I think the idea is that the funding might come with conditions to reach a significant % of the audience. E.g. often public broadcasters have a remit of 99% of population coverage with their broadcast technology, while private stations have much lower or no legally obligatory reception target.

I don’t think that’s a big obstacle in this case though.

We are back, baby.

I’d say for me it would depend what the monument stands for.

The problem with this is that there’s often multiple interpretations. Is it a monument to the celebrate the defeat of Nazism, or to glorify the paternalist role of the Soviet Union over the Warsaw Pact countries? You can’t really say it’s only one or the other - you can only decide which one matters more to the society at a given point in time.

I think that when there’s no consensus about an interpretation in a society, a good place to start is with contextualisation. A high-profile but contentious monument should come with a small open-air museum that provides the context of what the monument was intended to stand for, what where the motivations of those who built it, and how it came to be seen as the time passed.

Then, time will tell if the society decides to interpret it one way or the other. At some point it will be clear if it should stay or go.

One can hope that the store operators will also be heavily fined for their apparent failure to protect their customers’ information from infosec threats. Show them teeth, GDPR.

Germany: shock

Cyprus: anger

None had any discourse around what the PISA scores measure and if there’s any problematisation warranted around the methodology etc. So, in the end, it just serves as a regular outrage topic for the news cycle, but because no-one understands what the scores mean, no-one can do anything about them.

Massive parking lots at the edge of the city. At least this was the recommendation of the Berlin Autofrei initiative.

Extensive summary also here

And if the strike spreads to Germany, which it very well could, it could mean the cease of operation of the Model Y factory in Berlin, which would be devastating to them.

A big problem is that Germany’s labour laws do not allow sympathy or political strikes. A strike can only be legally called in association with a collective bargaining agreement negotiation/dispute.

Germany will be the weak link in this cross-country wave of strikes.

For clarity, I’m in favour of changing the terminology to highlight the historical injustice.

I just thought it’s important to admit that it’s a recent change of linguistic preferences even in the most official Greek publications. Indeed, up to the last couple of years, the adjectival “Elgin” was used in Greek as an accusation of theft, not a recognition of ownership.

I wouldn’t focus too much on that. I studied in a Greek-medium public school, and the sculptures were always referred to as “Elgin Marbles” in history textbooks produced by the Greek Ministry of Education. Same for journalism and public discourse in Greek.

Diligently correcting the term to “Parthenon sculptures” is a recent cause.

Yes, but in the absence of other factors, “cold tolerance” is something that can change by habituation.

I’m not sure how a personal budget app can help you keep track of a Heizkostenverteiler/heating cost allocator. There’s many unknowns during the operation time and even the landlord is given a year to crunch the numbers before they bill the tenants.

What is progress is that people on district heating now get their kWh consumption readings every few months.

There’s a rather considerable current of leftism that is libertarian. Over-regulation of what a person can do, especially with something as, well, personal as appearance, is at odds with left-libertarian values.

Left-authoritarianism is of course compatible with such regulations.

Okay, that explains the crowds.

Where German rental contracts say “any alterations need to be reverted for handover”, rental contracts where I originally come from say “any alternations are forbidden without the express permission of the lessor”.

No, not really. They aren’t moot.

Cost or supply are one thing, but Germany definitely has strong tenancy rights.

Cyprus likes to pride itself as having strong tenancy rights too, but it’s not even half of what I enjoy in Germany. I didn’t even have to get permission to hang a picture on the wall.

Leftist parties should talk a bit more about the same stuff that the right-wingers do. Would rather have a left-wing party bait people into voting for them with immigration rhetoric, instead of the fash.

What is then going to happen is that leftist values-voters will abandon those parties, so the parties deflate and still can’t govern. And if the new voters who were “baited” stay for a second electoral cycle, they then take control of the party and turn it into what we didn’t want to exist in the first place.

You win voters by convincing them that you have the best answers to their problems and the expertise to implement them.

It honestly feels like a very high price to pay for the sake of rapid expansion. It doesn’t feel appropriate to remove the unanimity rule before the EU becomes a true union of federated states. The usual Polish existential populist rhetoric notwithstanding, it is the wrong approach to European integration (broken clocks occasionally being right, etc). At this point, for me it’s enough to reject this report.

For fairness: It is positive that the report suggests giving the right of initiative to the Parliament. The plan for the Commission is also an improvement although it sounds a bit confused.

Betteridge’s law of headlines, right?