ameer

Didn't take it as criticism, but man you have a knack for asking silly questions sometimes.

A Chiron is a toy and so is an 80 million home. When covering a basic need for shelter or transport, its acceptable to spend a larger percentage of your income/worth. How many people who have a 300-400k house are actually worth more than their house? For most the house is their biggest asset. So yeah it becomes ok imo to spend 3.5 mil on a toy when your life is simply exactly the same with or without it, I guess. At least that's my rationale.

It is a figure of speech. Words have nuances, subtle meanings, put together in phrases, they sometimes express more than their meaning taken separately. I'm surprised that I, as a non native English speaker, have to explain this to a native English speaker. What I meant by that figure of speech, translated into vulgar English, is that you really need "fcuk you money" to own a Chiron. Do you feel enlightened? Allow me to give you some more food for thought: "A candle loses none of its light by lighting another". Figure it out.

It's a fantastic looking car. I saw one in Monaco this summer, it was in the Bugatti boutique there, the design and details on the car are mind blowing. It's so much better than the Veyron. Regarding affordability, I personally take the Fortis approach, I don't ever spend on anything which I can't comfortably afford. Basically it must not affect my lifestyle or interfere with future plans or business. I'd buy one if I had an income of probably more than 10 mil a year, though I don't know how much more my lifestyle would change if I were in that income bracket... who knows... maybe even then I'd feel I can't afford it. Would love to be in that position at some point. At the moment the most I feel I can afford comfortably is my C63s (even felt guilty about that at 100k eur), so I'm pretty far away from the 10 mil a year or Chiron. Not to mention the costs of maintaining and insuring the Chiron which is probably another 300-350k a year, perhaps more, just insurance where I live would be at around 5% of the value of the car per year. Buying it would be the easy part, spending 300k a year just on one car.... you need pretty deep pockets. I guess the old adage "if you have to ask..." has never been more true than on the Chiron.

Though birth rates arent an objective way to judge sex or attraction. With the advent of contraception it's normal that birth rates go down. It doesn't mean baby boomers had more sex, its just that sex resulted in more babies in those times. If I were to guess people are having more sex now than ever. Can't find any official statistics, but this is the closest I can get to a study. It seems that the Greeks are the ones getting the most action. http://www.alternet.org/sex-amp-relationsh...sfied-countries http://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/the-10-m...e-world-334352/

Come on RD... that is super far fetched... Why do you guys think Europe is populated by metrosexual shemen? Southern cultures are very macho, traditional roles for men and women are very much alive, acceptable and mostly the norm. Europe is not just Sweden. RIP, new sad reality kicking in.

