News and information from Europe 🇪🇺
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The elephant in the room are the military expenses to protect against Russia.
The open question is if 5% are necessary or if 2% would have been enough.
Nobody can trust Russia. Assholes downed a civil aeroplane and refuse to take responsibility. Also they occupied a lot of Europe and Russified it as much as they tried.
I think that the expenses must be paid from billionnaires' wallets, and those billionnaires must not be able to trickle the expenses down, also not being able to flee.
they occupied a lot of Europe and Russified it as much as they tried.
That was the USSR, led by a Georgian. The Russians can be blamed for much but I think they were resettled in the USSR much like any other ethnic group.
If you want to claim that the USSR liberating Europe from the original nazis and stopping the Lebensraum and the Holocaust was "occupation", you have to also concede that those parts of Europe are currently occupied by NATO.
I don't.
Then you are contradicting yourself.
How?
You are either claiming that the USSR's liberation of Europe both was and wasn't occupation, or you are claiming that the USSR preventing fascists from coming into power on those countries was 'occupation', while the US putting fascists into power there and also doing things like what has been done to Greece and Ukraine is somehow not such.
I didn't say anything about that because it doesn't matter for the Russians. No matter if the USSR was good or bad, that Russification is not proof that Russians want to russify their neighbors.
Ah, I misread what you meant, in that case.
Also, as there's no standardized way to count these, Finland with mandatory conscription has a crapload of expenses which aren't included in miltary expenses. In current global situation I don't think increasing expenses was a wrong call and it's not purely black and white, there's also at least some jobs to finns trough the investments, but I'd say that our money would've been better spent to something else than US and Israel tech as (specially USA) has not been really reliable partner.
But also the reality is that even without those expenses our budget has been negative for quite a while, so something had to be done. I'm not saying that current government had the best actions, and they have objectively made things worse on some places, but just waiting for a miracle wouldn't have worked either. But that's a whole another discussion.
The elephant in the room are the military expenses to protect against Russia.
Probably shouldn't have been invading Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iran, and elsewhere, and shouldn't have been pushing for war with Russia all these decades, then.
I’m curious to understand how disruptive and destructive people are handled. In my community I have heard of multiple tenants - who by all appearances aren’t mentally ill, as they have jobs and families - causing damage that requires stripping the floors and walls, replacing plumbing etc. Simply bringing someone in from the cold doesn’t automatically remove the reasons they’re originally unhoused, and there’s often a reasonable opposition to supervisor visit/inspections as part of previous trauma.
If you break stuff in a rented apartment, you pay the bill. If you dont pay the bill; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distraint (the Sweden section seems to be quite similar to what happens here). If you start earning and paying taxes, you'll have money taken straight from your paycheck and sent to the people you owe money to. There is some time limit to this, but its like 15 years or something.
Things might have changed since I last checked this stuff, over 10 years ago.
How does that work when they’re a recently homeless mentally ill drug addict who causes damage in the tens of thousands of dollars? They don’t have a job etc.
Usually the renters have insurance for damage caused by a person unwilling to pay. Insurance companies pay up and then try to recuperate some of the costs from the person responsible for the damage.
Drug addicts and mentally ill people are offered help and if they cant get or live in a normal rental apartments, there are sort of dormitory style places with nurses, guards and other staff 24h or 12h per day to keep things in check. They require the persons living there to check in at least once a day, they have a nurse signed up for them, usually have a session with the nurse once a week or so, a doctor checks up on them regularly as well. That's the sort of last resort thing, if one doesn't want to live in those places, then the government sees it as them choosing to be homeless. Nobody will be forced to get a apartment, nobody is forced to rent an apartment.
And of course properly mentally ill people are usually kept in mental hospitals.