Spotted the US-american assuming their law system is used world-wide.
If over here a lady buys a hot coffee in a McDrive, drives away, spills the hot coffee on their legs and makes a car accident due to this ... she won't be able to sue the McDrive. There's no fine-print or "Coffee is hot, you dumb person" writing needed anywhere. She could be lucky if she doesn't get fined for endangering others by her stupid actions.
So, if we have a power outage here, the courts don't suddenly get busy. Because there simply no one is suing.
Fun fact: despite this bad power outage, the power grid systems in Europe are still better (even way better) than in the US. There is a comparable statistics measure called "SAIDI" --- system average interuption duration index. And duration wise, per custom and year, the US power grids are worse than over here than in most of West Europe: (US SAIDI 2020: 1.3 hours, German SAIDI 2020: 0.3 hours). That's a factor of more than 4 on the worse-iness of US power grid!
That could be an indicator that suing at the tiniest chance isn't helpful macro-ecnomical. Or that a general suing culture (with legalese trying to protect one from the economic risks) aren't actually helping improving things in the general sense, although they reduce the risk of getting bankrupt. But society-wise, a sue culture is most probably a negative: you spend energy/time/money on things that aren't necessary in saner law systems.
Separate reply for a separate topic: You're repeating the urban-legend version of the McDonalds lawsuit, not the real story, which you can find in numerous places, e.g. https://www.ttla.com/?pg=McDonaldsCoffeeCaseFacts. tl;dr, it was repeated wilful negligence by McDonalds, they'd already injured several hundred other people through it. They knew it was a serious problem but kept doing it anyway.
We had a problem some time ago with a major power outage due to operator negligence. When it came to assigning blame it turned out the corporate structure was such that it was impossible to sue the operator. Since it was in effect publicly-owned, the public would have been suing itself.
Are 850000 millions muslim refugees are soooooo many more than over 5 million "Gastarbeiter".
I'm not saying those 850.000 millions are negligibe. They increase the scarce housing situation even more. They have antique idealisms (like that woman aren't equal, that woman showing their hairs are whores, that all jews must be bad). So they create a bit of trouble here, like antisemitism or even from time to time an "Ehrenmord".
But still... the millions of turkish Gastarbeiter actually changed german culture, think Döner Kebab. Which we can't say from the 850.000 recent refugees.
"Muslims are in Europe in large numbers because of wars that Europe and the West either started"
That's an interesting claim. The biggest muslim community in Germany is from Turkey. They came all here because of economic reason.
I'd even go so far that it's their religion that holds muslim states in a terrible economic situation. If you look down at 50% of your population (females), treat them unequal because of some ancient sharia feelings, sometimes even keep them away from good education ... then surely your car doesn't go fast, because the hand brake is still set!
The islamic culture was once renowned for education (e.g. look at Ibn Sina or why we today use "Algorithm" as word, or our numbers). But that's long gone. Even before islamists took over in Iran they seized the oil industry before they had the educated people to run it. In essence the country destabilized itself in the Mossadeqh time. But todays islam ... is more often than not demagocial instead of scientific. They dislike knowledge. The more islamic a country is, the more this is visible. Nothing of this creates good living condition to people, I'd say. And nothing here is in influence from "the west". Or Russia or China.
Now, the civil war in Syria ... I'm quite unsure if that has been instigated mainly because of the west. If anything, I'd say that the east (Russia) bolstered the syrian dictator. That most syrian people hated the torturing regime has IMHO nothing to do with "US and Israel spent years destabilizing Syria".
On your point that the US and USSR inventions only created destabilization with their wars... on this I agree. I can see the liberation of Kuwait from Saddam as a worthy war. But not the others.
"And noone stops US/israel" because no one has love the the Iranian regime, which kills its own people, allows Hamas to rain rockets on Israel (even when I don't like the israel government, the israel people don't deserve these attacks either!). It supports Yemenitic pirates. So it's an awful government, not righteous at all -- not even in a spiritual sense. There's a german saying: how you shout into the forest it will come back.
"and media totally ignore the suffering in Palesine"
That is a rather absolute state and easy to falsify. Just 2 days ago I heard a report in "Deutschlandfunk" about how israel settlers killed palestinians (basically: they let their cows go onto the fields the palestinians owned. Which come from their village to chase the cows away. And then a settler in a israel military uniform used his storm rifle to kill one, injure one heavily and one lightly).
