Idk how it is in Germany but my wife is currently trying to became a train driver in France and there are far more requirements that what you would imagine.
Even if the job is actually opened to basically everyone (and that’s pretty nice), you have to be in perfect physical and psychological shape with pretty strict tests, you have to be intellectually apt enough to follow the training which is pretty intense. You have to accept work conditions such as not knowing your work hours until the day before. You have to accept sleeping who knows where at least 2 times a week. You have to accept having only one weekend off per month.
So what happens is that when you have that much filters and you still want to hire train drivers, you can’t afford to expect your drivers to know another language on top of all of the rest.
Actually I’m a taking the train everyday to go to work and I have barely any complaint with the SNCF.
Most of the time they do what they can to deal with issues.
I don’t feel like there are too much issues it’s just they are extremely bad at communicating issues when they happen.
Sometimes the train is not there when it should but on the screen it just disappears as if it passed. Most of the time it’s just 2-5 minutes late but you can’t know. Maybe it’s just late. Maybe the traffic is stopped. Who knows.
I just dont understand how they don’t have people whose job is just writing messages for the information screens.
What is worse is that in my region, they have a pretty decent community managers for live information but they only post information in twitter because why not. So they already have the people doing this work but those people are saying different things than what the screen shows. Just let them write things on the screens :D
The original EEC was to help maintain peace through economic interdependency. Now the EU is very different with ultimate goal of full integration, i.e. a federal state. The single market is a step, the single currency is another step, EU Parliament, tax rules, now possibly defence matters, etc. Step by step but always in the same direction.
The EU started with the coal and steel initiative, which created a common market for those commodities. It was indeed "peace through trade", but mainly trade.
And the goalpost has since moved very far, I don't see really how preventing countries from sending back illegal immigrants or making same-sex marriage has anything to do with European peace.
The point made is still valid since the EEC was created in 1957 and, before it, the Coal and Steel Community in 1951. Of course it is also unclear what they had in mind with that phrasing, and perhaps it even varied depending on whom you asked: The UK government under Thatcher signed it but I think we can all agree that she wasn't aiming for a federal EU (her famous "No, no, no" speech in 1990 makes it beyond doubt). I think the people at large did not want nation states to disappear within a federal EU, either (and probably still don't).
Can you tell me when was it better than nowadays ? The EU is far from perfect, but still I'm glad to be born after its creation than before. Because my grandparents were born before and they know what it was to be at war.
European Union have been meaningfully created so that the enrolled countries economically depends on each other. It came with a lot of downsides (loss of national sovereignty is one of the biggest), also a lot of benefits (bigger market) and the most important of all of those, it came with the longest peace period of the continent in the human history.
It may seems that things are not going in the right direction and I'd agree but we are pretty rich compared to the rest of the world, we are in good health, and we are still not at war against each other like we were in the last thousands years so I'll take that.
You don't need to destroy individual countries to achieve peace and prosperity.
We had prosperity befote the EC and we can, and did, achieve peace by a mindset shift after two world wars and free trade. There is a big difference between the original EEC and the EU, too.
Again these are all a posteriori arguments that are repeated ad nauseam to justify a federal Europe and to manufacture consent.
I agree that we can't (and will never) know if we could have done it better.
But the results are here : we are at peace, and compared to the rest of the world, we are in good health, we live in overall great conditions and we are pretty much free. I'm not saying we don't have to fight to enhance things or to at least keep them like they are. I'm french so I know what it means to protest against basically everything ;)
I'm not saying we couldn't have done it better. But it's important to acknowledge what we really have before trying to get better things.
Me too, so I know that the country entered the EEC without any desire to disappear into a superstate but that's what's happening very insidiously, including because the country has had very weak leadership for decades.
Sometimes it's just amazing to look at how much dedication someone put into a list like this, and wonder what they do with this information. It's inspiring (to me at least.)
In a park near my hotel, there's an elderly gentleman who uses a giant brush to paint calligraphy on concrete walkways every morning. He paints it with water - so it gradually evaporates over the course of the next hour or so. I admire his work in the same way I admire this web page.
I am guessing someone who works at the station shared some internal documents.
I remember in the mid 90s watching Nickelodeon before school and they played an entire 30m block of commercials instead of a program. They probably lost the tape or something.
There are definitely outside organizations whose sole responsibility is to monitor TV/radio broadcasts and nowadays even podcast sponsor breaks to ensure that ad copy is inserted as agreed. (Source: I was contracted to do some of that work for a time.)
Even if the job is actually opened to basically everyone (and that’s pretty nice), you have to be in perfect physical and psychological shape with pretty strict tests, you have to be intellectually apt enough to follow the training which is pretty intense. You have to accept work conditions such as not knowing your work hours until the day before. You have to accept sleeping who knows where at least 2 times a week. You have to accept having only one weekend off per month.
So what happens is that when you have that much filters and you still want to hire train drivers, you can’t afford to expect your drivers to know another language on top of all of the rest.
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