Understanding Europe

[RealBlackStuff]

THIS IS BRILLIANT - Europe in a "few" words

Pythagoras' theorem - 24 words.
Lord's Prayer - 66 words.
Archimedes' Principle - 67 words.
10 Commandments - 179 words.
US Declaration of Independence - 1,300 words.
US Constitution with all 27 Amendments - 7,818 words.
EU regulations on the sale of cabbage - 26,911 words

[killer]

LOL, however ...

The EU has 23 official languages, plus a number of other languages such as Russian, Catalan, Galician, Basque, Welsh, Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, etc.
Every document produced by the EU has to be in each of the official languages.

Reference: http://europa.eu/abc/european_countries ... dex_en.htm

Some languages are terse, others verbose. The English phrase "crew only" translates into a huge sentence in German.

[dr_st]

A funny joke, unfortunately neither original nor true.
http://www.snopes.com/language/document/cabbage.asp

[Puppy]

This is an old joke But the reality is much worse. While most of EU regulations are stupid and pointless, some eastern-block countries like Czechistan creates actually even worse local regulations and acts so we can say thanks to the EU to at least fix them to an acceptable level.

In 2004 when we voted to join EU, one of arguments was that EU allows freelancers to offer their services (like IT consulting) easily in other EU countries. The reality is, that for me is much easier to have a contract with any non-EU company than EU one because there is a lot of bureaucracy, tax hell and possible extremely high penalties (which is Czechistan-specific issue, not the EU in general) when you do a small mistake or fill some form wrong etc..

BTW Prague has a new attraction for tourists called Corrupt Tour (offical web http://corrupttour.com/en/)

[killer]

Number of words in the UK constitution = 0 (zero)