It's not "damaging" to France to say that the country is run by dishonest incompetents. France is a wonderful, beautiful country - any visitor can see that it in a few hours. But if a government is lowering people's incomes and increasing unemployment, we have a right as rational people to say as much as we can about it.
How is 'socialist' used in meaningless ways? Socialist in 2012 means someone who believes that wealth should be distributed from wealth-creators to the public sector, with the result that the country as whole grows more slowly than it should. Maybe you are thinking about what "socialism" originally meant, or what it "should" mean. Socialism has been defined by history.
I don't want to have a political discussion on HN. But the original claim that France is "one of the most socialist country of the planet" is ridiculous (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism)
There are problems in France (As there are in other countries). But just saying it's because France is socialist will not help to solve them.
I've spent 12 years in Paris working on the web. Before that I spent 9 years in Russia - I know propaganda and lies. The French government is incompetent and dishonest.
Why do I write this? Because it's in all of our interest here in France that the rest of world know. These buffoons want to be taken seriously on the world stage, like Chernenko and Brezhnev. No reason to allow that to happen.
I've lived in France 12 years and run a web consultancy in Paris. The government is completely out to lunch - and I feel the international media has not covered this story sufficiently. Unemployment is going to rise, investment will drop and extreme political movements are going to become even more popular.
Which raises an interesting question: Should local hacker/nerd/entrepreneurial communities adopt an all-English approach or should they strive to invent at least some new vocabulary and use those.
I've lived in Paris (12 million people) for 10 years - but I grew up in Montreal (3.5 million people). Montreal has better nightlife than Paris, and it's no contest.
My first reaction to this was: creepy. The sales pitch is creepy - telling us in the best newspeak that less is more. The sales language is creepy, describing how much more "secure" a machine is because it only browses the web. The sales video has the smell of a lecture, with a message that hints at Big Brother. The layout of the product page is even creepy, with all kinds of colors and icon styles.
Google doesn't want to add value to anything here. They want control, and they are playing catch up with the iPad. This is the textbook way to run business, and it will fail.
I am 49 years old and I work as freelance consultant on e-commerce projets. Honestly, it is impossible for me to work (which means mostly sitting) for 3-4 hours in the morning and 4-5 hours in the afternoon and also sit during lunch. If I do that I will either fall asleep or be unproductive for most of the afternoon. At lunch I spend at least one hour walking, running or biking. At the least I must get outside, whatever the weather.
I was studying in Russia when Chernobyl occurred, and I dated a woman from northern Ukraine who was a teenager at the time of the accident. I saw the results of the accident firsthand - basically everyone under the age of 10 was affected - hair loss, skin rashes and nausea in the immediate years after, cancer and early death later.
But even so it isn't fair to judge the safety of nuclear power by Chernobyl. Chernobyl happened because the Soviet system had become incredibly incompetent, and technical decisions were being made by thugs.
The capitalist system quite often also becomes incredibly incompetent and has its technical decisions made by thugs. Tepco, the company that runs the Fukushima plant, has a long history of corruption, faked security reports and blatant incompetence.
What makes nuclear power unsafe is human error more than technical failure. That's the aspect the naive technocrats (like the guy who wrote this article) always ignore.
