As I've said at least once, the EU is
a humongous bureaucracy playing at being a transnational government. So, when it
decided to produce a uniform system for drug trials across 28
countries, no one should have been surprised it came up with
something that increased costs, extended delays and benefitted no one
except paper-pushers and lawyers. Certainly not patients. In fact,
it's so obviously bad that EU MPs have said they're going to scrap it
and come up with something better. Maybe. Meanwhile, R&D stays
stalled.
It's
surely not at all surprising that 67% of Spaniards think the job
being done by the PP government is “bad or very bad,” while 70%
think the same about the PSOE opposition. With a general election
next year, the real question is how much of this disaffection with
corrupt politicos will translate into support for Spain's new party,
Podemos, now in 3rd position. Can it really replace PSOE as the
left-of-centre option? Possibly. Hence the barrage of
criticism directed at it by the 2 main parties.
Everyone in the UK is familiar with
'grade creep". This is the ability of students to achieve grades
way above their predecessors. And it doesn't only occur at secondary
school, with GCSEs and A Levels. It's been happening so long at
university that the percentage of First Class degrees has risen over the last 30 years from
5% to 20%. I mention this merely because of
the accompanying comment I read from a CEO about the best recruits
his company could get - “They need a lot of training. They can’t always
spell. They can’t be left to write emails without supervision.
They’re bright, but you can’t assume they know anything."
Certainly not how to punctuate . . . .
Who'd be a cop? A couple of Ibiza
police officers stopped a van in the early hours of Tuesday morning
to breathalyse the driver. He was clean but the officers were a tad
taken aback to find 6 semi-naked Swiss folk in the back engaged in
some horizontal jogging. Rather than arrest them for indecent
behaviour, they gave them on-the-spot fines for not wearing
seat-belts. Which were readily paid, garnering a 50% discount. The
wisdom of Solomon.
Finally
. . . I've said that Google's translations of Spanish text into English are poor.
One reason is the lack of personal pronouns in Spanish and another is
the different word order. When you combine this with the Spanish love
of long sentences, the result can be gibberish. As an example of the
latter, I offer you this, a sentence of 111 words:-
Si, mientras estuvo acampada, la gente no supo más que mostrar su
indignación, una vez nombrado el sujeto que les había impulsado a
salir a la calle, solo faltaba que un grupo de lo que Iglesias llama
buenos comunicadores, expertos en el uso de la Red, bien dotados para
la “presencia mediática”, construyera una visión del mundo en
la que la gente, convertida en comunidad, pudiera sacar la
consecuencia de que si ellos están en el poder es sólo porque
nosotros los pusimos, y que ahora, que ya no nos representan, podemos
echarlos, por mangantes, por corruptos, por vividores, porque al
traicionar el mandato de representación se han convertido en
escoria.
And
here's Google's attempt at a translation:- If, while you were
camping, people did not know more than show their outrage, once the
subject that had driven them out into the street named, just missing
a group of churches called what good communicators, skilled in the
use of Red, well suited to the "media presence" build a
world view in which people turned into community, could get the
result that if they are in power only because we put them, and now
that no longer represent us, we can throw them by crooks by corrupt,
for freeloaders, for betraying the mandate of representation have
become dross.
I
rest my case.
No comments:
Post a Comment