
271: No Such Thing As A Safe Robot
No Such Thing As A Fish
Hungarian Entrepreneur - Not Building an Underwater Treadmill for Dogs
A Hungarian entrepreneur has been fined for not building an underwater treadmill for dogs. He was given a suspended prison sentence and 140,000 euros by the European Union. Treadmills are crucial for dog recovery but he never built one. Chazinsky also looks at how Victor Orban is using EU money to build a football stadium in his home village that's four times bigger than its population.
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Speaker 2
Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Chazinsky. My fact this
Speaker 1
week is that a Hungarian entrepreneur has been fined for not building an underwater treadmill for dogs. Confuse it.
Speaker 3
I haven't
Speaker 1
done that either. Oh. You expect the police at your door any moment now. I hope we have all done this, because this person got in trouble. They got a fine of 140,000 euros this person. And it's because years ago in 2008, this business one said that he needed 140,000 euros of funding from the EU's Rural Development Fund to develop a hydrotherapy treadmill system for dogs. Now this is a genuinely important thing for animals that have been wounded. Don't laugh, it's crucial for dog recovery. The only thing is he never did any of that. The officers were investigated, they were overrun with weeds, no one was using them. Six months after the EU payments were made, this investigation opened and he's finally been investigated and given a suspended prison sentence for never building that treadmill. And a fine, which is actually a very lenient fine really. It can't be essential for dog healing. Otherwise no dog would ever have survived any injury before the invention of the underwater dog treadmill. You got to do it. So hungry at the moment is run by Victor Orban. He has taken money to make a 4,000 seat of football stadium in his home village where he grew up called Felk Shoots. And the population of that town is about 1,000. So it's four times bigger than the number of people who live there. He's also made a vintage railway between his two childhood villages. He took two million euros of EU funding for this railway. And they claimed that there would be 2,500 to 7,000 passengers using it every single day. And in the first month there were 30 passengers. And it's just him going back and forth. I think it might be. He is football obsessed Orban isn't he? So this railway line was connecting the football stadium that he loves to this other little village. But he played semi-professional football while he was doing his first stint as prime minister in the 4th division of their league tables but still decent. He said to watch six football games a day. Which is a lot for someone who's running a country. And his first trip abroad when he was prime minister was to see the World Cup in Paris. And people say that he has not missed a World Cup or Champions League final stints. He's been at the news recently or rather his government has because they have a new campaign about having lots of children. And it's a sort of pro-fertility campaign to get the population numbers up. But unfortunately the stock models that they used for this campaign, you may have seen this in the news, were the two people involved in the distracted boyfriend meme online. So they were trying to present a couple who were very happily in love with each other. But really we knew the truth. That he was a distracted boyfriend. And it has no idea what we're talking about. Not on social media. It's not a happy couple. A meme is kind of an immature video that goes online. OK. It all goes back to the 1980s. I'll look it up afterwards. Yeah. So treadmills. Yeah. Treadmills are times that animals are always using treadmills. They've been used to treadmills we used for animals before they were used for humans even. And actually they were really important for horses in farming. They have been for hundreds of years. So in the 19th century especially before things were properly mechanized then farm machinery was basically horse operated. So you had threshing machines which would be these big machines which kind of separated the grain from the corn. And they'd go round and round in one building. And the way they go round and round is you just have two horses on a treadmill. Trossing along it all day long. So they're pushing it. They're operating the mechanism. So they're on this treadmill. It's connected to a bunch of pulleys and cogs and stuff. And then that's turning the wheels round. It just feels very hard. The idea of in a gym pushing a treadmill along with your feet. It is very hard.
Live from Birmingham, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss underwater dog treadmills, hitchhiking robots, and the late, late Elizabeth Taylor.