GABA ghoul posted:

It's completely worthless for ranking safety though. Crime perception and crime are not necessarily correlated(or have become anti-correlated in many places due to sensationalist media reporting). It's still useful for understanding public anxieties about safety though.

IIRC Spain has one of the lowest murder rates on the planet, which is usually correlated with low violent crime. I doubt it would show up in the last few places in a real safety ranking.

Blut posted:

The countries included by itself should throw up red flags for likely having very questionable veracity. It includes Georgia and North Macedonia, but not EU members like Belgium, Ireland or Sweden that would have more reliable, and more comparable to the rest, data.

Numbeo is also completely trash for things like this, its entirely subjective reporting on how safe someone felt walking down a street. For all you know the person doing the reporting is some fedora wearing American who's on their first trip outside of Kansas.

Doctor Malaver posted:

Why would self-reporting from North Macedonia be less reliable than from Belgium? And why would a response to "Do you feel safe walking at night?" be less comparable? Are Macedonians so savage and alien to us EU members?

BTW there are stats for those countries too of course but they didn't make the top-20 list. And there are hundreds of reports per city, which isn't enormous, but also wouldn't be tipped by a fedora-wearing American who decided to lie about living in one of the European cities.

GABA ghoul posted:

It's completely worthless for ranking safety though. Crime perception and crime are not necessarily correlated(or have become anti-correlated in many places due to sensationalist media reporting). It's still useful for understanding public anxieties about safety though.

IIRC Spain has one of the lowest murder rates on the planet, which is usually correlated with low violent crime. I doubt it would show up in the last few places in a real safety ranking.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

I think the issue here is mostly the fact that it's about perception, which includes expectations. Say a country was extremely safe, but just had a doubling of violent night crime in recent years. Suddenly, the streets feel much less safe than the baseline people had gotten used to, causing the country to fall down the rankings, possibly past much less safe countries that have just been consistently bad - or even improved a little, making the streets feel safer than the baseline expectation.

That said, I can't find any stats that really justify acting like North Macedonia couldn't be reasonably perceived as safe, especially in comparison to Belgium and Sweden.

Fat Samurai posted:

Home break ins and squatting (not sure about if that's the correct term, apologies) have gone down the last few years in Spain, but the sales for alarm systems have increased until we're the fourth country in number of alarms (not per capita, total). Both the companies selling them and right wing parties have been waving the fear of immigration and crime flags for years, and it shows.

Doctor Malaver posted:

Why would self-reporting from North Macedonia be less reliable than from Belgium? And why would a response to "Do you feel safe walking at night?" be less comparable? Are Macedonians so savage and alien to us EU members?

BTW there are stats for those countries too of course but they didn't make the top-20 list. And there are hundreds of reports per city, which isn't enormous, but also wouldn't be tipped by a fedora-wearing American who decided to lie about living in one of the European cities.

Blut posted:

Statistical comparisons between EU countries tend to be a lot more accurate than comparisons between EU and non-EU countries. Primarily because there are EU standard reporting measures in lots of areas these days, which helps hugely with the data compatability.

As well as that you have the issues like wealth, police funding/effectiveness, and corruption, which influence the reporting of crime figures heavily. All of which would favour rich Northern European countries over Macedonia or Georgia.

Doctor Malaver posted:

That would be true if we were looking at institutional data. We aren't. We're looking at crowd-sourced data.

Doctor Malaver posted:

That's a fair point and maybe explains why Scandinavian countries are doing so poorly on the list.

Where is Sweden on that metric? I was in Stockholm this summer and walked through a cozy residential neighborhood and literally every house on both sides of the street had an alarm system. That's still rare in Croatia.

mobby_6kl posted:

I guess self-reported/survey data of perception could be interested if contrasted with actual crime stats but as it is

Anecdotally, I was just in Barcelona and my friend warned me to never go to some district that I've since forgotten, but I'm absolutely sure is actually perfectly safe. Maybe not like "walk around drunk at 2am with the wallet sticking out of the back pocket" safe but not like you'll get randomly murdered there.

quote:

The French government has pledged to cut another €10bn out of this year’s budget as weaker economic growth makes its earlier fiscal plans untenable.

With much of Europe stuck in a period of sluggish growth, the French economy is expected to expand only 1 per cent this year, according to revised government forecasts released on Monday, down from the 1.4 per cent that had been the basis for the 2024 budget. “Lower growth means lower tax receipts, so the government must spend less,” finance minister Bruno Le Maire said in a news conference announcing the new measures.

