For the three EU citizens this is most likely illegal and they most likely will win in court. For the American Cooper Longbottom the situation is worse though.

That all would change if they get convicted though. The Berlin Senate claims they entered the university breaking open doors and threatening workers with axes. If they can prove that in court, then all of them could be kicked out of Germany. Well after being at least six months in prison that is.

The problem really boils down to a combination of NIMBYism and even more importantly lobbying. Telecom lobbied the German government to allow them to not upgrade to copper cables and upgrade those with better backend infrastructure as well. However that is always going to be worse then proper fiber.

For mobile in most countries the government issues licenses with built in fines, if certain coverage quality is not reached. Germany did not do this and the conservative government even repeated that mistake with 5G. The issue is that there are only three network providers and obviously upgrades cost money, which means less profits.

In this case the division means there are more then one ways to get to Europe. It also offers multiple different countries as options. The UK being Enlgish speaking and is culturally way closer to the US. Spain has the massive advantage of being Spanish speaking, which many Americans also speak at home. Many European countries like Germany and Italy offer citizenship by decent, which many Americans are eligable for. So in this case an advantage.

Also Europe is a much better place to live. A lot of people keep forgetting, but China is still a developing country. GDP per capita of China is about as high as that of Mexico. Another part less known is citizenship. The only way to get Chinese citizenship is by having Chinese family. Obviously that is not an option for most Americans.

No, they want Europe to pay for its own defense. That still would include buying US weapons.

Basically the US was the worlds police until recently. That gave them a lot of global influence mainyl the USD being the global currency. However it also required them to have a massive military and do things like supporting Ukraine, which obviously cost a lot. So they want other reasonable countries to pay for their own defense to keep their costs down. That however always meant still buying US weapons. The problem being that for some like the EU a working defense means less reliance on the US, hence less benefits.

How many would know it’s a real place?

A lot of Trump supports certainly have never seen or been in a cunt.

tThe current ranking is:

So there are clearly a lot of fairly succesful alternatives to Amazon.

Nope. The SPD defending the AFD. Faeser stops the publication of a report, which would label the whole AFD as a party fighting the constitution. They actively work sending refugees to countries like Afghanistan, help to criminalize climate and Palestine activists and so forth.

The only left leaning thing they actively fought for in the last term in government was raising the minimum wage a bit. Everything else which was decent left leaning policy was brought through mainly by the Greens. Sometimes even the FDP had to rightly fight the insane policies of the SPD.

I hope Nintendo stocked those Switch 2s everywhere ahead of time or it’s gonna be rough.

The EU has a 20% tariff on Chinese electronics.

This is not about tariffs. If you buy US weapons, the US has some control over their use. You generally need ammunition, spare parts, service the weapons and for some more modern ones access to US servers. The contracts also usually include clauses of needing US permission to resell those weapons.

There were some rumors that the US forbid US made weapons to be given to Ukraine for some time. The EU does not want something similar to happen, if Russia attacks them.

Not just that, but Peter Thiel has German citizenship and speaks fluent German although with an accent. He is pretty much the most likely of the PayPal Mafia to do a lot of damage in Germany.

The budget, which adds up to about $245 billion, was announced at the National People’s Congress, the annual meeting of China’s legislature. The Pentagon and many experts say China’s total spending on defense may be 40% higher or more because of items included under other budgets.

That is for this years budget…

https://apnews.com/article/china-defense-budget-taiwan-4ac7cbdc7d5b889732cd55916ff7eb36

Chinas defense spending is now higher then EU defense spending was before Russia invaded.

China is up there too, with U.S. $236.1 billion in 2024.

There is for example no need for the EU to have a navy fleet that can operate independently for many months in the Pacific.

So Tahiti or New Caledonia do not need a navy to be protected. I am sure the French will be exited by having part of their country not being protected by the EU.

Exactly, but given the current situation I am sure a lot of potential buyers would prefer the gold to be in a vault in Germany.

Germany did move gold from New York to Germany a decade ago. It is certainly possible, but obviously takes some time to do right. There might be other brothers after all.

Travel, but not settle or work. For Americans going back to the US for better salaries is quite realistic. For poorer countries retiring in your country of origin is very attractive.

Berlin has an IT english speaking expat bubble. However when you look at the share of Americans in Germany on a county or city level, Berlin has a lot, but it certainly is not alone. Military bases are also a thing, but pretty much only in the south.

Have they changen from 8 years to 5 for all? And do they still require non-EU people to give up their other citizenship if they want German citizenships?

Yes it was changed relativly recently.

The constitution is easy to change, it only needs a 2/3 majority,

Only that Putins party and the pacifist Linke have over a third of the votes. The former has a lot of open facists in its ranks and the later hates the idea of killing Nazis, because that is violent.

The German constitution is very gender bias in that it only allows men to be forcibly conscripted. To be fair they can also choose a civilian alternative, but still sexist.

Bernard: “What if the Prime Minister insists we help them?”

Humphrey: “Then we follow the four-stage strategy.”

Bernard: “What’s that?”

Richard: “Standard Foreign Office response, in a time of crisis. In stage one, we say nothing is going to happen.”

Humphrey: “In stage two we say something may be going to happen, but we should do nothing about it.”

Richard: “In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there’s nothing we can do.”

Humphrey: “In stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it’s too late now…”