The issue is that there are too many cars (including pollution, congestion, noise), not that there is not enough transit - or at least this is a separate issue.
If you could multiply by 10 the number of people using public transport without changing the number of cars on the road, would the car make less noise, or pollute less, or take up less space? I don't see how.
So the two policies we are discussing really are:
- reduce the number of people using cars by making using cars directly more expensive
- reduce the number of people using cars by making using cars indirectly more expensive, by lowering the cost of the alternatives and funding this extra cost _somehow_ (taxing everyone whether they use cars or not?)
It seems to me that solution 2 is potentially less effective, definitely way more complex and basically make everyone pay rather than just car users.
Of course if the goal is either to be ineffective (just subsidy transit but don't make me abandon my car) or shield car users from most of the cost (create an expensive solution to reduce car usage by making everyone pay, not just car users); then sure, it's better.
The French higher education system is such that a lot of business students come from somewhat math-heavy undergraduate programs: 9h hours of math class plus one hour of one-on-one oral examination for 2-3 years.
Maybe yes maybe no. A lot of the jobs in a big city metro are out in the burbs. Until fairly recently, my company's only office in the area was a 45 minute drive from downtown. There are more tech jobs in the city proper than there were 15-20 years ago when there were approximately zero. But a lot of the jobs in the area are still spread around the suburbs and exurbs.
I don't think proponents of the "car-free" or "15-minutes" cities have:
- supermarkets are super close
- everything else is super far (including workplaces)
- you don't have a car
in mind. I don't think that in London (the main example in the article) most jobs are a 45 minute drive from central London nor that most people drive to work.
That's probably true in Boston as well. But that's because, if you work 45 minutes out of Boston--of which there are many companies along the Route 128 or 495 corridors--you probably don't live in Boston unless you're a die-hard urbanite willing to put in a long commute to your suburban job. (To be fair, a lot of the west coast companies that established Boston outposts are in town and local suburban companies increasingly have options for people to work in a city office (or remotely) if they want to.)
I am not sure everybody would agree with that statement. Some might say academia exist to do research that extend humanity's knowledge, whether there's a financial reward or not.
I would point out that research universities also patent things that researchers discover, and most have a pretty good profit split with the individual. If someone believes they might unlock the next stage of IA and want to profit from it personally, being at a university might be better than a comparably sized company.
Landmark decisions ([0], [1]) set precedent. The conseil constitutionnel has ruled that its precedent is binding [2]. In fact the majority of current constitutionnal law in France was willed into "constitutionnal" status by a landmark decision of the conseil [3]. I mean precdent can move _laws_ to the _constitution_ (see [4]). That seems pretty binding and persuasive.
[3] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9cision_Libert%C3%A9_d%2...: essentially, the council ruled that the preamble of the constitution also had constitutional value (which was not the case previously and still is not for laws) - since it also mentions other texts (the preamble of the 1046 Constitution, the 1789 Bill of rights, etc. those texts also have the same legal power as the constitution.
I thought "conseil constitutionnel" on the judicial branch + "conseil d'état" on the administrative branch (french law is split in two branches), but apparently the "conseil constitutionnel" is doing both, the split is "cour de cassation" (supreme court) + "conseil d'état" (administrative supreme court), with the conseil constitutionnel doing its thing upstream unrelated to any of them.
I don't think so, are you sure? The Conseil d'Etat has two distinct roles (and thus two distinct branches):
- serving as the supreme court for the administrative "order" - as a judge, the CE does not check if laws are constitutionnal
- serving as legal counsel to the government - in which case it does check if bills put forward by the governement (i.e. not laws already adopted) are constitutionnal but this is merely advisory.
And the “is this law constitutional?” part is done by the Constitutional council, which is not quite a court. And there’s a second Supreme Court (Conseil d’État) anyway. Quite different from the US.
A randomly selected hamburger, frankfurter, or wiener, probably isn't made in Hamburg, Frankfurt, or Vienna.
And sometimes it can get even weirder: Stilton cheese is named after where it was historically sold, but it's made elsewhere and you're not allowed to call a cheese "stilton" if you actually make it in Stilton. (Edit: I originally got Stilton and Cheddar mixed up).
