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Free-As-In-Beer Electricity In Greece?
PolygamousRanchKid writes New Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will lay out his radical left-wing government's policies in a speech later on Sunday, firmly rejecting any more austerity forced on his debt-strapped country by its euro zone partners. In his first major speech to parliament as premier, Tsipras is expected to say that Greece wants no more bailout money, plans to renegotiate its debt deal and wants a "bridge agreement" to tide the country over until a new pact is sealed. A second part of the speech will touch on his government's social and fiscal policy over the longer term and is likely to repeat pledges for such things as a rise in the minimum wage and free electricity for poorer Greeks. Which gets me to thinking: with free electricity, wouldn't that be a great business opportunity, to build a cloud of servers in poorer Greeks' basements? Maybe that is the real plan behind the free electricity idea.
So, he doesn't want any more bailout money, but he DOES want them to give him money to "bridge" things over?
I take it that what he really means is that he doesn't want any more money with strings attached (like an obligation to pay it back), but he's happy to accept money with no strings....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Let's exploit the already-screwed Greek government for some 'free' CPU time to run your own business..
Actually, I believe a more accurate statement would be that the Greek government has been exploiting the rest of the EU for free money.
But, as the famous economist John Maynard Keynes said, "If I owe the bank 100 pounds . . . I have a problem. If I owe the bank 100,000 pounds . . . the bank has a problem."
Right now, Angela Merkel has a problem, because she guaranteed the German public that all the money that they lent to Greece would be eventually paid back.
Alexis Tsipras has stated that he wants Greece to stay in the Eurozone. I don't believe him. What he wants most, if for Greece to be free from old debts to the EU. The EU is not going write off the old debts, and let Greece stay in the Eurozone. So his other choice would be to let the bus crash and default on the debts. The EU would then have to toss the Greeks out of the Eurozone. Then Tsipras could claim that he wanted to stay in the Eurozone, and that it was the evil EU who kicked them out.
When the Greeks go back to their own Drachma, instead of the Euro, they can then print as many of them as they like. They can distribute them as they wish, and make everyone in Greece rich!
Of course, the Drachmas will be close to worthless on the world financial markets . . . so the Greeks would not be able to purchase things that they think they need from foreign countries . . . like TVs, cars, washing machines, etc.
But at least they would be free from the Euro yoke, and have control over their own fate . . . and have nobody else to blame, if they don't like how it turns out.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
There will always be people who want a share of OTHER people's wealth.
I'm trying to work out which side of your equation is the employee, and which side the employer....
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
How many failed capitalist experiments are we going to be subjected to
I've only ever been subjected to one, and it doesn't seem to meet any practical definitions of failure. Though the number of failed socialist experiments on the other hand...Icarian, Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Venezuelan, Cuban, the Paris Commune...actually the list would probably be big enough to make a book, so I'll stop there.
when it is the workers who are doing all the work?
I remember when I watched the documentary about Tetris, I think it was Alexey Pajitnov who said that in socialism they pretend to pay you if you pretend to work.
Europe is composed of socialist countries and has been for about 60 years or so for the ones that weren't communist and the rest became socialist when the communist regime fell. Germany? Socialist. France? Socialist. Sweden, the land of Ikea, Swedish meatballs, and the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? Socialist. Britain, that bastion of capitalism? Socialist. That big ass VAT they pay in Britain? That's to support their socialist regime. Take a look at the health care and welfare systems provided by the European countries. They're socialist.
Taking into account things like technology available to the common people, things like internet access and mobile phone technology, I would have to say that things are a hell of lot better than in the U.S.
So how exactly have they failed?
Care to explain why Cuba is a failure when health care and education are on a much higher level (and much cheaper) than in the USA albeit being under a boycott and other sanctions from the USA the last 70 years?
I don't know, why don't we ask the hundred of thousands of Cubans who fled that paradise and decided to live in Miami instead? Just to be fair and balanced we could also get the opinion of Americans who fled the USA and went to live in Cuba (if you can find one that's not a wanted felon).
lucm, indeed.
