As an L2 German speaker living in Germany, I have witnessed how slight vowel length differences matter. In my native Polish, vowel length is not phonemic - unlike in German. I've recently had a situation when I pronounced the word Krokette with a long E /krokeːtə/ instead of a short E /krokɛtə/, and I had to repeat myself a few times before the seller understood what I meant. I pay a lot of attention to properly timing my words, because this seems to be the biggest barrier for others to understand me in here.
One other thing is stress placement; Polish places its primary stress on the penultimate syllabe of each word, making it probably the only Slavic language without variable stress (sentence stress is an another case). Whenever I hear Czech or Ukrainian - closely related languages - I need some extra time to post-process what has been said, and then I recognize the words that are understandable to me to a significant extent. I'm usually not able to process those in real time.
I sometimes meet foreigners who have been to Poland and learned a few phrases from the locals. Usually "How are you" is among them only because they have specifically requested this to be translated, but I've never heard this being used as a greeting in my entire life.
I'd be all up for an initiative that attempts to burst the liberal bubble which seems to reject the possibility that people have other things to do than follow the latest inclusivity trends online, but come on. You know well what this is about. Had to scroll like 3 posts down to find out that this panders to reactionary clowns[0].
If this were a protest I would expect polemic discourse, yet the "official account" is just throwing shit around and screaming with excitement when someone "gets offended"[1].
The legal minimum is 20 working days, though. The people in tech I've met in Berlin are getting anything between 26 and 30. My contract starts with 27 days and this number will be raised every year I'm working there till it reaches 30.
I'd agree that this mentality of "we don't need a trade union as IT workers" is pretty widespread, and it's not only a Polish thing - I've moved to Germany a long time ago and witnessed a works council being formed in the company I've been working for at the time. That company had a large IT department, but it was not an IT company per se and the basic workforce did unskilled labor. These were the people who initiated the process; some non-IT office staff joined the union, but I haven't heard of anyone working in IT who would take part in organizing a trade union. And this was in a country with presumably the strongest worker protection/union laws in the world.
The other thing the CEO mentioned in the email was mining industry unions - this is the prevalent view on unions in the eyes of non-unionized workforce in the country. This might be propaganda, but ask a Polish person what do they think of the coal miners and you will hear some expletives. It's common knowledge that the coal industry has long been unsustainable and the only reason it's being kept up is to gain some votes from that part of workforce.
An additional thing to know here is that the largest trade union is Solidarity, the direct successor to the original Solidarity trade union turned political movement which was the dominant force driving the democratic changes in the 80s. The movement is very politicized and heavily leans national-conservative (e.g. the official union newspaper basically reprints unfounded news and conspiracy theories), which further deepens societal divisions on the topic.
It's true that Berlin public transit has no physical fare enforcement (e.g. there are no ticket gates at subway stations), but the state operator of public transit is anything but lax on fare dodgers: the tickets are being checked randomly by undercover ticket inspectors, and every so often there's news of an inspector being violent [0]. The reality with ticket inspectors stands in stark contrast to the witty and playful online identity maintained by the BVG.
Additionally, repeated fare dodging is treated as fraud by the German law and repeated offences can land you in jail [1].
That's not really a question in a legal system in which judges are removable by a ministerial decree. The judiciary that has ruled this has been installed illegally and is literally pressed into making judgments made by the party elite - regardless if they make sense or not.
Exactly my reasoning for moving out of Poland. It's fun to watch and cheer if you are a normative citizen who will never be affected by this, but for everyone else it turns into hell sooner or later. There are multitudes of people I know who ended up under psychiatric care because it's becoming hopeless for them as the anti-modern kulturkampf gains in strength.
One other thing is stress placement; Polish places its primary stress on the penultimate syllabe of each word, making it probably the only Slavic language without variable stress (sentence stress is an another case). Whenever I hear Czech or Ukrainian - closely related languages - I need some extra time to post-process what has been said, and then I recognize the words that are understandable to me to a significant extent. I'm usually not able to process those in real time.