$10/gal for gas has really forced European manufacturers to produce 80 MPG cars and reduce the amount they drive. Oh wait....
Compared to the US, Europeans drive a lot less -- by living closer to where we work and using public transport more. I don't know MPG figures off-hand (it's a poor unit to choose to measure efficiency), but there are also a lot more, smaller cars here than in the US.
You must be new here: This is a U.S. based website. My comment "There's not a single car for sale that gets 54mpg " refers to the U.S. market..... as does the original article.
You "don't see how they'll do it", yet you say such cars exist in Europe, and you say they might import those cars from Europe?
Does health insurance in the US cover the procedure at the moment?
Circumcision has been in the news in Europe recently, due to a German court ruling that the procedure contravened the rights of the child. Rates dropped massively in the UK in the 1940s, when the NHS was introduced and the procedure wasn't included, as doctors said it wasn't medically necessary.
I remember my mum teaching me to wash my "winkle*" in the bath, when I was old enough to wash myself. It went along with washing behind my ears, and it no more to do with "sex education" than that.
Only one boy in my class was circumcised. I didn't know, until the first lot of sex education (age 11) when he volunteered the fact (he was the only Jewish boy).
A "TV" is something used to watch live television.
I've noticed all the angry posts above, refusing to let the person checking licenses in to the house (you don't have to).
However, not watching live TV is unusual, so I avoided all the hassle by letting them look at the TV, see that it very obviously was connected to 5 consoles and a DVD player (but no antenna, cable or satellite) and haven't heard anything more from them in two years.
In the UK I'd cycle to a railway station. I could take the bike with me on the train, which would increase the possibilities for onward travel but keep it difficult to be tracked.
Crossing the border is more difficult, but probably more necessary than in the US. One option would be to try and stowaway in a lorry heading to France on the train or ferry, I don't think the checks for entering France are that thorough -- but it's still a pretty high risk.
In continental Europe I'd do the same, except it's much easier to find somewhere to disappear (so many more options, easy to go somewhere and seem like a migrant worker), and/or to leave the EU completely.
In that case I'd suggest the employee joins an already-existing large union, which will have a decent legal team.
Unions here have gone on strike because one of their member's was sacked unfairly (I remember them announcing a short while later that they definitely weren't going on strike when an employee -- a train driver -- had broken a critical safety rule and was sacked).
Probably "Central Belt" (though I live in the far South of England, so ICBW).
but I guess the Highlands is where I spent most of my holiday. My complaints are mainly about Pitlochry, Plockton, Kyle of Lochalsh, Fort William, the connections in between, and the train trip from Fort William to Glasgow).
However, I did a trip to the Highlands with some friends a couple of years ago, and we never had problems in towns and villages. (We had three cars, and regularly lost each other, so I know there was coverage. Also, one guy was always tweeting pictures). Are you sure your phone is fully compatible with all the non-US frequencies? If it were only tri-band I think you might get some coverage, but only sometimes.
You should definitely have no problem at all in Edinburgh (except, perhaps, in thick-walled stone buildings).
Is there a reason that there 'almost has to be a markup'(beyond the costs of shipping)?
I don't know if this applies to Australia, but some products are more expensive in the EU because the legally mandated warranty for the product is longer than for the US. I can buy a TV here in the UK, and if it breaks within three years there's a good chance it's the place I bought it from's problem (there's some complication, depending how long it lasted). If a manufacturer makes shoddy products, they're either going to do some QA and try and send the better products to the EU, or increase prices to cover the increased costs.
(Similarly, a company might increase costs in the USA to pay for the higher cost of liability insurance.)
Just lots of people using their annual leave (/vacation time) at roughly the same time. All of the EU gets at least 20 days (i.e. four weeks), some countries have more than that -- e.g. 30+ days.
At my workplace we get 30 days at the start. August is always quiet (but never empty!), and the whole city is quieter for July and August -- traffic is less, the trains are less crowded, the news is either international or silly (not much UK/EU politics happens).
Europe is quite far north compared to the US, so the extra daylight in summer (and the lack of it in winter) really makes people want to make the most of the summer generally, and August especially (warmest).
Believe it or not, your holiday time really screws you economically.
I don't understand what you're saying. Was this person really claiming that Google developers don't get in to work before 2pm in the afternoon? Because I call B.S.
That's what he said -- at least for his team (him being in London, and his team in California, for some reason).
I met him at a conference in London, and was chatting in a pub afterwards. He had to excuse himself to go to a meeting, and I asked why he had a meeting at 21:00 on a Friday. He invited a couple of us to the Google office for free beer, we travelled there and met some more Googlers, but he left shortly afterwards to go to the meeting.
I got the impression this was a fairly regular thing, but I don't know.
