History / Poland PRL era shops in pictures [17]

nice photos Jon. I especially like the one with the caption reminding the reader that Bulgaria was formerly part of the USSR!

History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]


No one expected that, except some loony lefties!


Promises made by politicians only engage those who believe in such promises


He certainly wasn't


He did not make the reunification possible, he jumped (rightly so) on the occasion. If I had to single one or 2 persons who made the reunification possible, I would say Gorbatchov (reunification would not have happened had the SU not been in the process of collapsing) and John Paul II (role in the downfall of communism)

News / Secularism = a dying society. How this phenomenon affects birth rate in Poland? [20]


Clearly you did not know Poland under communism to make such statements. Flats were even smaller then and the current situation marks a significant progress


Yes, these measures are largely (but not only) responsible. Unfortunately, the current French government has reduced them dramatically for the most well off part of the population


Agreed, this is more or less the heart of the system applied in France


Why instead? As explained by InPolska, it should be possible for women to work AND have babies


?? You should get your facts right before posting nonsense. The Turkish invasion was only a reply to a coup initiated by the Greek Cypriots at the instigation of the military junta then in power in Greece, who wanted Greece to annex the island. There were thousands of Turkish Cypriots living on the island at the time and that is why the Turkish army intervened (and no, I am not Turkish!).

News / Secularism = a dying society. How this phenomenon affects birth rate in Poland? [20]


Nonsense. France is undeniably secularised and still has a very healthy birthrate and an increasing population. And no, before you start, this is not due to Muslim immigration!

News / If Poland were in the Eurozone... [39]


Reminds me of the old (but very true) quip; If you owe the bank 1,000 PLN and you default, you are in trouble; but if you owe the bank 10 bn PLN and you default, it is the bank that is in trouble..

Life / Single mothers in Poland [175]


Would that be France? I happen to agree with some (even most) of the ideas that you have presented but there is something so "arrogant" about your way of putting them forward that one almost feels bound to reject them...

UK, Ireland / My bad experiences with Polish neighbours in UK (not meant to offend) [173]



You should make up your mind.. Are you talking about Asians or Africans (or both??)

News / Poland's indecent junk capitalism? [53]


I think it is a bit more complicated than that. Many economists put contracts which are not "umowy o prace" (salaried contracts) in this category. But the reality is that many highly skilled workers prefer not to go for umowa o prace in Poland for tax reasons, since they pay only a 19% flat tax rate against a higher tax rate for salaried workers of 32%. I have worked so far in 5 different countries and,as an example, Poland is the only one where I saw most lawyers employed by financial institutions ( I am here talking about internal legal departments, not outsourced work) employed on the basis of civil law contracts and not salaried.

News / If Poland were in the Eurozone... [39]


Indeed, the idea was that a common currency would "transfer" part of the German economic strength to other members of the EU (southern Europe) without them having to abide to strict rules (deficit.). But the idea was not not properly thought through,and it is quite amusing when you see that the opposite has happened with the German economy becoming the major beneficiary of the common currency


Not only the Euro, but the whole concept of the EU is originally a French idea (Monnet, De Gaulle). Part of the original idea was that since France could no longer play in the same league as before, with the international scene dominated by the US and the USSR, France could leverage the EU to achieve the same goals. That is why the recruitment system fort civil servants in Brussels was modelled on the French system, and as result France was the country with the most A graded civil servants (then highest rank) in Brussels. Again, this has backfired and today the EU is clearly dominated by Germany.

UK, Ireland / My bad experiences with Polish neighbours in UK (not meant to offend) [173]


I know, that's why I suffer from schizophrenia.. My French half wants to make such sweeping statements (and no, I don't eat horse but I do enjoy the occasional snail or two!) but my other half, the British one, resists it!

News / Dunkin Donuts to come to Poland [46]


that's because it is altogether a different product, the real stuff is the Costa Rica one. US style coffee belongs to the same category as US beer, the "washing up" liquid category.. A chains like Starbucks has had such a tremendous success in the US because they brought something which was hitherto unknown, the faint whiff of real coffee

UK, Ireland / My bad experiences with Polish neighbours in UK (not meant to offend) [173]


In fact, Hungarian is not Nordic (ie unlike Danish or Swedish) but has the same roots as Finnish, Estonian or Turkish. Attila is quite frequent a name in Hungary, which is logical since Hungarians and Turks share common ancestry (Huns)

UK, Ireland / My bad experiences with Polish neighbours in UK (not meant to offend) [173]


That would be quite surprising, Polish and Hungarian/Estonian are very different languages and they sound very different, even to an uneducated ear (Hungarian is closer to Turkish or Finnish)

News / Dunkin Donuts to come to Poland [46]

For me, chains like Dunkin' Donuts (or Baskin Robbins..) are a symbol of everything that is wrong with US food. Strongly manufactured, full of sugar, fat and salt, with little or no nutritional value:

dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3023750/As-Dunkin-Donuts-unveils-new-calorie-laden-menu-health-experts-issue-warnings-fatty-snacks-sugary-beverages.html

At least, they recently decided to remove titanium dioxyde (yes, that's what you also find in paint) from their doughnuts!

theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/mar/11/dunkin-donuts-to-remove-whitening-agent-from-donuts

Life / Single mothers in Poland [175]

thanks Polonius for this clarification, good to hear!

History / Do Polish people in general dislike Russia or Germany more? [369]

Troll??

History / Do Polish people in general dislike Russia or Germany more? [369]


you're probably right.. Voltaire famously (and sardonically) remarked: "This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.".. It must therefore have been Germanic, unless we are talking about a complete misnomer..

