If you are skilled with Google Maps you can find lots and lots of good restaurants in Italy.
Yelp in Italy doesn't really exist, no one in Italy uses that. TheFork is okay for the deals that they have, like coupon etc. but to be fair I would not recommend that for tourists since you'll be missing out lots of nice restaurants since on TheFork there are just a few of them.
Yes, TheFork is limited. We usually go with local recommendations. We also tend to return to the same places so know what we prefer / are looking for.
Places we've eaten at in Puglia (from Tricase to Lecce to Vieste) are a mix of local recommendations, places we've researched, or random luck. A place we stayed outside Treviso/near Venice, the little hotel recommended this pizza place where entering there must have been a hen party or some such (many women poured into slip dresses of a wide age range) and we were skeptical. Turned out to be really quite good - different types of crust, local and other draft beers, etc.
To be fair I don't like the commercial banking system but having all the banking system centralised like that is so much worse. At least the commercial bank system is in some way decentralised.
Also CDBCs are programmable, Programmable money is a dangerous tool in my opinion. The State could thoroughly control everything you could do with money (e.g. carbon allowances, money that expires etc.), money would literally become vouchers controlled by the government. Pure dystopia.
The main problem is that the European Parliament can't write new laws.
There's no way to directly elect members that write laws. In every democratic country, you do.
I agree. It would have been better if a directly elected body could propose laws. Whether you consider the EU "not very democratic" is kinda subjective, but there are certainly strong arguments that it's not as democratic as it should be.
But "if [the not directly elected parts of the EU] want to do something they will and there’s nothing that can be done about it" remains incorrect.
In my opinion, the EU to be really democratic, the Parliament, that we elect directly, should be able to have the same "right of initiative" (i.e. write laws, not just to approve them) as the Commission/Council.
There is a very large organization out there who pays in those dollars and demands taxes in those dollars. If you want to live in a certain piece of dirt, you will deal with that organization.
That dirt is very tangible. So is the vast organization running that dirt: it builds roads, runs a military, and (in extreme cases) sends out people with guns if you don't pay those taxes.
I think the point being made is that we assign a value to arbitrary things. People often cite cryptocurrency as not having real tangible value but the same could be said about anything we collectively assign some value to it.
I'd further argue that nothing truly has tangible value because by definition, value is an intangible concept. The question isn't whether it's tangible, but whether its value to risk ratio is good enough for you.
I really think that banning and blocking Russian people is counterproductive. You just create more division and you don't really gain much.
You create more hate against the west and you give the rulers an excuse for what they're doing (You see? The west hates you, they don't even want you to play tennis etc.).
