u/tripletruble

when i am in charge, my least liberal policies would probably involve a wacky expansion of sin taxes: TV getting taxed, video games getting taxed, sugar getting taxed like crazy, cured meats getting taxed out the wazoo, cinemas not getting taxed, liquor getting taxed like crazy but sub 5.5% abv beer is exempt, bars getting tax breaks (get out of your houses people), pickup trucks getting taxed..

Feel like it's the almost opposite? The ones where the croissant is say 1.40 is far more likely to be done by hand compared to the one that costs 1.10. It is costly in terms of labor and real estate to make viennoiseries by hand

Oh ya you can feel him looking an angle and that's definitely one of them

Parents don't got time for that

Tell that to the wild mob I saw outside my window last night lol

There's some true and interesting stuff in your comment but the story you tell of how the pension reforms went down is not based in reality. The CFDT was very explicit that it would oppose any attempts to raise the statutory retirement age to 64 or 65. There was not some compromise available to Macron that would have meaningfully improved the sustainability of the retirement system. Macron did in fact concede on a lot of what you claim would have satisfied the CFDT (counting motherhood, earlier retirement for workers who started working at 18, taking into account occupational hardship although not to the extent demanded by the CFDT etc)

It would be a lot easier if we could blame the predicament on Macron's hubris but he really has made almost every reasonable effort to ease pension spending (even when retirees represent a huge share of his supporters) and has faced overwhelming resistance from a coalition of the unreasonable

Lisnard was on TV talking about pensions within the last couple weeks

At the beginning yes it it was about education but now the overwhelming majority are protesting cost of living and a hodge podge of other left causes

It's actually crazier than that because the 32% of education that goes to pensions is not only for former teachers, it also pays the pensions of state postal and telecom workers. It's a deeply weird and misleading accounting

closer to the former. they are not expected to actually fight looters or carry weapons. their presence is the deterrence.

saw like 6 on my street today. one was just posted up in front of the now boarded up and closed for the weekend furniture store. my 5 year old asked me where their swords are

Crazy number of private security guards on my street in Paris

What does that even mean

Why would one want things to be run well?

EU countries have also capped a proposal to defer taxation on share options — something start-ups asked for in order to attract talent — to companies with a turnover of less than €150mn and 750 employees, thresholds that many early-stage companies quickly reach. Issues of taxation are a highly protected national competence in the EU and require backing from all 27 member states.

as someone invested in europe's success: dang that sucks

as someone always on the look out for regression discontinuities:

https://preview.redd.it/d90am6n2a9xh1.png?width=265&format=png&auto=webp&s=cc658b1d4e4ca09b085e01b7ad9e8d37902cb091

that would be a lot of work for me, so instead lets continue to impose a shitload more work on thousands of private companies trying to grow

incidentally the previous inhabitants of this apartment had a crazy secure door installed - steel plated, huge af deadbolt, some sort of bolt that goes into the floor and ceiling. this is possibly related to the fact that they are jewish

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health insurance also runs in the 0.5% to 7% profit margin range as well

next major protest in paris is scheduled for tomorrow and the march is set to go through my neighborhood. feeling dread

you feel that the Hong kongers are morally pure

weird extrapolation from what i said but ok

i actually got the impression they were very concerned about the optics globally and believed a peaceful protest had a better chance of earning sympathy for their cause elsewhere. multiple protestors asked me if i thought the protest seemed violent and it was an important strategic choice in their view to avoid violence - and if someone misbehaved, others would quickly intervene.

you can think that was eventually the wrong choice for hong kongers but it would be hard to persuade me that looting or burning down buildings in france is serving to make voters more amenable to a left-wing government. i think this is evidenced pretty clearly from the fact that many protestors in france want to distance themselves from the looting and destruction

i sincerely mean without offense but this is why talking to americans about french politics - at least the ones i personally am close with - can be tiresome: they are deep in the habit of seeing things through their domestic left-right divide

is it your suspicion that would they have been more effective had they looted shopping centers?

it's hard to explain how insidious french unions are. for example, france's public broadcasters have a union. that seems like it should be okay because people working in media can face tough working conditions. a french news program prepared a 12 minute video of last saturday's protests in paris with extremely minimal commentary and no footage of looting. the only thing that could be at all construed as political commentary was footage of Mélenchon marching in a peaceful branch of the protest while a more violent confrontation raged on.

the broadcaster's union however tried to censure it, calling for journalists and broadcasters associated with the program to be removed:

“The weekend edition of the 8 p.m. news has chosen sides,” but this “in no way represents the views of all France Télévisions journalists. Only a small faction is constructing this repugnant narrative,” they add.

Distancing themselves from “this disinformation-filled news broadcast, which acts as a mouthpiece for the Interior Minister,” the union says it now expects “clear answers” from management “to find out what action it intends to take in response to this editorial debacle.”

now imagine this kind of thing playing out over and over, in smaller ways, across the entire media ecosystem.

and this is not a unique situation. i work in a place that, outside france, one would not usually expect to have a union. yet they manage to inject an aggressively leftwing confrontation into nearly every major organizational decision

i attended/observed one of those big hong kong 2019 protests and it's crazy how much more disciplined those kids were than these french protests despite having a radically more important and tragic struggle

Believe it or not, the protests can get much worse