7 ms·

I've found the original debates video on the National Assembly website. My French is good enough for that (not enough for cooking et al. though), so I believe I

I've found the original debates video on the National Assembly website. My French is good enough for that (not enough for cooking et al. though), so I believe I understood. I'm positively surprised by some deputies remarks. But Bruno (interior minister) Retailleau is either totally incompetent technically, with his advisors as well, or is a liar. "We will apply the math selectively, only for those that are a threat and when the big brother approves"... In every country it's the same narrative. This time it was not about children, but "Freeing France from the drug trafficking trap" ("Sortir la France du piège du narcotrafic"). And it looks like it was not the main point and they tried to pass it as a minor subnote or something. ... They will find dozens of other issues to cancel the math. https://videos.assemblee-nationale.fr/video.16453163_67dc7864b9d58.3eme-seance--sortir-la-france-du-piege-du-narcotrafic-suite-20-mars-2025 https://videos.assemblee-nationale.fr/video.16453163_67dc786...

mytailorisrich 2y ago
France is in decay with incompetent and unpatriotic governments for decades. It is facing many issues but has lacked strong leadership courageous enough to put country first. So, in fact, it is a fairly typical European country... The spread of "narcotrafic" is an example of that, there are others. If you follow French news you'll see many.
- buybackoff 2y ago
  I live in France for the last 5 years. Been to many places in the world. France is OK overall.
  - mytailorisrich 2y ago
    Well I am French. "OK overall" is obviously good but at global scale this means better than the "third world", so context is important. The context of my previous reply is France's "direction of travel", which negative like most other European countries. This is a key metric on any meaningful timescale, which is what ultimately matters.
    - buybackoff 2y ago
      I beliebe you are talking about the first derivative. I want to believe the second is all right lately. The scariest thing in France I've seen is ~20yo voting for Mel-the-leftist-egocentric-schmuck so that they could keep doing nothing but taxing productive people. Other that that the "direction of travel" is dual: either drown in the mire of ever increasing taxes or kick ass. My feeling is that France has everything for the later, but for some weird reason prefers the former. Yet, in the meantime, it's OK. And the very latest geopolitics headlines are nice, if they ever come true. My original point was about individual rights. I'm glad the country stands firm on that.
      - mytailorisrich 2y ago
        I agree with you. On individual rights I would qualify that by saying that France has never been leading on them. The state is what matters and individual rights have always in practice been restricted to that effect.
        buybackoff 2y ago
        I admit ambiguity, but I meant 180 opposite. I believe France is and has been the top at individual freedom. That perception is an important reason I'm there, so I acted on it.
        Cyph0n 2y ago
        How can you say that when individuals are not allowed to show religious symbols or wear religious clothing in any government-affiliated setting? I don’t see how state-enforced irreligiousness (secularism/laicite) doesn’t completely contradict with individual freedoms.
        buybackoff 2y ago
        Cela s'appelle la laïcité. If you have problems with that there are so many 3rd world countries that care about medieval stuff more than development. I think laïcité is one of the coolest words/concept, France should only really enforce it further.
- kergonath 2y ago
  > France is in decay with incompetent and unpatriotic governments for decades. What are you on about? What does the "unpatriotic" bit have to do with anything? > It is facing many issues but has lacked strong leadership courageous enough to put country first. Right. What would "putting country first" mean? France is doing what it wanted to do for decades, which is consolidating European power to its advantage. Is that what you consider unpatriotic? If so, I have bad news for you: France is a great country, but absolutely does not have the resources for its ambitions on its own. > If you follow French news you'll see many. If you follow sources related to reality in any way you’ll see that some things are getting better and some things are getting worse. What does not change is the agitation about safety and security to make people afraid of their own shadow, even as the situation is quite clear: the country is safer than it has ever been. You have a valid point hidden somewhere, it’s that the people were shortchanged and that inequality is rising. You are badly misguided if you think that this has anything to do with patriotism. In fact, the people pushing this narrative have their own interests to look after in the class struggle. They might make you think that they have the same enemies as the people but they are just looking after their own. Just look at any country in which the local nationalists came to power.
