Merkel’s position on refugees has been, and still is more liberal than any English speaking country - she was for example opposed to caps on refugee arrivals, saying that human need had no cap, and that helping refugees was a moral imperative. The reality is though, that she doesn’t have a majority government, and she…

To be fair, AfD is not popular in Germany. They garner a minority of votes, which always goes to some extreme right-wing party - and the refugee crisis has buoyed their support in the last election (somewhere around 15%). None of the other major political parties will work for them out of principle, and even the…

By basically every metric, the average German is better off than the average American. Wage and benefits are immensely better for the average person, there’s public and private healthcare so everyone is covered, education is free, you get like a month of holidays even if you’re a junior employee, public infrastructure…

As a foreigner, it’s pretty crazy that Americans can’t register and vote at the polls. What’s this “in advance” nonsense? :/

Today in Berlin a crazy guy ran into a cathedral and started attacking people with a knife (European gun laws), but was stopped when police shot him in the leg.

The point is, when you train your police for 2-3 years before you deploy them, you get better results.

In the U.S. do they have “residents only” signs for roads? I imagine that could be one option – just really heavy signage, city permits for residents who live on that street, and periodic police checks to ticket non-residents using that road?

When I saw the picture, I was convinced it was somebody climbing on the tree and hanging by their arms... because even though it looks like a lynching, there’s no way a painting of a lynching would be allowed in a school right?

Ugh...

There are Canadian companies, that literally truck parcels across the US border to send them cheaper.

USPS is great, and I think it’s a thing that foreigners (like myself) are totally blown away by, and jealous of.

Karl Marx’s was dead well before the GDR and totalitarian communism existed; and his observations on capital and class are pretty fundamental throughout all of the humanities and social sciences...

When studying in a German university in the recent past, we read Marx. All university students probably do at some point…

Yeah – I mean I don’t think there’s active malice/corruption, but just structural inefficiency/structural implications which facilitate a lack of knowledge.

It’s bad, because I think everyone has good intentions (with the exception of some shady contractors, sure), but the result is a system that’s very wasteful.…

Yeah, as another user (Honron King) point out, it seems to happen in civilian contracts as well.

I think frankly, the problem is that management in these agencies think in a very isolated way about their unit/department only, and so they’re not thinking about total costs, or the business responsibility of the whole…

“Anti-Fa” has really been a longtime movement in Europe, where you have established left-wing political networks/squats/punks/political parties/protest groups where Anti-Fa arose from in the early 80s. If you’re in major cities like Berlin, you’ll even see banners hung from buildings... which is not to say that it’s…

Surely you have other regional flags?

Ugh that Twitter comment.

If someone’s Twitter handle is “7th Panzer Division,” I think it’s pretty safe to say we can ignore whatever they post.

In Canada they exist in a small way but carry negative stigma. In Germany they also do barely exist but with nazi connotations.

From the top though you can’t see their relation to the handlebars, so it does it look really like his elbow is at the side... but his whole body contorting to counter-pull against the pedal strokes. The sprinters are standing but also trying to drop the profile of their upper bodies as low as possible, which is gonna…

I mean if you’re gonna race like that, you either end up with the weird and sometimes farcical “no drafting” triathlon bike races where people are technically forced to give up to passes, or you may as well just skip to individual time trialing.

I dunno, it’s hard to say in this case. I hope their jury is confident in…

South Korea has a new president which has promised that while he is pro-US, that Seoul should be able to “say no to the Americans.” The new President is a former special forces soldier who became a human rights lawyer, and was tortured by the older SK state. He has promised a more conciliatory approach to dealing with…

The man was born in, and died in the US. He’s associated strongly with American architecture in competition with Soviet architecture. While he did make the Montreal Biosphere, and he did live in Canada for a pair of years in his youth... he was not Canadian.

There are entire university departments dedicated to urban planning and design, and America, though young as a country, has made contributions to the history of architecture with greats like Buckminster Fuller. American design experts are in international demand, creating environmentally friendly plans for quickly…