That sucks! However, it looks like 0.2% is for your savings accounts. Greater returns can be had from Certificates of Deposits (COD), which we call term deposits. A lot of your banks really seem to push for 20 year terms though
I also noted that a lot of your banks have the most ghetto website design I have seen since the days of Geocities. I dare say the could be good career opportunities for designer people there.
When I was young (way back in the dawn of time) interest rates reached up to 14.9%, but mortgage rates were 18.5% !!! Awesome for depositing, shite for borrowing.
Where? Here everyone swears at everyone and there’s no laws at all. The police runs away when they see street fights No idea from where you got that information.
Just because there isn’t common or frequent enforcement doesn’t mean freedom of speech is legally protected. It just means there isn’t a lot of enforcement. That can change, easily, especially if someone targets you for it.
I know enough about history to appreciate the value of legally upheld freedom of speech, and that even if a country is not currently abusing citizens for speech it doesn’t mean it can’t or won’t.
Also any EU member nation does not have freedom of speech legally protected.
The USA has problems, sure, but I know that I’ll have lawyers clawing to represent me if my freedom to speech is egregiously infringed by the government.
20 years give 1,80% at my current bank
2 years only 0,05%
For 5 years, the highest gives 1,75%, but it’s a bit sketchy.
While on savings you pay about 1-1,5% tax per year apart from inflation. So you basically lose 2-3% of the value every year at the current interest rate.
In other words, people are forced to invest their money if they want a chance at actually increasing it.
In Europe there can be very specific laws about things like not insulting the royal family in the Netherlands, but this actually being enforced is really rare if it even happens at all. If you make a death threat it would be an entirely different matter. The only things that you really have to watch out for is hate speech/inciting violence, but I guess that applies anywhere. I never had the feeling that I was living in a big brother society though.
These days “hate speech” can be as simple as making a joke.
I make jokes about literally everything. They’re all terrible.
Don’t think it’s bad? In the UK there are already people who are jailed for tweets or social media status messages. Arguably a part of the world in modern times that used to be free speech supporting next to only the USA (the free speech king of the entire world, despite the problems we already have about infringing on our freedom of speech). Maybe you don’t feel like you’re living in a Big Brother society, but you are. The reason you don’t feel like it is because the novel 1984 was conceived before we had the internet as it is today. Big Brother doesn’t have to make a big presence known. Big Brother just has to know what you’re saying so it can crack down on wrong-think.
No it can’t. That’s just the excuse made by racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, misogynistic bigots. If that were true you’d be happy posting a joke that you think would get you arrested for posting in the UK.
Thus far the people who have been arrested for abuse on social media are those who are trying to radicalise people, stalkers and those people who have posted countless hateful messages. Plus bomb threat messages. Are you seriously saying that you’d prefer to live in a country where people can ruin the lives of others and get off with no repercussions?
It’s odd because from the outside looking in most of us feel that personal freedoms in the US don’t match ours. And this is actually backed up by multiple freedom indices. For example here and here. Less freedom than Taiwan…
Still don’t believe in jokes that could get you arrested?
They mention the joke he made in this link.
I’m not going to post the joke itself here because I don’t want to get shoah’d off this forum.
The joke is funny. It’s just an edgy joke.
Suggesting that laws destroying freedom of speech are only abused against people you accuse of being “racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, misogynistic bigots” is just a bad excuse to justify tyranny. You think tyranny is acceptable as long as it’s only used against what you consider to be the “undesirables”. One day you’re going to say something that people think falls under those lines, and you’ll be thrown under the bus. You’ll wish you had principles then.
I have to side with @Nigrescence on this one, dude. A simple joke can and will easily be classified as hate speech these days; look also at the case of Dieudonne in France.
Your ‘equity’ if that’s the right term.
Total money you have minus debt. And if that’s higher than 25.000 you pay 1-1.5% of that amount (more money = higher tax rate)
There’s an exemption for some things like if you own a house, but say you have 125k cash that would be 100k taxable, making the tax like 1200 euros per year roughly.
That’s an interesting case. I just looked up Dieudonne and it seems he’s in trouble in part for this gesture called “La quenelle”. Now when I first saw it and looked at the Wikipedia page, the immediate interpretation I got was that it was funny. It’s clearly a mocking gesture. It’s not intended to be offensive. However the Wikipedia page suggests only sinister interpretations.
However if you look at a more objective source of information about the gesture, you will see that my initial interpretation was indeed accurate.
This is the level of subversive re-contextualization that will happen to YOU in order to demonize you or your jokes or anything that someone doesn’t like about you.
EDIT: More about “la quenelle”, the original source event of the gesture.
