I've seen an interesting documentary about the wealthy in Germany and how they generally differ from e.g. American wealthy. In Germany most of the wealthy pretend to not be that wealthy. They dress rather ordinarily and keep it lowkey. We don't even know how many of the richest Germans look like currently, because advertising wealth is not seen as positive here than in the United States.
Doesn't mean that the German wealthy are more virtous or anything, they're just keeping it down and are thus less bothered.
Most people strive to be seen as Mittelstand. Not poor, but not obscenely wealthy. Which lead to a funny episode where Friedrich Merz, head of the CDU and owner of two private jets, said in an interview that he was upper Mittelstand.
Yeah, in the first place it needs to be looked at home outside influence could even do that. Because, there are systemic issues that let that happen. A democracy should have checks and balances to fighting something like that. And if it is so brittle that some Russian bribes can turn the country upside down, then you need to look at what went wrong in the democracy and how to fix that.
If it wasn't the Russians it would be someone else. Britain needs to strengthen it's democracy and sharpen it's systems to minimize the impact of outside forces, not just blame outside forces for existing.
The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) is investigating senior officers at Avon and Somerset police, who knew about the undercover officer’s relationship with the woman as far back as 2013.
They appear to have waited at least seven years before informing the woman that the person she knew as her fiance had been using a fake identity given to him for use in covert police operations.
What the fuck.
What was he even investigating that he stayed undercover for two decades?
So they can Netflix and chill during the Russian invasion. That's definitely what these devices were for. No way Elon could've known there was any military usage in a country desperately fighting for it's existance.
She was at first in favour of keeping it, but after Fukushima and subsequent panic in Germany she U-turned and got out of it.
Now, I am aware that nuclear energy has issues, like the nuclear waste. However, we need something to tide us over until we fully transitioned into renewables and that something is now the shittiest coal we can get, And of course, at this point it's way too late to reverse it again. We started to build down our nuclear facilities years ago and building them up again would not be worth it.
However, we should've not stopped using nuclear that early in the process of pushing renewable energy.
Mrs. Merkel was aware, but she rather went with the vox populi of fear of Fukushima.
It helped in some cases. E.g. the first thing the government did when faced with Covid was to ask experts and put it into the hand of the RKI with several people familiar with coronaviruses.
However, in other instances she understood the science and just chose to ignore it because of politics.
Understanding science is good, but you still need to act accordingly.
At least since the movie before Spirited Away. While doing research I read a book where the author lamented that he is glad that Spirited Away will happen (it wasn't yet released at that point) because it now would be truly the last movie of Miyazaki.
I mean, most countries do that in various ways. There are two differences for Russia in that matter.
They actually had a lot of Soviet weapons still around. Like, in quantity Russia was playing in the big leagues. The issue was just, of course, that a lot of it was unusable and got worse over the years with lacking maintenance and with technology getting more and more obsolete. Nevertheless, Russia had certainly a lot of arms and vehicles.
The Soviet Union was quite powerful and the image has still stuck with people and Russia did its best with parades and all to pretend that the glory is still with Russia. I put a bit of that blame also on American media repeating the image of the powerful Soviet Union as a dangerous adversary.
The war in Ukraine made it clearer than ever that Russia is only a shadow of what the Soviet Union once was in power projection.
Nah, not second best. That's probably just Americans that still haven't registered that the Soviet Union is gone. Generally there was an awareness that the glory days of the USSR was gone and that Russia's small economy could only maintain a crude army.
However, people didn't think that it was THIS bad. This is bad even for Russia's military budget, where one can only assume that there was a lot of corruption on all levels to produce the state of the army at the start of the war. And of course, with things like this, it just got worse by the day.
So, the point of pressure was that a lot of British jails are overcrowded and the Manchester police replied as to the place as "metropolian London", which includes a the 160% allocated Wandsworth jail. The German authories asked what specific jail so they're sure that it's not Wandsworth and the Manchester police just never replied anything to that.
Germany was asking for guarantees that the prisoner wouldn't be send to an inhumane jail and the UK wouldn't give a guarantee.
This is a normal process for Germany when it comes to non-EU countries.
In their statement, council leader John Cotton and deputy leader Sharon Thompson said the authority was also facing financial pressures due to problems with the implementation of its Oracle IT system.
Intended to streamline council payments and HR systems, the flagship system was expected to cost £19m but after three years of delays it was revealed in May it could cost up to £100m.
I've seen an interesting documentary about the wealthy in Germany and how they generally differ from e.g. American wealthy. In Germany most of the wealthy pretend to not be that wealthy. They dress rather ordinarily and keep it lowkey. We don't even know how many of the richest Germans look like currently, because advertising wealth is not seen as positive here than in the United States.
Doesn't mean that the German wealthy are more virtous or anything, they're just keeping it down and are thus less bothered.
Most people strive to be seen as Mittelstand. Not poor, but not obscenely wealthy. Which lead to a funny episode where Friedrich Merz, head of the CDU and owner of two private jets, said in an interview that he was upper Mittelstand.