Much like with those stereotypes of belligerent Irish drunkards and criminals - the real cause for prejudice may actually be older prejudice from centuries ago.

I suppose this picture is a forgery then.

Your Brexiters can't stop lying, you can't even tell the truth about what you've said in the past, can you?

And since Germany outranks the US here, I wonder how they handled the European 'right' to censorship. Say what you will about Ajit Pai and his corporate cronies, I certainty do, at least here in the US I won't face legal trouble for 'insulting someone's dignity' or 'insulting someone's religious sensibilities' (yeah, blasphemy, of all things) or violating someone's 'right to be forgotten' by continuing to host a factual news article.

Except that the hoops are not meaningless if you want to keep your job, get paid, and feed your family.

The gospel according to Jordan B Peterson — 21 April 2018

There are many other memorable passages. One that particularly stands out is where Peterson describes a period of soul searching 30 years ago when looking for something in which to believe — anything of certainty. And he started to reflect on a practice at Auschwitz about which he had read.
:
"A guard would force an inmate to carry a 100-lb sack of wet salt from one side of the large compound to the other and then to carry it back. It was "an act of pointless torment ... a piece of malevolent art. "

Serenity doesn't pay the bills. Meanwhile, lugging a 100-lb sack of wet salt back and forth across the Auschwitz quadrangle keeps you out of the furnace for another day.

If your child required you to lug a 100-lb sack of wet salt for miles and miles in order to be spared from a cruel disease, the situation would be (A) in no wise different, (B) meaningful, rather than cruel and pointless.

And decided to walk rather than borrow some euros for a data center they don't need yet...

Apple will place the first tranche of its €13 billion Irish tax bill in an escrow account next month following the signing of a legal agreement between the Government and the US tech giant.
...

two people (elistists like yourself) insist they know better than everyone else.

The link from TFS didn't say much about those two people, so I looked around. Here's what I found

https://www.irishtimes.com/new...

Those two people are local residents. The one pegged as leading the charge is an US-born environmental engineer, and they are apparently funding the appeals out of their own pockets.

If we take their word, they don't look like elists to me. More like activist (the guy also objected to an Amazon data center)

This is the part where the experts at slashdot scrutinize this environmental engineer over his nerd creds, with no elitism on our part whatsoever.

Yes.

https://www.irishtimes.com/bus...
http://fortune.com/2012/04/29/...
http://www.businessinsider.com...
http://www.businessinsider.com...
http://www.finfacts.ie/Irish_f...
http://dukeundergraduatelawmag...
https://www.thecasecentre.org/...

Then another 20 cities would pop up.

Facts assumed, but not in evidence.

If the only reason Amazon is considering these 20 cities is because of corporate welfare, then that means those cities have no inherent value at all. Which is obviously false. Its not just geographic location, but also the quality of the local population, local infrastructure and good governance - which ironically is disproven by handing out these government giveways willy-nilly.

One of the reasons companies went to Ireland was due to taxes.

And that's not working out so well for them.

One of the reason Hollywood moved to Canada is because of taxes.

As it happens, I married a hollywood producer, so I've got direct knowledge of that. Hollywood has not "moved" to Canada. Sure, there are a handful of productions that do some work there. Its a couple of drops in the bucket because Canada does not have the business infrastructure that LA does. Those tax breaks help to compensate for that lack, but they don't come anywhere near making up for it in the general case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

"The case is clear: an economically challenged government, perniciously influenced by the interests of the housing lobby, blew it. The entire Irish episode will be studied internationally in years to come as an example of how not to do things."

https://www.irishtimes.com/new...

https://www.rte.ie/eile/brains...

Spent 2 minutes on google..
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/n...
https://www.irishtimes.com/new...
http://www.sheknows.com/home-a...

Heck, there are tons of articles about people dying from fire extinguishers and people actually killing others with them too.

I keep running into facts that piss me off so much about the schools around here.

Why do schools not allow 3 recesses for more physical activity? Why are school serving trash for lunch? Why the hell are the before/after care places all forcing the kids to stay indoors and be inactive?

France, Japan, and many others with thin kids allow 3 recesses/exercise breaks and serve better food.

http://www.alternet.org/food/f...

