2014 was the first year under the new MFF for 2014-2020, which contains lower overall figures than the preceding spending plan. The weight of regional spending and research and development gradually increases until 2020, while the share of agriculture decreases year on year, unlike under the previous MFF where it was the biggest spending area. This change is reflected already in 2014, with regional and agricultural resources on par with 42% of the budget.
They base their number on the EU budget from 2013 (budget as a document), while this here is apparently the actual post-factum number from the 2014.
Will not pretend to be a finance specialist, but AFAIK the budget is only a plan, a commitment, and is not always followed strictly, and thus differs from the actual numbers. Though I do not expect the numbers to differ it that much. But one has to compare the comparable years, and there is no by-country split of 2014/later budgets.
[...] are you telling me you won't reinvest in training one of your own to take the job as opposed to letting in a foreigner?
That's what Germany did. In addition to relaxing the stance on immigration, they did reform the education system, introduced subsidies for reeducation of employed, and free education for unemployed.
Whether there were many or few, it depends on your perspective. Changing the union is a big deal, IMO.
Otherwise, I have read in the past about three such cases. One of the articles closed on the notion that many changes to the union are simply not brought up anymore, despite popular support, because position of the UK remains the same.
Everyone need to be for any expansion of the capability? Not just majority?
As far as I understand, this affects the "Eurolaw"(?) (Primärrecht in German: the basic founding laws of the EU).
In order to change any of them, all participating countries must vote "yes".
Changes to other laws require only majority, but can be vetoed by any member with veto right. UK has veto right.
With sharing of wealth for instance Sweden is supposed to be the country which pay the most in vs what it get back / capita I think? I assume UK pay in more than what they get back directly, but of course they also have access to the market and the people and get to sell goods onto other EU nations and get their brightest people into their union.
Infographic. SE pays 3.8B, and receives 1.7B. UK 11.3 vs 6.9. (Wow, I always thought that UK is not part of the CAP, because they were deriding the program so much in the past, and yet they are.)
Outside the CAP, the money largely go to support poorer countries and regions: building infrastructure, improvement in education, and so on. To make sure that with the time they could raise their living standards. It was very insightful to read that some regions in UK are poor enough to receive that support (but largely voted to leave).
I've read that EFTA also has membership fees, and in case of UK the sum would be comparable to what UK pays (net amount) now into the EU budget (more than 2Bln pounds).
Well, he is kinda making the Leavers point. His office in the UK has 60 people in it, and not a one is a local person. The entire office is foreign-born. It doesn't get more "they took our jobs" than that.
The counter-argument would be: how many of the unemployed UK citizens could take the positions?
At the peek of unemployment in Germany 15 years ago, they did a research and found that while there were 1.5M unemployed, there ware also around 2.5M open positions. Almost no one out of the unemployed could take the positions because they lacked qualification and/or education. That research was more or less the final nail in the coffin of Germany's pervasive and very popular anti-immigration policies of the past.
The irony is, back then, the Germany was the main opponents of the free worker movement in EU - while the UK was actually an ardent proponent who talked Germany into it.
But then there's the sharing of wealth with other nations, refugees, more power to the EU rather than politicians close at home...
So far UK had vetoed many of the EU political power expansion projects (often for a good reason; but not always).
Can't say about the much hated on the USA forums "sharing of wealth", but as refugee situation is concerned, the Brexit wouldn't change it.
UK takes refugees because it has signed of the Refugee Convention. In fact, after the Brexit, UK would probably have to take even more refugees, because right now EU has a deal with Turkey to take some of our refugees.
If EU was just a free trade union UK would had stayed.
Of course they would have stayed. Being a loophole to regulations is a very profitable business. That's why, for example, the hedge funds love it there in London. And that is why I'm glad that they are leaving.
As far as a "race to the bottom", is that what we see with APEC, or NAFTA? No [...]
... because nobody can compete with the elephant in the "room" - the USA.
And that's why the unions work: they are narrowly defined (not really full-fledged free-trade/etc unions), and they are dominated and controlled by the USA. (And please do not pretend that it is not so. Or probably from USA's perspective, being dominated by USA is the norm of life. But it is not.)
The great thing is that now that the UK has voted out, several other countries are going to follow.
"Liking or not liking" the EU is not the same as "in or out". So it is not going to happen.
Oh, Brexit would make a splash. But.
First. When UK economy would stagnate for few years - and NHS would see even less funding - even nationalists would come to their senses. First-world nationalists tend to lose support quickly, when people's living sandard is on the line.
