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The German media have been talking for months about a €10bn cost-cutting program at Volkswagen that includes layoffs, and Czech labor leader Jaroslav Povšík of Škoda Auto started warning in Sept. that it could affect Czech jobs too. One of the main issues is lower-thanexpected sales of e-vehicles (EVs), and that was even before the generous EV subsidies in Germany ended this week. While the Czech cabinet was putting all its effort into attracting a VW gigafactory, VW was already making plans to downsize its EV output. The CR is now in the position of losing production of regular Superbs and Octavias to Bratislava - to make room for EVs that might not be produced in the expected numbers. Didn't Petr Fiala and Jozef Síkela get wind of this when they met in Prague on Oct. 30 with VW Chair Oliver Blume? Investor Warren Buffett famously said that, "You don't find out who's been swimming naked until the tide goes out." We'll soon find out if the CR is the naked man of Europe.
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Over the past few years, Russia has dominated the most important Western migration route on the African continent. The threat of the free passage of hundreds of thousands of Africans as an instrument of Russia's hybrid war against Europe has thus become very real. How could this have happened when the West had controlled the whole of West Africa for over a century?
Two certainties: the army and corruption
Sixty years of political independence have, however, failed to create a middle class, sufficient education or a stable political system in post-colonial societies. Thus, in virtually all West African countries, only two stabilizing factors have established themselves: the military and corruption. In all cases, Western attempts to democratise the communities there through the modernisation and training of armies have gradually failed.
'The road to Europe is now wide open for refugees and migrants from virtually all of Africa. Russia, which also has mercenary troops in Libya, now controls the whole of it."
"The Russian Ministry of Defense has recently established its own interventionist "volunteer" force under the name "Afrikaner Corps" - the similarity to the name of the Nazi Afrikakorps of World War II is more than interesting."
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"The cause of the crisis is moral misery. The turning point of the economic crisis? I don't believe in any turning points per se. What we used to call economic crisis is another name for moral misery. Moral misery is the cause, economic decline is the effect."
Tomáš Baťa
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Two minutes says it all! Freedom has never been and will never be free. Ukrainians are also fighting to restore the moral values of today's world that uncontrolled prosperity is destroying. The end of moral values is followed by the fall of everything, sooner or later. JŠ
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Prague - 3Kino Art - 12.12.2023: Erasing the (Ukrainian) Nation
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...Being able to have a good meltdown may give you wrinkles, but it's definitely better than Botox. Few things are as liberating as experiencing failure and getting over it. But don't take that to mean we should idolize failure. Losing shouldn't be the new kind of winning...
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The question of the good life is eminently philosophical because it is eminently human and can transcend the horizon of everyday life. It concerns us all, and Plato said it: the good life is the examined life. That means a life where we ask ourselves the question of what a meaningful life is. But I see where you're going with that question. A philosopher shouldn't give answers about how exactly to lead a meaningful life. It should never be a matter of someone telling you Do this and don't do that, have a family or don't have a family, have this job and not another. The philosopher, I think, should cultivate the awareness that we sometimes overestimate the contents of life. Life is, after all, random, and one doesn't usually have much control over what happens to one. Your effort and duty - and this is what a philosopher might point out - is to find yourself in what has happened to you.
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In the article "Ministry of Defence counts retirement benefits and 500 million in fines in defence spending" it says, among other things:
The cost of retirement benefits for soldiers who have already retired to civilian life. This amounts to more than three billion crowns in 2023 alone. The amount supposedly spent on a "modern and efficient army" also includes a fine of 550 million crowns for mistakes in the purchase of helicopters. The Ministry of Defence has awarded several contracts for the supply of about 1,000 multiply overpriced MINIMI machine guns for 1.5 billion. The machine guns are not supplied by the Belgian manufacturer but by a village dealer CB Servis Centrum.
The Ministry of Defence still refuses to provide information on the details of the purchase, especially the unit prices. The dealer supplying the machine guns is said not to want this. Kverulant.org sued the Ministry of Defence for illegal practices and the Municipal Court in Prague upheld its claim. Nevertheless, Černochová again refused to provide him with the information. Subsequently, the Prague 6 court ordered the bailiff to recover the requested information in September 2023. It will be no surprise if the costs of this execution are also included in the country's defence expenditure.
Several paradoxical conclusions emerge from the above. For example, that the more the Ministry of Defence fixates on arms purchases and the more fines it is fined for doing so, the better the defence will be able to meet our commitment to NATO. Or that the more soldiers go into civilian life, the more the state will have to pay retirement allowances and the better our commitment to defence will look on paper. Finally, the more lawsuits the defence loses, the higher the amount spent on defence. There seems to be something rotten in the state... Czech.
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