Quote: "Another bigger contribution to French students' healthy disposition? Recess. Students have two 15-minute and one 60-minute recess every day, writes Plantier, and they also have the advantage of walking or biking to and from school, which students only attend four -- not five -- days out of the week."

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/wh...

Japanese friends rave about their childhood lunches. They also all walked to and from school, about a mile or two away. When they got older, they road bikes.

I hear my kids complaining about not having enough time to eat as well. I visited once and was amazed at the time restraint. Here is an Irish article with the same problem. This can't be good.

http://www.irishtimes.com/life...

“God above is in charge of the weather and we here can’t do anything about it,” he told the Dáil [Ireland's parliament] during a debate on climate change on Wednesday.

‘Only God controls the weather’, Danny Healy-Rae tells climate change debate

Oh come now, practically every word Naomi Klein ever wrote on climate change has had that it's primary focus. She's hardly unique. You won't find that in scientific reports however, because climate scientists are not sociologists. They keep their focus to their field of expertise: x causes y, reduce x.

And a casual google reveals that she believes capitalism is incompatible with environmentalism. So no, Klein is not an example, but rather the opposite. Funny, how I still don't believe you.

While you gave interesting evidence that the mortality rate from extreme weather events have gone down you 1) showed no evidence that your theory on WHY this happened is true (it may be - but you have not proven that argument)
2) failed to actively argue how to expand that to the most vulnerable societies
3) assumed that climate mitigation must be done by reducing quality of life (which is not an avenue ANYBODY is pursuing - it only exists as a strawman fallacy from deniers - on the contrary, climate change mitigation strategies are all based on replacing archaic and dangerous technologies with better and newer ones, not abandoning tech - upgrading it).
4) showed absolutely no evidence that this pattern will hold if the degree and frequency of extreme weather events were to increase significantly. That seems highly unlikely since one of the effects of extreme weather events is to be hugely expensive - they cost a lot of money to clean up and recover from. Just look how much it cost to deal with Katrina and we underspent hugely (which upped the deathtoll a lot). So that means - there must be a point where the wealth LOST due to extreme weather events will eradicate so much wealth as to start destroying any mitigating factor wealth may have had on surviving them.

Let's start with point 1. We have a huge reduction in death rate from extreme weather. That's evidence, counter to your assertion that it isn't. We have a dearth of explanations for why that death rate would decline so dramatically in the face of increasing population density and climate change. Maybe Gaia likes polluting, capitalist societies?

As to point 2, what makes a society "most vulnerable"? Poverty is the common characteristic with obvious reasons why poverty creates vulnerability. Thus, by removing poverty, say by implementing one of the historical approaches to developed world status, one removes the vulnerability as well. It wouldn't be hard for a "vulnerable society" to mix and match the historical successes to tailor an approach for their own society.

I'll further note that we already have massive improvement in the well being of these "most vulnerable" societies due to the influence of global trade and some degree of modernization of their societies and infrastructure.

For point 3, the obvious rebuttal is that countries have actually tried "climate mitigation" and it's been both remarkably harmful and ineffective at mitigation. For example, Germany and Denmark doubled the price of their electricity while importing power from places like Poland's coal power plants. Many dead end technologies (solar thermal and biogeneration) have been pursued with many billions of dollars of subsidies to no useful effect. A certain US pipeline has been blocked for a decade without doing anything useful in the process (aside from costing the US and Canada economic benefit and jobs as well as a few lives).

Why would point 4 happen? You don't exactly have a scientific case for extreme weather getting far worse, you know. The researcher-based arguments for example are models all the way down with a very tenuous connection to any data or underlying physics. And the hysteria-based arguments aren't based on anything at all.

Katrina killed a lot of people because the Mayor of New Orleans failed to evacuate the city in

I have a friend in a prominent university in Ireland, where Guinness (I shit you not...) sponsored the funding of the universities research into the societal effects of alcohol - and where research published by this branch of the university, has to be presented to the sponsor for approval, before publishing.

"Guinness is good for you", remember...

France is closing reactors and cutting back because of cost and safety concerns. http://www.irishtimes.com/news...