Second. UK is unique in that it is living in a virtual media bubble. You have a completely perverted image of the EU, created and nourished by the media over the past 15 years. I know it, because 15+ years ago I was reading lots and lots of UK press. And the reporting was on completely different level. I have seen it changing from small stupid lies and half-jokes 15 years ago. To stupid unfustified accusations 10 years ago. To blatant lies and red herring - on front pages! - 5 years ago.
Some saner UK reporters are depicting that it is as if the people started believing their own lies.
Even here on the thread, most US readers know political system of the EU better than the most UK readers. And that's the f*cking Slashdot, where more or less exclusively only highly educated people are gathering. Let it sink for a moment: UK, being part of EU, knows less about EU, compared to the US who is related to EU only remotely.
you mean the UK tried to retain a strong trading relationship without abandoning its sovereignty?
EU is all about trading - but, excluding: price manipulation, currency manipulation, equity manipulation, market manipulation, and so on.
If you want to sell me something, if you want my money, you automatically have obligations toward me. If I want to sell you something to you, I automatically have obligations toward you. That's Business 101.
Nobody is going to deal with a country which might rip off somebody, and deny responsibility because "but sovereignty!" excuse. That's Politics 101.
P.S. You might want to visit Cuba and ask them about how they reveled for decades in sovereignty.
Malta and Luxembourg have 6 seats each. That's 40% off the mark.
So from the 7:1 influence ratio you tried to cry here about, it is more like 12:1.
IOW, the voice of the UK in EP is 12 times more powerful. Or in other words: it would take 9 countries at the bottom to match the voting power of UK. and at least 10 to outvote.
It would end up either very loose and inefficient, or very short-lived.
Because as long as there are no political boundaries set, every state member is free to participate in the "race to the bottom" of deregulation, as a mean to attract more business and hopefully tax income.
Or other way around: how many free trade/economic unions, not dominated and controlled by a single larger country, can you name? I know of precisely zero such unions in existence. And I have read how such unions in the past have deteriorated quickly because everybody tried to exploit and capitalize on each other's weaknesses.
That's why if you want a long term union, you have to level the playing field for every participating country. A political framework is needed for that.
They are not. Many independent organizations since then did the tests to confirm just that.
One German magazine made a test of several diesel cars, and threw in one benzine one. In their test, only one - diesel! - car complied with the advertised emission standard. (Don't remember the brand (not BMW). What was surprising to me is that even the car running on benzine produced the NOx.)
Another German magazine did a test too, and IIRC only BMW diesel emission was within the advertised emission standard.
The larger problem behind the scenes is that the manufacturers have promised too much to the regulators but couldn't deliver. Thus the existing Euro 6 emission standard, established on the said promises, is simply not implementable at the moment. The industry insiders told that the emission limits should be raised by at least 70% to be in alignment with the current level of technology.
discussions of variable sigils are so far down the list of relevant considerations when discussing a programming language, I can't fathom why anyone who has coded for more than a week would actually bother mentioning them.
You probably never had to code couple thousand lines of code in a day, have you?
Perl5 is otherwise fine language. I'm using it now for more than 15 years, including using it 2 years full-time professionally.
In the past, on smaller things, Perl's syntax was not as cumbersome. But for newer code, especially OO one, the denser code is just overflowing with the sigils (and dereferences). In the older times, for small/medium stuff, one often resorted to the built-in variables. In OO code, literally everything is a user variable, and a reference more often then not. Sigils and the -> are the most typed characters and are the most annoying ones, since they are hard to type by touch. Modern Perl5 iteration lessen the burden by allowing to skip the -> in more cases than before. But the sigils have remained untouched.
Over the years of using Perl5 I have realized its greatest shortcoming: I have to type $/%/@ characters too often, what sometimes gets me - especially if I try to do something OO in Perl.
I have looked (again) at Perl6 recently, and was appalled to see that it used even more of punctuation than the Perl5.
As a way forward for Perl5, a special mode which allows to omit the $/%/@ qualifiers would be really nice. After all, Perl already has the "bareword" error handling: it shouldn't be too hard to make the qualifier optional.
The problem isn't the theory itself but that no establishment scientist dares to criticise it or debunk it.
Some scientists bear a lot in common with religious people. Few psychologists and philosophers claim that we, humans, naturally predispositioned to have blind believes, aka religion.
Or let me put it in a different perspective. Some scientists believe that laws of physics control the world - while others know that laws of physics are just loose model describing our knowledge about the world around us.
This really is the crux of the whole argument and the whole problem here, from a different perspective. Fear of ridicule. Loss of reputation, loss of career.
And that's what we call "herd mentality". And how it is enforced: with the fear of social exclusion.
