It's 8€/hour because that's a reasonable, although still quite low, rate for the living costs in Germany, as well as a reasonable number compared to the other nations in central Europe. Now if there were no taxes and stuff, then perhaps ...

As a nation we hold human rights, especially human dignity, in high regards, at least that's what it says in our constitution. Yeah, that might be a flawed economic strategy, but it's in the first article of the German constitution. There are also laws that outlaw immoral low payment, but since "immoral low" isn't defined wages can be as low as 1€ per hour, because that's what the government apparently perceives as a dignified payment.

They do not outlaw jobs, they outlaw payment that is too low.


Those jobs will still exist, and will still be the same. It's not even a case of "immigrants steal our jobs", since most of those aren't jobs your regular German is willing to do anyway.

The previous German government consisting Christ Democrats and Liberals always opposed changes that might endanger jobs. Therefore they give large companies subsidies for energy costs, because they might built their next facility outside of Germany, which would mean less jobs, less taxes, no more economic growth. After all economic growth is their holy grail, working 40 hours a week, having plenty of buying power on their low salaries, which does check out because of rather low prices of inferior goods.

But things have changed a little bit after the last elections. The liberals didn't make the cut to get into the parliament, mostly because of their bad reputation from massive Lobbying, and their prior failure in the Bavarian elections, which caused a nationwide backlash. The Christ Democrats, having lost their longstanding coalition partner and only about a third (34.1%) of all votes, were faced with three left-wing Parties; the Social Democrats, The Left and the Green Party. All of them wanted minimum wages and tax increases for top earners. While The Left and the Green also had a number of very inconvenient ideas for the German economy, they weren't willing to give up, like 'not build' more lignite power plants, to 'not stop' subsidizing renewable energies, like it is still done with conventional energies, the Social Democrats were willing to compromise.
In the end a coalition between Christ and Social Democrats was formed, they agreed on a minimum wage, which doesn't adapt to inflation, they agreed on no tax increases and they agreed on the continuation of sodomizing the environment. They've found a new enemy which is killing, it's called "energy turnaround". If employers have to pay higher wages for workers they surely can't be brought up to pay energy costs as well - their internal logic. Therefore they want to put a stop for solar and wind power, promote energy from lignite plants, since there are a lot of lignite deposits here in Germany. Lignite extraction could create jobs on a large scale, which is good for the economy, never mind the COx emissions, China and India doesn't care much about that as well, so why should we do? (again, their logic not mine)

There is no minimum wage here in Germany, at least not currently.
There is a number of exploitation of cheap labour, mostly from east European countries, some say it's the only reason why our economy is the strongest in Europe. It's basically modern slavery, they earn 5€ per hour, which for them is a lot of money, but would be ridiculously low for German living costs including insurance, health care and other expenses.
Workers in adjacent countries, like France, lose their jobs because their parent companies rather have goods shipped to Germany and processed there. Then shipped back again, because it's way cheaper than processing goods locally in France, where the minimum wage is almost twice as much (9.4something€ per hour).

Our Lobbyist Kiss-asses, err, I meant to say politicians, fear that minimum wages will ruin the economy of Germany, will destroy jobs. Now that a minimum wage (around 8€) was promised to be introduced in 2016 from the coalition of Germany's upcoming government, we'll see how things will develop.

I never thought that the reason was because of freedom of expression, that there was this single, one reason, that served to hold everything together.
Europe is a lot older than the USA, has a lot more historical events, that have divided it quite often. This history defined Europe, rather than philosophy.

Before the 3rd Reich, in the Republic of Weimar freedom of speech was almost as important as in the USA. Hitler used this for his demagoguery.

Now we know that we have to allow bad speech and should counter it with good speech. This also happened in Germany. The true left wing parties, that hadn't been usurped by Hitler, like he did with the NSDAP, spoke against Hitler, made fun of the situation, never believed that he could win the elections with his blatant racism.
But here it comes where freedom of speech failed at that time. To counter bad speech with good speech you need listeners, people that actually want to hear that good speech, who are willing to spread this opinion. But at that time there weren't many people that did want to listen to the good speech. The reasons for this may go back to the end of the 1st World War.

Today, as a German, I wish that we could get rid of the last remnants from WW2 that restrict free speech today. It might have been useful in the past to get rid of Nazi war criminals and supporters as fast as possible, but today most of these people are already dead. Hardly anyone of the holocaust survivors are still alive and able to get deeply offended by someone who tries to deny the horrors they had to live through. Soon this law will become obsolete.

According to more recent reports (German) the Court was fooled by this alleged law firm. They've presented the incident to the court as peer to peer file-sharing of copyright protected data, the Court ruled accordingly.

Drone Pizza Delivery

This videoclip has been around since a few months.

(beware of sarcasm)
Yes, I completely forgot. The internal combustion engine and therefore the automobile was invented in the USA, so was the liquid fuel rocket, that opened up space exploration and created the necessity to develop microelectronics. The metric system, also invented by the USA, while not practiced in the USA, also became the standard scale in science for a reason. The USA then again didn't invent the nuclear bomb, never used it against humans in any war, because that would be horrible.

