u/NeuronautML

I don't know about other downvoters, but i downvoted you because you said kids should be beaten into submission at school. Corporal punishment is the refuge of bad parents and it's not a teacher's job to harm your children that way. There is not a single justifiable reason that you need to be physically violent with a child to educate them. In fact, that only makes it worse. You either raise a fearful child or a hateful one. Either way, in my book, it's child abuse and you were calling for it.

And boy would i cause all sorts of sky falling down trouble on the poor soul that decided to physically assault my child, undoing my job of teaching that violence is only a tool of self defense. I suffered significant corporal punishment growing up and i can guarantee it improved my life in no way.

I would say for this to happen, the biggest challenges facing Europe would be to massively develop its services and post soviet democratic countries would have to be on board with their exports losing competitiveness in the global market. Poland, for instance, is industrializing further but interesting to note that 90% of their goods market is the EU and only 10% goes of out EU. So in a way, post soviet democracies can still be goods exporters inside EU's internal market. Letting go of industry is not something i believe post soviet democracies would ever accept.

Western, central and southern europe already survive on luxury and unique regional products to support their industry despite their high cost of living, so competitiveness is not a big issue there.

As for services, specially tech, European customers are used to having easy access to highly unregulated digital tech from the US, with union busting, privacy invasion and low taxation, that gives them an unfair edge against tech developed in Europe. Europe has begun to subsidize all European tech (you can even see some games and software with EU stickers for receiving subsidies), but i think Europe needs to tax US digital services and goods, otherwise there is no competing with massive billionaire fortunes that are president friends. There's no competing when your competitor's workers don't have maternity leave, work 60-70 hours a week and have 10 days holidays a year and thank goodness nothing like that will ever fly around European unions. Trust me, Elon and Walmart tried. Without taxation motivation, there will never be a European alternative to US tech, but they don't want to tax tech without an alternative. Catch 22.

And this is the EU. Anything that takes the US 10 years, takes the EU 20. This is good in a way, because everyone is heard and there is no crazy orange lunatic coming to change fundamental laws overnight, but to react against something like this will take a while. In the EU we're used to wait, we understand why we wait. But international markets might not be so patient. Also by the time the EU starts changing meaningfully, it is very possible Trump is not president anymore, making the change pointless, so i see the EU doing their usual "looking busy and waiting" routine.

It might happen, just not soon.

As a European, the Euro can't replace the dollar. It's not about how stable it is, it's about how many Euros there are. Whichever country will be the world reserve currency will have to produce so much currency to be used all around the world that their non digital exports will never be competitive. The Euro just isn't produced in large enough quantities to be used as a world reserve currency, its production and distribution is tightly controlled for use in European and European partner markets. At least not right now. A long time ago some OPEC countries wanted to try out the idea of using Euros, but just couldn't get enough liquidity to trade all the oil in Euros.

Donald Trump wants the US to both be a goods exporting powerhouse and the world reserve currency. He thinks it's possible, that these diametrically opposed goals have a middle sweetspot where one can be just enough of a world reserve currency not to worry about debt anymore, but also a country that others depend on for manufacturing. That's what all the tariff dancing is all about. I think he's nuts, but hey, every economic theory needs to be tested. Just wish we were testing more sophisticated economic theories.

Anyway, as of this moment Europe is not geared for it. Not industrially, not financially and to be honest, i don't think Europe is even into it. But it's not impossible. It would just require a lot of changes.

100% agree on this. Usually i like geneva_convenience's posts and comments, but if we're going to start editorializing news articles, instead of just posting the original title and clarifying with information about the PA, the posts lose value massively for me. Where does the buck stop if everyone who republishes links "corrects" news titles as they feel ?

I don't even disagree with the point of the OP, but this sort of sensationalizing articles just feels like a distant cousin of click bait. It's what British newspapers do and why i absolutely loathe most of them. Is the new title wrong ? Possibly not, but that's not the original piece of information. It's like the reader is too stupid to be served the original information and thank goodness there's someone to serve you the "correct" title.

I'm against Israel hasbara and disinformation but i find this isn't the proper way to address it.

