You are talking about the low level corruption, that certainly isn't very common in the more developed countries (except for southern Europe, obviously). The high level corruption thrives everywhere, though.

Look like it is difficult to walk in a car-obsessed country. Even the police finds that strange.

Taxi driving is, in fact, different from personal driving. Taxi drivers drive much more than personal drivers, so the probability of an accident is higher. And since they are drivers for hire, they are responsible for the passengers. Hence the different license.

So, what exactly does the government gain? The processing fees for issuing the commercial driver license? They aren't that high, the fees usually just cover the costs of the pencil pushers.

What if he is?
Free market forces can suck very much. They lead to bubbles, crashes, front runnings and all the rest of the misery that is associated with them.

Nortel used to be worth 400 billions. Two years later only 5 billions. It still was the same company, just not as overvalued anymore. Market capitalisation doesn't show how much an enterprise is actually worth or whether it does something right or not. It only shows what the speculators currently think.

This was, in fact, a proof of concept. Freight train between China and Germany is already regular.
Trains are quite efficient. They are also way cleaner than ships, especially when using electric power.

On the russian side they use blue electrical tape, not duct tape.

Only on the US side. The russian modules use CO2, if I remember correctly.

http://www.theguardian.com/bus...

Aren't hydraulics that are pressurised with gas actually pneumatics?

And this is a statement born out of ignorance of what peak oil actually is. It is maximal sustainable production.
Tar sands won't ever get you over a peak because the oil from tar sands is difficult to extract, so it won't be possible to extract as much oil from tar sands, as there was extracted from easy to claim oil wells at their peak. You won't be possibly able to extract as much oil from the difficult sources as you had extracted it from the easy ones.
Even if you get your oil off world, you certainly won't be able to get 80 millions of barrels a day from space. Even if one very distant day in the future the transport capacity would enable humankind this feat, the humankind would not need oil by then anymore.

Supply and demand function is not magical, as you imply. Sometimes there is just no more supply, no matter how high the demand is. And sometimes the supply costs have risen so high that it would be way cheaper to find an alternative solution. Thus in any of these cases oil production would not ever reach the erstwhile peak.

USA hit their peak oil in the 1970ies in fact. Russia reached peak oil about a year ago. When the ISIS situation is over, then the cheap oil from Iraq will also be gone. Oil price will go up long term, even when they are political driven fluctuations right now.

you don't need a driving license for a horse.

you mean the crusades against the very much christian russians and czech? and since when were livonian peasants conquerors who's land had to be retaken?

3. Soviet communism is what trainwrecked most of eastern europe and several asian countries whose preexisting regimes favored heavy handed states anyway. Then there's the self-loathing cultures it created in places like sweden. I hardly call any of this a success.

Along with pushing literacy from 24% to 99.8%, sending a man into space, advancing the technology level from being more than 50 years behind the rest of the developed world to being maybe 10 years behind and doubling the life expectancy. No sir, totally not a success.