The US government knows this.

The US government should also know who hold its debt…

Yep, I would love to see how will go if the commander in chief of the world largest army invade one country of one of the largest ower of their public debt…

EU will not even need to send an army, we just need to sell the US debt.

If Britain was opposing the EU and they allowed Britain to leave then they must feel safe about the future of the EU.

UK was not opposing EU, they were simply watering down everything.
But even US could not really interfere with UK internal politics to such level. They tried to convince people that were better to stay in the EU but Farage (and in my opinion EU) won.

If requested by who?

IIRC by the seller, if you did not pay the montly check for your loan they were able to disable the car and then recollect it

That would actually be a fantastic security feature for owners to be able to do if their car is stolen.

Yep, it was a fantastic security feature for the owners but also a way to disable the car if you do not pay the loan.

In some way yes

Did they forget to bribe UEFA officials?

Reading the article, it seems he forget to bribe everyone, not only UEFA officials…

Well no. At some point it will become too much expensive to extract them to be able to continue to use them.

Not considering that sooner or later someone will realize that it would be less expensive, in the long run, to devolop a serious alternative to the oil (be sun, wind, nuclear or whatever else) than be subject to the blackmail of a single state and/or person which would decide that it is a great idea to start a war just because. And this, as a byproduct, will also resolve most of the problems in the middle east region since without oil they had nothing.

Do you know which reforms?

Every reform that increased the integration of EU made after Brexit, basically. Historically UK blocked a lot of reforms because the cannot profit from them. Remember that UK had a special status in the EU, from the beginning, so it was their interest to block reforms that would have forced them to give in some of their advantages. Think about a common European defense, UK always stopped it because they were told so by the US.

Why do you like it, apart from overcoming blocks?

First of all, because it is the only logical conclusion if we want to keep Europe somewhat relevant in the world.
After that, though I’m speaking as an Italian here, maybe politicians will be forced to do more than just try to act like they own their little backyard and probably we will gain something.

I think to remember to have read something about the possibility for a car manufacturer to remotely disable the car if requested or defaulted, something like once you park the car and turn off the engine it will not start again so no security problem, but I cannot pinpoing when/where i read it or if it ever went beyond the stage of an idea.

Here we are talking about things not completely paid off. If you use a loan to buy something (a car, a phone, a house, whatever) until you paid off all the loan the thing is not yours.

If you don’t pay your car loan, they can reposses it, if you don’t pay your phone loan they block it, if you don’t pay your data plan they close it. I don’t see anything strange here.

But i’m not against the ban myself. We use animals mostly for two reasons: their body as an object (meat, leather, milk, etc), and their energy as a tool. In developed nations we replaced their physical effort with machines, what remains in is basically entertainment.

True, but in this case it was/is a tipical tourist attraction. I don’t see why we could not still offer it without mistreating the horses. Btw, then also the other places that offer rides with horses should be banned.

Everyone with a pet will say their cat/dog is not merely entertainment, I know I’m being a bit crude here but animals aren’t really needed anymore in that sense. Dogs form a bigger exception than horses nowadays.

You are not entirely right. For people who live in the city it is true, for people who live in the countryside animals, mostly dogs but not only them, are still working animals for a lot of things.

Personally i think those horses could feel fine entertaining tourist by riding them around in carriages - if they’d treat the animal well.

That’s the whole point. They could have enforced the rules (or make better ones if necessary) instead of banning something (which will probably end with the horses killed and sold as food).

But nowadays my impression is that all this “love” for the animals is used to hide the fact we do nothing for the people.

Which would be the correct solution. Short term rent are only the wrong answer to a real problem (the fact that a bad tenants has more right of the homeower in the end).

But I will love to see what the EU will say when they will discover that the vast majority of the homes on the short rental market will not enter the long rent market.

So the solution would be a better enforcing of the rules, not to ban something that is somewhat tipical but it seems that nowadays we prefer to ban something instead of enforce the already present rules.

When talking to a tyranny or an authoritarian regime, you are referring to its ‘leader.’ So, basically, you are asking pootin to hand himself over. Which is absurd.

Historically dictators never step down voluntarily…

Which is something they already can do, just push an update and they are done. And after they simply go out of the market: nobody will buy their phone anymore.

But this is something different, here we are talking about something that is not different than reposessing a car if you don’t pay the loan you used to buy it.