The advantages of living at +0100 (I thought London was +0000)
The number isn't really relevant, it's simply that the Pacific Ocean is really wide and few people live there, which makes the other side of the world roughly central.
Bangalore is a little tougher, but they could still do 10PM central US, 8:30AM Bangalore. Is google so inflexible that they refuse to reschedule a meeting to be more convenient for everyone involved?
I met a project manager at Google in London, who was on his way to a meeting at 21:00 (+0100/London), as that was 14:00 (-0700/California), and the developers in California refused to get up any earlier for the meeting.
(You can talk to most of the world at a reasonable time from London. 08:00 here is 18:00 in Sydney, 18:00 here is 08:00 in Hawaii.
I live in London, so I know loads of people who've relocated -- many semi/unskilled young people from Southern or Eastern Europe, but also plenty of skilled workers from Northern and Western Europe, and transient workers from Australia, NZ, SA etc. Half the people I meet aren't British. Some Swedish friends told me last night that London is the fourth-largest city by Swedish population.
I haven't checked any statistics, but I wouldn't be surprised if British people are some of the least mobile in the EU.
(FWIW, my sister/friends etc have probably been on benefits for less than six months between them. They can get unskilled temporary jobs in offices easily enough (and do so).)
The government should, as a condition of receiving unemployment benefits, require people located in areas of high unemployment to relocate if there are appropriate jobs elsewhere.
Agreed. Wasn't the whole point of Jobseeker's allowance to fund things like train travel to job interviews? (I could be wrong, I never needed to sign on.)
I think there's probably quite a simple explanation for this. The amount of debt that students in England and Wales will likely need to take on (barring rich parents) to pay for a degree has risen significantly from this year (not quite at US levels yet, but getting much closer).
I've read that many potential students don't understand one very important difference between the American-style student debt and the English/Welsh version: in England/Wales the interest rate is low, and you don't have to pay back the debt until you earn over a certain amount (£15.7k), and the repayment amount is fixed (9% of income over £15.7k). The debt doesn't count on a credit score either.
My younger sister, and some of my friends who were just starting university when I was just finishing, have science degrees from good (in several cases very good) universities, and are struggling to find appropriate jobs.
One has a degree in Biochemistry from Imperial, and was told last month by the Jobcentre staff that she'd have a better chance finding a job if she removed it from her CV! (She's had a succession of temporary jobs, boring office work etc, all with the promise of a permanent position at a later date, but that always seems to go to the less-qualified person who the company presumably assume will stick around for longer).
My sister found a job doing data entry for a company in her field (bio-somethingorother), hoping that would lead somewhere, but it hasn't.
I think there seem to be better opportunities elsewhere in the EEA, but people seem unwilling to move. I can understand that a little, but at 21 I thought it would be great to go and live in another country (I applied for a couple, but was offered a job in the UK within days of starting to look anyway).
Meanwhile, the place I work struggles to find computer science graduates, as we don't pay anywhere near enough to compete with the City, so we have to find idealists who really want to work for a charity, and they're rare.
A BT Basic phone line costs £4.80/month in the UK, which is about $7. If they can manage to give subscribers the option to be listed or not (which is simply a tick-box when signing up online), why can't Verizon?
The VoIP providers have the same rules to adhere to, and they manage to have zero-cost "line rental".
The flat shelf toilets are sometimes seen in Germany and Austria, but nowhere else. Public toilets in France are often squat toilets, which are also common in Bulgaria.
I've never had a problem with any European toilet, anyway. Maybe it's your diet?
(I did find the toilets in a fancy hotel I stayed in in the US to have so much water that my penis dipped in it. That wasn't pleasant.)
The difference here is that you won't be required to make a new purchase. Many UK retailers will also dispose of your old stuff free if you buy something, although they're not required to.
They are required to either accept the old stuff when you buy something, or pay a general fee for stuff to be recycled (and you take it to the recycling site, or the council collects it).
In my experience, if an item fails during the warranty period (which is quite long, by law, in the UK) the company will replace it very quickly, often with a refurbished item. Presumably, they then attempt to fix what you send them.
Slashdot Mirror
$10/gal for gas has really forced European manufacturers to produce 80 MPG cars and reduce the amount they drive. Oh wait....
Compared to the US, Europeans drive a lot less -- by living closer to where we work and using public transport more. I don't know MPG figures off-hand (it's a poor unit to choose to measure efficiency), but there are also a lot more, smaller cars here than in the US.
You must be new here:
This is a U.S. based website. My comment "There's not a single car for sale that gets 54mpg " refers to the U.S. market..... as does the original article.
You "don't see how they'll do it", yet you say such cars exist in Europe, and you say they might import those cars from Europe?
Your comment makes no sense.
Does health insurance in the US cover the procedure at the moment?