  - mytailorisrich 2y ago
    Good attempt at caricature or is it humour?
  - JodieBenitez 2y ago
    > the situation is quite clear: the country is safer than it has ever been False. https://www.interieur.gouv.fr/content/download/135975/1076724/file/IA-64_V3-3.pdf https://www.interieur.gouv.fr/content/download/135975/107672...
  - rdm_blackhole 2y ago
    Crime is under-reported in France because most people know that wasting your time to go to a police station to report a small crime is basically useless as nothing will come out of it. I have talked about it on this forum. I have had my car broken into multiple times in France, and each time I had to file a police report. Guess how many times the culprits were caught? A big fat zero. So the statistics look good. But what about the reality? Do you think a women coming home at night is felling safer now than she would have been 30 years ago? I don't think so. Not too mention the rampant Islamism that has taken over entire suburbs were women are not free to wear what they want and the cops don't go there unless they have the CRS (riot police) with them to protect them in case something goes wrong.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- skrebbel 2y ago
  I found the Front National guy!
hansvm 2y ago
Totally unrelated, but since you brought it up a bit, I find recipes written in French to usually be much higher quality than similar recipes I find in English -- enough so that I'll alter my country and language for search engines when searching for recipes, and for ChatGPT I'll ask the question French. Modern translation products aren't too terrible to cook from. Especially if you know some French already, I think you'd get good results dropping your recipes into an online translator and trying to make the most of it.
- buybackoff 2y ago
  What I had in mind is that I go to a local market every Sunday to buy some nice fresh food. But e.g. for the fish/meat I still only understand 1/3 or 1/2 of the names/terms. Nevertheless, I have read some lengthy tax code sections more than once in details... I do not cook like a French, and - oh - they cook really nice! :)
- yodsanklai 2y ago
  As a French, English is my default language for most queries on the web, but it wouldn't cross my mind to look up for a recipe in English. I also find that we have a lot of good science/maths youtube channels.
  - Symbiote 2y ago
    If searching for recipes in English, you need to add "UK" or maybe "Australia" to avoid the American recipes. (Avoiding US measurements and processed ingredients.) But even then, there's still a lot of spammy or dumbed-down content. I look for sites I recognise.
- shabgzer 2y ago
  Try German, too. I'm always amazed at the level of German writing, even by regular joes on forums and Discord, compared to for instance Dutch writing.
  - hansvm 2y ago
achenet 2y ago
As a Frenchman, this really grinds my gears. Our state is already one of the biggest arms dealers on the planet, and, like all modern nation states, fundamentally a coercive protection racket (note that I don't actually have a problem with coercive protection rackets. You remember that scene in The Godfather where everyone is thanking Vito Corleone as he saunters through the street? That's me thanking the French welfare state for taking my taxes and giving me universal healthcare and environmental regulation). Why don't we just get in on the drug trade ourselves, undercut the dealers and start a government monopoly like Sweden has with alcohol?
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  > Why don't we just get in on the drug trade ourselves, undercut the dealers That was tobacco, but they blew it by never going for alternatives nor providing healthier/better products. With the pharma knowledge we have now, we surely could have developed a legally acceptable drug with few enough downsides. Otherwise, they are of course getting in on the drug trade, just not under the framework we'd want to: https://www.brut.media/fr/articles/cocaine-11-policiers-juges-pour-avoir-organise-un-trafic-depuis-la-guyane https://www.brut.media/fr/articles/cocaine-11-policiers-juge...
  - cship2 2y ago
    But once it is legal, they can't use it to deal weapons anymore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_affair
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bambax 2y ago
The level of math and/or tech understanding in the French political "elite" is abysmal. These people graduated high school, and went on to college without doing any math AT ALL after 10th grade ("seconde"), and probably sucked at math even then. And they have nothing but contempt for the people who do understand those issues ("les techniciens").
