Lol ! you are the perfect example. in what universe one race can flout all existing laws, an as a consequence the other race is stuck with more laws, and it had many more to comply to begin with?
where I live, there are bike only lanes physically separate from car lanes. I am more likely to spot Godzilla reading a sport magazine at my cocktail bar than a cyclist using them.
for a start, all those who use a racing cycle will never use a cycle lane. it's not as clean a car lane, where the traffic gets rid of pebbles, leaves and other residue on the lane. As purists, they are loathe to mount any front lights, back lights and so forth. the rest, the "recreational cyclists", are even worse.
I can on a humane level understand your instinct to protect the weak, but when there are laws for that, everybody is expected to follow them, especially if they make sense: Being visible in the dark, when you are a cyclist, it's not something people should be reminded of. So I am interested in your opinion:if I hit a cyclist who is dressed to be invisible, in a dark road with a separate cycle lane, and he's going in the wrong direction, at what speed society thinks that morons like that should pay my car instead of the other way around? that's why I use an onboard camera. People have been hardwired that provided that they are perceived as doing the "right thing", it's always someone else's fault.

lucky you. I live in Italy, where usage is low, but authorities have an hardon to increase bike usage. Pity that in their enthusiastic laissez faire attitude they do not enforce any kind of behaviour on cyclists, so in the dark you simply try to avoid dark shapes against a darkish background. Tonight, out of about twenty bikers, 1 (one) had a working light set but he was cycling on the wrong side, the rest were practically invisible, without even reflectors, and two were cycling in the dark side by side. some were handling their cell phones at the same time of course.
I do expect my investment in an onboard camera to pay off, unfortunately, when one of these bumbling fools gets too darn close for comfort. Sorry, but stupidity should pay a price in real life. Why should I get stuck with the bill because I drive carefully and you do not?

Actually, the Germans seem to be looking at Germany with horror: Der Spiegel, before the new energy law was passed, published a statistics in which it showed that Solar, one of the sacred cows of sustainable energy, had produced next to zero in a six month period including the winter. Moreover, no one has published a viable estimate of the costs of upgrading the energy trasmission network to cope with the high volatility/low energy production density of a system overwhelmingly based on renewables.
anyway, in the meantime German industry is talking with its shoes: new chemical plants are based in the USA, not Germany. of course, plaudits to the Germans for being more ecological, but I cannot but remember that the lowest energy footprint if you look at Earth from space is North Korea, not actually a place attracting droves of ecologically minded citizens from all over the world.

you cannot, as per testimony by the company in the antitrust investigation. I do wonder how to translate "schmucks" in legalese.

My father was a village MD, and we talked at lenght about this, so here goes:

1. yes, and that's why the Placebo effect is largely ineffective on the medical professionals;
2.Sadly, increasing price is one of the things that correlates with placebo effects;
3. Emphatically no, but there is not a real need for specific "placebo"medicaments: lots of active principles help lower the symptoms, all the while not doing anything much, and they are mostly cheaper than "alternative" medicine.

P.S.: as to point 2, there is a solution: putting a reasonably big price tag on the box and telling the patient that 90% of it is borne by the insurance, since it's so effective.

Actually, this has been tried in Italy, and it works at 50%

The 50% not working: reducing pollution. statistics in the city where I live showed that the reduction was way below targets. people organized, and most of the people commuting had already organized before, using trains, metro and the like (they were pissed at the limitation nonetheless)

The 50% working: the powers that be decided that it was a huge success, and that it was a matter of scale (i.e., too few days of alternate plates), and anyway it was a symbolic gesture. Even this way, the measure was scrapped here for good two years ago.

Nah, the actual event would be obscured by an insane amount of paperwork.

Hypersonic missiles are mostly different from conventional, high mach number missiles for their operating height. they are the ultimate bombers or recon planes , not the ultimate missiles, since things like the SSN 22 sunburn are operational now, and can go mach3+ at low altitudes.
remember that in the last phases of the operational life of the SR 71 Blackbird, their payload was a high mach number drone.

This is not a tax to promote French content. If anything, over the world youtube has done more to promote local content than any government institution, simply by being there.
BUT, it is a convenient tax to promote government institutions, stuffed with well paid bureaucrats, that as an hobby and with no prospect of return on capital, spend money on politically approved content.
One convenient riposte could be "sure, we'll pay this tax. But let's do it this way. first year, you get the money you want. The year after, promoted content should gross on the open market at least the institution funding. if it does not reach the objective, all salaries will be capped at the median wage. if that's not enough to reach parity with gross sales,wages at the institution would be proportionally cut."