Can we stop this pointless penis-weaving now? Comparing a multitude of cultures this way just doesn't work. There's a lot of history and art in all parts of the world, the difference here might be that it is preserved in a different way.
For the technological part, Europe played a vital role in technological advancement of the world, then Nazi Germany and the 2nd World War came, threw Europe a few decades into the past. It is a fact that the Old World, not only Europe, contributed a lot to our endeared western values. This doesn't man that it couldn't have happened on the Americas as well, it just happened this way.

But well, that's European history, and as a European who am I to criticize the superior historical knowledge of an apparently random american individual? Now I'm going back to kissass Islamic terrorists.

At least they call themselves "Liberals". We have plenty of parties that focus on social and environmental topics. There's no need for our 'Liberals' to be much concerned with these problems.
I could write an essay about what they've achieved in the last decades, about what I think was wrong, but I don't think that this is the right place.

It's the same crap as over here in Germany.

Rightwing politicians (our Liberals are right wing conservatives) complain about distortion of the energy market, wanting to cut off all renewable energy sources from subsidy while they still provide a lot of money for oil, coal and nuclear power. While the costs of renewable energies are openly dumped on the citizens of Germany, there are a lot of hidden costs for coal, oil and nuclear power, like tax deductions, government funded permanent repository and insurance in the case of catastrophes, which makes the funding of nuclear power almost as expensive as all renewable energy sources combined.

Look at it this way, with renewable energy sources a lot of the energy generation is in the hands of the public, private, independent persons. Bigger power suppliers never liked the concept of independence because an independent customer is a bad customer. They can afford high quality lobbing, convincing politicians that conventional energy sources are far superior, create jobs and therefore need more subsidies.

Another thing is that renewable energy sources encourage research and development of better energy storage, a good longterm development for humanity, which also isn't needed for oil, coal and nuclear energy, since oil, coal and uranium 'are' stored energy.

Well, you're partially right, but still neglecting a few factors that come into play, like education, planned parenthood, and human rights for women. These apparently are important factors for population growth.
You can already observe that population in highly industrialized nations with solid education is dwindling, here in Germany the average family has less than two children, and some of our right-wing (nutjobs) politicians fear that immigrants will outgrow our population within a few decades.

Here might be an interesting video about the population growth, although it's somewhat about religion it points out what appear to be the more important factors: Hans Rosling: Religions and Babies

Therefore I don't see a reason to stop vegetarianism, because it would make things worse, there is evidence to the contrary that population will explode once again if we increase efficiency. As long as we keep people educated, give women rights, don't have high mortality rates that encourage to 'produce' a lot of children, this might well work, and does have better prospects than producing more and more cheap meat, growing more and more food for animals which needs more and more artificial fertilizer, that requires a huge amount of energy to bind all that Nitrogen plants want.

Yes, I have to agree, it's certainly not bought. Burning fossil fuels does seem to be way more sensible.
(beware of sarcasm)

To be honest, I don't live in the US, I live in Germany and use wood burning since years, about 10m^3 per year. Here in the south of Germany we have massive sustainable forestry, leaving over tons of firewood every year. It's cheap, most independent and my emissions in any way are lower compared to using oil or electric energy for heat in winter.
I have to agree that there is a problem with fine-particle pollution, hence the new regulations, but some of these regulations just appear to be insane. For example here there are regulations for COx emissions, although there should be no net yield for burning a tree, since it pulled its carbon content from the atmosphere anyway. Yet our government is in favour of building new lignite power plants, shutting down subvention for wind and solar power, which again does seem sensible, doesn't it?

The equation was to clarify things. Nobody expects from a 1st grader to fully grasp the concept and to be able to set up a an algebraic equation.

Other than that this kind of math is what we did in the 1st grade in Germany in the 90's, probably not 'the solve for x' part. Well, in our case the equation would have been: 5+( )=6; fill in the missing number.

But solving an algebraic equation is easy for must students, the problem is with visualized problems and word problems. Because here different 'problems' arise for the student like proper depiction and choice of words for the age and on top of that there is reading comprehension.

Because 6 is the "whole" number.

The equation would be:1+1+1+1+1 + x = 6; solve for x.

The misleading thing is that the '6' is on a cup and not in the form of six pennies.

Other than that I don't fully understand the fuzz about this. I've had questions in exams that wouldn't allow me to solve the problem from elementary school up towards my masters degree. Sometimes there are mistakes, for me it was that a vital information was missing to solve the problem. The difference is that these are custom made tests by the professors, sometimes only a few hours before the exam (from what I know), and these standardized tests ought to be a 'little bit' more refined.

Yes, atheism doesn't imply good behaviour, it doesn't even imply education, but neither does it lead to loss of all morals, a claim I've encountered among religious people.

So this puts all atheists in a bad light, right? Because you know, all atheists are alike. (beware of sarcasm)
Communist atheists killed a lot of people for being religious because it didn't agree with their communist ideals of society, not because they were atheists and followed a doctrine to exterminate all who believe in any religion.

A major problem with most religion on the other hand is, that their followers are duty bound to show other humans the way to enlightenment. A good believer doesn't keep to himself, he tries to help other people. You might say people who do this are extremists, lack common sense, but I say: They simply follow their scripture, truly believe what it says.

In the end it is: And people aren't immune from being the bad guy either: People killed a lot of people for any reason.