We also seen the fields of rubble the israel armed forces produced in the Gaza strip.
What we however can see: the media coverage of the Hamas attack where they killed and abducted so many people was extensive (rightfully so, as it was an abhorrent act). However, the systematic destruction of lifing quarters into huge fields of rubble by the IDR was mostly only mentioned. It got coverage, but not really that extensive.
And yet, in "Tagesschau" and "Zeit" you could all the time hear about the issues the reporters had about actually reporting from there, since Israel controlled most information channels.
What also is a very german thing: any critic on the israel governments doing is sooner or later "conquered" with some "this is antisemitic" claim. However, few are actually antisemitic (yep, there are yew haters here, especially after we've got so many arab immigrants). But there are also many people that can separate between a religio, the very diverse people groups living in Israel and the current israel governement.
You have a very narrow view of the EU. The EU isn't a single body, dictated by some common mind.
We have the EU Parliament, the EU Council, the EU Commission. Often they have different views in itself (e.g. factions in EU Parliament, or commissars in the commission that are more end-user-friendly vs. ones that are move business-friendly). And the EU Council (the ring of head-of-member-states) is more often than not just of one opinion, e.g. thing at Poland when it was governed by PiS. Or of Hungary and to some smaller extend Slovakia.
"The EU wants ..." is therefore quite often wrong.
That site lists many of candidates as "support" just because they have not publicly opposed, so it is not a realistic view on the opinions of EU parliament.
Better to look at actual votes cast.
Also, they are not distinguishing between supporting mandatory monitoring and other forms (e.g. present legal situation where monitoring is allowed).
The current proposals do not include mandatory monitoring. If mandatory chatcontrol had the wide support that site suggests, it would have been introduced and passed long ago.
If they can't get it passed because the people don't want it, then why do they keep trying to pass it? Some entities with a lot of power or influence clearly want it. This is the same thing we see in the US. We keep saying "no", and they keep trying.
Maybe the EU people don't want it, but at least some governing body of the EU clearly does.
There's a comment not too far up in this thread saying this is more of a US thing than an EU thing, but it looks like exactly the same pattern from where I'm sitting in the US.
if you truly dig down it's the US and of all people Ashton Kutcher (https://mullvad.net/en/why-privacy-matters/going-dark) who are pushing this. So they can then point to the EU and say ”they do it so why not do it here?”
as long as the EU is headed by a woman who habitually loses SMS messages negotiating billion euro deals i figure the assessment you question is spot on.
Well, Visa and Mastercard are expensive and suck. The shop always has to pay them some percentage for a transaction. That adds up.
For decades, european countries like Netherlands or German had cheaper alternatives, e.g. in Germany the old "EC Card" and now "girocard". That costs a shop just a fixed amount of cent... and a very low amount.
(That is BTW one of THE reasons why US travellers won't see "Credit cards accepted" in every store ... our alternatives are just cheaper, so the market decided)
Also, Visa and Mastercard as US companies. So they are sniffing on all european transactions.
And it happened more than once that US companies tried to execute bullshit US laws in Europe. Example: there was once an german online shop that sold cuban cigars. Eventually the US website that hosted the shop said "Oh, that's not allowed" --- despite it perfectly legal by german law. And they didn't just delete this cuban cigars, they disabled the whole shop, with IIRC 20000 EUR positive balance. And the shop owner didn't even get his money, since their customer service sucked and was only automated response and untrained indian call center clerks.
So no, we cannot really depend on US services. They are expensive, they customer service sucks, they are sniffing either directly or let the NSA sniff everything.
And, bank-wise the USA seems to be some decades back (not online-bank-wise!). I mean, they still have pay cheques? Not direct bank transfers? Shudder. No wonder that, if they have no alternatives, they think everything must be Visa or Mastercard operated.
> One describes the policy. Which is what they want to achieve. They want to achieve that a hotel employee checks on every room every 24 hour.
I find it puzzling how you (and all the other commenters here) accept this rule like sheeps. Normally, you US citizens cannot stop boasting how the USA is supposedly "the land of the free".
So don't take this personally, I'm replying to this as to all the others that appear like they find it totally normal that some security guy or hotel cleaning can enter a rented room. Every 24 hours, or at all. It's not normal. And IMHO not even needed / helpful.
No 24h check will ever hinder a mass-shooter. The criminal would just wait until room cleaning made their job, then go to his car and get the big suitcase with all the guns and ammunition one can buy entirely too easy in the US. And then he can shot from his room, minutes after this compulsory do-nothing 24h "security" check.