'safety concerns' is one word for completely unfounded and irrational fear mongering. If politicians play to those baseless fears that can translate into a real cost though. It'd be a shame to see France dragged down by the same luddites that have held the American power infrastructure back in the seventies.

France is closing reactors and cutting back because of cost and safety concerns. http://www.irishtimes.com/news...

You clearly don't understand the concept of ruling.

You clearly don't understand the concept of RTFA. You should try that before you look any dumber. The whole lot of you.

Key segments from TFA:

European Commission investigation seen concluding by March

If the Commission decides to enforce a tougher accounting standard, Apple may owe taxes

There has been no ruling yet. Period. And if that ruling comes, (and if that ruling actually comes out as expected - it still may not) it means the Irish tax laws will have to be changed retroactively. To be fair, that information can only be found in better articles. Like this (older) one or this

Sadly, his manifesto would be endorsed by the majority of people even in the countries he hates for welcoming immigrants. We freely allow the migration of money, but, but not people. Jobs don't have to climb a border wall, cross a sea or desert or even get a visa before leaving their home country.

Countries such as the US treat corporations as people, except when it comes to national borders. We require a passport for living-breathing people but not for corporations. I've never heard of a corporation being held against its will for decades in a prison/refugee camp while its immigration status is being evaluated. Corporations needn't cross deserts or crowd onto rickety boats. They are seldom convicted of treason or Logan act violations regardless of the havoc and resentment they create as representatives of their homeland in other parts of the world.

We don't bat an eye when a wealthy businessman distorts a third-world economy with their holiday home or an expat REIT vulture fund managed by former US VP Dan Quayle acquires and ruthlessly forecloses on hundreds of properties in Northern Ireland's 6 counties. Your portfolio now "owns" land that the Irish have struggled over for generations.

Gangolf, I don't know what immigrants did to you to make you so angry. I am one of the 232 million people who live outside my birth country. If we were counted, 0th generation immigrants would be the 5th most populous country in the world, ahead of Brazil. But we are shunned and labelled as if refugee == immigrant == illegal. I'm truly surprised that you count the US as a country that is "too welcoming." As an insular isolationist, you might not be aware that US immigration policy has changed considerably since the waves of 19th and early 20th century immigrants. The US solved its 1990s boat people crisis by warehousing refugees at Gitmo. It's solving the central American crisis by building a wall and letting people die. "Illegal" is a good definition of these border policies which violate international law. Rest assured that I will never use your software until you understand more about the people who provide a convenient scapegoat for politicians and a convenient target for your hate.

Yesterday M$ announced major data centre expansions in those countries, for Azure, DynamicCRM and other cloud offerings (link. I imagine the lower corporate tax rates had something to do with it!

See here where some crook gets his own Wikipedia entry delisted from Google:

Google removes Wikipedia link to former criminal ‘the Monk’

Wikipedia swears to fight 'censorship' of 'right to be forgotten' ruling

"All of the lazy copy and paste repurposed articles written about O’Brien after he helped sell a TV show are based on one initial article in The Irish Times." ref

And just as unrealistic, I mean wouldn't a tattoo of the prison layout on your back be a bit of a givaway.

'Written by the team behind Prison Break, the show “follows an eccentric genius and his international network of super-geniuses as they form the last line of defence against the complex threats of the modern age”, according to its makers.' ref

You're right:

From http://www.irishtimes.com/cult...

"I was coming home from school and encountered a house surrounded by black cars. Mom was on the couch, crying; Dad was not too happy. A lot of men in suits were wanting to yell at me for what I had done but were a little surprised when out of my schoolbag I pulled an extradition waiver â" which calmed the conversation down. If they signed this [the extradition waiver] then I would show them where the holes are in their network. We ended up doing a deal â" which happens in most hacking incidents you never hear about.â"

and:

"The showâ(TM)s creator, Nick Santora, introduced him as a man who âoehas saved the world several times over, things he canâ(TM)t even tell us aboutâ."

or:

"One of Scorpionâ(TM)s executive producers told Comic-Con, âoeWalter personally caught the Boston bombers by writing an algorithm that tracked motion on all the cameras within a two-mile radius of the blast. That kind of thing makes for a really compelling episode of television. He also stopped nuclear meltdowns from happening.â"