The 2024 budget already included roughly €16bn in cuts, mostly from phasing out energy subsidies, but the additional cuts are needed to meet a commitment to reduce the budget deficit to 4.4 per cent this year. Le Maire promised there would be no tax increases to plug the hole, casting it as a consistent policy choice that President Emmanuel Macron’s government has stuck to since 2017. “We have cut taxes and won’t deviate from this line. French people can’t bear any more tax,” he said. The moves come as France is under pressure from credit rating agencies and national finance and audit watchdogs to defend its deficit-cutting plan, which is slower than most other EU countries.

Brussels has recently struck a deal on reimposing revised fiscal rules that were suspended because of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Analysts expect France to be the least likely of the four biggest eurozone economies to meet the bloc’s new annual targets for cutting public debt and limiting public spending.

Half of the €10bn cuts will come from government ministries, such as spending less on hiring, procurement, travel and offices, while the rest will come from scaling back programs including subsidies for home renovations to reduce carbon emissions and international aid. Spending on healthcare and local governments will be protected from the cuts, said Le Maire.

quote:

Following its investigation, the EDPS has found that the European Commission (Commission) has infringed several key data protection rules when using Microsoft 365. In its decision, the EDPS imposes corrective measures on the Commission.

The EDPS has found that the Commission has infringed several provisions of Regulation (EU) 2018/1725, the EU’s data protection law for EU institutions, bodies, offices and agencies (EUIs), including those on transfers of personal data outside the EU/European Economic Area (EEA). In particular, the Commission has failed to provide appropriate safeguards to ensure that personal data transferred outside the EU/EEA are afforded an essentially equivalent level of protection as guaranteed in the EU/EEA. Furthermore, in its contract with Microsoft, the Commission did not sufficiently specify what types of personal data are to be collected and for which explicit and specified purposes when using Microsoft 365. The Commission’s infringements as data controller also relate to data processing, including transfers of personal data, carried out on its behalf.

golden bubble posted:

https://www.ft.com/content/02e6cca7-6cdd-44e3-9d1e-71ea9883f4b2

quote:

https://twitter.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/1770136473427198259

Mark Ames posted:

"German schoolchildren should be prepared for war to 'strengthen our resilience', the country’s education minister has said...'civil defence' exercises should be held in schools as part of efforts to help youngsters cope in the years to come."

Jon Pod Van Damm posted:

true.spoon posted:

While she likely said something dumb I am confident that this Xeet by the esteemed Mark Ames is misleading without looking it up.

Antigravitas posted:

Zivilschutz includes things like spotting misinformation on social media.

Antigravitas posted:

Zivilschutz includes things like spotting misinformation on social media.

Rust Martialis posted:

No wonder Ames and the Torygraph are against it

quote:

In the interview, Ms Stark-Watzinger, 55, said she also wanted to see more outreach work from members of the Bundeswehr, the German army, to make children feel more familiar with the armed forces.

“I think it is important that youth officers come to schools and report what the Bundeswehr is doing for our security,” she said.

Antigravitas posted:

Zivilschutz has been a thing for many decades. When there's war within a day's drive from Berlin it's a pretty good idea to talk to students about it and be allocated the time to do it as well. There are plenty of classrooms where at least one child is directly affected, and indirectly everyone is. The news is full of war poo poo, gruesome pictures flood social media, etc.

I'm not a fan of having the military in school, but teachers' associations want to have the resources to deal with this poo poo.

Tesseraction posted:

As I recall Current Events was the precursor forum to Debate & Discussion, based off that class name.

In Europe's defence, and particularly in Germany, contemporary history is taught, hence the infamous case of the German student studying overseas in the US having to explain to an American classmate arguing against learning about slavery, that, actually, Germany does teach about the Holocaust, because it's important to learn from historical mistakes.

true.spoon posted:

I was bored enough to try to look up what she actually said but it turned out to be pretty annoying. The original interview is surprisingly difficult to find and literally every article concentrates on the same three snippets. The one interpreted as "students should be prepared for a war" seems to be "Die Gesellschaft muss sich insgesamt gut auf Krisen vorbereiten - von einer Pandemie über Naturkatastrophen bis zum Krieg." (Society overall has to prepare itself well for crisis events - ranging from a pandemic to natural disasters up to war.). A rather uncharitable interpretation of a fairly bland statement.

steinrokkan posted:

Fico simply follows the oh so familiar "disgraced social democrat -> fascist tinpot dictator" pipeline.

true.spoon posted:

I was bored enough to try to look up what she actually said but it turned out to be pretty annoying. The original interview is surprisingly difficult to find and literally every article concentrates on the same three snippets. The one interpreted as "students should be prepared for a war" seems to be "Die Gesellschaft muss sich insgesamt gut auf Krisen vorbereiten - von einer Pandemie über Naturkatastrophen bis zum Krieg." (Society overall has to prepare itself well for crisis events - ranging from a pandemic to natural disasters up to war.). A rather uncharitable interpretation of a fairly bland statement.

His Divine Shadow posted:

Is austerity considered a natural disaster?