hehe, ok, you're dumb. 86.5% is deeply in the hole.
So, what is 82%
What is 102%
What is 208%
Personally i've had a house loan of 220,000 EUR when I was making 44,000 EUR a year, i.e. my debt to "gdp" was around 500%. Was I "in a deep hole"?
You don't consider 86.5% to be deeply in the hole?
Compared to 208%?
Compared to 104%?
No, I don't.
Oh, by the way, what's the figure for Germany?
82%
I could under stand a tax on money after the 1st mil at 75%,
Good. Because that's exactly what it is.
(As with all tax matters it's almost universaly misreported. The proposal is simply a new high rate band of 75% for income over 1m EUR.)
M. Hollande is old school ENA (Ecole Nationale d'Administration) which turns out highly-educated senior French bureaucrats and politicians, who, whatever else they may be, are not daft.
Not Daft? They why is he pursuing austerity, a policy which has always led to economic depression and increased debt? It is nice he restrained to blow education, but then why blowing everything else?
Uh, because of the fucking Germans.
I really hope it hasn't - at £5000/year full time, it's tuition fees are considerably lower than the £9000/yr everyone else seems to be charging for an undergraduate degree. When you take into account the student loans that everyone here takes out to pay them, lower tuition fees seem like a good way to reduce our reliance on credit.
And please never forget that the people who voted for those fees didn't pay them themselves, instead they were paid to go to university.
(AFAIR I used to get about GBP 1000 a year, not a lot even then, but I left university with a a debt of only GBP 200. <yorkshireman>Try telling that to the kids of today</yorkshireman>).
You have to understand how deeply in the hole some of these countries are
Public debt as a percentage of GDP:
Japan: 208.2% (2011 est CIA)
USA 104.1% (2011 est CIA)
France: 86.5% (2011, est Eurostat).
(Similar figures from IMF).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_debt
So, some of these countries are in a pretty deep hole. Maybe not the ones you were thinking of.
I love the sould of Paulite heads exploding in the morning.
Oh yeah, I totally forgot about when France left NATO.
You probably forgot about it because it never happened.
France left the NATO military command, it never left NATO.
(And, for those of you not keeping up with events, it rejoined the military command some time ago).
What's your alternative "solution".
Society.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
I'm not a global warming naysayer, but are humans solely to blame for this? How much of it would have happened anyway? (I'm thinking of the sun's 11-year cycle and the recent larger-than-normal volcano activity)
Um, maybe other people have already tried to answer those questions?
The answer is that the majority(*) of warming is due to human activity.
(As for the solar cycle - it's pretty obvious that an 11 year cycle can't make a 30 odd year trend).
(What "recent" larger than normal volcano activity? Also large volcanic events tend to reduce global temperatures.)
(* scientists tend not to say "all", there might be a little bit of warming coming from somewhere else).
If you are a dissident escaping from a tyranny like N. Korea or Cuba, then, yes, the US is the place to go.
You'd think so, wouldn't you.
Imagine you're running from Ghadaffi's Libya. The US would sound like a nice place to escape to. Imagine your supprise when you get waterboarded for two years then handed over to Ghadaffi's secret police for the real fun stuff.
What counts as a tyranny can change pretty fast.
Another source of the strong Swedophilia around the world, is that until a few years ago, the Swedish educational system was open to, and free of cost, to anyone applying from around the world, and accepted students purely based on academic merits. Unfortunately, this practise was not allowed within EU and discontinued some years after Sweden joined EU.
Uh?
Got some kind of source for this 'cos I can't imagine what rule would do that.
The EU insists that member states treat EU citizens no worse than citizens of the state. It says nothing about how non EU citizens are treated.
Sounds like a straight banana story to me.
The quantifiable costs and benefits are given in the IPCC report: according to the report, inaction means a possibility of losing a few percent of world GDP decades-to-a-century from now, and action means a certainty of losing a few percent of world GDP sooner than that.
Where do you see this in AR4?
Care to cite chapter and verse?
100% nuclear powered electricity generation
Unfortunately, there simply isn't enough Uranium for that.
So use thorium, dummy.
Administration: An ingenious abstraction in politics, designed to receive the kicks and cuffs due to the premier or president. -- Ambrose Bierce