- palsecam 2y ago
  Vladimir Arnol’d (the famous Russian mathematician) touches on that subject in his essay « Sur l’éducation mathématique » <https://smf.emath.fr/system/files/filepdf/Gaz-78-Arnold.pdf https://smf.emath.fr/system/files/filepdf/Gaz-78-Arnold.pdf> (in French; Arnol’d also taught in France). According to him, mathematical teaching has become overly abstract, leading to students being disgusted by maths, seeing it as disconnected from reality. Some of these students then end up being ministers… Original quote: « Comme de telles mathématiques scolastiques, séparées de la physique, ne sont adaptées ni à l’enseignement, ni à aucune application éventuelle à d’autres sciences, les mathématiciens se sont fait haïr des lycéens (dont certains ensuite sont devenus ministres) et des utilisateurs. »
- mariusor 2y ago
  I think most of the people in the "making decisions" business don't really care about how or even if something is possible, they leave it as an exercise in compliance for the "boffins" and "les techniciens".
- buybackoff 2y ago
  France has great engineering tradition. One of the left leaders is PhD in math. As I mentioned, multiple comments by members of National Assembly were quite educated. The problem is with key politicians having perverse incentives and misrepresenting bad things to the less educated public.
rdm_blackhole 2y ago
> Freeing France from the drug trafficking trap This reason just like all the other reasons that have been used to try and strip away every shred of privacy that we have (think of the children, fight terrorism and so on) is complete bogus. My mom was working as an admin person in a police station in France back in the 90s and from the many conversations she had with the cops, knowledge was never the problem. They already knew back then where all the drug hot spots were but truth be told there has been a lack of enforcement of the law. Why you ask? Simple, in most of the suburbs were drug trafficking happens, you have high unemployment, people low education and very few prospects for their future, so it has been said that the government has avoided coming down too hard on drug traffickers because they don't want these areas to erupt in chaos and start rioting. In a way, the French government has used the drug money to indirectly buy social peace. If the French government wanted to fight crime and get rid of these drug traffickers, it could simply legalize pot like in Germany and Canada and kill the black market. Instead, it chooses once again to go after the sellers and the buyers. It makes zero sense because unless you are going to enforce the law by punishing the traffickers with the death penalty like in some countries, we know from all the data of the last 30 years that you cannot stop the flow of drugs. We can't even keep drugs and cell phones out of jails/prisons, how is it that we think we can keep them out of entire countries? The solution is simple, you legalize it and tax it and make it hard for kids to get it just like we do today with alcohol and tobacco. That is the only sensible approach. What do you think the drug cartels fear most? The cops or legalization?
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
  It's still true today. A cop friend of mine told me "if you arrest all the drug dealers, the whole city will burn in less than 24 hours."
- RegnisGnaw 2y ago
  You think legalizing pot will solve the problem? Its the harder drugs that's where the money is. No country has legalized hard drugs.
palsecam 2y ago
> I'm positively surprised by some deputies remarks. Not personally surprised, but I agree, they talk sense and understand the matter quite well. Thanks for finding and sharing the debate video, btw! > Retailleau is either totally incompetent technically, with his advisors as well, or is a liar. Sadly, gotta agree here too. M. Retailleau seems off the mark. He looks (to me) like he speaking in good faith tho, and that he “just” doesn’t get it. Nevertheless, he has a point when he mentions Apple and CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material). Apple has shown that using homomorphic encryption could be 1) actually practical, and 2) helpful on such matters. Cf. https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Technical_Summary.pdf https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni... & https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/homomorphic-encryption https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/homomorphic-encry... & https://repositorio.fgv.br/items/047aca31-ccdc-45bd-a7d3-6c0a337cb42b https://repositorio.fgv.br/items/047aca31-ccdc-45bd-a7d3-6c0....
fisian 2y ago
Denying math has a tradition among politicians: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Malcolm_Turnbull https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Malcolm_Turnbull