Perhaps in the US less people know about Ataturk because Turkey is less important to American history, but in Europe, with Turkey being a significant historical force, Ataturk is quite well known. What is less understood in both Europe and the US, is that despite Turkey being a secular country there have always been deep divisions in society about the direction the country took after 1923. In Turkey this division in society is represented as White Turks vs Black Turks (it's not ethnic, it's just a figure of speech). White Turks are the urban, educated, secular elite, the people from which Ataturk's Young Turks movement was born, the Black Turks are the rural, religious, less educated ones. This is just one of many long running divisions in Turkish society, not everyone agreed with Ataturk, he was a an enlightened man, but he was a dictator make no mistake about that, he meaned well, and to secularize society dictatorship is needed, the same happened in Europe when countries moved towards more secular governments, democracy did not just spring up spontaneously. You can say Ataturk is the Turkish counterpart of Germany's Bismarck, Bismarck was very vocal on his dislike of democracy. Well... ever since the Turkish Republic was born, the Black Turks, have had a suspicious view of government, conspiracy theories were rampart and still are, they viewed the gvt as being "infiltrated" by non Turks or non muslims, they could not outright reject it and begrudgingly had to follow suit. Ataturk foreseeing such a situation in the future (this conflict between the White and Black Turks) charged the army to be the guardian of secularity. And they have done their job when either the gvt became too islamic or too leftist. Sometimes too much democracy isn't necessarily a good thing. They didn't seize power... they were voted for. Erdogan by his own admission is a Black Turk. This segment of society has come to power and like any segment of society who feels ignored and unrepresented for long periods of time, when it comes to power, it clings to it, it is paranoid and under the guise of righting past wrongs, it sometimes exaggerates and commits abuses. In the past 10-15 years there has been a massive shift in wealth and power from the previous secular elite to the new elite created by these so called Black Turks. They support this gvt and feel they finally have a say in how the country is run. One interesting tidbit: Do you guys know why Ataturk changed the alphabet? Turks of course used to write with Arabic script, but Ataturk decided to change it with Latin script. He sold this to the public as a modernization of Turkish culture, but the reason was not to westernize the Turks. The reason was to cut their access to scriptures and other old religious writings which he viewed as dangerous and toxic. He knew that one day he'd have a generation of people completely unable to read and write in Arabic script. Even the language was changed with many French, German and English neologisms introduced. Such radical changes were made, that there are situations nowadays when a young urban dweller would have trouble understanding a very old person living in rural areas, Ottoman Turkish was a lot different to the Turkish language spoken today. Nevertheless Turkey is an important country not only to NATO, despite it being a Muslim country it has huge cultural influence especially in eastern Europe and Eastern Mediterranean. Long running, millennia old cultural, historical and geographical ties can't just be severed overnight, they go back to the very foundations of civilization. Constantinople, the capital of what used to be the Eastern Roman empire or Byzantine empire, now known as Istanbul, is still the seat of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. What the Vatican is to the Catholics, Istanbul is to the Orthodox. Just like German and Russian minorities, there are Turkish/Tatar/Turkified people living all over Eastern Europe. This problem is extremely complex and needs to be handled with the utmost care, antagonizing Turkey, creating a split, would result in many other problems in the long term. The complexity of the relation between Turkey and Europe is really hard to grasp for most people with little knowledge of history and cultural ties/sensitivities etc. Simplifying this relation can be extremely damaging, which is why I personally don't really trust the west to handle Turkey properly. I have serious doubts some politician voted into office by people living on the other side of an ocean who barely know where Turkey is, let alone anything about the region's history or culture can do anything but create a disastrous situation. In some ways I'm myself conflicted over this entire situation. Sometimes I tend to think: "fcuk them all, let them work it out themselves, this is not our responsibility, perhaps Trump and other populist politicians like him are right about certain things", but once I become aware of the intricacies and complexities, and the potential consequences I sometimes think the best approach is to work with people. Leaving people to their own devices in order to work out their problems is not always a good solution. Working with them can only help. The current trend of oversimplification of very complex issues might turn out to be a bigger threat to peace and stability. This trend is becoming dangerously popular and is already having effects, Brexit, the rise of Trump and other populist politicians all over the west. There is no easy solution. These factoid based politics, a rejection of reason imo, can not lead to anything good. Perhaps humans, in a collective psyche bee hive kind of way, have an innate tendency to self destruct and we don't even realize it exists. For all our cultural superiority, wealth, social progress etc, our most basic instincts are just waiting for a chance to rip through the thin veneer of civilization. They're like inside a pressure cooker, the more tightly they are kept, the harder and easier they come out when a chance reveals itself. There is a perceived inaction or indifference on part of muslims in regards to terrorism or other violent elements in their culture. But I think it's a bit unfair to judge it that way, Muslims who are more modern, don't really care much about religion, and are mostly only nominally Muslim but non practicing, and are understandably reluctant to engage the religious community, they probably have better things to do. So then, the condemnation and rejection that is demanded falls to the more conservative practicing ones which are in touch with the religious and conservative communities. And herein lies the problem, even though most conservative ones reject violence they agree with many other things that we in the west find questionable. THen you have state sponsored fundamentalism, Saudis biggest export aside from oil is their repulsive interpretation of religion. This is really an uphill battle. What most people seem to ignore or forget, is that the overwhelming majority of the victims of terror are Muslims themselves. Society questions why muslims seem to not condemn terrorism (they do but somehow it seems not loud enough, perhaps because not many in the West read or watch media outlets from the muslim world), yet governments of the world make little or no pressure on fundamentalist shit hole countries to purge their religious establishments of extremists. No pressure on Saudi Arabia to stop exporting their vile ideology, radicalizing communities all over the world, yet there is social pressure on muslims as individuals to do the job that the governments in their adoptive or native countries ought to be doing. Isn't that a bit hypocritical? If those surveys were taken in the 30s or 60s or 80s would they still be the same? I'm not old enough to know how attitudes were back then, but from what I've been told, there was far less antagonism towards the West, and people in Muslim countries were more secular and more willing to adopt western views on sensitive topics. If you even look at pictures from those times you'd see a remarkable difference in the number of women wearing headscarves, etc. And yes there is racism in Europe, most Americans I meet have a rosy view of Europe, they seem to think it is less racist, less prejudiced and better than the US in many ways, not sure why... but that's what they seem to think, perhaps a case of the grass being greener? I guess western europeans are just more closeted and diplomatic about it. On the other hand western and northern Europeans are far more racist beneath all the PC bullshit than people in the south or east. PC has never really caught on in Eastern Europe, a "sensitive" westerner would be appalled at some of the public debates going on right now. Those people in America that are offended by "micro aggressions" and who demand "safe spaces" and other such bullshit would be laughed at and have their sanity questioned. That said many countries in the south and especially in the east of Europe despite not being PC, are inherently more tolerant than many other places that only claim to be, a consequence of history perhaps. The inquisition only killed 1700 people or so over a very long time span, perhaps a century or two. It's greatly exaggerated. Isis kills that many in a week. The other effects were that Jews were expelled from Spain outright, and Muslims were given a chance to convert to Christianity or leave. Some left, but most converted and stayed. The biggest irony is that when the Jews were forcibly expelled from Spain, it was the Ottomans who sent their navy to pick them up and invited them to settle in the Ottoman empire. Man this was long post... Sorry guys, I got carried away

