u/trollercoaster — trollercoaster

The thing is that people who want to will drink regardless. If it's entirely illegal, they'll do it in secret. If it's legal, there is at least some chance of supervision. Just look how Americans behave the moment they turn 21. And what they will do to get alcohol when younger. (forged identity documents for example, having a fake ID document is considered pretty normal among US teenagers) That's what you get for infantilising your youths and young adults and banning them from drinking entirely.

Look where the 1968 APO ended up. They got corrupted by the time they were able to occupy powerful positions.

They start out non corrupt due to lack of opportunity. As soon as they gain power, they will become increasingly corrupted. The nature of politics strongly favours ruthless careerists, and in the end that leads to the large and powerful parties mostly consisting of people who would sell their own grandmother for personal profit.

The current system has some fatal flaws: It is reliably and repeatedly failing at holding politicians accountable for their actions and forcing them to actually do what they promised before the election. It also strongly favours parties and politicians backed by people and corporations with deep pockets.

Unless there is accountability, the system will ultimately fail. Unfortunately, those who could introduce such accountability, are exactly the same people who greatly profit from there being none.

I don't buy that they are "willing" anymore. I've been lied to and betrayed by far too many politicians on every governmental level, and from all kinds of different parties, and as long as they face exactly zero consequences for essentially defrauding their voters, this won't change.

How would people not lose faith in a perverted form of democracy, where pretty much all you can vote for are different collections of lying self serving bastards employed by the ultra rich in order to fuck over ordinary people for their profits?

There is a reason why free trade with the EU is tied to regulatory alignment and the customs union.

There are differences. The Posh Taliban in Saudi Arabia and Qatar do have lots of money and oil and gas.

!Same procedure as last time?

And once more, the mighty island nation of Global Britain sets out to achieve the impossible: Entirely free trade with the EU without joining the customs union. And, of course, free movement only for goods.

I didn't have a re-run of the Brexit comedy on my bingo card and am mightily annoyed, for my strategic popcorn reserves aren't up to that, thanks to lack of foresight on my behalf, and the global political situation.

This is looking like it's going far better than "tax the rich", which failed.

People have their priorities backwards.

Oh yes, definitely. *Die Sendung mit der Maus* is a national treasure.

Only on paper. In practice, the genitive is virtually extinct, much to the despair of a few grossly overrated zealots.

Practically, German has only three cases, though, even if some uptight formalists (who also likely use a pair of pincers to pull up their pants) will greatly bemoan the simple fact of life that the genitive does not exist in the wild.

Don't worry about the formalities too much. Read lots of German, listen to lots of German, try to find people to speak German with, and it'll come to you naturally. Especially don't try to be too perfect. Spoken German is way more lax than the rules for written German. High German, as it is written and taught, barely exists out there as a spoken language in its pure form. The German language area has a plethora of different regional dialects, which will sneak into the spoken German of even the most fervent formal high German speaker.

Ich schick mein Kuseng der holt das ab der ist dumm.

Wo mein geld?

Was letzte Preis?

Not only that, some of the defensive plans during the Cold War were pretty destructive for the defended countries. One big part of the planned response to an all-out Warsaw Pact assault on Western Germany, for example, would have been to detonate several truckloads (in total 141) of nuclear mines on choke points along strategically advantageous routes in order to slow down the attack.

There were prepared shafts for deploying those mines on important choke points near the East German border along the most likely avenues of attack.

It's really not compensating for past mistakes, it's a symbolic fig leaf to cover up the lack of compensation. Just a bunch of empty virtue signalling to over up how many former (and new) Nazis were and still are allowed to keep going on as if nothing happened.

Heavy equipment is pretty hard to conceal during transport, there is still a lot of effort involved in evaluating and interpreting satellite images, though. Potentially those efforts can be, at least partially, be thwarted by moving around dummy equipment, or driving around in circles, with repeated unloading and loading in areas invisible to the surveillance (e.g. under a roof) in order to sow confusion about the real numbers. Anything that's small enough to be loaded into a container, or can be easily broken up into small enough parts, is quite easy to hide from direct observation. Nobody looking from the outside can tell whether a shipping container contains a bunch of Taurus Cruise Missiles, or just a lot of rubber ducks.

Of course, access to relevant paperwork will reveal pretty much anything you can think of. But that's what counter espionage is for, most countries operate entire government agencies with that task.

I guess having a secret bank account in the same tax haven creates a certain familiarity that transcends all potential political differences.