mytailorisrich 2y ago

France is in decay with incompetent and unpatriotic governments for decades. It is facing many issues but has lacked strong leadership courageous enough to put country first. So, in fact, it is a fairly typical European country... The spread of "narcotrafic" is an example of that, there are others. If you follow French news you'll see many.

buybackoff 2y ago
I live in France for the last 5 years. Been to many places in the world. France is OK overall.
- mytailorisrich 2y ago
  Well I am French. "OK overall" is obviously good but at global scale this means better than the "third world", so context is important. The context of my previous reply is France's "direction of travel", which negative like most other European countries. This is a key metric on any meaningful timescale, which is what ultimately matters.
  - buybackoff 2y ago
    I beliebe you are talking about the first derivative. I want to believe the second is all right lately. The scariest thing in France I've seen is ~20yo voting for Mel-the-leftist-egocentric-schmuck so that they could keep doing nothing but taxing productive people. Other that that the "direction of travel" is dual: either drown in the mire of ever increasing taxes or kick ass. My feeling is that France has everything for the later, but for some weird reason prefers the former. Yet, in the meantime, it's OK. And the very latest geopolitics headlines are nice, if they ever come true. My original point was about individual rights. I'm glad the country stands firm on that.
    - mytailorisrich 2y ago
      I agree with you. On individual rights I would qualify that by saying that France has never been leading on them. The state is what matters and individual rights have always in practice been restricted to that effect.
      - buybackoff 2y ago
        I admit ambiguity, but I meant 180 opposite. I believe France is and has been the top at individual freedom. That perception is an important reason I'm there, so I acted on it.
        Cyph0n 2y ago
        How can you say that when individuals are not allowed to show religious symbols or wear religious clothing in any government-affiliated setting? I don’t see how state-enforced irreligiousness (secularism/laicite) doesn’t completely contradict with individual freedoms.
        buybackoff 2y ago
        Cela s'appelle la laïcité. If you have problems with that there are so many 3rd world countries that care about medieval stuff more than development. I think laïcité is one of the coolest words/concept, France should only really enforce it further.
kergonath 2y ago
> France is in decay with incompetent and unpatriotic governments for decades. What are you on about? What does the "unpatriotic" bit have to do with anything? > It is facing many issues but has lacked strong leadership courageous enough to put country first. Right. What would "putting country first" mean? France is doing what it wanted to do for decades, which is consolidating European power to its advantage. Is that what you consider unpatriotic? If so, I have bad news for you: France is a great country, but absolutely does not have the resources for its ambitions on its own. > If you follow French news you'll see many. If you follow sources related to reality in any way you’ll see that some things are getting better and some things are getting worse. What does not change is the agitation about safety and security to make people afraid of their own shadow, even as the situation is quite clear: the country is safer than it has ever been. You have a valid point hidden somewhere, it’s that the people were shortchanged and that inequality is rising. You are badly misguided if you think that this has anything to do with patriotism. In fact, the people pushing this narrative have their own interests to look after in the class struggle. They might make you think that they have the same enemies as the people but they are just looking after their own. Just look at any country in which the local nationalists came to power.
- mytailorisrich 2y ago
  Good attempt at caricature or is it humour?
- JodieBenitez 2y ago
  > the situation is quite clear: the country is safer than it has ever been False. https://www.interieur.gouv.fr/content/download/135975/1076724/file/IA-64_V3-3.pdf https://www.interieur.gouv.fr/content/download/135975/107672...
- rdm_blackhole 2y ago
  Crime is under-reported in France because most people know that wasting your time to go to a police station to report a small crime is basically useless as nothing will come out of it. I have talked about it on this forum. I have had my car broken into multiple times in France, and each time I had to file a police report. Guess how many times the culprits were caught? A big fat zero. So the statistics look good. But what about the reality? Do you think a women coming home at night is felling safer now than she would have been 30 years ago? I don't think so. Not too mention the rampant Islamism that has taken over entire suburbs were women are not free to wear what they want and the cops don't go there unless they have the CRS (riot police) with them to protect them in case something goes wrong.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
skrebbel 2y ago
I found the Front National guy!

hansvm 2y ago

Totally unrelated, but since you brought it up a bit, I find recipes written in French to usually be much higher quality than similar recipes I find in English -- enough so that I'll alter my country and language for search engines when searching for recipes, and for ChatGPT I'll ask the question French. Modern translation products aren't too terrible to cook from. Especially if you know some French already, I think you'd get good results dropping your recipes into an online translator and trying to make the most of it.

buybackoff 2y ago
What I had in mind is that I go to a local market every Sunday to buy some nice fresh food. But e.g. for the fish/meat I still only understand 1/3 or 1/2 of the names/terms. Nevertheless, I have read some lengthy tax code sections more than once in details... I do not cook like a French, and - oh - they cook really nice! :)
yodsanklai 2y ago
As a French, English is my default language for most queries on the web, but it wouldn't cross my mind to look up for a recipe in English. I also find that we have a lot of good science/maths youtube channels.
- Symbiote 2y ago
  If searching for recipes in English, you need to add "UK" or maybe "Australia" to avoid the American recipes. (Avoiding US measurements and processed ingredients.) But even then, there's still a lot of spammy or dumbed-down content. I look for sites I recognise.
shabgzer 2y ago
Try German, too. I'm always amazed at the level of German writing, even by regular joes on forums and Discord, compared to for instance Dutch writing.
- hansvm 2y ago

achenet 2y ago

As a Frenchman, this really grinds my gears. Our state is already one of the biggest arms dealers on the planet, and, like all modern nation states, fundamentally a coercive protection racket (note that I don't actually have a problem with coercive protection rackets. You remember that scene in The Godfather where everyone is thanking Vito Corleone as he saunters through the street? That's me thanking the French welfare state for taking my taxes and giving me universal healthcare and environmental regulation). Why don't we just get in on the drug trade ourselves, undercut the dealers and start a government monopoly like Sweden has with alcohol?