As I'm a British national, I don't know if this is the full reason, or if this is in combination with the natural human tendency to care more about nearby things and that the Atlantic is so big that all of the USA is closer to one of the places called "Champagne" within the USA than to the original in France.
There is a kind of onion called a "Vidalia onion," grown in the town of Vidalia, Georgia. They're a sweeter onion, which is unusual, which is why it grew into a brand.
However, because of this, a lot of people's first exposure with a sweet onion is a Vidalia. But not all sweet onions are Vidalia onions. Yet sometimes people still use "Vidalia" to mean "sweet onion" in a generic sense.
I suspect it's very similar, honestly: I don't think your average American knows that Champagne is a place. Their only exposure to the word is via that style of wine. And so they associate it with the style rather than the brand/region.
(Vidalia onions are also protected legally in the same way that Champagne is; a lot of people in this thread saying that that's just some silly French thing don't realize how common this is. In the onions' case, this has been true since 1989.)
Cheddar isn't a Protected Designation. So, if you want to make Cheddar in Swansea? No problem. Edinburgh? No problem. Dublin? Pretoria? Atlanta? Christchurch? All fine.
"West Country Farmhouse Cheddar" is protected, but that's quite a mouthful so few people care, and that still only requires you made it in roughly the correct way (you need to use local milk) and in roughly the correct part of the UK (maybe an hour or two drive from Cheddar).
Perspective: live in the USA, from Australia (where the “locale” mentality is the same as USA), lived for years in France. So I understand both sides.
The simple explanation is that nobody in the US really cares about the point of origin — even wine labels are considered more a brand than a location. There is no sense that « terroir » might have any consequence.
Sometimes you encounter food labeled with the state where it was grown or produced — that’s mainly a “buy local” claim, nothing more.
It’s mostly genericized at this point. You can get a Philly cheesesteak all over the US, for example. Maybe it’s not as authentic as something from Pennsylvania but being pedantic about it is a little snobby.
Philly cheesesteak has never been about Philly grown meat and Philly grown cheese though. French also won't be fighting to have "Paris-Brest" region protected for instance.
Champagne is not about a recipe or concept, the grapes are grown and made to wine in the actual place.
In actual language usage, in the US, many people use champagne to mean any white sparkling wine (possibly any sparkling wine).
In the southern US 'coke' can be used to mean soda. Any soda. Even Pepsi. It doesn't matter that Coca-Cola has the trademark for Coke or that a Pepsi isn't a Coke.
> In the southern US 'coke' can be used to mean soda. Any soda. Even Pepsi. It doesn't matter that Coca-Cola has the trademark for Coke or that a Pepsi isn't a Coke.
Not just soda. My parents moved to Texas, I visited a bit, and had people ask me if this Coke thing was true. I had no idea... we generally didn't eat out, so I didn't hear what the locals did.
When I was back for Christmas, we were at a restaurant, and I heard the waiter as the table beside ours asking about drinks, so I listened...
Customer: "Can I get a Coke?"
Waiter: "What kind of Coke?"
(as this point I'm thinking they want clarity on Regular, Diet, Cherry, etc...)
Customer: "A lemonade".
That was just weird to me. A Coke is literally ANY drink in Texas.
I agree people should be allowed to colloquially call it whatever they want. Nobody will be there to stop parents from call their kids' PS5 a nintendo or calling mega blocks legos.
The rules are different for official product names though. I think "sparking wine" is explicit enough for any of these drinks to not have to strip the Champagne region of its name.
>The rules are different for official product names though.
Your argument about "official product names" seems inconsistently applied.
In your first paragraph, Nintendo® and Lego® are registered trademarks with the government and therefore, "official product names":
>I agree people should be allowed to colloquially call it whatever they want. Nobody will be there to stop parents from call their kids' PS5 a nintendo or calling mega blocks legos.
If people can colloquially re-use "Nintendo" to label any game console from Sony/Microsoft/Sega, why is colloquially using "champagne" to describe sparkling wine that's not from France a different scenario?
EDIT to reply: >The point makeitdouble is making is that it’s fine for people to use the term generically, but products shouldn’t use the name generically.[...], but Sony can’t call their next console a “Nintendo”.