Circumcision has been in the news in Europe recently, due to a German court ruling that the procedure contravened the rights of the child. Rates dropped massively in the UK in the 1940s, when the NHS was introduced and the procedure wasn't included, as doctors said it wasn't medically necessary.
I remember my mum teaching me to wash my "winkle*" in the bath, when I was old enough to wash myself. It went along with washing behind my ears, and it no more to do with "sex education" than that.
Only one boy in my class was circumcised. I didn't know, until the first lot of sex education (age 11) when he volunteered the fact (he was the only Jewish boy).
(*Is "winkle" British slang?)
I'm glad the EU banned stuff like that (for saving electricity). My stuff has real off-switches.
I think the "unspecified driving style" is to drive straddling 2 lanes, then the alignment of the camera is wrong. They do say it's impractical ...
A "TV" is something used to watch live television.
I've noticed all the angry posts above, refusing to let the person checking licenses in to the house (you don't have to).
However, not watching live TV is unusual, so I avoided all the hassle by letting them look at the TV, see that it very obviously was connected to 5 consoles and a DVD player (but no antenna, cable or satellite) and haven't heard anything more from them in two years.
In the UK I'd cycle to a railway station. I could take the bike with me on the train, which would increase the possibilities for onward travel but keep it difficult to be tracked.
Crossing the border is more difficult, but probably more necessary than in the US. One option would be to try and stowaway in a lorry heading to France on the train or ferry, I don't think the checks for entering France are that thorough -- but it's still a pretty high risk.
In continental Europe I'd do the same, except it's much easier to find somewhere to disappear (so many more options, easy to go somewhere and seem like a migrant worker), and/or to leave the EU completely.
In that case I'd suggest the employee joins an already-existing large union, which will have a decent legal team.
Unions here have gone on strike because one of their member's was sacked unfairly (I remember them announcing a short while later that they definitely weren't going on strike when an employee -- a train driver -- had broken a critical safety rule and was sacked).
(Views based 100% on how things work in the UK.)
I'm not sure which definition of Central Scotland you use,
Probably "Central Belt" (though I live in the far South of England, so ICBW).
but I guess the Highlands is where I spent most of my holiday. My complaints are mainly about Pitlochry, Plockton, Kyle of Lochalsh, Fort William, the connections in between, and the train trip from Fort William to Glasgow).
The countryside around those settlements are some of the most remote in the UK. For example, your train passed through , which is so remote there are no public roads to it (there is a public footpath).
However, I did a trip to the Highlands with some friends a couple of years ago, and we never had problems in towns and villages. (We had three cars, and regularly lost each other, so I know there was coverage. Also, one guy was always tweeting pictures). Are you sure your phone is fully compatible with all the non-US frequencies? If it were only tri-band I think you might get some coverage, but only sometimes.
You should definitely have no problem at all in Edinburgh (except, perhaps, in thick-walled stone buildings).
http://www.boots.com/en/Boots-Value-Health-Ibuprofen-200mg-Tablets-16_44701/
200mg in the UK, and 40p for 16 tablets.
http://www.boots.com/en/Boots-Pharmaceuticals-Ibuprofen-3-Months-Plus-100mg-5ml-Suspension-Strawberry-Flavour-100ml-_1225226/
100mg dose available for babies and children ("strawberry" flavoured).
Is there a reason that there 'almost has to be a markup'(beyond the costs of shipping)?
I don't know if this applies to Australia, but some products are more expensive in the EU because the legally mandated warranty for the product is longer than for the US. I can buy a TV here in the UK, and if it breaks within three years there's a good chance it's the place I bought it from's problem (there's some complication, depending how long it lasted). If a manufacturer makes shoddy products, they're either going to do some QA and try and send the better products to the EU, or increase prices to cover the increased costs.
(Similarly, a company might increase costs in the USA to pay for the higher cost of liability insurance.)
Boss: "You'll work the hours I tell you to, and you'll like it. Shut up and get back to work or you're fired."
Employees: We have joined/(formed) a union. We will strike if you don't negotiate with us.
At least, that's how it works in Europe, and we're much better for it (IMO).
"Summer holidays"
Just lots of people using their annual leave (/vacation time) at roughly the same time. All of the EU gets at least 20 days (i.e. four weeks), some countries have more than that -- e.g. 30+ days.
At my workplace we get 30 days at the start. August is always quiet (but never empty!), and the whole city is quieter for July and August -- traffic is less, the trains are less crowded, the news is either international or silly (not much UK/EU politics happens).
Europe is quite far north compared to the US, so the extra daylight in summer (and the lack of it in winter) really makes people want to make the most of the summer generally, and August especially (warmest).
Believe it or not, your holiday time really screws you economically.
No one here cares ;-)
I don't understand what you're saying. Was this person really claiming that Google developers don't get in to work before 2pm in the afternoon? Because I call B.S.