makeitdouble 2y ago
> Why don't we just get in on the drug trade ourselves, undercut the dealers That was tobacco, but they blew it by never going for alternatives nor providing healthier/better products. With the pharma knowledge we have now, we surely could have developed a legally acceptable drug with few enough downsides. Otherwise, they are of course getting in on the drug trade, just not under the framework we'd want to: https://www.brut.media/fr/articles/cocaine-11-policiers-juges-pour-avoir-organise-un-trafic-depuis-la-guyane https://www.brut.media/fr/articles/cocaine-11-policiers-juge...
- cship2 2y ago
  But once it is legal, they can't use it to deal weapons anymore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_affair

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

bambax 2y ago

The level of math and/or tech understanding in the French political "elite" is abysmal. These people graduated high school, and went on to college without doing any math AT ALL after 10th grade ("seconde"), and probably sucked at math even then. And they have nothing but contempt for the people who do understand those issues ("les techniciens").

palsecam 2y ago
Vladimir Arnol’d (the famous Russian mathematician) touches on that subject in his essay « Sur l’éducation mathématique » <https://smf.emath.fr/system/files/filepdf/Gaz-78-Arnold.pdf https://smf.emath.fr/system/files/filepdf/Gaz-78-Arnold.pdf> (in French; Arnol’d also taught in France). According to him, mathematical teaching has become overly abstract, leading to students being disgusted by maths, seeing it as disconnected from reality. Some of these students then end up being ministers… Original quote: « Comme de telles mathématiques scolastiques, séparées de la physique, ne sont adaptées ni à l’enseignement, ni à aucune application éventuelle à d’autres sciences, les mathématiciens se sont fait haïr des lycéens (dont certains ensuite sont devenus ministres) et des utilisateurs. »
mariusor 2y ago
I think most of the people in the "making decisions" business don't really care about how or even if something is possible, they leave it as an exercise in compliance for the "boffins" and "les techniciens".
buybackoff 2y ago
France has great engineering tradition. One of the left leaders is PhD in math. As I mentioned, multiple comments by members of National Assembly were quite educated. The problem is with key politicians having perverse incentives and misrepresenting bad things to the less educated public.

rdm_blackhole 2y ago

> Freeing France from the drug trafficking trap This reason just like all the other reasons that have been used to try and strip away every shred of privacy that we have (think of the children, fight terrorism and so on) is complete bogus. My mom was working as an admin person in a police station in France back in the 90s and from the many conversations she had with the cops, knowledge was never the problem. They already knew back then where all the drug hot spots were but truth be told there has been a lack of enforcement of the law. Why you ask? Simple, in most of the suburbs were drug trafficking happens, you have high unemployment, people low education and very few prospects for their future, so it has been said that the government has avoided coming down too hard on drug traffickers because they don't want these areas to erupt in chaos and start rioting. In a way, the French government has used the drug money to indirectly buy social peace. If the French government wanted to fight crime and get rid of these drug traffickers, it could simply legalize pot like in Germany and Canada and kill the black market. Instead, it chooses once again to go after the sellers and the buyers. It makes zero sense because unless you are going to enforce the law by punishing the traffickers with the death penalty like in some countries, we know from all the data of the last 30 years that you cannot stop the flow of drugs. We can't even keep drugs and cell phones out of jails/prisons, how is it that we think we can keep them out of entire countries? The solution is simple, you legalize it and tax it and make it hard for kids to get it just like we do today with alcohol and tobacco. That is the only sensible approach. What do you think the drug cartels fear most? The cops or legalization?

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
It's still true today. A cop friend of mine told me "if you arrest all the drug dealers, the whole city will burn in less than 24 hours."
RegnisGnaw 2y ago
You think legalizing pot will solve the problem? Its the harder drugs that's where the money is. No country has legalized hard drugs.

palsecam 2y ago

> I'm positively surprised by some deputies remarks. Not personally surprised, but I agree, they talk sense and understand the matter quite well. Thanks for finding and sharing the debate video, btw! > Retailleau is either totally incompetent technically, with his advisors as well, or is a liar. Sadly, gotta agree here too. M. Retailleau seems off the mark. He looks (to me) like he speaking in good faith tho, and that he “just” doesn’t get it. Nevertheless, he has a point when he mentions Apple and CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material). Apple has shown that using homomorphic encryption could be 1) actually practical, and 2) helpful on such matters. Cf. https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Technical_Summary.pdf https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni... & https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/homomorphic-encryption https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/homomorphic-encry... & https://repositorio.fgv.br/items/047aca31-ccdc-45bd-a7d3-6c0a337cb42b https://repositorio.fgv.br/items/047aca31-ccdc-45bd-a7d3-6c0....

fisian 2y ago

Denying math has a tradition among politicians: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Malcolm_Turnbull https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Malcolm_Turnbull