While these models can find more bugs, it seems that these bugs do not convert to exploits to a higher rate than before

I don’t know the inner workings, I can’t even say anything about the speedup, but the UK preferred free markets whereas France prefers state companies. That must have been an endless source for conflicts. I wouldn’t ascribe the entire slowdown to US influence.

The problem was that UK had a special status, it was a full member but they had a list of exceptions (like the currency, they still used the pound) and in the EU they always were considered the frontend for the USA. It was the UK that blocked some reforms that passed the moment the UK was out.

I think the Hungary situation was milked to establish the need for a reform. As I wrote at the start, without veto powers, we get closer to the USE. For the USE, that means more power but for the citizens it means less power.

Maybe, but unanimity was not manageable anymore, too many states with too many different interests. It is not realistic that a small state could hold back EU just because, the decision process became longer and longer and any decision is watered down.

And I’d like to see something like USE, in my opinion EU is still not integrated enough but I understand that a lot of people need to start to think in a very different way.

Yes. We started with Hungary blocking the EU.

Which is why the unanimity rule is obsolete in my opinion. When EU was smaller, it made sense, now not anymore since there is no way that every decision is good for everyone.
Even a single state that had the unanimity rule would be problematic: no decision could be made since nothing will be good for everyone. Same for EU, if we must decide on something and it need to be good for everyone there are 2 cases: 1) your result would be useless since it would be watered down in many ways or 2) you don’t decide.

The countries could just have continued their EU behaviour outside of the EU.

They did, but they did not used the weight of EU, which is bigger than the sum of the single states.

True, but a political structure like EU solves a lot of problems when you think about cooperating

It does. Which makes blocking the EU inconvenient but it doesn’t block the countries.

Again, it is true, you are not blocking the countries. But they have not the same weight of EU.

and the US president at the time (Kennedy) was not happy about it.

The question is why? Did he just want the best for Europe and Nato or was the US losing too much influence?

Obviously because they lost influence.
If you had not noted it, after the Brexit charade (which, btw, demostrate why it is important that EU work as a single entity) EU started to move faster (not always in the correct direction in my opinion) exactly because the United States’ Trojan horse in the EU, the UK, was out of the decision process and cannot block things anymore.

BUT if every EU country had dealt with UK as single state, even if working with other countries, the result would have been very different.

Most likely, but they could have created a way to fully copperate.

So they should have something like EU without having something like EU.

So the point is ?

The countries don’t need the political structure of the EU. They could cooperate in other ways. Going for itself doesn’t require to act in the most selfish way.

True, but a political structure like EU solves a lot of problems when you think about cooperating: without EU every cooperation agreement would be a bilateral agreement between two states, and every pair could (and would) be different.
I am old enough to remember how it was to do business before the current EU, not to talk about travelling.

And in the Élysée …

Some words are missing.

You are right, sorry.
I was saying that in the Élysée Treaty, the US, NATO or any other country or organization were never mentioned and the US president at the time (Kennedy) was not happy about it.

Do you think this stays the same as it now if Sunday becomes just a regular working day? I highly doubt it.

If it is a normal working day you somehow should be given a day off some other day (Monday for example).
In this case I agree that probably you would not be paid more but on the other hand you still have your day off (and sometime it can be usefull to have the day off in the middle of the week). If they simply want to let places to be open also on Sunday then it is overtime and you can be paid more or earn an additional day of PTO.

Indeed there are. That’s why I wrote “the vast majority” and not “everyone”. Just because there are exceptions to the rule we shouldn’t simply abandon the rule, though.

Sure, but it not impossible to discusse about a rule change.

Isn’t having Sundays off protected by law in all of EU?

I think it does not cite specifically Sunday but that you need to have a day off a week

Saturday too for that matter, except of course it doesn’t have to be those 2 days, but we generally have 2 days off per week, and working Sundays pays extra.

Or you make up for the working Saturday on some other day.
For example in Italy shops are closed half a day on Monday (groceries shops open only in the morning while other open only in the afternoon) exactly because they work on Saturday. Some kind of shops still close on Monday to balance the Saturday opening (barber shops for example).

And yes, normally here Saturday is paid 50% more and Sunday 100% more. Sometimes you can choose to have the day not paid but to earn an extra day of PTO to use when you want. I know more than few persons that work on Sundays to have some more days for the holidays (even though there are a limit imposed by law to the number of Sundays you can work in a year)