The isolated subthread with grandparents (saagarjha, Brybry) that makeitdouble and you are replying in is talking about language usage and not corporations' product branding:
Brybry is actually already agreeing with your Sony example and that comment gets downvoted? Both saagarjha and Brybry have stated correct facts about how language is used in the wild so what exactly are people downvoting? I'm truly confused.
Again, the context of the subthread is language usage and not about breaking France & EU legal rules around "Champagne".
The point makeitdouble is making is that it’s fine for people to use the term generically, but products shouldn’t use the name generically. So a parent might call a PS5 a “Nintendo”, but Sony can’t call their next console a “Nintendo”. The same applies to champagne. People can call sparkling white wine “champagne”, but companies producing sparkling white wine should be able to call their products “champagne” unless it is actually from Champagne.
We generally mock wine-snobbery. There’s some element of stereotyping French things as pretentious. But mostly it is because that’s the brand of wine that is known by everybody to be fancy. (Hey, stereotyping is bad, but on the other hand we don’t mistake any British food for fancy, so at least there’s some begrudging respect built into the stereotype).
So really, congrats to Champagne for making a brand so well known that Wayne’s World can make fun of it and be sure that basically the whole audience will get the joke. I mean that sincerely.
You have to know a little bit about wine to know about Napa Valley. I think “it’s from NaPa Valllleeyyy” in a sort of silly voice is something that somebody might say. It just doesn’t have the reach.
I would think of this as not really making fun of Champagne. We’re making fun of being the kind of person that cares about Champagne.
The British food thing is I think less about respect or fanciness and more familiarity. American staples tend to have similar ratios of various nutrient groups, often without even as much as a substitute. American "home-style" cooking is almost identical in a lot of respects, if we ignore regional variations in both countries.
So I think its less that we think French cuisine is fancy or British food is bad, and more that we don't even really think about British food because a British Christmas dinner is basically the same as an American one (and I've got no clue what a French person would eat for Christmas dinner, so it is exotic and expensive sounding in that respect).
Of course all of this mostly applies to everyone in any anglosphere country. I don't think an Australian would be any more uncomfortable eating a home cooked American meal than an American would be eating a British one.
I think the issue with Champagne is that in the USA we used the word as a generic term for sparkling wine for MANY decades before it became a Designated Appellation. Bottles were sold here using the word champagne only to indicate it was sparkling wine.
In English, champagne isn't wine from a specific location, it's a specific type of wine. People aren't going to call red wine grown from the place champagne.
It's like saying you can't call them brazil nuts unless they were grown in Brazil.
> People aren't going to call red wine grown from the place champagne.
Correct, because red wines produced in Champagne are called something else.
To get to your point though, red wines from Bourgogne are most certainly referred to as "burgundy" and depending on whom you ask, it's always pinot noir (but some will argue Gamay is included). I've noticed that many chefs refer to any good Pinot as a burgundy when dunking it in their stews, and while that's probably okay most of the time when cooking, that generalization is discarding more than just a little nuance for drinkin' wine. A pinot noir grape grown in Oregon can be vastly different than one from France and I will usual skip on the former.
> It's like saying you can't call them brazil nuts unless they were grown in Brazil.
You're attempting to compare an entire culture, craft, and industry of wine to nuts that fall off trees. With things like wine, cheese, and cured meats, there are certainly regional characteristics and traditional techniques that make a product distinct. This designation is to protect consumers and businesses and hurts no one except imposters?
Since that's all too high brow, another more pertinent example may be how everyone from Kentucky knows the limestone in the water makes its whiskey the best in the would. While the US has some laws defining qualities of whiskey, it unfortunately doesn't lay down rules on "terroir". Corn mash isn't quite as expressive as wine grapes, so I can understand the skepticism but many folks swear that the old barns where bourbon whiskey is aged add their own touch.... not so sure about that one.
And this where your ununderstanding starts. It is a place name for you. For literally billions of people it's some word describing a type alc. drink first.
It's quite common in the EU. Names such as cognac, port, and parmesan are protected, and you can only use them for products made using the traditional process in the traditional region.
> The problem is that the CNAF deliberately targets small unintentional errors rather than large-scale intentional fraud.
The French welfare system is incredibly complex - see for instance this [0] simplified description of housing allowances which is 80 (!) pages long. This is not the most complex part of the system. With such a system, there are massive amounts of errors, both too-much-money-given and not-enough-money-given. The scale is so large that the French Court of Accounts refused to certify the CNAF accounts last year[1]: thoses errors represent about 7.5% of the CAF budget.
