Atropos

Unfortunately the law does not work in this direction: It is perfectly fine under EU law if Spain treats its own companies worse than Non-Spain EU companies. Lacking a cross-border element, the EU freedoms (Freedom of services/establishment) don't apply, and I think it would be hard to classify the Spanish law as an export ban.

However the Spanish rules might constitute a restriction of competition under EU law, but since the political climate is a bit anti-Google right now, maybe it won't be investigated too closely.

You need to realize that the EU is not federal in the sense like the USA - the EU and its member states have a much more complicated relationship. The EU is a supranational entity and the EU Commission is the executive body of the EU alone. EU institutions like the EU Commission, the European Court of Justice etc. can sometimes have agendas that are NOT part of the agendas of the EU's member states.

So Point 1): Clear NO. The EU does not have the power to change tax laws, that is in the domain of the national EU member states. That is actually what the whole article is about - that the EU commission is using the trick of declaring tax advantages as a form of "state aid", because then it falls under EU competition law, for which the EU commission's DG Competition does have a competence. For the same reason the LIBOR price fixing that is investigated in the USA by the SEC was dealt with by the EU's DG Competition under antitrust law - because otherwise the EU probably wouldn't have been able to act.

Point 2): No it is not easily in the power of the EU to change the data protection regulations - there is actually a huge fight going on at the moment about the new EU data protection regulation, mainly because Germany is blocking it.

Point 3): The USA and the EU are two different organizations with different legal systems. Because something does not violate US antitrust law doesn't mean it is ok under European antitrust law - Microsoft has already paid billions of fines under EU competition law for offenses that were dropped under US law. Moreover there is the famous Honeywell merger, that went through in the US and then got blocked in the EU.

That may be the official US/UK media narrative, but it is nonsense to anyone who looks at the underlying data. Do you realize that a restructuring of Greece debt has already happened with Greece private creditors incurring around 53.5% face value losses? And guess what - the Eurozone is fine. Furthermore Greece GDP and banking is tiny compared to the Eurozone. Does sharing the same currency mean that mean that the USA is forced to bail out the city of Detroit?

If the mantra "Same currency - responsible for all debts" was true, it would be impossible to explain why the yields of German/Austrian/Finnish bonds are trading at a vastly different level than the Italien/Spanish/Portuguese etc... bonds!

I really don't get the amount of hate and derision the European Union is always getting from US commentators. Culturally and geographically, for example Finland and Greece do not have much in common - yet Finland is willing to help them out, despite the "NO BAILOUT" clause explicitly implemented in the construction of the eurozone.

Meanwhile the USA has neighboring countries like Mexico or Cuba with huge problems like drug wars or lack of democratic elections (Cuba only) and which are poorer GDP/capita wise than countries like Poland, which were practically communist colonies of Russia until 1990! Sorry but it seems to me that the European Union is much more beneficial to the European continent than the USA for the American continent.

With regards to attracting international students, the effect of English being the language of academia cannot be overstated. If you compare Germany with countries like France, Spain, Italy, Russia, Japan or South-Korea, I would rather doubt that it attracts significantly less foreign students.

There is one German company offering a solution (https://www.sofort.com/eng-DE/), but as far as I know, it's still unclear if their users don't break their own banks' ToS-

Going public involves giving up a lot more control, since private investments of qualified investors are basically a freely negotiable contract, while offering shares to the public is legally standardized. For example, once public there is very little you can do against some troublemaker acquiring a significant position in your company via the open market and then causing endless trouble via legally required minority shareholder rights...

You are either horribly misinformed or simply trolling. The reason MAXIMUM roaming charges are set by Brussels is that the competition in the telecommunications market EU wide is not working. The main reason for that is a particular market structure: In most countries, landline telecommunication service was provided by the government, and the operators only later being privatized. The now private company could in a way free-ride on the original investment made in the infrastructure by the government, which is why an attack on the market by foreign companies is difficult. Furthermore the telecommunications industry has very strong network effects, so that the dominant natural provider could even be a sort of natural monopoly.

The licences for example for 3G/4G networks are mostly offered in a public bidding contest in most EU countries, so the state intervention is quite minimal. Unless you are suggesting government should have nothing to do with it at all, and every operator should simply use any frequency he desires and let's see what happens?

Please read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_on_roaming_charges_... to see how bad the situation was before EU intervention!

I would estimate that it would be pretty much impossible for the average internet user to find child pornography or videos of murder/rape etc. But I find it is hard to estimate if the reason for that is targeted government action, or it is because sharing those kinds of material goes against the natural moral instinct of most normal people.

Pretty weird. On the one hand, there clearly went some effort into this. On the other hand, they are not represented by counsel (p.36), which makes the likelihood of the case being thrown out for procedural reasons regardless of the merits around 99%. All in all I'm leaning more towards publicity stunt...

I don't believe you can "train" to require less sleep, the people for whom it is possible are probably neurophysiologically different. Your example would contradict it, but I think you made it up, some statements will sound strange to anyone familiar with the industry. You certainly wouldn't mind linking Mike's linkedin profile?