Let's not forget Germany already has the oddest photography laws of all western countries. It is the only country that effectively makes the art of street photograph illegal: you should have consent of all people in your picture, even in public places. All pictures of the Berlin Wall being taken down would be illegal if taken today. There's a reason Germany doesn't have Google Streetview.
That's just nonsense.
The "you should have consent of all people in your picture" is a new prevailing legal paradigm how to deal with paparazzi and such. Otherwise, the person in a photograph simply has no rights whatsoever: authorship belongs to the photog, the copyright to the organizer/etc, while bystanders have no place in the copyright scheme whatsoever.
Germany and most Europe has extended it to public places mostly because the most visited public places - the sightseeing hotspots in the Europe - are also the places where local people live and work. And they lived and worked there long before the shitty tourist epidemic.
In most countries, photographs are the property of the photographer and he can do with them whatever he wants (if it is not obviously damaging to the subjects). In Germany, that's not the case; photographers need consent not only to use pictures but even to take them. In that regard, Germany is unique and against that background, this ruling is no surprise. In fact it is completely consistent with the way Germany deals with photography in general.
First. It's not only the Germany. Lots of countries - and some states in the USA - have similar laws.
Second, the need for consent in Germany has nothing to do with the law. It is just the local tradition to ask permission if person(s) feature in your photograph prominently. It was like that even before the laws made it official.
Otherwise, in a public place one generally does not need a consent. But if somebody sees that you making pictures of them, with the help of the law, they have legal standing to request the deletion of the unwanted images. And that's normal: people on the street are not pro models, why should you be able to profit of their images, if they do not want it?
Slashdot Mirror
In 2013. In 2014 the figure is different and it is counted differently, and the budget/spendings underwent change.
As written here:
2014 was the first year under the new MFF for 2014-2020, which contains lower overall figures than the preceding spending plan. The weight of regional spending and research and development gradually increases until 2020, while the share of agriculture decreases year on year, unlike under the previous MFF where it was the biggest spending area. This change is reflected already in 2014, with regional and agricultural resources on par with 42% of the budget.
They base their number on the EU budget from 2013 (budget as a document), while this here is apparently the actual post-factum number from the 2014.
Will not pretend to be a finance specialist, but AFAIK the budget is only a plan, a commitment, and is not always followed strictly, and thus differs from the actual numbers. Though I do not expect the numbers to differ it that much. But one has to compare the comparable years, and there is no by-country split of 2014/later budgets.
[...] are you telling me you won't reinvest in training one of your own to take the job as opposed to letting in a foreigner?
That's what Germany did. In addition to relaxing the stance on immigration, they did reform the education system, introduced subsidies for reeducation of employed, and free education for unemployed.
Whether there were many or few, it depends on your perspective. Changing the union is a big deal, IMO.
Otherwise, I have read in the past about three such cases. One of the articles closed on the notion that many changes to the union are simply not brought up anymore, despite popular support, because position of the UK remains the same.
Everyone need to be for any expansion of the capability? Not just majority?
As far as I understand, this affects the "Eurolaw"(?) (Primärrecht in German: the basic founding laws of the EU).
In order to change any of them, all participating countries must vote "yes".
Changes to other laws require only majority, but can be vetoed by any member with veto right. UK has veto right.
With sharing of wealth for instance Sweden is supposed to be the country which pay the most in vs what it get back / capita I think? I assume UK pay in more than what they get back directly, but of course they also have access to the market and the people and get to sell goods onto other EU nations and get their brightest people into their union.
Infographic. SE pays 3.8B, and receives 1.7B. UK 11.3 vs 6.9. (Wow, I always thought that UK is not part of the CAP, because they were deriding the program so much in the past, and yet they are.)
Outside the CAP, the money largely go to support poorer countries and regions: building infrastructure, improvement in education, and so on. To make sure that with the time they could raise their living standards. It was very insightful to read that some regions in UK are poor enough to receive that support (but largely voted to leave).
Currently, it is France, Italy and Spain [theguardian.com] who pay for the British rebate and not the other way around.
This is misleading. The data simply show what countries would have to pay how much, if Britain didn't have the rebate.
The rebate is already applied on the Island. The rebate money do not flow back to UK - they never leave it in the first place.
I've read that EFTA also has membership fees, and in case of UK the sum would be comparable to what UK pays (net amount) now into the EU budget (more than 2Bln pounds).
Well, he is kinda making the Leavers point. His office in the UK has 60 people in it, and not a one is a local person. The entire office is foreign-born. It doesn't get more "they took our jobs" than that.
The counter-argument would be: how many of the unemployed UK citizens could take the positions?