Differences of opinion.

Under close scrutiny you will find some primitive aspects in western cultures as well. The difference between west and east is that the primitive aspects in the west are far more benign nowadays, 100 or 200 years ago things were very different. Religious nuts in the west today are content with simply talking shit instead of taking direction action. There is plenty of bad stuff I can identify. For example I find socialism and this obsession with equality, primitive, I think it's a return to tribalism. Despite its shortcomings in some areas, western culture is more advanced, and better suited to the times we live in. I don't believe cultures are equal. Why should they be? Is it reasonable to assume the culture of France is equal to the culture of uncontacted tribes in the Amazon? They are only equal in the sense that they are both allowed to exist, but each in their own cultural space. Cultures can only coexist if they are similar enough, or start from the same premises and the only differences are nuanced and minor. For two radically different cultures to coexist, one must yield to the other.

What about it being in the hands of a megalomaniac, bent on the restoration of something that never was? Something similar happened in the 30's as well. The present scenario is just as worrying.

So let me get this straight. In the USA there is a domestic organization (BLM) who promotes civil disobedience, has no coherent leadership, and who's myriad of statements either subtly encourage violence against the state and its representatives, or can be interpreted as such. This has gotten to a point where folks are acting out on those premises. There are other countries in which such organizations exist, and they have very diverse purposes and gripes. Most of them find themselves on a watchlist. RIP

What I'm most surprised of is that at least in Europe, there is a pattern to these people becoming radicalized. It's always a petty criminal, not religious, with a history of drug/alcohol abuse, usually known to police. How does a petty criminal who uses drugs become over the course of a few weeks a religious zealot willing to sacrifice his own life to take others? Makes little sense to me. I'd expect potential terrorists to be one of those extremely conservative types. One more thing I'm wondering about is how come politicians like Hillary Clinton, or Merkel or whatever keep telling us NATO can't do anything about these barbarians? Why can't ISIS which is comprised of what? 25-50 thousand fuckwads be eliminated in a week or so with a ground campaign? Why must we tolerate a terrorist state, accept refugees, bow to the likes of Erdogan who is strong arming the west to his will? Why? I see politicians are flexible enough to back out of campaign promises, why can't they be flexible and change tune to support stability in the middle east? In Syria's case it's Assad. Can anyone tell me why Assad was so bad? Was he a bigger threat to the world than Isis? Not a bullet fired to Israel since the 70s, all minorities protected, peace and quiet, a stable country, no isis etc. Yes he opressed his own people when they wanted to engage in politics, but he also opressed islamists, many seem to forget that. Why is it that he can't be supported in order to restore order? Is it a point of principle? Politicians have principles now, is that it? What about the suffering of the 7-8 million people who are now displaced in Syria? What about their lives? Why subject them to this pain and suffering for a 'principle'? The minority of displaced people who have arrived in Europe are facing a hostile population, the rest also facing hardship and hostility, instead of living with their dignity intact in their own countries. Why was this necessary?

This part is actually not true at all. There are many schools of thought, each with their own interpretations, lots of cultural practices are based on the huge body of theological philosophy and traditions rather than the quran. What you describe above is the standard for wahabbis/isis types. They do have the means to reform, just not the will and/or possibility. Also, past "reforms" gave birth to the wahabbi interpretation and thinking. They did reform but the in the opposite sense. Wahabbis were confined to certain remote geographical areas in that great "friend" of the USA known as Saudi Arabia. With the discovery of oil and the immense amount of money and power that resulted, they have taken it upon themselves to project their way of thinking and their way of practicing religion throughout the muslim world. Why do you think they are largest proselytizers of islam? Why do they fund so many schools and mosques all over the world? It is they who have spread this cancer throughout the world in the 20th century and now everyone is reaping the harvest of those poisoned seeds. The middle east was very different in the recent past 50s 60s 70s. The younger generations are the most religious and most extreme. And this theory explains why, imo. With their influence and money they've drowned out competing and critical voices.