Translated excerpt for the relevant part: "Far from the mainstream media, it thrives on the Internet. In this universe of its own, we find the quenelle, which we can see one of the first performances in public in a show about secularism, in 2005. "The dolphin, now, when he sees a man, it is fuck our mouth. Of course. Because he knows that his fin is going to fuck us until then … “Dieudonné then makes the gesture of the quenelle.”
Translation is automatic from Google, but the context is accurate.
I have no opinion. I’d naturally assume not because of the odds.
Are you aware of the political climate regarding anti-Semitism and why this may be more inflammatory than you think? Context and climate is relevant.
Context. Telling a “joke” about a missing, presumed murdered 5 year old is far from appropriate and lead to him being accosted by people. In part his detainment was for his protection, whilst of course it was punishment. Do you think the appropriate course is just to let people post jokes about an ongoing murder investigation, potentially making the discovery of evidence harder?
If you were to post jokes on the presidential twitter about him being involved in child abuse, bestiality and drug abuse I would wager you’d have some people turn up at your door.
Jokes are fine, but context is relevant, and some jokes are not jokes. A group of students at a University made “jokes” about raping fellow students…and those messages got exposed. Of course something has to be done about this sort of behaviour, else people get hurt.
So I live in a tyrannical state? Many of those so called tyrannical states have more freedom (according to those studies I linked) than where I presume you live? People can be hurt by words, can become suicidal, fanatical or injure others…surely you’d rather protect those more vulnerable than yourself against those who just set out to cause mental harm to others?
Again context - “It was the evening after Paris marched in solidarity with the murdered journalists and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo magazine” and “Dieudonné is merging Charlie Hebdo with Amedy Coulibaly, the man who took hostages in a kosher supermarket the day after the Hebdo attacks”.
He didn’t just tell a joke, he made light of something that was tragic and shocking, and potentially inciting further horrific action. Additionally he had previous history of incitement.
Was he inciting people to terrorist action? Doubtful, but is it possible that some people at that time could be mentally harmed by hearing about that “joke” or even worse, inspired to commit further atrocity?
Sometimes It’s context, other times, “joking” about raping colleagues is not a joke in any sense of the word.
Wow, so we actually have someone who seriously thinks the pug video is anti-Semitic. Curious. Seeing your mental gymnastics to justify the action taken against him exactly proves my point about freedom of speech and how the UK is suffering a crisis attacking freedom of speech.
The joke isn’t about the five year old. The joke is about the evil man who committed crimes against her.
You might find it distasteful, but that’s irrelevant. People have a right to be distasteful. Freedom of speech means we can offend others’ sensibilities sometimes. Also the man had already been charged and that was public knowledge. I personally would wait until conviction to make such jokes (under the presumption of innocence until proven guilty) but people have a right to make jokes earlier than that if they choose.
“some jokes are not jokes”
I’m so sorry, I totally forgot about wrong-think.
As for that University case, I don’t see how that’s relevant. Rape threats are threats. Threats of physical violence are not in contention here. Also I don’t even see the context of what they said. How do I know I can trust the source you linked? This could even be another example of free speech being oppressed. We just don’t know.
Is the pug video a threat of physical violence? Is the joke about the murderer a threat of physical violence?
The answer is unequivocally “no”.
Keep it relevant. Your non-sequitur is irrelevant.
Well I don’t even know where you live, so I can’t say, but based on the views you have been expressing it would be safe to assume that when it comes to freedom of speech (which is the only topic relevant here for our consideration) that your country is almost certainly tyrannical compared to the USA. Feels good to be #1.
Also I don’t trust the Cato Institute for anything, so your links are absurd and prove nothing. They are a political organization and have a clear bias. We would have to agree in the first place that their metric for their conclusion is viable, which simply may not be the case. The best you can say is that the Cato Institute’s conclusions are viable only for those who wholeheartedly agree with all of the Cato Institute’s political views as used in that report. Additionally, those Cato Institute reports are aggregates of multiple factors. They are not a pure isolation of just freedom of speech. Lastly, nowhere in the report do they address measures of freedom of speech of the individual. They only measure restrictions on media and press. I don’t think those are a meaningful measure of freedom of speech for the individual. CLEARLY you never even skimmed their reports. Screw you for wasting my time. Next time read your source before snogging its dingaling so hard. You are the epitome of dishonest and irresponsible. I’m done with you. I’ll let someone who cares about France to respond to your nonsense misrepresenting the comedian.
Frankie Boyle, Jimmy Carr, Jim Jefferies. The list goes on of highly successful comedians who tell many rape/aids/cancer/dead baby jokes. Whether someone finds these funny or appropriate is entirely subjective, and in no fashion changes the fact that a joke is a joke.
Look at this picture
Some people think it is black and blue. Some people think it is gold and white. No matter what they think, it is still a dress.
No idea from where you got that information.