At the peek of unemployment in Germany 15 years ago, they did a research and found that while there were 1.5M unemployed, there ware also around 2.5M open positions. Almost no one out of the unemployed could take the positions because they lacked qualification and/or education. That research was more or less the final nail in the coffin of Germany's pervasive and very popular anti-immigration policies of the past.
The irony is, back then, the Germany was the main opponents of the free worker movement in EU - while the UK was actually an ardent proponent who talked Germany into it.
But then there's the sharing of wealth with other nations, refugees, more power to the EU rather than politicians close at home...
So far UK had vetoed many of the EU political power expansion projects (often for a good reason; but not always).
Can't say about the much hated on the USA forums "sharing of wealth", but as refugee situation is concerned, the Brexit wouldn't change it.
UK takes refugees because it has signed of the Refugee Convention. In fact, after the Brexit, UK would probably have to take even more refugees, because right now EU has a deal with Turkey to take some of our refugees.
If EU was just a free trade union UK would had stayed.
Of course they would have stayed. Being a loophole to regulations is a very profitable business. That's why, for example, the hedge funds love it there in London. And that is why I'm glad that they are leaving.
As far as a "race to the bottom", is that what we see with APEC, or NAFTA? No [...]
... because nobody can compete with the elephant in the "room" - the USA.
And that's why the unions work: they are narrowly defined (not really full-fledged free-trade/etc unions), and they are dominated and controlled by the USA. (And please do not pretend that it is not so. Or probably from USA's perspective, being dominated by USA is the norm of life. But it is not.)
You should believe that.
It's not like you have any choice anymore.
The great thing is that now that the UK has voted out, several other countries are going to follow.
"Liking or not liking" the EU is not the same as "in or out". So it is not going to happen.
Oh, Brexit would make a splash. But.
First. When UK economy would stagnate for few years - and NHS would see even less funding - even nationalists would come to their senses. First-world nationalists tend to lose support quickly, when people's living sandard is on the line.
Second. UK is unique in that it is living in a virtual media bubble. You have a completely perverted image of the EU, created and nourished by the media over the past 15 years. I know it, because 15+ years ago I was reading lots and lots of UK press. And the reporting was on completely different level. I have seen it changing from small stupid lies and half-jokes 15 years ago. To stupid unfustified accusations 10 years ago. To blatant lies and red herring - on front pages! - 5 years ago.
Some saner UK reporters are depicting that it is as if the people started believing their own lies.
Even here on the thread, most US readers know political system of the EU better than the most UK readers. And that's the f*cking Slashdot, where more or less exclusively only highly educated people are gathering. Let it sink for a moment: UK, being part of EU, knows less about EU, compared to the US who is related to EU only remotely.
you mean the UK tried to retain a strong trading relationship without abandoning its sovereignty?
EU is all about trading - but, excluding: price manipulation, currency manipulation, equity manipulation, market manipulation, and so on.
If you want to sell me something, if you want my money, you automatically have obligations toward me. If I want to sell you something to you, I automatically have obligations toward you. That's Business 101.
Nobody is going to deal with a country which might rip off somebody, and deny responsibility because "but sovereignty!" excuse. That's Politics 101.
P.S. You might want to visit Cuba and ask them about how they reveled for decades in sovereignty.
From whom you got your information?
UK has 73 seats. You are almost 5% off the mark.
Malta and Luxembourg have 6 seats each. That's 40% off the mark.
So from the 7:1 influence ratio you tried to cry here about, it is more like 12:1.
IOW, the voice of the UK in EP is 12 times more powerful. Or in other words: it would take 9 countries at the bottom to match the voting power of UK. and at least 10 to outvote.
Still not enough??
P.S. Seats in the EP.
The EU on the otherhand is controlled by unelected bureaucrats from Brussels, very democratic.
Bullshit.
Or you are comparing that to how you elect the Queen? Then, yes, EU is very undemocratic. /s
The EU allows for free movement between countries,
Which is also a requirement for joining the European free trade union.
and is also forcing countries to take in some of these migrants.
Oh really? Read and weep. It has nothing to do with the EU. UK would still take refugees after leaving EU.
I assume you refer to this Commission.
It is actually elected by the European Parliament, which is democratically elected.
Any other bullshit to dispel? Or you can google the rest of it yourself?
a simple free trade/economic cooperation treaty
It would end up either very loose and inefficient, or very short-lived.
Because as long as there are no political boundaries set, every state member is free to participate in the "race to the bottom" of deregulation, as a mean to attract more business and hopefully tax income.
Or other way around: how many free trade/economic unions, not dominated and controlled by a single larger country, can you name? I know of precisely zero such unions in existence. And I have read how such unions in the past have deteriorated quickly because everybody tried to exploit and capitalize on each other's weaknesses.