So basically the probability to have an error is just a function of how complex your situation is, and thus the "algorithm" targets more complex situations - change in your marital situation, having adult children (which may or may not need to be taken into account when applying for benefits depending on a bazillion variables), and so on, increases your probability to be targeted.
As a french person, I don't get why no politician ever talks about simplifying those things. It sounds so easy and such a quick win, leading to more visibility on the budget, and people getting easily access to their due money.
But I think I know the answer: current government doesn't want to make welfare easy to access, they want to actually deter people to use it unless they absolutely need it.
If France is anything like the Netherlands, the benefits system isn't used by a few poor's, it's used by the majority of the country, instead of adapting tax codes. Simplifying it is going to (unintentionally and intentionally) hurt some groups, and nobody what's to be on the hook for it, despite it having been an increasingly large election theme.
France at least has a culture of constitutional reboots.
> current government doesn't want to make welfare easy to access, they want to actually deter people to use it unless they absolutely need it.
The more complex a system, the more skill and resources (ability, time, finances) it takes to navigate it.
Eventually, complexity serves to exclude everyone but people who are able to make a career out of pursuing benefits - who are also more likely to be fraudsters.
1. for any given budget, there is no Pareto-improving reallocation: if you want to give more money to someone, then the money has to come from someone else.
2. given the current complexity, there are a _lot_ of edge cases to account for. If you do not want to make any loser after a reform, and not have as many edge cases, then you'd need to pump a lot of money to a lot of people so that "edge case people" who become "average joe" do not lose out. See for instance the people who end up with less disposable income when their pension is raised (https://www.alternatives-economiques.fr/vrais-faux-gagnants-...) (!). See also the riffraff about the "montant net social" - now the exact income (which is basically net salary + a bunch of things your employer pay for you and are counted as income) you need to report on welfare application is written on pay slip. Nice simplification here, right? People who reported wrong income (only net salary generally) were upset that it was a plot to decrease welfare.
3. people genuinely genuinely love special cases. Hence the tradeoff for the government between adressing a special case but adding more complexity always end up with more special cases, more complexity.
Some examples: since housing is expensive, people want to help renters with cash payment (of course it can't be bundled with the basic income, it has to be its own benefit), but they also want some public housing with below market rents. Now you need to acocunt for the in kind benefit of having a below market rent in the rules of housing benefits if you want to be relatively just between those two populations.
Recently, the cash benefit for handicaped people computation was changed - it depends only on the receiver's income and not on household's income (the main argument was that household income as an input makes handicapped less autonomous on one hand, and decreases working incentives for them). Now this means that some benefits are computed at the individual level, other at the household level. Of course there is a transitory period where people can be grandfathered-in the old rules so as not to make any losers.
And so on and so forth.
Large families need their own benefits, because they have unique(tm) needs, you just can't make a per child benefit that just scale.
And so on and so forth.
Did I mention that you want to help overseas territories with special fiscal rules?
And so on and so forth.
I think the two most prominent examples of this were the two failed Macron reform: the first pension reform (universal public pension fund instead of several) and the basic income (revenu universel d'activité - basically a merger of APL+RSA+PA at least). Always a special category that lose out if they own complexity-inducing special case is ironed out.
4. because of points 1-4, no one understands anything and thus there is a strong suspicision that the government is here to rob you of [your benefits | your pension | etc] when there is a reform proposal.
If you could multiply by 10 the number of people using public transport without changing the number of cars on the road, would the car make less noise, or pollute less, or take up less space? I don't see how.
So the two policies we are discussing really are:
- reduce the number of people using cars by making using cars directly more expensive
- reduce the number of people using cars by making using cars indirectly more expensive, by lowering the cost of the alternatives and funding this extra cost _somehow_ (taxing everyone whether they use cars or not?)
It seems to me that solution 2 is potentially less effective, definitely way more complex and basically make everyone pay rather than just car users.
Of course if the goal is either to be ineffective (just subsidy transit but don't make me abandon my car) or shield car users from most of the cost (create an expensive solution to reduce car usage by making everyone pay, not just car users); then sure, it's better.