Here, were I am (Germany), things are completely different.
First, it's not so easy to get weapons. Not even at gun exhibitions. That in itself helps tremendously getting a less violent society.
Second, here we have the right, upheld by courts, that a hotel tenant can make the hotel not enter his room. A "do not disturb" sign is everything that is needed. If you want, you can look it up under "Frankfurter Landgerichts aus dem Jahr 2009 (AZ 2-19 O 153/08)".
Sure, there are other rulings that landlords (including hoteliers) have under some circumstances the right to enter a property they rented out. Like fire, or water pipe broken. Actual, imminent danger. Not hypothetical danger! But they even cannot get a general "you can always enter" term signed, that would be null and void over here.
The more free private entities are from government oversight, the more carefully they have to read contracts. For example, even the US is not quite so free as to allow people to sell their organs. If it were, citizens would have to carefully read room rental contracts at hotels, to make sure there were no conditions which included forfeiture of a kidney.
(FWIW, I'm now living in Germany, and it's significantly more relaxing with a bit less freedom. There's definitely different tradeoffs which make more sense for different people).
The most illuminating example is, unfortunately, in a controversial area; so please take this as descriptive rather than normative: Back in my city in America, when I heard a loud bang in the night, 4/5 of the time it was fireworks or a car backfiring, and 1/5 of the time it was gunfire. I found an expended 9mm round while walking my dog one morning. It wasn't even a particularly dangerous city, by American standards; but every year I had a 3/100k chance of being killed by gunfire; even accidentally, even while just sitting in my living room.
Here in Germany, I'm not magically immune to crime, but the base rates of gun crime are so low that I never worry about loud bangs. That comes at the cost of the freedom granted by the Second Amendment in America.
Another, slightly less salient & serious example: Germany has strict laws about public photography. Take a look at any "embarrassing pratfalls" or "annoying Karens" video reel: They may be US-weighted, but they come from all over the world--but not Germany. The lack of freedom to document the people around you on video trades off with the security of knowing you can slip on a banana peel without being known worldwide as "the banana peel guy."
> you (and all the other commenters here) accept this rule like sheeps
What do you mean "accept this rule like sheeps"? Do you expect violent resistance? Do you want to sue someone because a security guy poked their head in the room for 30s? How would "I do not accept this rule like sheeps" look like in your opinion? How far would you go resisting it?
> you US citizens
Wrong assumption.
> So don't take this personally,
I won't. Clearly you don't know anything about me.
> appear like they find it totally normal
I can explain what is a fact of life (they have this policy) without expressing my opinion about it.
> No 24h check will ever hinder a mass-shooter.
As clearly stated in my comment.
> The criminal would just wait until room cleaning made their job, then go to his car and get the big suitcase with all the guns and ammunition one can buy entirely too easy in the US. And then he can shot from his room, minutes after this compulsory do-nothing 24h "security" check.
Yes. Exactly this is described in my comment.
> that would be null and void over here.
Thank you. Interesting addition to the conversation about how it is in Germany. Different places have wildly different legal norms and expectations.
For me it is hard o get upset about this either way. A hotel is a different type of arrangement than renting.
If over here a lady buys a hot coffee in a McDrive, drives away, spills the hot coffee on their legs and makes a car accident due to this ... she won't be able to sue the McDrive. There's no fine-print or "Coffee is hot, you dumb person" writing needed anywhere. She could be lucky if she doesn't get fined for endangering others by her stupid actions.
So, if we have a power outage here, the courts don't suddenly get busy. Because there simply no one is suing.
Fun fact: despite this bad power outage, the power grid systems in Europe are still better (even way better) than in the US. There is a comparable statistics measure called "SAIDI" --- system average interuption duration index. And duration wise, per custom and year, the US power grids are worse than over here than in most of West Europe: (US SAIDI 2020: 1.3 hours, German SAIDI 2020: 0.3 hours). That's a factor of more than 4 on the worse-iness of US power grid!
That could be an indicator that suing at the tiniest chance isn't helpful macro-ecnomical. Or that a general suing culture (with legalese trying to protect one from the economic risks) aren't actually helping improving things in the general sense, although they reduce the risk of getting bankrupt. But society-wise, a sue culture is most probably a negative: you spend energy/time/money on things that aren't necessary in saner law systems.
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