It's not misleading or ambiguous. As a bystander to this discussion I'm shaking my head wondering whether you are doing this on purpose.
The vast majority of employed people have a single reasonable choice: to take their employers insurance. Anything else would be much more expensive because of lack of deduction. When they change jobs, they are again at the mercy of their (new) employer. Sure there are self-employed folks, and it's different for them, but this thread is not about them. And of course most people with their own insurance choice are self employed precisely because everybody else doesn't really have a choice, which is the whole point.
So, can we please stop with this smoke screen? My popcorn reserves are running low.
Um, joining the EU is not the same as joining the Euro. They can keep doing this exact thing after joining the EU if they keep their currency just like a few others are doing.
No, this is mostly about fishing rights afaik. Britain also kept having issues on that front.
All EU Member States, except Denmark, are required to adopt the euro and join the euro area. To do this they must meet certain conditions known as 'convergence criteria'."
> Now, every country joining the EU is expected to join the Euro at some point.
In theory yes, in practice no. The Swedish government has said repeatedly they don't plan to join despite being legally obliged to do so.
EU law says they have to do it, but it also says it can't be done without their active cooperation, and there is no penalty if they refuse to cooperate. The obligation is essentially toothless.
So Denmark having a formal opt-out from the Euro and Sweden not, is really more of a theoretical difference than a practically relevant one.
> Sweden is long in the EU. CURRENTLY the expectation to new member states to join the Euro when joining the EU is different -> much higher.
I don't agree. It isn't just Sweden; Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Romania too. The time between EU accession and Euro adoption is normally a decade or more. If a government doesn't want to adopt the Euro, there are heaps of levers they can pull to slow the process down, and there is no way to punish a government for doing that. The easiest is that you have to join ERM II at least two years before adopting the Euro, but nobody can force you to join ERM II – so Sweden, Poland, Czechia, Hungary and Romania have all refused to join it. The only current ERM II members are Denmark (with a formal opt-out), and Bulgaria (which wants to adopt the Euro – it had hoped to do it 1 January 2025, but the ECB says their inflation is too high – 5.1%, the limit is 3.3%). If Bulgaria gets inflation down in 2025, they may succeed in joining on 1 January 2026.
When negotiating to join, the politicians say "sure, we promise we'll adopt the Euro", knowing that they'll likely be retired by the time joining the Euro is a real possibility.
> Sweden was also long not in NATO. Now it is. Similar, support in polls for Euro introduction is rising.
Yes, but that doesn't change the point – an EU member state (present or future) cannot be forced to adopt the Euro, it will only happen if the member state's government is willing, and they'll likely only be willing if it is sufficiently popular with their people.
Only if they changed the rules to make ERM II membership mandatory and automatic, or if they changed the Euro convergence criteria to remove the need for it. I've heard no talk they are planning to do so.
The non-Euro EU members have a say in the enlargement negotiation process too, and they don’t want new members to be forced into Euro adoption - it might weaken their own ability to resist that pressure in the future, plus additional non-Euro EU members are a potential source of new internal allies
> They won't become EU members, without a clear will to adopt the policies which lead to the Euro.
The government that negotiates to join the EU may do all they can to convince the EU that they want to join the Euro – they might even really mean it. Then, after accession, that government loses an election and get replaced by a new government which is anti-Euro. What can the EU do to stop that? Nothing.
The European Parliament is elected every few years by citizens in all member states.
The European Commission is nominated by the European Council and and confirmed by the European Parliament.
The European Council consists of government officials from the member states where they have been chosen by national democratic processes.
It may be a little complicated, but it's all rooted in democratic processes. Please stick to the facts and keep the populistic anti-EU nationalistic propaganda to yourself.
(Every kid in the EU has been learning those basic facts in school for decades, making it surprising that this populist nonsense still catches on with so many people. I have an easier time forgivin non-EU folks, but even those should check the facts before claiming things.)
> The European Commission is nominated by the European Council and and confirmed by the European Parliament.
> The European Council consists of government officials from the member states where they have been chosen by national democratic processes.
