The differences in regional accents between say local Dublin English and the Supra regional Dublin accent (i.e. without even leaving the city) are reasonably large. I dunno what italian dialectal differences is, but Englishes are often very large city.
I'm not saying it's impossible; Trainspotting, for example, is mostly written in phonetic Scottish english. Many english speakers find it difficult to read though, for precisely that reason…
It's actually worse than this; you'd need centralised control over pronunciation as well. Otherwise, would a speaker of local Dublin english spell tree and three the same? And should a speaker of South Eastern Hiberno-English spell three and tree differently, even though the difference in their t and th is indistinguishable to most speakers of British English?
The lack of exact correspondence between spelling and pronunciation is a feature, not a bug.
This is interesting, but I suspect Maersk's work on ammonia/Methanol engines may beat it to decarbonising shipping. Interestingly Maersk Oil tried using wind power a few years ago - iirc they found it got about a 10% reduction in fuel usage, which is not nothing, but it very far from perfect…
>If we ever want to get close to the dream of an European Federation we need to get the Army done.
If we want an EU army, we need a single EU foreign policy first. Otherwise who decides when to use it?
And if we have a single EU foreign policy, how do we deal with NATO? Do state that are non-aligned just have to suck it up? How do we deal with France's military adventures in Africa? Do the countries that object to them have to suck it up and Françafrique quickly collapse? What's the EU position on the Carlingford Lough Dispute? Is Imia in Greece, or not?
> Then maybe some EU equivalent of the FBI (no Interpol doesn't cut it, something with trained men with guns and bugs and all, and EU only).
This bit is ongoing; The European Public Prosecutor is the first step in this, and frontex are already armed. Note that despite the EU having armed forces, the oversight mechanisms for them are, so far, atrocious. Perhaps we should fix those before expanding to an army?
> Even a possible future improvement of the relationships between Europe and Russia is contingent on this: we need to be able to talk with Russia without the US sitting at the table, and to have the option to also act against the interests of the US. Which, frankly, don't really coincide that much with that of Europe anymore.
Do you have a course of action that you think we should be pursuing that we cannot currently? I can't think of one, but it may exist. And if you do, is it one that would command support in all EU states, or is the first step getting foreign policy to move to QMV? And if that's the case, how do you plan to win a referendum in Ireland to (effectively) abolish Irish neutrality?
Scotland, and NI. Which are 2/3 of the constituent "kingdoms" that were united to form the "United Kingdom".
Of course, it might not happen, but odds are rather better, in both cases, than they were pre Brexit.
Ninja Edit: This isn't to try and minimise the importance of Wales, just a recognition that at the time of the creation of the UK, the famous Encyclopaedia Britannica entry (For Wales, see England) wouldn't have been controversial in most of the UK. But even in Wales, Plaid have done very well, and become much more radical, as a result of Brexit.
Firstly they didn't get free trade - there are tariffs, rules of origin, and a lack of equivalence for SPS & product safety rules. The last one is especially egregious currently, because the UK still has exactly the same agricultural rules it did when it was a member.
Secondly, there is now a customs border in the UK. That's a fairly gigantic offensive ask for the E.U., which they largely succeeded in.
Thirdly, the UK got significantly less freedom on state aid than it wanted (which is of course, not surprising, given that the freedom they wanted was "We do whatever we want").
They got control over immigration. Of course, as a consequence of this, so did we, and if you read the UK press, they're currently finding out that that's a thing that cuts both ways (and they're not massively happy about this).
Worth noting: this kind of rule is both normal, & legal in both IE & UK. The idea that this wasn't the case somewhere sounds weird (although nice!) to my European ears.
> The fact that other countries manage to be outside the EU and do just fine.
This is the wrong way of thinking about things. Yes, other countries manage to be outside the EU, and do fine (albeit, at least in Europe, most of those doing fine have close links to the EU). But, those countries don't start from a position of being tightly integrated into the European economic system.
No. The example of a giffen good given is a high calorie food, that's exceptionally low status. Thus, when its price falls, people will demand less of it, as they can afford to replace some of their consumption of that food with more expensive, better food. Workers replacing some proportion of their bread or potato intake with meat, as the price of that bread or potato intake drops, say.
The idea is that the good is the lowest quality way of fulfilling some need - so people buy it because they can't afford anything else.
I worked in a McDonalds for six months. The money was rubbish, but that aside, I quite enjoyed it. There's a sense of camraderie in that kind of job that you don't get in more well paying jobs, it's easy to be social with your co-workers, and actually, I kind of enjoyed making burgers.
None of those things make up for the giant differential in income, and predictability of hours though. And McDonalds does lack the occasional super interesting problem you get in IT - but day to day the actual job wasn't a lot worse.
Init scripts are code though. I mean, they're code that's mostly boiler plate, but they're still code - I can do arbitary things in them, reasonably unconstrained by their stated purpose.
I'm not saying it's impossible; Trainspotting, for example, is mostly written in phonetic Scottish english. Many english speakers find it difficult to read though, for precisely that reason…