History / Do Polish people in general dislike Russia or Germany more? [369]


Yes and no. I agree that on an individual basis Poles and Russians are quite similar and usually get on well with another. However, it makes one think again when you see that the majority of Russians believe that Putin was right to invade Ukraine and that they still believe Stalin to be a hero as opposed to a mass murderer..

News / If Poland were in the Eurozone... [39]

what do you mean by " done the austerity thing already" Jon? Poland has not been in recession since the financial crisis and, unlike eg Latvia, did not have to sack thousands of civil servants and reduce by 25% the salaries of those who remained. However if you are referring to the communist period and following this the " Balcerowicz" years, yes, I agree, this was real austerity. Reminds me of an interview I read in the French economic daily" les Echos" some five years or so ago. The French journalist was asking the then Prime Minister of Latvia (now in Brussels) how he had managed to push through such drastic measures ('austerity') when in France the government could not do 10% of what he did without having half the country taking to the streets. The reply was swift: " because you call this austerity?? I don't .. Communism, that was real austerity". Sums it up well, doesn'it?

News / If Poland were in the Eurozone... [39]


Yes, but if they had left and had to introduce, let's call it the new drachma (NDR), the country would have regained some competitiveness through devaluation. That is all the more important since one of the main planks of their economy is tourism, and lower prices have a direct impact on the numbers visiting. OK, all imports, including BMWs and Mercedes, would have suddenly become much more expensive, meaning fewer imports but also more exports and in the long run a positive impact on trade deficit.

I cannot resist the pleasure of quoting the below sentence:
"The decision to suspend Greece from the common currency became inevitable when it emerged that Athens had fiddled with the accounts yet again amid chronic economic weakness, forfeiting what credibility in the international arena it still had left..."

A good description of the current situation one might say.. Not quite so.. This relates to the expulsion of Greece from another monetary union more than 100 years ago, in 1908 (Latin Union) when the Greek state, which was at the time already in dire straits started to debase the common currency by reducing the amount of gold in the coins they were minting..

mostlyeconomics.wordpress.com/2012/05/24/when-greece-exited-from-latin-american-union-in-1908/

Plus ça change...

News / There is no Poland without the Church! [178]


Yes. The church where I married in Warsaw in 1986 was St Stanislas Kotka in Zoliborz and it was there that late father Popieluszko preached. Although baptised, I am an agnostic, and i must say that i was deeply moved by what i saw when my wife took me to one of the monthly "masses for the Fatherland", which were ongoing despite Popieluszko's assassination 2 years earlier.

The church was of course full, so was the small park around it, and seeing all those people starting to sing patriotic songs at the end of the "normal" mass despite being filmed by the secret police was extraordinary.. That's when I started to delve in more details to understand the role of the RCC in Poland, and I agree with Polonius, without it, Poland would probably not exist, or at least not in today's shape. Contrary to many western countries where the Church was on the side of power, RCC helped sustain the very notion of "polishness" by running underground schools etc when the country no longer existed or when its was under foreign control, including during communist times. I am still an agnostic (verging on the atheist, sorry Polonius!), but I do respect the Polish Church for their role in preserving Polish culture. At the same time, many young Poles, while respecting this past and the role of the RCC, lead their own personal life without necessarily following to the letter all the "teachings" of the Church and I , for one, find this quite healthy..

News / Czechs most liked by Poles! [35]

yes, and that's also part of the reason why Poles get on well with Hungarians in spite of the latter not being Slavic. Poles and Hungarians are both susceptible to mood swings and quite impulsive, contrary to the Czechs. They are more "instinctive" as opposed to the more rational Czechs

Real Estate / Poland: Swiss Franc loans come back to bite [37]

Got mine from KB but that bank no longer exists per se, it is part of BZ WBK, itself a part of Santander

News / Pope Francis' anti-Polish encyclical? Criticism of coal burning in Poland. [67]

I beg to differ.

In my book, one of the biggest problems humanity has to face today is the lack of common project/dream to look forward to. The only thing politicians/government propose nowadays is to make sure that GDP continues to grow a few percent every year and that standards of living improve. I am not saying this is a bad thing (if only for the millions of people who are unemployed), quite the contrary, but there is nothing inspiring in that . Compare that to the Renaissance when new worlds were discovered or even to the 60s when everyone got up in the middle of the night to watch the first man on the moon (I was a kid by then).

We all know that the Earth will disappear in a few billion years. All that ecology can do is to delay the time when Earth becomes inhabitable, but it cannot change the fact that one day our planet will be engulfed by the sun. So shouldn't our governments be busy trying to put a manned expedition to Mars, as a first step to further reaches? I might be naive , but incidently I do think that this will help solve issues like terrorism, by having all of us focus on what we have in common ( we are all humans and have a common destiny) as opposed to what our differences are.

Food / Food shop of choice in Poland for foreign nosh? [22]


Definitely not an acquired taste, I have never found a fan outside of the British isles

Food / Food shop of choice in Poland for foreign nosh? [22]


LOL!

Real Estate / Poland: Swiss Franc loans come back to bite [37]


You are confusing interest rate and margin. I got 0.70 margin because my loan was large (over 1 M CHF) and the LTV low (ca 60%), which means that even today all my repayments are covered by the rental I get from the property (this is an investment property).

Real Estate / Poland: Swiss Franc loans come back to bite [37]

it isn't rocket science! As previously explained, the margin of my loan is 70 bp above 3m chf libor. Right now , 3m chf libor is at - 78bp, so -78+70 <0, so i am only repaying capital

Real Estate / Poland: Swiss Franc loans come back to bite [37]

nope, loan was unfortunately for me taken at the wrong time in 2008...