I disagree. Successful elected government officials from member states aren't governing the EU Commission and Council. They're governing their own member states, where they are elected by the public.
Unpopular, unsuccessful ex-government officials from member states are governing the EU, where they are appointed by bureaucrats.
Just look at the uninspiring Commissioners we've suffered over the last few years.
It's telling that the Von Der Leyen Commission scraped in with just 51.4% of MEP votes.
> Unpopular, unsuccessful ex-government officials from member states are governing the EU, where they are appointed by bureaucrats.
Von der Leyen was not appointed by bureaucrats.
> It's telling that the Von Der Leyen Commission scraped in with just 51.4% of MEP votes.
That's nothing special in European voting systems. Various governments (regional or country wide) in Germany have small, but relatively stable majorities provided by coalitions. That's very different to the mostly two-party systems in the US or the UK.
The CDU is a large party, not a particular large "organization" in terms of full-time CDU employees. The bureaucracy of the CDU is in no way responsible for nominating/selecting the EU President of the Commission.
Ursula on der Leyen was 2019 supported by Angela Merkel (Chancellor of Germany) as the future president of the EU commission. That's no secret. Macron also supported her. The European Council then nominated Ursula on der Leyen and she was accepted by the European Parliament. The Parliament is directly elected the citizens of the European Union.
The election of her was kind of unfortunate, since it was signalled by parties that the election to the parliament will also find the proposed EU commission president. But that was not the case. Since a candidate was not found (various parties and governments were not happy with the proposed candidates), the European Council finally proposed Ursula von der Leyen, which then also got a majority in the parliament.
51.4% is a majority. You are free to disagree again, but that won't change the facts. You can just as easily disagree about gravity, evolution or climate change. Still won't change them.
Look, I don't like lots of things about the EU either. But the first step to being able to change sth is to acknowledge the facts. Claiming that von der Leyen wasn't democratically appointed is similar to Trump claiming the 2020 election was stolen. Not a great start.
That was always one of the issues with EU, and EEC before it, membership in the UK. There was no education as to the change in constitutional status, nor explanation of how the EEC (then EU) actually worked.
Most folks still had the view that UK Parliament was in charge, not really appreciating the change. That also applied to our MPs, hence the Factomane cases.
Now if there had bee proper education in the UK as to the impact of EEC and EU membership, possibly Brexit would not have happened.
From Chapter 6: 'The Inherently Undemocratic EU Democracy'
'A number of prominent public intellectuals put pen to paper to warn not only of a crisis of European democracy, but of a crisis of the very ‘political institution’ of democracy, and particularly its representative and liberal variants. Contemporary manifestations of the ‘hollowing out’ of democracy following the Eurocrisis have taken many forms and several contributions in this volume have dealt with various aspects of the phenomenon.'
' .... a crisis of the EU’s own democratic credentials. Even as they insisted on its purely economic character, commentators were quick to criticise the undemocratic form that the emergency EMU-related responses to the Eurocrisis came to assume, particularly at the European level, where not only parliamentary processes, but also the Treaties’ legal prescriptions, were systematically circumvented'.
The EU has certainly its issues, no doubt about it. They need to be pointed out and addressed for sure. We are not in disagreement there.
But the flat out denial that EU is in principle a democratic system is just a too simplistic view. It tends to be mostly touted by those populists who ultimately would like to see an authocratic state with themselves in charge.
I think it makes a lot more sense that there's a lot of (especially rich people and US folks) that desperately want EU to fail - either because they're deeply nationalist, see a profit motive or just hate foreigners.
Those will craft narratives that are patently untrue to drive their agenda.
> At this point every remote internet checklist has to include checks for humanity,
I genuinely don't understand this requirement. Isn't an interview exactly that? It's a conversation pretending to be about a technical problem/question/challenge but in reality its purpose is to find out whether you click with the person and would want to work with them. If some ChatGPT text can trick you then your process is broken anyway and everybody joining your company can expect colleagues selected by this sub-par process.