The downside of the coup's failure is that it will bring about the complete end of democracy in Turkey. It will be a sham just like in Russia. I see this as the premise for a future civil war between secularists and islamists in Turkey. Not today, but it's possible in the future. So many fault lines in Turkish society, ethnic, religious, political, economical etc. Divisiveness is growing, and when a huge spectrum of society feels pressured, ignored, and disenfranchised... well...

Erdogan says it's a minority faction with no support. Then why did he shut down twitter fb an youtube? He also urged people to protest against the coup. So again why shut down social media? Wouldnt it be in his interest for people to gather and protest? Turkish military in past coups didnt fire on civilians.

I agree but at least there's a chance things may go the right way. F16 shot down helicopter...

Well instability leads to uncertainty. Basically things can go in several directions from here. I know for sure Erdogans direction, back to the middle ages. I guess anything is better than that.

Guys just stay away from me. It seems that wherever I go shit starts happening. On a serious note, I hope it's a powerful elements from the army, and their coup against the islamist mini-Putin succeeds.

French-Tunisian man was identified by the media as the truck driver. Decided to cancel the 5 day trip to southern france. Staying home.

Holy crap... I am literally about to leave for the airport, direction Nice. Just saw this news on my phone... fcuk this. fcuk it. This is horrible. I'm shocked. Rip to all the victims. I'm afraid of possible follow ups. Debating staying the fcuk home with the gf. At least my country is safe from this shit. fcuking politicians, they just had to support "democracy", fcuking hypocrites. Lets create a political void in the Middle east, surely it will be filled by democrats and human rights advocates. Surely it will never empower the extremist elements there and in turn everywhere else. fcuk isis and everyone else, they want to live in the middle ages, let them, seal them off with a fcuking wall , bomb them until there's no one left, for all i care. Is it just me? Am I the only one who remembers a safer time when the middle east was ruled by "evil" despots, and the world was a much better place? Bring them back! RIP.

Don't be too quick to draw conclusions, for the moment and the medium term, nothing has changed between the UK and EU, they are still in it, companies are still going strong. But there will be pain, unless access to EU market is preserved. FTSE 250 is still 8% down since Thursday.

Turkish Airlines is actually quite good, one of the better airlines to travel with.

The irony is that the majority voted against it's own interests. Sometimes unpopular decisions are in the interests of the people, as an elected politician you have a duty to act in the country's best interests. If this were a vote specifically on immigration I'd agree with the result, but it wasn't supposed to be that. It was turned into that by a bunch cynical politicians who's only goal was to gain political capital. They lied and distorted facts to scare people into voting leave. As you can see they've backtracked on every major promise of the 'leave' campaign in 48 hours after the vote, immigration included. It was totally irresponsible of them. You understand the subtlety of this, I hope. It was a dishonest vote, and a campaign hijacked by petty interests. I don't have any stake in this, the UK to me is just a vacation spot, and I occasionally order stuff from amazon uk, that's about the extent of my direct interest, it doesn't affect me one bit, but I still feel what happened is profoundly wrong. On the bright side, perhaps I'll be seeing less british tourists in the future, as it will become more expensive for them to travel. I absolutely loathe them, some of the worst behaving.

If there were just 35 it'd be a happy scenario, I fear there are far more. I travel to Turkey once a month at least, for business, and I'm terrified of going there. While there, I've started to actively avoid tourist or crowded areas, I also now avoid one of my favourite routines while in Istanbul, crossing the Bosphorus by ship to get to the Asian side. Hundreds of people on those public transport ships, security is lackluster at best, a terrorists wet dream. It really sucks to have that in mind all the time. When I hear politicians from behind security and armored cars, telling people not to be fearful and to go about their business like nothing happened, and to not let terrorists win... I get sick to my stomach. Terrorists have already won.

Democracy doesnt mean 'tyranny of the majority'. I'll bet you I can find at least a dozen scenarios which the majority would vote for that are completely opposed to any democratic principles. The majority will happily trample a minorities rights if it weren't for the safeguards built into western political systems. It's why countries have parliaments. Otherwise we'd just have a tyranny of the mob, because they are the majority.