One of those things that there might be a piece of paper, but when big money wants to change streams - it will happen one way or another.

There’s no concept of chip and PIN credit cards in US? I’m fairly sure I used my European chip and PIN credit card at least on my hotel in NYC  around half a year ago with me inputting my PIN to the reader.

No idea how they will do it in US, but in Europe where the 3 German’s have been eating up the Japanese and French manufacturers for past two decades- the whole idea has been that you can actually get the quality of E-class materials for example.

It has done nothing to Mercedes brand for decades in Europe where you actually have the full lineup. Streets totally saturated with cloth seated A-class Mercs and nobody is thinking that’s a reason they would not get a A-Class or SL.

I feel like there is way too many VW’s as the world largest car manufacturer for the customers to be pretentious. Dunno if you are from US, but these kind of threads in US blogs are always so confusing where VW is painted as some kind of quirky manufacturer.  

Renault–Nissan Alliance (now Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi Alliance)?

Though, there are already tariffs on cars. The question would be what’s the problems with locals if they can’t compete even with the tariffs? It also makes it extremely hard for the likes of PSA to do the jump to the US market and establish manufacturing base there in due time. VW Group can do it with their bottomless…

That’s not quite true here in the Nordics at least. 5% of cars were AWD back in the 90's, but now slightly over 20% of cars sold example in 2016 were AWD.

Indeed. As long as there are cars, hatchbacks aren’t going anywhere in Europe. They are a convenience in many cities and don’t carry the social economic standing they seem to in US. You can be a high school graduate or a CEO driving Golf or a A class.

Renault hasn’t had much of a reason to enter US market with them being the main owner of Nissan. They rather spend their money on furthering Nissan, rather than forcing Renault, Dacia or Alpine to US.

It was so blatant in Iceland and so visible that there was no way Iceland would have not done it. Iceland had become very wealthy in 2006, but they had a real cliff on front of them went it all came down. These Icelandic banks were 10x the GDP of Iceland.

Considering soccer is the only real global sport there is - you can find anything under the sun when it comes to soccer teams, nations and their average fans. One thing that makes it so endlessly fascinating imo.

Makes sense considering soccer is physically much more taxing than basketball or baseball.

It can be mental and physical. Soccer is a marathon. Players will be physically exhausted by then end.

Metal gear always had problems with long overruns and they sank a lot of money to them. Konami have not just improved their profits on gaming side every quarter since they dropped singe players and focused on mobile and console games like PES, but even their revenue.

I like to think that on the video the car wasn’t actually invited to any of these events on the video. It just drove randomly to a fashion show red carpet and people started cheering rather than furiously shouting it to go away.

I’m not sure what does that have to do with this? Rules are pretty simple. You get caught and your achievements are void. He got caught and medals went to a people that were not using or where not caught.

You are absolutely right about the Xerox case. I would say there are still plenty of new ideas, but Apple isn’t usually the one that comes up with them and that is shown especially on their past R&D costs.

There were some articles about it in 2009 couple of years after iPhone had been released. Mostly focusing on how Nokia had missed the opportunity with the inventor being old Nokia employee, Finnish and all that.

There’s no denying Apple has changed the market and I think we are better with Apple. Though, what he is saying is that Apple isn’t an R&D company, rather takes ideas from others and that is partly true. GUI idea was stolen from Xerox PARC. Apple’s R&D costs as a whole were always been minuscule compared to the likes…