That's what he said -- at least for his team (him being in London, and his team in California, for some reason).
I met him at a conference in London, and was chatting in a pub afterwards. He had to excuse himself to go to a meeting, and I asked why he had a meeting at 21:00 on a Friday. He invited a couple of us to the Google office for free beer, we travelled there and met some more Googlers, but he left shortly afterwards to go to the meeting.
I got the impression this was a fairly regular thing, but I don't know.
The advantages of living at +0100 (I thought London was +0000)
The number isn't really relevant, it's simply that the Pacific Ocean is really wide and few people live there, which makes the other side of the world roughly central.
Bangalore is a little tougher, but they could still do 10PM central US, 8:30AM Bangalore. Is google so inflexible that they refuse to reschedule a meeting to be more convenient for everyone involved?
I met a project manager at Google in London, who was on his way to a meeting at 21:00 (+0100/London), as that was 14:00 (-0700/California), and the developers in California refused to get up any earlier for the meeting.
(You can talk to most of the world at a reasonable time from London. 08:00 here is 18:00 in Sydney, 18:00 here is 08:00 in Hawaii.
I live in London, so I know loads of people who've relocated -- many semi/unskilled young people from Southern or Eastern Europe, but also plenty of skilled workers from Northern and Western Europe, and transient workers from Australia, NZ, SA etc. Half the people I meet aren't British. Some Swedish friends told me last night that London is the fourth-largest city by Swedish population.
I haven't checked any statistics, but I wouldn't be surprised if British people are some of the least mobile in the EU.
(FWIW, my sister/friends etc have probably been on benefits for less than six months between them. They can get unskilled temporary jobs in offices easily enough (and do so).)
The government should, as a condition of receiving unemployment benefits, require people located in areas of high unemployment to relocate if there are appropriate jobs elsewhere.
Agreed. Wasn't the whole point of Jobseeker's allowance to fund things like train travel to job interviews? (I could be wrong, I never needed to sign on.)
I think there's probably quite a simple explanation for this. The amount of debt that students in England and Wales will likely need to take on (barring rich parents) to pay for a degree has risen significantly from this year (not quite at US levels yet, but getting much closer).
I've read that many potential students don't understand one very important difference between the American-style student debt and the English/Welsh version: in England/Wales the interest rate is low, and you don't have to pay back the debt until you earn over a certain amount (£15.7k), and the repayment amount is fixed (9% of income over £15.7k). The debt doesn't count on a credit score either.
It's somewhere between a debt and a graduate tax.
My younger sister, and some of my friends who were just starting university when I was just finishing, have science degrees from good (in several cases very good) universities, and are struggling to find appropriate jobs.
One has a degree in Biochemistry from Imperial, and was told last month by the Jobcentre staff that she'd have a better chance finding a job if she removed it from her CV! (She's had a succession of temporary jobs, boring office work etc, all with the promise of a permanent position at a later date, but that always seems to go to the less-qualified person who the company presumably assume will stick around for longer).
My sister found a job doing data entry for a company in her field (bio-somethingorother), hoping that would lead somewhere, but it hasn't.
I think there seem to be better opportunities elsewhere in the EEA, but people seem unwilling to move. I can understand that a little, but at 21 I thought it would be great to go and live in another country (I applied for a couple, but was offered a job in the UK within days of starting to look anyway).
Meanwhile, the place I work struggles to find computer science graduates, as we don't pay anywhere near enough to compete with the City, so we have to find idealists who really want to work for a charity, and they're rare.
A BT Basic phone line costs £4.80/month in the UK, which is about $7. If they can manage to give subscribers the option to be listed or not (which is simply a tick-box when signing up online), why can't Verizon?
The VoIP providers have the same rules to adhere to, and they manage to have zero-cost "line rental".
I think you're generalising a whole continent ;-)
The flat shelf toilets are sometimes seen in Germany and Austria, but nowhere else. Public toilets in France are often squat toilets, which are also common in Bulgaria.
I've never had a problem with any European toilet, anyway. Maybe it's your diet?
(I did find the toilets in a fancy hotel I stayed in in the US to have so much water that my penis dipped in it. That wasn't pleasant.)
Ya The guy deserves years in a federal pound you in the ass prison.
Please not that on this side of the Atlantic, anal rape is not seen as an appropriate punishment.
The difference here is that you won't be required to make a new purchase. Many UK retailers will also dispose of your old stuff free if you buy something, although they're not required to.
They are required to either accept the old stuff when you buy something, or pay a general fee for stuff to be recycled (and you take it to the recycling site, or the council collects it).
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WEEE#Member_state_implementation
In my experience, if an item fails during the warranty period (which is quite long, by law, in the UK) the company will replace it very quickly, often with a refurbished item. Presumably, they then attempt to fix what you send them.