It's so full of weasel words it's unbelievable. An algorithm that tracks motion? what you mean checking if one frame is different to the next? that's tracking motion, hardly rocket science, any CS101 student could do it. Helped stopped nuclear meltdowns from happening? Well so have I, by not becoming an incompetent nuclear engineer that goes on to produce a flawed reactor design I assure you have also done exactly this. Things we can't be told about? Oh well, I'll assume they just don't exist then or I might as well just mention that I'm personally better than this guy because I saved not only the world numerous times, but the entire universe, I just can't tell you how.

Which is a shame because it sounds like the show may be a bit like Numb3rs, the sort of show that might interest me, but with this insurmountable pile of tosh and bullshit that's apparently surrounding it I'm going to steer VERY clear. This guy is obviously an egotistical self-publicist and a serial liar, and the guys writing about him are obviously absurdly naive and have failed to realise that they could've made up these exact same stories without getting him involved.

Everything he says is something many people could say and it would hold as much validity, there's literally nothing about this guy that's actually in any way verifiable - the incidents he claims to have been involved in, the things he claims to have done, absolutely none of it is verifiable. A genius that got a bog standard degree at a run of the mill UK university? - Christ, it's not like his "intelligence" even got him into Cambridge early, or even at all. It says he graduated in the late 90s, so if he was 13 in 1988 then that implies he only followed the same path of literally millions of other teens the same year he did. Why if he was such a genius wasn't he doing his A-Levels or degree early like real actual genius kids consistently manage to do? Even my fucking cousin got an A-Level at 14 because she was ahead of her years and yet she wasn't exactly exceptional - a few others in her school did too. I have two degrees, one of which I studied for whilst working full time, this means my academic achievements at very least are well ahead of this guy and I'm not exactly stand out either.

I can find not a single shred of evidence that this guy is anything other than mediocre at best.

Some research has been done on the matter in the UK: http://www.irishtimes.com/news...

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/20/union-to-sue-construction-firms-blacklisting-allegations
Undercover police had children with activists
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jan/20/undercover-police-children-activists
"Derry interrogation centre hidden from torture inquiry"
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/derry-interrogation-centre-hidden-from-torture-inquiry-1.1486059
The results of UK public, private, police, military, signals intelligence work can make for interesting reading over the years. In the past you had to take part in protests, be seen or be informed on. In a more digital age a lot more sections of the UK gov and private sector are been invited to look over files and submit reports or will have expanded information 'logging' powers. Recall what powers the UK gov wanted see used on the internet?
"Changes to council surveillance powers"
http://www.lawgazette.co.uk/66244.article
A lot of councils, government departments and various quangos (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation) where to get new telco related powers

There are more than a few jobs. By last year 2,800 staff in Cork alone.

The money brought in by that level of employment may be worth more than some minor tax they might earn if
Ireland changed the tax loophole.

Because Apple need do nothing more than change a couple lines their US tax return to cut that revenue stream
out from under Ireland. So you can bet there will be some small increase in taxes but that increase will be very
small as long as there is a large employment component in Ireland.

Google: http://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/europe/concern-about-irish-tax-reflects-disquiet-about-google-1.1559370
M$: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-microsoft-avoids-taxes-loopholes-irs-2013-1

Since /. staff, we're talking about timothy and Soulskill who seem to be working for Google and not /., don't want to cover objectively, here's some real news.

SEC clears Apple's tax strategy... all that "Holy grail of tax avoidance" talk was bullshit and lies.

Apple's tax strategy passes SEC inspection: The technology giant brushed off claims it had the "Holy Grail of tax avoidance" by senior US politicians. Now the US Securities and Exchange Commission has the company's back.

Let's look at who the real evil company is:

‘Dutch sandwich’ grows as Google shifts €8.8bn to Bermuda

Ahh, so that's where the money is.

Concern about Irish tax reflects disquiet about Google

or this:

Google's UK division paid £12m in corporation tax in 2012 - Google paid only £11.6m in corporation tax in the UK in 2012, despite revenues of £506m, it can be disclosed.