It already is, at least IP lawyers should be aquainted with the term, even some scholarly articles at ssrn.com use it. But it probably wouldn't be a prominent term in judgements, because it is too broad and doesn't describe "what the troll did and why it is bad", so it isn't really useful in that sense. I guess the standard formulations would be more like "abusive conduct" etc. (My own jurisdiction isn't angloamerican)

Yeah it is incredibly easy to short Bitcoin by trusting an unregulated, anonymous website without exposing yourself to any counterparty risk... There just isn't any real way to short Bitcoin, because if your investment thesis is true and collapses, it will be very difficult to collect your winnings.

"The real reason" for the current price hike is most likely http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=bitcoin meaning we are back in a super high interest in bitcoin phase. Maybe because that is because the world just realized the "currency of the Internet" thing, or it is just a hype, fueled by a lot of misleading promotion and lies. No use to discuss it though, we all will learn in 6+ months...

The whole "Cyprus people are getting into Bitcoin" narrative is a total lie as well. But I guess Bitcoin is a great learning opportunity for spotting Scams etc., as long as people don't lose too much money, it might even be beneficial.

You do realize that I quoted numbers for the last 10 years? Since the Eurocrisis started, the Euro has losses of around 6-10% against the other major currencies, so your deflationary argument isn't really sound.

All I wanted to say is that in the long run, foreign exchange rates express some form of judgment about the soundness of a currency. The markets still consider the Euro a very sound and safe currency - at least more so than the USD and the UK pound. A weaker exchange rate might be preferable, but that is not a way Europe wants to go. Instead of printing money, the idea is to restructure the economy. In the short run this will of course be super painful and allow commentators to shout "Look, austerity has failed". Let's talk again in 2025, bond yields for Greece,Italy,Spain are already down...

What exactly is your point? If we see market prices as reasonably efficient, the current Euro price shows that the typical "Stupid Eurocrats idiotic mismanagement of the flawed Euro project will lead to European collapse in 2 weeks" simply doesn't have a base in reality.

Individual (small) countries may fail, the system will be fine, and misinformed doomsayers will - as always - end up making fools of themselves.

Smug US/UK commentators have now been shouting for 3+ years about how incredibly stupid the EU is, how the Euro will break up in two weeks... But why is the Euro up 16% against the USD and 23.3% against the UK pound over the last 10 years? Why are German bond yields lower than the US bond yields, and why do some stable eurozone countries still possess a triple AAA rating by all credit agencies, in opposition to the US?

Considering the population, Cyprus is more like a middle-size city than a country. It joined the EU in 2004 and the Eurozone in 2008 - their problems are much older than that. Other than for humanitary reasons, the EU shouldn't and doesn't really care if they go under. If panicked investos withdraw their money they shall - smarter investors will pick up their holdings and realize gains; the doomsayers will end up as losers, like the US hedge funds ala Paulson betting against the EU the last years.

Your question is actually examined in history research. Generally there is something of a ,,forgetting curve'' for historical events, after which they leave the general societal awareness. (Of course estimations are hard, but around 50 years = 2 generations seems reasonable) WW2 and the "Holocaust" are widely credited as falling outside the curve, meaning the events are much more salient today than would be expected given the length of time elapsed. Of course the singularity of the horrors plays a role in this, but some historical researchers do not believe this to be the main reason. Compare the general knowledge of WW2 with the knowledge of WW1, nearly everybody knows Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Pearl Harbour, but who remembers the Battle of Ypres?

One theory is that WW2 and the "holocaust" have a special role, because the weirdness of the period following it. Because of the fight against communism, the USA and West Germany nearly instantly became allies after WW2 and occupation with the horrors past became discouraged. For example Hans Globke, one of the authors of the Nuremberg race laws, was allowed to be a high ranking minister in the Adenauer administration and some believe he was the reason why Germany and the CIA were not very interested in finding and prosecuting Adolf Eichmann at the time.

That is why there was a certain time lag in considering the events of WW2. In Germany there were the student revolts around 1968 and in 1969 the German chancellor Kiesinger had to step down because of his "nazi past" - which in comparison to Hans Globke was totally harmless. In a similiar vein the word "holocaust" mainly comes from a US TV-Series in 1978, the preferred jewish term is the "shoah".

I guess we will have to wait until the 2030s or so,to see if it still overshadows everything else then.

In my 5 years of University in Germany, probably 95% of my courses had at least 300 students and there are exactly 2 professors who know me as more than "the random person who just raised his hand". Simply recording the lecture with a camera and putting the content online would have already been a huge improvement. Obviously closer supervision/contact with professors is a superior model, but sentences like "these students need engagement with their teachers to feel comfortable and to succeed" sound almost laughable from a German perspective. Would I have enjoyed the personal experience of a good US school? Probably yes. Would paying $20,000 per year in tuition for the privilege instead of no tuition at all have been worth it? In my case, definately not!