Italy has both government approved TV channels, and a similar institution promoting Italian film productions. This content gets rave reviews, especially by involved parties, and it never produced anything that any foreigner (or Italian, for that matter) would remember. BUT, If I whistle some Sergio Leone soundtrack in Tibet, anyone would recall the film.

Same as before:tax authorities do NOT tax the car. they tax the buyer on the transaction, and there's some form of "possession tax". that's not a tax on assets. If it were a tax on the car, a car owned for example by a deceased penniless owner would still pay tax, and above all, it would be economically capable of paying such tax. but it does not: even taxes related on car possession tax the owner, not a car.

Bear in mind that these kind of stamp duties bear no relation of the use of public resources that using a car entails: If I want to tax for that, I'd tax the fuels, and that's exactly what governments do. when they do anything else, like "taxing cars based on engine size", they are simply meddling in people choices unrelated to use of resources and so on. I think that it's "politically convenient" to set up a labor intensive organization to collect and check a taxation which could and is more efficiently collected in another way, and above all it is unrelated to usage, income of the owner, efficiency gains and so on.

It's a common error in European fiscal policy that assets can be taxed. In reality only financial savings and income are taxed, and the final percentage applied is variously disguised as "capital gains tax", or other quibbles.
to clarify further: for an asset to be taxed, in my small world of financial analyst, it must either produce a taxable financial income, which is then taxed, or it must be an acceptable mean of exchange with no or negligible frictional costs. Houses are only an indexation parameter in taxes, since no tax authority whatsoever accepts a lien on 10 square feet as payment: they want hard cash. If the owner-occupier of a house had the opportunity or willingness to put the house in a separate company, it would be clearer still: the company would never make one cent, and it would be taxed on a fictional rent, which by itself is part of the owner's income. Therefore, the owner's income is taxed twice.
So, on bitcoins, the problem is magnified: if it is a mean of exchange, like banknotes, by itself it should not be taxed. the relevant transactions could be taxable, but not the means of exchange: after all, if I buy a car by bank draft or money transfer I do not pay either X or Y depending on how I paid. the effort of the authorities is to preserve the monopoly on fiat currency, that's it.

went through that with my mother. she went through a bout of being insane, but not enough not to ask me to kill her. And I had to say I could not, while both she and I knew it was not the case. Thankfully, she passed away relatively quickly, but I do not think there are crimes bad enough to warrant this as a penalty.

Here in Italy, the only form of broadcast HDTV content is via pay channels. I see them stealing a page out of the mobile phone companies, and include the TV in their contract, so that the early exit penalty would be paying off the TV. they get more consistent revenues, and the HDTV producers "Eat" the retailing margin, or they split.
Only problem, as a consumer, would be if they get the producers to include the ability "brick" the TV remotely (for non payment, for instance) and/or include some proprietary encryption.

that's exactly the case. the judiciary in Italy have given an enormously lax interpretation of abuse of law, to the extent that it is in the sole and retrospective interpretation of the tax authorities to say what the law actually intended years ago. Mind you, that leads to byzantine tax laws, since the legislator has no interest whatsoever to do it right the first time.

I am italian, I am not a tax expert but have been involved in these things for professional purposes, and I think that this is the usual govvie blackmail.
Apple does not produce anything in Italy; the local subsidiary is involved in marketing, and own and operates a relatively small number of own brand stores. By "own brand", read:
1. the company selling the goods is really Apple;
2. it always will have its European headquarters in the most favourable tax place, and no, it will not be Italy. deal with it.

so, what is Apple really doing in Italy? practically nothing that it could not do on line: delivering standardized goods to customers. No personalizations, no customer service. So, in a pinch, Apple could leave Italy altogether, tell my daughter to buy the new Iphone on their internet site, free delivery to the home by UPS, and show Italian tax authorities the finger. Results? LESS tax revenues in Italy. Smart, uh?

For those not aware, the real swindle is in Ireland: profits of the Irish subsidiary, which would normally be taxed at an outrageous 12,5% Irish tax rate, are trasferred tax free to Bahamas. So the Irish would have two grounds to do something, because that's the de facto legal residence of the subsidiary, and because Apple would not probably get a better deal elsewhere.