Ah yes, the appeasement strategy. Works every time, for whoever is on the receiving end of it of course. One would think Europeans would know better, but i guess life teaches you the same lesson until you're ready to learn.

Maybe AstraZeneca CEO should figure out where the massive windfall covid vaccine profits went and invest them wisely instead of filling the pockets of shareholders. Dude got massive taxpayer investments, spent the last 5 years acquiring smaller healthcare companies, snubbed a uk plant investment because they didn't get enough money from the taxpayers and bragged about how much money they were making about a year ago from the pipeline investments.

Clearly there isn't enough space here for AstraZeneca's shareholder greed and progress it seems, but it sure as hell isn't the job of the European taxpayers to prop these guys up. Honestly i find it embarassment that a company that has been all about bragging about growth these last 5 years now complains they aren't competitive enough because they aren't getting enough free money.

The problem with the Euro and why it's so stable is that its supply is tightly controlled. If there is to be any Euro vs USD to be widely used in world markets for trade, more Euros have to be made available worldwide for countries to use. Such an increase of supply will have destabilizing effects in the economy and will be more challenging to keep stable, as now the ECB must consider the trade happening with Euros wordwide and not just eurozone trade in its currency supply control.

Additionally, the EU would face less competitive exports, which is one issue currently faced by the US that Trump is trying to fix because he doesn't understand economics, but can't.

Overall the EU would require a much more robust financial asset trading and regulation infrastructure to handle being a world reserve currency.

It's not just whoever currency is the top dog, a world reserve currency requires a finely adjusted economic policy that the ECB must be prepared for.

The worst country on planet Earth. The lowest of the low. A nation of evil demons from hell.

They have the death penalty. Imho any country with the death penalty is primitive and inadequate in terms of law. It's that solution for when your legal system is unable to rehabilitate criminals or keep the population safe otherwise. There's a reason why most countries with the death penalty are struggling poor African, middle eastern and south east asian nations. Some edge cases on developed countries too, of which Japan is one.

Only with guerrilla tactics against the US army, like Vietnam or the Taliban. They would still be occupied. No army in the world can stop a US offensive. They invested a lot in order to make it so. Fighting the US on a conventional war style is suicide.

The real pain to the US would come in the form of trade sanctions and loss of military allies in the EU and elsewhere in the democratic world. It would take a few years, because the EU and the US are pretty interconnected. Nato would probably be dead in the water.

After that it's speculation that US enemies would seize the opportunity of their isolation. The lack of trade would severely impact revenues and Americans would be in for the wildest depression of US history, with a likely forecast of IRA style civil war between Democrats and Republicans. If Greenlanders kept at it, they would eventually take the region back.

The US isn't a dictatorship, it's a democracy. Democracies don't usually fare well on offensive land grab wars for very long. So the US would either let go of Greenland with a new, sane president or become a dictatorship eventually. Lots of ifs in this scenario but taking Greenland would cause a lot of hurt for the US undoubtedly.

Top quality comment. Developing Russia into a strong nation would be a century long effort and would require a complete change in way of thinking.

If anything, they only expanded their cannon fodder doctrine to their economy as well. Russia will never be a great nation by itself. They will only be one by taking great nations next to it. Putin knows this and it is what i suspect the reason for these senseless wars. Even the atomic bomb is useless to them if nobody attempts to go into Russia. Brickwalling them economically and militarily will lead them to degenerate and die, owing to their self destructive policies, which is why Putin is so against a defensive organization forming around them. It's why he's so invested in Donald Trump to turn around the already forming brickwall.

It was never about the range of the nukes, intentions of the US or the alleged offensive intentions of NATO that never existed. It's purely and simply because if Russia doesn't take land to exploit from people who actually can carry out meaningful progress and development, they degenerate as a country. Their doctrine is self destructive and they have never known any better.

Wonderful, a separation from the US by the EU within my lifetime. I hate Trump but this is such a blessing.