Neither in Russia nor in China socialism is considered a failure
Well, let's see ... by "Russia," of course you mean the "Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics," right? Oh, right ... that union of socialist countries under a central socialist government failed miserably, and destroyed itself. Russia, on the other hand, isn't an example of failed socialism, it's just a good old fashioned miserable totalitarian state that's busy looking to invade its neighbors to make up for its crappy management of its own resources and industry. And ... China? Complete failure of socialism. How can you tell? Because they're clinging to it the collectivist crap in name only, and relying on market economics to produce the prosperity they want.
In both countries however capitalism is considered to be a failure.
No. Without market economics, Russians would be even worse off than they are now. Capitalism failing? Whatever shreds of it they're allowing to function are the only thing producing any shred of prosperity there. And failing in China? It's capitalism, and only capitalism, that is powering that country. Capitalism is working there despite the oppressive, putatively socialist tyranny that otherwise attempts to control the culture there.
Care to explain why Cuba is a failure
Ah, now I see. You don't actually consider poverty, being imprisoned for saying the wrong things, being killed or imprisoned for trying to leave and other socialist delights to be sign of failure. You have some very strange standards for success. Would you feel more successful here if we took away your internet access, threatened you with prison for criticizing politicians, made you subject to a family that has run the country at the point of a gun for decades, and which you'd feel so desperate to leave that you'd risk drowning in shark-infested waters, paddling to the US in raft, and hoping your own country won't jail you for trying? And Venezuela? Really? You must try very, very hard to avoid actually paying attention to what's going on there. If you insist on being that ignorant, please don't do anything that might risk other people - like, voting.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Why do we have to choose between capitalism and socialism? Both have their benefits and both have their problems but they are NOT mutually exclusive. Most countries used to have a progressive tax system with high rates of tax on high earners. CEOs and the like still made more money than the rest of us and did well for themselves but the higher taxes these people paid helped provide common services that we all used e.g. healthcare, transport infrastructure, free university education etc.
This system put both socialism and capitalism in balance. You have the freedom to use your (free) education to go an make money and will directly benefit yourself from doing that but society also benefits and uses the higher taxes you pay to educate the workers you employ, provide the infrastructure to transport the goods you make etc. The trick is to make sure that the high tax payers also benefit from how the taxes are spent even if they don't necessarily benefit as much.
"All Greeks own many houses".
... and of course, all Greeks will steal from you, cheat on you, etc, etc
"All Greek fish sold are from Thailand"!
"All Greeks own yachts"?!
"You get thrown out of buses"?!?!
That's the most complete collection of negative comments I've ever read online, kudos to you for collecting them.
However, compiling a list of negative press releases (like the 3000 blind people, which was a great scandal here as well) and putting some anecdotal self experience, is far from describing the truth. Enough with the "greek sterotypes", even the German don't believe them
I'm not sure what kind of spoiled rich Greek friends you have, that can obviously spend enough to travel abroad and play basketball and whatever, but I assure you that the *vast* majority of people here are struggling with 30% true unemployment and 500 Euros wages. Old people are suffering with a 50%-70% cut in their pension. Disabled people where stripped off their benefits overnight. Gas and heating prices went up 50%. Electricity went up at least 20%. All these along with a 30%-50% increase in taxation *of the poor* (and 0% increase for the rich). This is the actual austerity, and not some bull*hit about people "forced to cut down on spending". Just take a look at the numbers of people immigrating, committing a suicide, dying of heart attacks etc over the last 4 years. Do you really think these where people frustrated for losing one of their yachts?
