My credit cards I’ve had in Germany/Austria were all basically glorified debit-cards which had their own bank account attached to them. Technically I had a credit limit of a couple thousand, but I never went into the negative.
The only difference (for me at least) was that I could use them to rent a car, which is nice.
Yeah most of europe is waaaaay better when is comes to mobile plans compared to the US.
I don’t use use that much data, but my 8gb plan is just under €6 per month.
In the US, I had a plan like this for over $30…
I can’t check at the moment, but that sounds like something ‘Simply Perfection’ would be capable of.
It’s essentially an addon specifically for tweaking the appearance of gnome stuff.
It’s not colonialism to prefer one culture (or certain cultural traits) to another. In fact, it’s natural.
I’ve lived in a number of countries and each had their own distinct cultural norms. Each has had aspects which I perceived as either positive or negative.
Add it all together and I definitely have preferred certain cultures, not because they are “better” but because they more closely match my own preferences. Other people would prefer different cultural norms.
IPTV is generally for live TV channels rather than on-demand.
Yeah that’s what I mean… it would be good for society if prices went down, but it would also make a lot of people pissed off, so they intentionally dance around actual solutions in favor of shit like this.
I recently moved to Vienna and don’t qualify for the public housing (you need to have lived here for a certain amount of time)but the sheer amount of it (and relative quality) means that even in the private market, competition is much less.
Compared to other cities we have lived in, the rent is much lower and the quality much higher.
Something like 60% of the population lives in either public or subsidized housing!
It’s the perfect solution for the democrats because it sounds good but also won’t actually cause housing prices to go down, so homeowners won’t feel like they are ‘losing’ money.
Sure, here’s a paper which explores the effects.
Essentially, housing prices have hugely inflated (in much of the developed world) because demand is much higher than supply. Prices in the real-estate market are generally really reactive to changes in supply or demand because each ‘product’ is unique and limited, as well as being worth a lot of money so there is more pressure to maximize the potential gains.
This sort of plan increases the resources available to the demand side without increasing the supply side. This drives up prices since there are more potential buyers.
Anyone who couldn’t buy a house without such a program is being added the the pool of people competing for a limited supply of houses. It won’t increase supply because supply is heavily limited by other factors, most notably zoning.
It’s unfortunate, because the thought behind such a policy is admirable. It’s trying to make buying a house more fair and more easily achievable for a broad segment of the population that currently is effectively shut out from owning a home.
In the UK a similar scheme just led to the entry-level segment of the real-estate market inflating faster than the rest.
It also led to a rise in more ‘luxury’ entry-level properties being built.
Again, it’s not exactly the same concept, but in the case of the UK, most economists agree that most buyers actually would have been better off if the policy had never been introduced, since the price rises ended up outpacing the value of the assistance.
The UK had a similar scheme for first time buyers and it’s often cited by economists as one of the biggest things fueling their housing crisis.
Not a raspi, but I had similar issues on my opensuse HTPC which turned it to be related to issues with (or missing) media codecs in Firefox.
After (re)installing all of them, it worked like a charm.
Imagine your town/city starts completely catering to people from richer countries coming there to get completely wasted and intentionally act crazy… that’s what happened to a huge portion of Spain.
That mentality is largely the result of overtourism though.
Spain is a country of under 50 million people which has over 70 million foreign tourists visit every year.
The US is 330 million people but only has 50ish million foreign tourists.
So imagine that the US has roughly 8x as many tourists per year (to match per capita) and imagine that a huge portion of these tourists were mostly coming from much richer countries and had the mentality of ‘let’s let loose in a cheap party spot’.
Just about everyone is in favor of some tourism, it’s just currently completely out of control in much of southern Europe. The numbers just completely dwarf just about anywhere else.
I’m sorry, but this is completely backwards with regards to the situation in Spain or many other poorer european countries. I’m much more familiar with the situation in Croatia, but this applies to most of southern Europe (including Spain).
Yes, the countries take in a sizable portion of their gdp from tourism, however this is generally at the expense of the average citizen. Tourism is notoriously bad at distributing any wealth it provides, while the average person living in these places gets all of the negative side effects. Tourists are generally coming from richer countries (USA, Germany, UK etc) and able to/used to paying much higher prices. So the local economy shifts to focusing exclusively on tourists (it’s where the money is) and locals get all of the negative externalities (inflated rents, inflated prices, crowding, poorly behaved tourists) with very little benefit.
Local and national governments focus exclusively on further investments in tourism (since it’s such an ‘important’ part of the economy!) at the expense of other investments (education, non-tourist infrastructure) which would be more beneficial to the overall population.
Not to mention, compared to just about anywhere else in the world, the number of tourists in Europe is absolutely overwhelming compared to locals. Croatia is a country of under 4 million people, but gets over 20 million visitors a year! The average salary is somewhere around $1000 A MONTH, so it’s no surprise that so much of the country is instead focused on the needs of tourists who can easily spend $1000 a week…
This isn’t the same situation as a tourism hotspot in the US, for instance (where I’m originally from). Yes, wages vary geographically in the US, but not nearly to the same extent. The areas often grew around tourism rather than being a normal functional city where families have been living for centuries before very recently turning into what is essentially a theme park which is largely unaccessible to natives.
Why does it need to be equal to population?
I’m not saying that all immigration is bad, but rather that above a certain level it gets difficult to integrate people. For european countries this is a much lower number than the US, since populations are much lower. At the same time, there are many more refugees than in the US.
It’s a genuine challenge here in Vienna, for instance, at the moment because recent immigrants make up a large percentage of school kids, who often have few language skills, tend to be very religious, and have extremely conservative views on things like feminism and gay rights. Unfortunately, their views tend to self-reinforce rather than become milder over time due to being the majority view among their peers/in their school/community.
You can’t really blame the kids, obviously they are just a product of the culture they grew up in, however you also can’t just ignore the issue. There isn’t any mechanism for preventing immigrants groups from clustering in specific areas (and I don’t think most people would be in favor of anything that draconian)
In an ideal world, maybe there is a perfect solution, but the reality is that the current system is facing a huge challenge. Like it or not, this is directly tied to immigration rates.
The issue is though that “segregation between state and religion” is a cultural trait. It’s not something that every culture values, nor is it something that inevitably happens.
In fact, it’s almost certainly a minority opinion on a global level. Particularly in (although not exclusive to) poorer non-western countries which tend to be much more conservative and religious.
A small number of conservative immigrants won’t hugely impact views in the host country, but a sizable number (particularly if they are concentrated in certain areas) absolutely can.
You know there are other countries tries right?
A lot of european countries are only a few million people…
Just have everyone use UTC!
Personally I always always buy phones with two sim slots. It’s super practical if you travel semi-often.
Idk about apple, but basically all of the mid-range androids have this feature. I guess this is about the US though, so it’s probably Apple.