> If some ChatGPT text can trick you then your process is broken anyway
This is pretty unfair and seems like victim-blaming when we have companies spending billions of dollars to create these programs with the specific intent of trying to pass the Turing test.
There’s a bit of an echo chamber on HN where people convince each other that all LLM-generated text is easy to identify, riddled with errors, and “obviously” inferior to all real-human writing. Because some LLM writing fits those criteria and is easily identified, these folks are convinced they can identify all LLM writing and anyone who can’t must be a dunce.
I didn't claim anything about identifying writing. That's a strawman. I'm talking about humans talking to each other. Even if it's in a zoom call. Any interview process that doesn't include that is broken, and that's my claim. Echo chamber or not.
Apologies for misunderstanding you, then. Agreed that human to human is critical, especially for identifying culture fit (not homogeneity of course, just interaction styles like openness, etc).
I do think people cheat video interviews with LLM help, but in-person should always be required anyway, even if it’s via proxy (“meet with a colleague from our Madrid office”).
How widespread is LLM cheating during video interviews these days? Honest question.. How do people even do it? Let an LLM app listen in and suggest avenues of discussion and lists a bunch of facts on the side to spice things up?
Even if that's the case, isn't it just a matter of conversing in a way that the LLM can't easily follow?
An interviewer is a "victim"? Maybe they should just, you know, speak to their interviewees. At least in 2024 that's hardly faked by an LLM. Therefore, if you are fooled, you cheaped out, and you are hardly a victim.
As much as I'd like to support the overall sentiment of the article, or at least of the part that I actually read, the stats just don't pass the smell test.
> If you’re like one of the Americans surveyed by Reviews.org, this is one of 205 times today that you’ll be checking the device in your hand. To spare you opening the calculator app, that’s about once every five minutes you are awake or two and a half full months out of your year.
That just can't be true. First of all, it assumes 1 minute of spending at the phone, every of those 1 times per 5 minutes. Totalling 5 hours a day. On average for everybody. I'm sure there are some outliers like that, but there are tons of people out there for whom there is no way they would get even close.
To top it off, their sample was surely neither random nor representative. Of course you get heavily biased data if you are asking a tech crowd.
I stopped reading at this point. Garbage in, garbage put, i.e. whatever conclusion they were eventually drawing was not based on actual facts.
By default, return nonsense on all ports. But once a certain access sequence has been detected from a source IP, redirect traffic to a specific port from just that IP to your real service.
A useful trick is to then at least visually structure those 150 lines with comments that separate some blocks of functionality. Keeps the linear flow but makes it still easier to digest.
Because now you have to jump around in order to see the sequence of events, which can be very frustrating if you have to constantly switch between two of these functions.
Plus, if we're dealing with a "long list of tasks" that can't be broken up in reusable chunks, it probably means that you need to share some context, which is way easier to do if you're in the same scope.
One thing I find useful is to structure it in blocks instead, so you can share things but also contain what you don't want shared. So e.g. in rust you could do this:
let shared_computation = do_shared_computation();
let result_one = {
let result = do_useful_things();
other_things(&shared_computation);
result
}
...
I think it's a nice middleground. But you still can't write modular tests. But maybe you don't have to, because again, this is just a long list of tasks you need to do that conceptually can't be broken down, so maybe it's better to just test the whole thing as a unit.
Instead of, say, 10 functions in a file that are all individually meaningful, you now have maybe 50 functions that are mostly tiny steps that don't make much sense on their own. Good like finding the "real" 10 functions buried amongst them. It's certainly higher cognitive load in my (painful) experience.
If the arguments to the function required are small, then breaking such a block down makes sense. Otherwise, it usually feels like an unnatural function to me.
The vast majority of employed people have a single reasonable choice: to take their employers insurance. Anything else would be much more expensive because of lack of deduction. When they change jobs, they are again at the mercy of their (new) employer. Sure there are self-employed folks, and it's different for them, but this thread is not about them. And of course most people with their own insurance choice are self employed precisely because everybody else doesn't really have a choice, which is the whole point.
So, can we please stop with this smoke screen? My popcorn reserves are running low.