Greece lied about their economic situation to get into the Eurozone, lied about it before the crisis broke, lied after it broke, and continue to lie now.
Keep in mind that the past four years of bank loans from the ECB have not been to save Greece. What they were really designed to do was to keep the card game running long enough to let EU insiders and favored national banks unload Greek bonds, and to reduce their exposure to Greek default risks long enough to put European taxpayers onto the hook in the inevitable event of a Greek default. They pretended to save Greece, and Greece pretended to reform. And now here we are.
The adoption of the Euro hastened and deepened Greece's crisis, but was not the central cause, which was their refusal to stop spending money they didn't have to prop up their extravagant (even by European standards) welfare state. This modern welfare state has now become more sacred to voters than the capitalist economics that make it possible. As Mark Steyn put it, "People’s sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense."
The problem is that with declining demographics, the cradle-to-grave European welfare state is unsustainable. Greece and the rest of the PIIGS are discovering that first, but birth rates are declining all across Europe, and modern welfare states are unsustainable without a new generation to stick with the bill. Most economists believe that Greece will never be able to pay back what they've already borrowed.
Syriza was elected on a platform of ignoring basic economic reality, but they've finally run out of people willing to loan them money to spend. The risk of a Grexit is already priced into all the European markets, But leaving the Eurozone doesn't provide relief for any of the Euro-denominated debt Greece already owes, and there's no guarantee European markets would even be willing to exchange refloated drachmas for real(er) money. And since it's hard to see any sane institution buying Greek debt after a default, Greece's government would undoubtedly start printing drachmas like mad and trigger hyperinflation.
If Greece was willing to pare back its welfare state to much saner levels, they might have a chance to slowly dig their way out of the crisis. Since they refuse to, they're in for a whole lot more economic pain...
Since the UK wisely kept its own currency, disruptions from a "Brexit" would be relatively minimal. It's far more likely that will see Greece exit the Euro, because they absolutely refuse to stop spending money they don't have. (Note that despite talk of "austerity," not once since the European debt crisis started has Greek cut government outlays to match receipts.) To Greece (and to a lesser extent the other PIIGS), the welfare state benefits have become more sacred than the capitalist system underwriting them.
Well, Greece is starting to reach the long run. They can't afford their own welfare state, but it's become so entrenched that politicians refuse to significately pare it back even on the brink of national bankruptcy.
The UK, like Germany, has a strong enough economy to avoid this fate for quite a while, but it too will get there eventually...
...because the Tea Party took scalps. They defeated Republican incumbents in primaries. They ended political careers. That's what forced Republican office-holders to take them seriously.
As far as I can tell, an Occupy-backed candidate (if there even is such a thing) hasn't defeated a single Democratic incumbent. As such, the Democratic Party can continue to ignore them the way they ignore black voters.
Indeed, criticizing Islam is a sure way to get attacked by Social Justice Warriors. Given that Sabeen Mahmud was almost certainly killed by radical Islamists, your comment is nonsensical.
Just how Islam became so sacred to radical feminists is an interesting question...
It will encourage high tech companies in general and venture capital firms in specific to:
A). Locate their businesses in a state (like Texas) where Social Justice Warrior-type lawsuits have little chance to succeed. B). More carefully screen potential employees for Social Justice Warrior tendencies so as to minimize the chance of future lawsuits.
Businesses exist to make money, they don't exit for believers in victimhood identity politics to wage politics and cash in at their expense.
Looks like someone was looking to win the Hyperbole of the Year Award.
If the worst thing about the future is having to buy adapter cables, sign me up. Sounds like a vast improvement over a future where men spend 8 hours reciting the Koran every day before going out to shoot heretics and abduct more women into sexual slavery...
Remember that? That was the 1928 pact that outlawed war.
You might remember how well that worked out.
This will work out just swell until Russia or China or ISIS develop an effective fighting robot and are able to deploy them in sufficient quantities to make a decisive difference in battle.
Plus there's the impossibility of enforcement. How can you prove it was a robot rather than a remote-operated drone?
And there's the tiny issue that, knowing how slowly the wheels of the "international community's" court systems turn, the war is likely to be won or lost before those violating it ever come to trial...
...than one of those bloated, slow-loading, all-Flash restaurant front-ends that take 20 seconds to load and animate before they show you the location, hours of operation, or any menus.