That's why if you want a long term union, you have to level the playing field for every participating country. A political framework is needed for that.
They are not. Many independent organizations since then did the tests to confirm just that.
One German magazine made a test of several diesel cars, and threw in one benzine one. In their test, only one - diesel! - car complied with the advertised emission standard. (Don't remember the brand (not BMW). What was surprising to me is that even the car running on benzine produced the NOx.)
Another German magazine did a test too, and IIRC only BMW diesel emission was within the advertised emission standard.
The larger problem behind the scenes is that the manufacturers have promised too much to the regulators but couldn't deliver. Thus the existing Euro 6 emission standard, established on the said promises, is simply not implementable at the moment. The industry insiders told that the emission limits should be raised by at least 70% to be in alignment with the current level of technology.
discussions of variable sigils are so far down the list of relevant considerations when discussing a programming language, I can't fathom why anyone who has coded for more than a week would actually bother mentioning them.
You probably never had to code couple thousand lines of code in a day, have you?
Perl5 is otherwise fine language. I'm using it now for more than 15 years, including using it 2 years full-time professionally.
In the past, on smaller things, Perl's syntax was not as cumbersome. But for newer code, especially OO one, the denser code is just overflowing with the sigils (and dereferences). In the older times, for small/medium stuff, one often resorted to the built-in variables. In OO code, literally everything is a user variable, and a reference more often then not. Sigils and the -> are the most typed characters and are the most annoying ones, since they are hard to type by touch. Modern Perl5 iteration lessen the burden by allowing to skip the -> in more cases than before. But the sigils have remained untouched.
Using references for this?... Perl6 is crazier than I thought.
The only thing they should fix in Perl is support for unicode filenames in Windows platforms.
In the past, I could work it around using the Win32::OLE (with CP_UTF8) and the host scripting interfaces.
But if I recall correctly, with Strawberry Perl, in couple of cases, I had no problems with the unicode file names.
Over the years of using Perl5 I have realized its greatest shortcoming: I have to type $/%/@ characters too often, what sometimes gets me - especially if I try to do something OO in Perl.
I have looked (again) at Perl6 recently, and was appalled to see that it used even more of punctuation than the Perl5.
As a way forward for Perl5, a special mode which allows to omit the $/%/@ qualifiers would be really nice. After all, Perl already has the "bareword" error handling: it shouldn't be too hard to make the qualifier optional.
The problem isn't the theory itself but that no establishment scientist dares to criticise it or debunk it.
Some scientists bear a lot in common with religious people. Few psychologists and philosophers claim that we, humans, naturally predispositioned to have blind believes, aka religion.
Or let me put it in a different perspective. Some scientists believe that laws of physics control the world - while others know that laws of physics are just loose model describing our knowledge about the world around us.
This really is the crux of the whole argument and the whole problem here, from a different perspective. Fear of ridicule. Loss of reputation, loss of career.
And that's what we call "herd mentality". And how it is enforced: with the fear of social exclusion.
Let's not forget Germany already has the oddest photography laws of all western countries. It is the only country that effectively makes the art of street photograph illegal: you should have consent of all people in your picture, even in public places. All pictures of the Berlin Wall being taken down would be illegal if taken today. There's a reason Germany doesn't have Google Streetview.
That's just nonsense.
The "you should have consent of all people in your picture" is a new prevailing legal paradigm how to deal with paparazzi and such. Otherwise, the person in a photograph simply has no rights whatsoever: authorship belongs to the photog, the copyright to the organizer/etc, while bystanders have no place in the copyright scheme whatsoever.
Germany and most Europe has extended it to public places mostly because the most visited public places - the sightseeing hotspots in the Europe - are also the places where local people live and work. And they lived and worked there long before the shitty tourist epidemic.
In most countries, photographs are the property of the photographer and he can do with them whatever he wants (if it is not obviously damaging to the subjects). In Germany, that's not the case; photographers need consent not only to use pictures but even to take them. In that regard, Germany is unique and against that background, this ruling is no surprise. In fact it is completely consistent with the way Germany deals with photography in general.
First. It's not only the Germany. Lots of countries - and some states in the USA - have similar laws.
Second, the need for consent in Germany has nothing to do with the law. It is just the local tradition to ask permission if person(s) feature in your photograph prominently. It was like that even before the laws made it official.
Otherwise, in a public place one generally does not need a consent. But if somebody sees that you making pictures of them, with the help of the law, they have legal standing to request the deletion of the unwanted images. And that's normal: people on the street are not pro models, why should you be able to profit of their images, if they do not want it?