The true problem of austerity was not that people where "forced to cut down on spending". It's that the state was forced to cut down on spending and find revenue by means of heavy and irrational taxation (insane actually). This had the obvious impact of putting the economy in a deep depression, thus leading the state into having to borrow again, leading to more heavy austerity measures etc. So we've ended up now with an economy 30% smaller, unemployment went from 10% to 30%, people have lost their jobs, their houses, their hopes, their lives and what for? , only this time it's not the private sector that holds it (european banks), but they have traded this with European state loans (see: european people's money). The new government doesn't promise it will "continue the policy of spending". It has promised (and we'll see if it manages that) that it will revert insane austerity measures. For example, cutting the basic wage from 750 Euros to 580 Euros was a measure that not even the employers wanted: They knew that this would drive the economy even more deep into recession.
So, please, check your facts before posting condemns about a whole race, just because you got cheated and had a fight with a bus employee on a crowded island in a crowded season.
I could write much more, about how German businesses funded corruption in Greece, How Germany benefits from the Greek crisis, etc, but it's pointless; You people will always believe that it's "the Greeks' absent mindedness" that is to blame about the crisis, that they had it coming, and that it will never happen to your country. Good luck.
Ah, and by the way, during my trips worldwide I've met literally hundreds of people who h
Real estate is the typical investment in underdeveloped economies. In developed economies you place your money in stocks and bonds, having a more than fair chance of getting a ROI equal or higher than the inflation rate. So, if a German or American has about $50,000 they'll place them there. In Greece the inflation was at 20% until the early 90s whereas bond interest rates were at 14% and the stock market was anemic (even worse than it is today). In other words, placing your money on stocks and bonds would *lose* you money.
Therefore Greeks placed their money in (old) houses or would build their own with the combined effort of three or more generations of a family. I don't think that an average placement of $25,000 per person, over a lifetime of work, in brick and mortar makes that person "rich" by any standard.
The problem reading the statistics is that the valuation of the houses is based on Greece's skewed "objective valuation" system. This system assigns a price per square meter of property for each area, however this valuation is not grounded on market values. It's arbitrary and usually 5x-20x higher than the market value. For example, the "objective valuation" of a derelict house I've inherited from my father in a mountain village near Kalamata is 250 Euros per square meter when the market value is less than 100, for well-maintained property (as I said, mine is falling apart). I've heard of worse cases, e.g. a 1000 square meter field in a mountain village which only connect to the nearest villages via a single dirt road was 180,000 Euros. Market value? About 5,000 Euros.
The idea behind this irrational system is that the presumptive income is based on the "objective valuation" system which has a high tax-free bracket (I think it's currently at 140,000 Euros). If the market valuations were used, very few people would have to pay taxes based on the presumptive income derived from their property.
So, yes, on paper Greeks are extremely wealthy because of the typical Greek solution of cooking up the numbers towards a desired effect and not towards objectivity. In reality Germans have more (neither far more, nor far less) personal wealth and in immediately liquefiable assets. I'm stuck with a derelict house I inherited from my father, without electricity, and with ever diminishing market value. I still have to pay 600 Euros per annum for property taxes for this house. So, what does this property actually count for? An asset of purely imaginary value 15,000 Euros or an annual liability of 600 Euros?
And a final note: your mass media may want to portray Greeks as tax evaders but that's not quite the truth. Two years ago I paid 85,000 Euros income tax out of 110,000 Euros turnover. That's an effective taxation of 77% thanks to the highest taxation bracket being 43% and having to pay 55% of your taxes as a downpayment for next year. The next year my income was a third of that. I've still not gotten back any of the money which was withheld from me two years ago. Yet, the government demanded that I pay OUT OF MY POCKET for the new taxes, including the property tax. I was one of the lucky few who had money in the bank, no loans and no family so I paid up. The majority of SMEs who saw their turnover shrink to crap due to the austerity have loans to pay, families to feed so excuse them if they don't pay their taxes because they preferred to not lose their 30-year-old 2-bedroom apartment with no central heating and not wanting to leave their children hungry. Some couldn't even do that and these are the exact people who will get up to 800KWh of electricity per two months for free, for a total cost to the state of 2 million Euros. Meanwhile your country makes 105 million Euros per year from the