[hartmut]

Isn't France intending to, or already did, repeal their 35-hour working week because it wasn't making them competitive and now Germany is going to institute a 28-hour working week?

Germany is not going "to institute a 28-hour working week".
The facts are quite different.
IG-Metall, the most powerful trade union, reached an agreement that gives employees only under certain circumstances the title to reduce temporarily working time down to 28 hours per week.
Those are sudden cases of need to care for close relatives, or claimed health troubles caused by night time work.
And even these regulations are not nationwide implemented, but restricted to the range of influence of IG-Metall, which includes automotive industry, as well as the biggest part of German machine-building fabs,
which are, btw, the most successful on the globe.
That's all. It is nothing more than a very partial adjustment of employers and employees interests.
Why this should lead to "a weak and decadent people" as Victoribus Spolia assumes, is as obscure as the vast exaggeration of that minor factor.

[Rich]

Indeed. It looks like what Lenin called 'the imperialist labour aristocracy' is alive and well. It's just that the imperialists now disguise themselves as anti-imperialists. Doubleplus good!

A Marxist lie to steal the achievements of White European civilisation. When Britain started its great economic take off in 1750 the value of imports from Empire was tiny compared its Gross Domestic Product. Britain won the Seven years war and the Napoleonic Wars. This was in large part because of its abilities to raise taxes, support a huge navy and subsides its continental allies. But those taxes certainly didn't come from the Empire. We lost the thirteen colonies when we actually tried to get them to contribute financially to their own defence.

When Belgium the second country to industrialise became independent in 1830 it had no empire. It was well industrialised before it acquired one. Or take Germany it industrialised without an empire. It was getting wealthy from their own labours that allowed them to fritter away the vast sums necessary to play the Game of Empires.

Poland, the Baltics and the Ukraine were actually valuable to Russia, far more than the Muslim shit holes that they had captured in the south. this is why the imperailist Lenin tried to use his teror machine to annex them to his Soviet empire.