I've never gotten anything remotely like this letter from the Republican Party or a conservative PAC (and I probably get well over 200 begging direct-mail solicitations a year).
I don't see such intimidation tactics as paying off for them...
1. "In 1991, Andrew Rapport declared Microsoft the winner in the PC contest because Microsoft and Intel had harnessed the Asian supply chain and dramatically undercut the cost of the eccentric Steve Jobs’s Apple Mac." No, by 1991, it was John Scully's Mac, as Jobs was ousted in 1985. 2. "When Apple’s first notebook, the Macintosh 100, wasn’t embraced by consumers because it was two big, too heavy, and too expensive" No, that would have been the original Mac Portable (1989), which was all of those things. The Powerbook (not Macintosh) 100 was actually a very light ultra-portable.
Since author Steven Max Patterson and his editors couldn't be bothered to perform basic fact-checking, I stopped reading at that point...
Without a top-down bureaucracy calling the shops, states can try 50 different methods to control the pandemic, and compare results to see who has the best one. They're not stuck mindlessly doing what Washington has dictated, even if it's wrong.
The CDC is swearing up and down Ebola can be transmitted by airborne infection, but what if they're wrong about this strain?
The federal government is much more likely than the states to continue a wrong course of action long after it's been proven a bad idea than the states. See also: Welfare, agribusiness subsidies, the food pyramid...
Let's not forget that the best estimates for the death of communist regimes killing their own people is right around 100 million people. Both The Black Book of Communism and R.J. Rummel's Death by Government come up with roughly the same number of people killed.
Communism is incompatible with both human rights and a healthy economy, and never has, never can, and never will meet the needs of its own people or offer better lives than those under capitalism.
Iron Dome uses a combination of a proximity (radar activited) fuse and fragmentation. Sometimes the interceptor destroys the warhead. Sometimes it causes an explosion of the propellant which destroys the warhead. Sometimes it simply breaks the incoming missile or rocket into segments or destroys its ability to follow its planned ballistic path. According to Lloyd and Postol, if the warhead isn’t destroyed the interceptor failed.
You don’t need a Ph.D. to see the immense flaw in this logic: if someone fires a missile at you and you aren’t hit that is good news.
...to end drug prohibition since at least 1996, on both practical and 10th Amendment grounds. Statists love the "War on Drugs" because it gives them more ways to control people.
...then sift through it to file tax evasion charges, but somehow keeping email backups for top IRS employees is beyond them because the hard drive crashed and they had to recycle the backup tapes.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been following the Greek debt crisis for at least five years, Greece's problem is that they absolutely refuse to stop spending money they don't have. Remember: Greece has never practiced real austerity (cutting deficits to match receipts) since they joined the Eurozone. Not once. (By contrast, Estonia did eliminate their deficit, and as a result started recovering from The Great Recession quicker than other EU economies.) Greece merely slowed the rate at which they were going more broke (or at least pretended to). Despite being right at the edge of complete national bankruptcy, Greece continues to insist that there will be “no wage or pension cuts” for government workers.
Greece lied about their economic situation to get into the Eurozone, lied about it before the crisis broke, lied after it broke, and continue to lie now.
Keep in mind that the past four years of bank loans from the ECB have not been to save Greece. What they were really designed to do was to keep the card game running long enough to let EU insiders and favored national banks unload Greek bonds, and to reduce their exposure to Greek default risks long enough to put European taxpayers onto the hook in the inevitable event of a Greek default. They pretended to save Greece, and Greece pretended to reform. And now here we are.
The adoption of the Euro hastened and deepened Greece's crisis, but was not the central cause, which was their refusal to stop spending money they didn't have to prop up their extravagant (even by European standards) welfare state. This modern welfare state has now become more sacred to voters than the capitalist economics that make it possible. As Mark Steyn put it, "People’s sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense."
The problem is that with declining demographics, the cradle-to-grave European welfare state is unsustainable. Greece and the rest of the PIIGS are discovering that first, but birth rates are declining all across Europe, and modern welfare states are unsustainable without a new generation to stick with the bill. Most economists believe that Greece will never be able to pay back what they've already borrowed.