But you won't see this on /. because timothy and Soulskill won't get checks from Google if they post about the real evil.

Just wait, some day the long knives will come out.

The long knives are already out, and they have friends.

You mean something like this?

Der Spiegel said the European Union and the UNâ(TM)s Vienna-based nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), were among those targeted by US intelligence agents.

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/us-spy-agency-bugged-un-headquarters-der-spiegel-reports-1.1505184

The original der Spiegel article talked about how the IMF and other corporations were also bugged.

It really is a silly question. IBM has an artificial brain with as many synapses as a human brain right now. Fusion energy is on the verge of a breakthrough, 3-D printers are almost cost effective on a per-household basis, solar power is dropping to the cost of coal power, Moore's law has held steady for decades... We are at the start of a second industrial revolution that will put everything in history to shame and without the exploding population from the first one. The world will be totally unrecognizable in a hundred years.

You can't think of another reason?

Why Theo Van Gogh Was Murdered
Dutch pledge Islamist crackdown
SPIEGEL Interview with Hirsi Ali: "We Must Declare War on Islamist Propaganda"
Violence in Holland: Jihad Behind the Dikes
Dutch anxiety over ‘Sharia triangle’ police no-go area in The Hague
Netherlands, Germany alarmed over Islamist extremists
Muslim Europe: the demographic time bomb transforming our continent

Going back to the wiretapping, it also has been common knowledge that its a unhealthy ammount in The Netherlands, but for some reason it has never upset people enough,...

I'm sure there must be a reason or two.

Why Theo Van Gogh Was Murdered
Dutch pledge Islamist crackdown
SPIEGEL Interview with Hirsi Ali: "We Must Declare War on Islamist Propaganda"
Violence in Holland: Jihad Behind the Dikes
Dutch anxiety over ‘Sharia triangle’ police no-go area in The Hague
Netherlands, Germany alarmed over Islamist extremists

We'll show them the light ! Here they are, all of them in all their glory:

http://www.independent.ie/
http://www.irishexaminer.com/
http://www.irishtimes.com/
http://www.thestar.ie/
http://www.herald.ie/
http://www.independent.ie/
http://www.sundayworld.com/
http://www.businesspost.ie/
http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/fr/viewer.aspx (they don't even have a website, how funny)
http://www.farmersjournal.ie/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html
http://www.mirror.co.uk/
http://www.thesun.ie/
http://www.mirror.co.uk/
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/
http://www.thesun.co.uk/

Most of them don't even have an irish dedicated website. They are pathetic. It's like passing a decree that makes people owing me $300 if they ever whisper my name in their car. There. Be warned.

maybe its the most clever link bait :)

I've excluded the URL's that link to the UK as they have no web .ie presence and therefore those sites are only partly involved.
Also, I'd like to add that I'm grateful for the free press we have in Ireland and I hope we don't f&*k that up.

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        t
        o
        f
        t
        h
        e (Dundalk)
        l
        o
        c
        l
        s
        Enniscorthy Echo (URL?)
        New Ross Echo (URL?)
        Gorey Echo (URL?)

  and..

N
a
t
i
o
n
a (English subsidiary)
l (English subsidiary)(includes Irish Sun Sunday)

Irish Mail on Sunday (URL?) (English subsidiary)
The Sunday World (URL?) (English subsidiary)
Irish Daily Mail (URL?) (English subsidiary)
Irish Daily Mirror (URL?) (English subsidiary)

Irish Sunday Mirror (URL? ) (English subsidiary)
The Sunday Times (URL? ) (English subsidiary)

I'm Irish. Note that there is a massive brain drain following the economic crash (...which shouldn't have surprised anyone. Bust follows boom...). The (relatively) smart young people are literally leaving Ireland by the planeload for the usual UK/USA/Canada/Australia, leaving various blundering buffoons in charge. So we get idiotic irish newspapers demanding fees to link to them, and unbelievably successful attempts to introduce full-blown internet censorship in Ireland at the behest of some idiotic record companies that haven't been relevant in years and should already be dead, we get religious bigots in power in hospitals letting women die.

