Quick reference:
Russia
Netherlands
Luxembourg
Croatia
Serbia
Slovakia
Slovenia
Also:
France
Puerto Rico
Cuba
Czechia
Thailand
Costa Rica
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I’m slow today, is it the 33 or something else?
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Don’t forget Luxemburg 
, it’s a sligtly lighter blue than 
.
Max Verstappen is a Dutch / Belgian racing driver, this looks like he’s meeting a fan who has his name printed on the Russian flag, and he’s showing her a picture of what the Dutch flag actually is supposed to look like.
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I liked it better before
But then I found out that that’s not an English word
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What did you originally write?
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Which goes to show that we need more imagination in our flags … Nepal went the extra mile on that. Not only the flag itself is memorable, but it is also the only non-rectangular flag national flag in the world.
This way you can never mistake it with anything else 
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Official 2012 photo of former French president François Hollande
Is it the flag of the Netherlands?
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It will forever remain a mystery…
unless you click this
auto coureur
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I’m shocked at how this is written up as entirely “a good thing”
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That feels somewhat humiliating to me. A bit like
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The French changed the hue of the blue part a few years ago, by the way (supposedly for fashion reasons, to look good near the EU flag of a similar blue). Now it’s back to the original, they say.
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It sounds strange to me as well, but I think the outlook is not the same. For example, when a school in Greece is organising an event before summer holidays to raise money, the school usually sells calendars or organises a party with tickets or sells crafts and cakes or if it’s a rich school, they invite celebrity singers etc and throw a party (with tickets). I was told that in US schools it’s a thing to pick 3-4 teachers and throw green slime at them as a fundraiser. If something like that happened in Greece for any school grade above nursery (at best), we’d have a feast on social media and heads would fall.
ΕΤΑ
(I’m not sure about american-based private schools in Greece, they tend to have a different curriculum and habits)
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Good God, how correct you are on that … it is shocking to see that it is presented as almost a Godsend. Look at this crap:
“I think it’s really cool when the community offers an opportunity like this for things that educations a lot of times pay out of pocket for,” she said.
Let’s face it, the people that made the donation over there is sadistic with their money and wanted a demeaning spectactle. And it is not as if it was a lot of money per teacher either.
Groveling in the middle of a stadium, with spectators and on live/social media coverage?
That’s decadence on a whole different level.
This actually makes it even sadder 
Because it means that they are socially conditioned to see this blatant abuse as a charity!
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In my experience, school fundraising in the U.S. was traditionally for extra-curricular activities (clubs, sport teams), not for classes or the school overall. The most common ones were sales of baked goods and crafts or small “carnivals” with kids’ games (beanbag toss etc.). The latter was done at my elementary school in the early 1960s to raise money for the PTA. These traditional forms continued in high school with the addition of car washes at a cooperating gas station (these are still very popular today, and I always like to patronize them). Toward the end of my high school years, I saw the first instance of the dunking game at a school carnival. If someone hits the bull’s eye with a ball, the catch on a lever releases and a person sitting on the other end of the lever is dumped into a big pool. Subsequently, this game became very popular at fundraising for sport teams, where, for example, one or more star football players would volunteer to risk getting dunked. Much later and today, teachers sometimes volunteer. It is often a popular teacher, but sometimes a real hard-_ss teacher volunteers, stimulating ticket sales and showing that he’s not a bad egg after all.
I don’t think the dunking game was degrading. It was done in the party spirit of good fun, and everyone, including the dunked person, had a good time. As the previous posts point out, the news item describes something that seems very degrading and decadent.
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I feel that I should note that this was entirely my point.
It’s completely natural and expected to view this school funding model as disgusting, because it is.
So often, we see acts of charity, that address shortfalls of both public policy and market failures, portrayed as “feel good” news stories. This particular example goes to the extreme of making such decadence and degradation so obscenely obvious that I hadn’t even thought it needed to be pointed out.
However, more insidious examples that abound in American society are stories of how many have to beg for charity in order to meet their medical needs. The way that the few viral fundraising successes are celebrated seems to forget the many that fall short, and so perversely puts a positive spin on this cruel symptom of the abhorrent American system of reserving adequate medical care as a privilege of the wealthy, rather than providing it as a basic, universal right (such as how the rest of the developed world has largely done).
It seems that school fundraising has evolved not only in the nature of its activities, but also in its scope of support. Throughout my grade school years, as children and students, we were annually recruited to sell various mail-order products in order to raise general funds for operation of the school. Nowadays, as a parent, we are asked to even donate a broad range of essential school supplies in order to help out.
I want to be clear that this isn’t a complaint about charity itself. Of course, we’re happy to help out and give all of the supplies that the school is asking for, and are fortunate enough that we live in a community that is able to take care of the needs of the schools. Of course, we should be charitable, but the natural extension of such compassion and generosity is to work towards a system where such charity is unnecessary.
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