No more supporting genocides, no more sensless peer wars, no more helping create high volume refugee crises, no more 20 year long wars on weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist, no more "heroically" deposing dictators to put extremist terrorist groups in their place and giving them tons of ready to use military equipment. No more random terrorist attacks from disgruntled extremist groups as revenge for random meddling going on since the 80s for cheaper oil prices. No more association with the country that detains people and tortures them without charges in illegally occupied land. No more threats of invasion by a military ally.

No more US influence. That's how I'd prefer it.

Yet no developed country with high taxation on high income earners and women in the workforce has ever managed to even come close to the success the US had back then. Something you see, for instance, in several wealthy European countries. No, that's not why. They had an entire continent of developed but destroyed countries paying off humongous loans under the Marshall's plan and similar investments thereafter.

Yeah it's true but they also always kinda sucked militarily. Today, they're struggling against Ukraine. Their peak was during cold war soviet era and even then, they got their ass handed to them by the Mujahideen, which is seen as the event that broke them up. In ww2 they struggled against Finland and just barely made it out of their fight with Germany still a country. Only because the nazis were too confident and got into a two front war. In ww1 the eastern front was basically Russia stacking up defeats. Before that they got their ass kicked by Japan. In Napoleonic times, France handed Russia several defeats, even with other countries helping it. In pre Napoleonic times, again, just Russian defeat after Russian defeat.

It's just a matter of fact that for as long as Russia has existed, they have always been a big unmaterialized threat. Even far back in the congress of Vienna in 1814 everyone was already assuming Russia was going to industrialize and how powerful Russia will become and in the end.... nothing.

I seriously don't think Europe needs even half of what the US has, even to face Russia. Nobody does, US military expenditure is ridiculous. I also think Russia is only still a country because no country in history ever wanted to occupy undeveloped tundra. Even the mongols only sorta occupied it by asking them for tribute and leaving them mostly alone.

Should Europe become complacent ? No, but seriously all Europe needs is a half decent unified army and a cooperating industral military complex for domestic use to go with it and i don't really think Russia will ever be that big of a threat.

Hard disagree that we're better off with relations restored. Even if Trump was not in the white house, the current internal political situation in the US is a powder keg ripe for abuse.

The US helped Europe in post war but it made enormous amounts of money with it. Why do you think in the 50s and onward Americans had a massive a massive golden age of prosperity where you could support a full household on a highschool diploma which led to a massive baby boom ? It was all piggybacking on the massive loans Europe took to rebuild itself.

Did they have to do it ? No, but if you know anything about Americans is that they love money. They didn't do it out of the kindness of their hearts or because they feel Europe is such an important ally, they did it purely and exclusively for money. They wanted money and Europe could give it. When matters of money align, and we both stand to profit, no issues there - we should cooperate with Americans. But make no mistake, everything the US does is for its own benefit and nobody else's and if they don't stand to gain anything from cooperating, they will throw their allies under the bus first chance. Americans must be kept at arms length at all times.

They are not European allies, they have never been European allies, we just stood to gain together in the past. It was profit, pure and simple.

Gonna be honest, i haven't agreed with that in 20 years, on account that the US can and will fuck over any ally it has if that has the slightest marginal gain for them. Any time the wind blows a different way, the US will throw all their allies under the bus. They are a greedy nation and poor allies.

They've spied on the EU, they applied tariffs on the EU, they have threatened the EU with invasion after we helped them in their fruitless war in the middle east and had to deal with the migrant crises that resulted from it basically alone ? Now we have to deal with meddling in democratic elections? Never again, i say. We go at it alone, we trade, but that's it.

Damned instant gratification tiktok generation. Can't even wait patiently for things anymore.

I hear Obama is working on it. He promised he would close it. I hear he even signed an executive order. But if he can't do it, I'm sure Biden can. One of the Democrat presidents since Bush opened it 25 years ago ought to be able to do it, for sure. Like what are the odds that in 25 years no president who said they would close Guantanamo bay would be able to do it ?

I know the democratic party has shown a huge amount of incompetence by losing to Trump. Twice. But no way they would let that slide for 25 years, right?

If someone invented a machine to turn orphan children into garden fertilizer, you know Deutsche Bank would find a way to invest in it.

Those guys are not just evil, they're dumb too.