I'm still here mostly because my retired aging parents are here and my brother's already gone and I didn't really want to leave them alone. So I haven't been actively looking for work elsewhere and I've been trying to fight on here. But if someone offered me a visa and job in Canada,say, out of the blue, I'd be very tempted to go at this stage, despite Harper being stupid and evil too. Too many people my age I know who would be pro-choice, anti-internet-censorship, nonreligious etc. have already left, and I think it's starting to give wankers like the child-rapey catholic church renewed confidence they can regain control of Ireland.

Let's go a level in...
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2013/0103/1224328379622.html

We'll show them the light ! Here they are, all of them in all their glory:

http://www.independent.ie/
http://www.irishexaminer.com/
http://www.irishtimes.com/
http://www.thestar.ie/
http://www.herald.ie/
http://www.independent.ie/
http://www.sundayworld.com/
http://www.businesspost.ie/
http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/fr/viewer.aspx (they don't even have a website, how funny)
http://www.farmersjournal.ie/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html
http://www.mirror.co.uk/
http://www.thesun.ie/
http://www.mirror.co.uk/
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/
http://www.thesun.co.uk/

Most of them don't even have an irish dedicated website. They are pathetic. It's like passing a decree that makes people owing me $300 if they ever whisper my name in their car. There. Be warned.

about the NNI taking this action...

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/1026/1224325733736.html

LOL.

This just in : Disney has bought out the. H.P. Lovecraft estate. A Star Wars/Marvel/Cthuluhu/Disney Princess animated film is rumored to be in production.

I'm glad Lucas sold to Disney, if he hadn't we'd never have this p.r. pic... http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2012/1101/1224325975225.html

My great uncle certainly didn't, back in the 80s. Each cow had the predecessor to an RFID tag around its neck. When it entered the feeding station, food specifically mixed for that cow was delivered. (Dairy cows had a diet that maximized both health and the value of the milk. Beef cattle were optimized for health and meat value. But every cow was treated as a unique entity, using parental data, size and weight as primary inputs, with tweaks manually coded in.) He would probably have fed someone to one of the bulls if they'd suggested just throwing any old junk at the animals.

Ok, eccentric wetware hackers aren't exactly two a penny in the farming industry. But, then, that's part of what created the mess. Those growing corn sell it to ethanol producers, not other farmers or the food industry. The health consequences for farm animals in using the new alternatives to grass are a product of an abuse of the old alternatives to grass plus an abuse of antibiotics and other bulking-up agents ("angel dust" - PCP - is one farmers use, even where it's not legal, Clenbuterol is another).

If, instead of using illegal drugs, nonsensical feeds, steroids and antibiotics, they'd simply opted for a more sensible diet for each cow, they'd have had the same profits with none of the scandals. Higher initial costs (so it takes longer for the net profits to be the same), sure, plus having to think (always a problem for conservative, rural districts), but that's it.

In related news Mr. Ciaran Tobin from Ireland still hasn't served any time for a car accident he caused KILLING 2 CHILDREN in Hungary.

The Hungarian courts sentenced him to 3 years during which he "left" Hungary on the grounds that his assignment ended, and the Irish supreme court decided against extradition.

Despite efforts of the Hungarian authorities, and despite the fact that Mr. Tobin actually offered to serve the 3 years in Ireland, no justice has been served.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/0620/1224318257596.html

I don't know why you bring up Irish tax laws, it is not analogous to the situation I describe at all. Ireland is an independant country and can set whatever taxes they like.

That's just the point. They are not an independent country as they're part of the EU. France, Germany, et. al. have been screaming for many years that Ireland's low tax rates are unfair and must be raised and yet they are able to keep their tax rates as they want them, regardless of this pressure.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/0119/breaking7.html
http://www.thejournal.ie/frances-bottom-line-increase-corporate-tax-or-we-wont-cut-your-bailout-rate-150942-Jun2011/
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/business/global/26tax.html?pagewanted=all

This isn't at all the same thing as the EU passing legislation and requiring all states to implement some form of it or face penalties. Which the 3 strikes law is a perfect example of.

It's not the same thing but it is applicable to the argument. Ireland is able to do what it wants even though it is part of the EU.

