Quote from: VincentX on February 11, 2015, 05:07:47 AM

The below Venn diagram is a vastly simplified representation of this (and already outdated too).

Indeed. There is 17 circles in more detailed diagram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Supranational_European_Bodies Grin

However, sometimes you don't need to know all the details to be able to tell the system won't work. Feynman could do it.

Quote

I'm completely dazed. Worse, I don't know what the symbols on the blueprint mean! There is some kind of a thing that at first I think is a window. It's a square with a little cross in the middle, all over the damn place. I think it's a window, but no, it can't be a window, because it isn't always at the edge. I want to ask them what it is.

You must have been in a situation like this when you didn't ask them right away. Right away it would have been OK. But now they've been talking a little bit too long. You hesitated too long. If you ask them now they'll say, What are you wasting my time all this time for?"

I don't know what to do. (You are not going to believe this story, but I swear it's absolutely true - it's such sensational luck.) I thought, what am I going to do? I got an idea. Maybe it's a valve? So, in order to find out whether it's a valve or not, I take my finger and I put it down on one of the mysterious little crosses in the middle of one of the blueprints on page number 3, and I say, What happens if this valve gets stuck?" figuring they're going to say, That's not a valve, sir, that's a window."

So one looks at the other and says, Well, if that valve gets stuck -- " and he goes up and down on the blueprint, up and down, the other guy up and down, back and forth, back and forth, and they both look at each other and they tchk, tchk, tchk, and they turn around to me and they open their mouths like astonished fish and say, You're absolutely right, sir."