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.

I think that in some parts, the stoves would smoke cloudier for some days, and then they would not be seen again.

... Great, now I have to build yet another Earth to get the question!

in these games, you can dress up as a petty tyrant or rogue state and get to ignore any UN sponsored regulation, unless you have an hand in designing it.

How can they be unnamed?

They are all named Johnson !!

"[...]but as far as the EU is concerned, this is all about a reduction of waste"

I wonder how many times they shuffled between Strasbourg and Bruxelles while they decided that I do not need three 15 EUR chargers.

want an economic proof that the molten salt storage is a Rube Goldberg ? there are lots of situation, predating the solar craze, where an economic way of storing and releasing energy in bulk would come in handy, and molten salt technologies date back to the late 1950ies. But no one used them, even when "Global warming" was not in the vocabulary and baseload generators were way more efficient at producing low cost energy than peak generators.
in most situation, it's better to use a generator at peak capacity 24/7, make it smaller and use storage, than have a bigger one and hover between 90% and 100%. I surmise that the Seville plant gets most of its efficiency from not using solar cells with all the attendant efficiency losses at the panel and trasmission level and use electrical energy to raise temperature in the salt, which I gather is perfectly possible technically. But that's a non sequitur: it's still a problem of energy availability.

......And, 297 times the surface, plus the added wiring etc. Only way to measure in a meaningful way is fixed cell, no concentrators, 10+ days during the equinox. Ah, do not forget diesel generators or batteries to guarantee continuous output, will ya?

problem:someone made mony using insider information, which is AFAIK a federal crime of felony;

solution: go old school and suspend trading in securities, including bonds and government bonds, from 15 minutes before a potentially market moving news dissemination, to half an hour afterwards.

this was widely used in equity markets before the socalled "liberalizations" came about. Oh, while we're at it, go back to force trading on official markets, of any securities liable to go exchanged in private hands and/or end up in instruments which end up in private hands. No dark pools, no proprietary trading , or other comparable things.
Problem solved.