Your main argument for the EU being satisfactorily democratic is the EP.

Not only the EP (which is democratically elected) but also the council (whose members are democratically elected by each state in question) and the president of the council (who is democratically elected by those who have been democratically elected).

The EP cannot proposes legislation, only amendments. Think about that for a second. The commission holds a lot of power, yet you cannot vote for it's members.

Not directly, agreed. The commission is not directly elected but is selected by those who have been democratically elected. You can vote for those who then select the members of the commission.

To claim the people have a say in everything is bullshit. There are basically no countries where the people have a say in everything....it isn't workable with a representative democracy. Having a say on significant issues is a minimum, and something the EU misses out on. Could the people in the EU vote for or against ACTA?

I have to disagree on the basis that there is nothing stopping people from making themselves heard. When the French minority youths rioted because they had poor employment possibilities, they demonstrated (rioted really but nonetheless made themselves heard) which resulted in the French government putting in place legislation to enable short term contract firing possibilities to try and reduce unemployment in that segment of the population. To further the point, a larger (ie non-minority) segment of the French populace decided that they didn't like the new legislation and went out in the streets to demonstrate (minus the riots) in their millions. Something like ten percent of the population this time, resulting in a very quick killing of the new legislation.

Did they have a direct say? No, not at all.

Did they make themselves heard? Yes, absolutely.

The democratic deficit in the EU has been acknowledged and discussed since the 70's. That the EP is democratically elected does not make the problem go away.

As I said, it's not perfect. No system is perfect. I maintain that it is far from a joke, though, and is arguably one of the most democratic systems in place in the world today.

That's what happened to the price of chicken and pork here in Ireland when the Brits had their BSE and Foot & Mouth problems. The prices still haven't gone back to the relative levels they were before.

On a side note, does this mean that the EU will now block US (non hormone tainted) beef? Only last month there was news about the US ending their ban on EU beef.

None. Really???

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/scotland-yard-suspends-8-officers-20-being-investigated-over-new-allegations-of-racism/2012/04/06/gIQAB3HGzS_story.html
http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/president-pleads-for-a-tolerant-society-189495.html
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/0404/breaking34.html

That's from a quick google search. I also have some personal experience...

A couple years ago, I lived in a neighborhood that had an apartment building that a large university (UCSD) would rent out for hundreds of Irish students to stay at during a summer exchange program. They (Irish students) would sometimes crash our local pub in large numbers (20+ people) completely wasted out of their minds. Usually they'd start speaking about us in gaelic (I guess they teach it in the schools over there nowadays, and the Irish students delighted in using it to talk crap about us), start smashing things, and on multiple occasions young Irish guys called my black friend a n**ger within ear shot. Every time they crashed the bar in numbers, the bartender(s) would eventually have to call the cops. The Irish kids would smash glasses and anything else they could get their hands on, then run off like a bunch of hooligans before the police showed up. And it wasn't like this only happened once with one group of students, it was a running joke at the bar because every summer the same thing would happen 4 or 5 times from a different group of Irish punks, I mean students.

My favorite part is that supposedly, this was the cream of the crop of Irish youth, students at prestigious universities that were well on their way to being productive members of Irish society... After my experience, I don't have a lot of respect for Irish "culture" anymore, nor do I have any interest in visiting the town in Ireland my family is supposed to be from originally.

Ironically enough, O2 Ireland announced today that they're laying off 11% of their Irish workforce.

Maybe it won't be Americans first, maybe it will be the Irish first that will just STOP PAYING THEIR TAXES.

Good for them.

Nice hope. But since Bono and U2 moved their music business offshore from Ireland to avoid paying taxes to the country he says produced him (and of course it did), there's no chance. Bono is the music industry, including the bloodsucking evil part.

James Joyce's works are now freely available to everyone.

An interesting thing I noted is that the Irish and UK copyright terms used to be limited to 50, but were changed to 70 to match the Germans.

It's in the Irish Times.

FTA:
The Irish Data Protection Commissioner is to undertake an audit of Facebook’s activities outside the US and Canada next month following complaints over the retention of users’ information by the social networking giant.