Populists only seek votes in countries where voting is standard. If you're an autocratic despot, you can be a populist in order to not be lynched by an angry mob.

I... well, yes. Having read up to get ahead of my stereotypes, I have to concede you are correct, on pretty much all counts. Thanks for the rebuttal.

Switzerland survives because its main export is untraceable (sort-of) banking. Ireland is still close to being financially untenable. Not exactly worthy models to emulate. No one is served by a race to the bottom.

And this amendment to international agreements would force countries to lower their corporate taxes to actually be desirable to companies that want to do business within it. This has as consequences that corporate tax income will remain mostly constant, since the lower taxes will be paid by more corporations, while every non-multinational company will basically be getting a tax break, thus stimulating your own nation's economy at the level where it'll do some good: The local level.

The countries it'll hurt are, for example, my own. The Netherlands isn't tax-less, but we do have corporate tax laws which make us suitable for tax avoidance.

Well, you certainly bumped up the IQ in this thread.

In addition to Germany's near strict-liability laws, which mean a driver is virtually always at fault in case of accidents with non-drivers, I'd like to point out the following:
- Most of Germany's road system is non-Autobahn. People are used to driving with restrictions. And are going to be nervously looking about to slam into them with a 100+kph speed difference.
- If you drive faster than the recommended maximum (130-140kph) and there's an accident, regardless of who caused it, your insurance company will try to blame you to at least some degree.
- They drive regular cars, with regular 5 speed gearboxes, for the most part.

That all means Germans tend, as a rule, to not go much faster than normal highway speeds, and yet pay attention more than on other roads.

If you don't report it when your lethal weapon is stolen, you deserve to go to jail.

So you told him to learn Mandarin, because he found a site confusing, and then used a Cantonese insult to drive your 'point' home. Learn French, zakkenwasser.

"about 0%" means that it isn't 0%. And these people are surrounded by infected people. Who may not have used soap or hand sanitizer anyway.

It's the same thing as herd immunity: If everyone disinfects, then you're good. If a fraction disinfects, then even that fraction is at risk simply by being surrounded by infection sources.

That's why they tried it on 148 people, and why they're posting average results, for average people. I am curious as to the outliers though.

They didn't do caloric restriction here. Apparently, a low carb diet allows people to lose weight better than a low fat diet. People ate how much they wanted. Whether it is because they ate fewer calories or because the body processes the food differently is irrelevant for the conclusion that low-fat works better.

Also, a claim of this study was that fat is *not* bad for you, and better than high carb.

They should make a book called 125 Years of German Humor. That would be the best two pages in comedic history.

Employees of companies are not legally required to be obedient. They can tell their US bosses 'no'. At which point it would be up to the discretion of the US bosses to decide to take action like firing the Irish employees, or to shrug and say 'oh well'. They are not legally obligated to fire them.

When I worked for a mobile app startup, we saw major usage spikes in Indonesia, India and the Middle East, as well as some African countries. They required data. Part of this is that they pretty much skipped the whole landline thing for the majority of the populations, so they could jump ahead on the technology curve.

I would not be surprised to see the 80% figure being true, even with the income difference.

There's law, and there's international diplomacy. If they yank him out of an embassy, every embassy is at risk of wanton search, and you can say goodbye to diplomatic immunity. If, at some point, Sweden extradites Assange to the US and there's a bit of outcry, they'll say "Oops, maybe we shouldn't have done that", and there will be no repercussions (except for Assange).

I haven't heard Sweden state that they will categorically not extradite him to the US, though.