I'm just going to go out and say it: Europe is poor. At least compared to the US. You can see this plainly when comparing GDP per capita but it's particularly telling when you look at the revenue of tech giants, such as Alphabet and Meta. For example, Alphabet made roughly 50% of its revenue from the US and about 30% from EMEA in 2025.
Now compound that issue with conservative investors, a fractured "single" market and a strong preference for social equality over entrepreneurship.
> Physical losses in undermaintained water grids are the biggest cause for the issue.
Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't that mean the water is returned back to the environment? It's not made unusable, nor does it disappear permanently.
In many places water is pumped from deep underground aquifers but leaks go to surface ground waters and could quickly end-up in the Ocean so aquifers are still depleted.
We're talking about accessible fresh water. If it evaporates and then rains over the ocean then it's lost, or as the article mentions, if it becomes contaminated then it's not longer usable as fresh water
We should definitely go all in on a perpetually growing population, what could possibly go wrong.
It's going to hurt, but that's what happens when people don't look to the future and do everything out of greed. The sooner we stop population growth the better.
This "greed" and lack of foresight underpins a lot of the welfare states of Europe. Many member states are doing nothing at all to account for this population shrinkage, much less plan for a world with less people.
Which in itself wouldn't even be a problem if lack of said documents caused your submission to automatically fail validation right at the start. Instead, a real, live person will need to review your request to verify that it indeed includes a full set of documents, said documents are genuine and "correct" (despite most of them already being issued by the government!) before approving your request.
And given the founding principles of bureaucracy, no set of documents is ever correct because there are at least two contradictory regulations on any given topic.
Not quite. Disguised employment is a pretty specific and (usually) clear-cut issue with well defined criteria. The problems start when a jurisdiction broadens the definition to include whatever they want because they want to capture more tax revenue.
IANAL, but I've been freelancing for years and had a similar thing come up. In the end I was found compliant with the law, ie: not in disguised employment.
Last year, when I bought a boat. Financially, it was probably one of the stupider decisions I've made. On the other hand, it opened a whole new world to me, forced me to grow as a person and made me reevaluate my priorities in life.
Not just any storm. It’s a storm on the Croatian coast that comes suddenly and doesn’t last long. When pronouncing the word, the emphasis is on the second syllable: neh-VEH-rah
I was commenting on the "short lasting" part (and the nuances between neverin vs nevera, first one being for "short lasting" storms/thunderstorms, the latter being more generic).
>The root of the word seems to be disbelief ne + vjera
The word is completely unrelated to disbelief, it's of Venetian origin (< nevèra, meaning snow blizzard).
> Fun fact: Jugo (another frequent wind on Adriatic coast) is even stronger wind, but what makes bora/bura special are strong sudden gusts.
I saw it jack-knife a semi truck on my way back from Dalamatia to Istria, all my Life I ave seen the aftermath of the Santa Ana winds in SoCal but I've never seen it happen in person, but I was stalking that truck for at least 15 mins keeping my distance as the the carriage swayed hard left an right as the
Bura got stronger as we got higher in elevation.
Eventually the hitch thing that attaches to the front part of the truck snapped and sent it flying into the air and then sliding down the road, it blocked the entire 3 lane road. I checked to make sure the guy was fine and then left when the police showed up.
Ironically, I had a Bura beer [0] with my food at a cafe as I was waiting for the rain to stop. I got hme to Istria pretty late, and all my patio furniture was tossed up, The Bura is no joke, but it has a cleansing effect; everything felt lighter after that storm.
> semi truck on my way back from Dalamatia to Istria
I can guess that was under Velebit, where bura is often very strong and at those times the road is closed for motorcycles, campers, double-deckers and vehicles with trailers.
But people regularly ignore those restrictions because they are not aware of the danger.
> But people regularly ignore those restrictions because they are not aware of the danger.
Possibly, I couldn't tell you where exactly it was to be honest.