I'm not from the US, I have neither in depth knowledge who Yglesias or this magazine is. From his wikipedia profile it seems he studied philosophy and never worked in finance - which is exactly what I would have suspected...

I'm not saying Amazon isn't overvalued. But to posit that, you have to make a comparison with a similar technology company and compare their respective growth prospects - of course nobody is buying Amazon stock because of their current profits.

A statement like "The P/E is high, other companies have a lower P/E, therefore the shareholders are generous" does not have any value at all and does not reveal profound domain knowledge.

He doesn't seem to know what he is talking about. This "If your profit is not healthy, people sell your shares and then you get bought out by a private equity firm" There are P/E ratios between "massively overvalued" and "massively undervalued" and there is no rule that you have to jump from one territory into the next - you can be overvalued and then adequately valued by the market as well...

And there are many companies not paying dividends. In growing companies it can make sense. The Washington Post pays dividends and is down >50% for the last 5 years, while Amazon is up 166%... Who has the generous shareholders now?

Well it depends what their target market was. If you are going for "traditional newspaper readers", betting that tablets will replace paper over the long term, then I can't imagine stuff like "single click" to matter. I for one don't think that anyone having a physical newspaper subscription right now would change to a different newspaper because of this...

Of course that demographic is going to disappear and all huge newspapers have financial problems at the moment. But for example the NewYork Times web subscription has >500.000 paying subscribers... I don't know, paying 30% to apple for a better payment gateway seems just excessive to me.

I'm not a programmer so maybe I'm way off, but I don't really see how -in the context of newspapers- the right to sell a native app on the appstore can be worth 30%, while a HTML5 version would be "free". And I also can't see how only targeting Ipad could be better in this context than targeting all tablets.

Because the population of people buying a yearly subscription to a newspaper is quite special to begin with - if you are counting on the increased publicity by being in the app store to sell subscriptions, I think you are doing something wrong.

Of course The Daily probably made mistakes as well. But I'm very sure that the succesful models of the future will neither be Ipad only nor giving up 30% to Apple without adding much value to the customer in doing so...

Do you have a source for this? I have never heard this and I very much doubt it is true. If you look at the "Paying Taxes Report" from the world bank + PWC, the UK has a yearly time to comply of 110 hours - versus 175 hours USA, 207 hours Germany, 330 hours Japan... Time to comply isn't a perfect metric of course, but all the classical "easy tax" countries like Switzerland, Luxembourg, Singapore, HongKong, Ireland have even lower numbers than the UK, so there is at least a correlation. (If you control for economically comparable factors)

But using Linux was not a decision of the IT department - it was a political decision by the city council and the mayor. If they decide to give a subsidy to Linux to promote local software development, that is perfectly within their mandate.

By the way, you need to realize that Munich's finances are very sound. In 2012 the city had a budget surplus of around 700 million € - so spending 20-30 million € on a 10 year IT project is not something that hurts them very much...

Even apart from the rape allegations, I have lost all respect for him because of this "hiding in the embassy" thing. He can't go to Sweden because he "might" be extradited to the US? Even if he is extradited, he still has access to the US judicial system and as an Australian citizen can count on some basic diplomatic support, furthermore the attention of the international media...

There are thousands of political activists in third world countries, who take much greater risk of bodily harm for themselves and their families every single day, without the perks like having a platform to portray themselves as a "civil rights hero" in the world media, or receiving donations for "legal defense and bail money", or being able to sleep with several groupies on a short Sweden trip.

Grandstanding speeches in the media combined with cowardly behavior is not something I can admire...

As a non-technical person with just a basic ability to program I would still agree with you - basic programming is only "hard" in the sense that the grammar of languages like French or German is "hard" - maybe the better word would be tedious?

Take a very basic task like "Apply this text replacement to all .txt files in this folder and all subfolders". If you are a beginner programmer for example in Python, you have to search for the module and get a basic understanding of how it works. While you never run into any conceptual difficulty, this can still take you a lot of time and you will make strange errors along the way.

Don't count out the Euro just yet! From Wikipedia reserve currencies: - 1999: USD 71.0%, Eur 17.9% - 2012: USD 62.2%, Eur 25.0%

Sure the next 5-10 years might be worse for the Euro, but for things like a global reserve currency one should think in 50+ year frames anyway...

While I agree with the opinion of the article, the content is quite superficial. Some things that arent mentioned could have a much bigger impact in the long run than some school programming project in Estonia: - The European Venture Capital Funds Regulation being finalised this year - The agreed enddate for SEPA, the harmonization of all European Payment Infrastructures being set for 2014...

Especially in the area of mobile payments I see a huge market potential because of the unique structure of the EU. If you travel through Northern Europe for example, you have the Euro in Finland, the Danish Krone in Denmark which is pegged to the Euro and then the Swedish Krone and the Norwegian Krone... A mobile app that would allow you to pay anything directly in Euros without having to convert into local currencies all the time would have huge value for the tourists - and the people selling stuff to them as well. With harmonized payment infrastructures and harmonized legal regimes this should be trivial to implement...