I'm not stranger to driving in 100MPH winds (Santa Ana), and I even did my Motorcycle endorsement in 70mph winds (I dropped their bike coming to a stop due to a freak side gust) but my little under-powered Golf was being tossed around by the Bura so bad that I was just waiting for the thing to jack knife as there were no exits for like +30km.
I took the toll road the rest of the way back to Istria as it wasn't worth it in the end.
Nevera can also be a variant for nevjera in the ekavian* dialect, eg. serbian language would use it (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nevera#Serbo-Croatian). Although the stress is different (/něʋera/ vs /něʋeːra/).
> Its an insult to people from non-english speaking countries.
No it is not. It may be an insult to people from larger countries who have been pampered all their life, with all the content they consumed being in their native language, being led to believe that their language is somehow equal to English. It is not.
I am Croatian. I don't expect anyone to learn my language, even if they're coming to live here. In fact, considering how difficult it is, we Croatians usually tell people not to bother. I do expect that when I travel, I can use English, the de-facto lingua franca, to find my way around and communicate with locals. I expect signs and information to be in English. Most amusingly enough, people from smaller countries _get_ this. They understand that if they want to participate in a global society, they need to learn English. People from big countries don't.
> a foreigner should not expect a country to conduct its legal proceedings in a language different to their native.
If that is the case, perhaps countries should consider their native language as an actual disadvantage when it comes to attracting foreign investment? After all, if I need to learn, say, Slovenian, to open and run a business in Slovenia, that makes me less likely to do so. Which means that Slovenia might need to settle for lower tax rates or provide some other benefits in order to entice me to do business there.
Of course it is. The same is true for every country.
I don't see a Chinese, Polish, Russian, or Japanese guide on the website of the British Chamber of Commerce. American websites also feature Spanish but I don't speak a word of that either.
People who can invest large amounts of money can afford a translator.
Even if registering a company in Slovenia is easy, dealing with Slovenians themselves will require learning about their language and culture. If you need to ask "what is a notary" then you failed to do so in Germany.
You can't expect the rest of the world to work exactly like it does at home. And if the rest of the world doesn't work like it does at home, that doesn't make it any worse necessarily.
From the country's perspective: what good does this foreign startup bring? There's clearly no money in it because apparently hiring someone to look over legal documents is considered to be too expensive. The first thing this person did was set up a holding company on top of a normal company because they were probably trying to avoid having to pay tax somewhere along the way.
Germany can use some modernisation, for sure, but half of these complaints are "I don't want to put in the effort so someone should do it for me" or "I hired people to do the difficult work and then did all the difficult work myself anyway for some reason" or maybe "it's hard to set up a company where I have zero responsibility of what the company does to its operating environment".
> People who can invest large amounts of money can afford a translator.
Yeah, that sound like the European way of thinking about business. "What do you mean you don't want to spend money on red tape and pointless busy-work? Maybe you're too poor to start a business?" On the other hand, the Anglo-sphere makes it as easy as possible to start a business. And thus, the US is a hotbed of innovation while Europe...is not.
> You can't expect the rest of the world to work exactly like it does at home.
Funny you should mention that. I come from a small country. And when you come from a small country, learning a foreign language is basically required. Nobody is going to bother learning your language in order to communicate with you. Why this idea is so foreign in _bigger_ countries was always fascinating to me (even though I know why).
> From the country's perspective: what good does this foreign startup bring?
Free money without the country having to do much? I mean, if I was a government, I'd be pretty happy with somebody paying me money for doing nothing other than keeping a piece of paper with a company name in a filing cabinet. I'd be even happier if somebody I didn't have to raise or educate moved here to pay taxes and spend their money.
> EU: 27 different markets in the EU + half a dozen markets in countries freely associated with the EU (e.g. Norway and Switzerland) in different languages, cultures and expectations
That's understating the issue. There are only 5 (!) EU member states with a population higher than that of the NYC metropolitan area and _none_ with that kind of population concentration or purchasing power.
Now compound that issue with conservative investors, a fractured "single" market and a strong preference for social equality over entrepreneurship.