Syriza was elected on a platform of ignoring basic economic reality, but they've finally run out of people willing to loan them money to spend. The risk of a Grexit is already priced into all the European markets, But leaving the Eurozone doesn't provide relief for any of the Euro-denominated debt Greece already owes, and there's no guarantee European markets would even be willing to exchange refloated drachmas for real(er) money. And since it's hard to see any sane institution buying Greek debt after a default, Greece's government would undoubtedly start printing drachmas like mad and trigger hyperinflation.
If Greece was willing to pare back its welfare state to much saner levels, they might have a chance to slowly dig their way out of the crisis. Since they refuse to, they're in for a whole lot more economic pain...
Since the UK wisely kept its own currency, disruptions from a "Brexit" would be relatively minimal. It's far more likely that will see Greece exit the Euro, because they absolutely refuse to stop spending money they don't have. (Note that despite talk of "austerity," not once since the European debt crisis started has Greek cut government outlays to match receipts.) To Greece (and to a lesser extent the other PIIGS), the welfare state benefits have become more sacred than the capitalist system underwriting them.
The problem with the modern welfare state is that eventually you run out of people to stick with the tab. It both discourages work and generates declining demographics, a dynamic that is unsustainable in the long run.
Well, Greece is starting to reach the long run. They can't afford their own welfare state, but it's become so entrenched that politicians refuse to significately pare it back even on the brink of national bankruptcy.
The UK, like Germany, has a strong enough economy to avoid this fate for quite a while, but it too will get there eventually...
...because the Tea Party took scalps . They defeated Republican incumbents in primaries. They ended political careers. That's what forced Republican office-holders to take them seriously.
As far as I can tell, an Occupy-backed candidate (if there even is such a thing) hasn't defeated a single Democratic incumbent. As such, the Democratic Party can continue to ignore them the way they ignore black voters.
Indeed, criticizing Islam is a sure way to get attacked by Social Justice Warriors. Given that Sabeen Mahmud was almost certainly killed by radical Islamists, your comment is nonsensical.
Just how Islam became so sacred to radical feminists is an interesting question...
Good pay, good hours, limited room for advancement.
But it's not like I expect a Dice Slashvertizement to be remotely complete...
It will encourage high tech companies in general and venture capital firms in specific to:
A). Locate their businesses in a state (like Texas) where Social Justice Warrior-type lawsuits have little chance to succeed.
B). More carefully screen potential employees for Social Justice Warrior tendencies so as to minimize the chance of future lawsuits.
Businesses exist to make money, they don't exit for believers in victimhood identity politics to wage politics and cash in at their expense.
Laws are for the little people, not them.
They believe, and act, as though they are above the law. Lying, perjury, obstruction of justice.
There's no dilemma if you feel that laws simply don't apply to you...
Looks like someone was looking to win the Hyperbole of the Year Award.
If the worst thing about the future is having to buy adapter cables, sign me up. Sounds like a vast improvement over a future where men spend 8 hours reciting the Koran every day before going out to shoot heretics and abduct more women into sexual slavery...
Remember that? That was the 1928 pact that outlawed war.
You might remember how well that worked out.
This will work out just swell until Russia or China or ISIS develop an effective fighting robot and are able to deploy them in sufficient quantities to make a decisive difference in battle.
Plus there's the impossibility of enforcement. How can you prove it was a robot rather than a remote-operated drone?
And there's the tiny issue that, knowing how slowly the wheels of the "international community's" court systems turn, the war is likely to be won or lost before those violating it ever come to trial...
...in the creation of transparent Aluminum....
...than one of those bloated, slow-loading, all-Flash restaurant front-ends that take 20 seconds to load and animate before they show you the location, hours of operation, or any menus.
He didn't find all the secrets...
Citizens United was founded in 1988.
Which you can read about here. And his letter didn't come from a PAC, it came from the Democratic Party.
I've never gotten anything remotely like this letter from the Republican Party or a conservative PAC (and I probably get well over 200 begging direct-mail solicitations a year).
I don't see such intimidation tactics as paying off for them...
1. "In 1991, Andrew Rapport declared Microsoft the winner in the PC contest because Microsoft and Intel had harnessed the Asian supply chain and dramatically undercut the cost of the eccentric Steve Jobs’s Apple Mac." No, by 1991, it was John Scully's Mac, as Jobs was ousted in 1985.
2. "When Apple’s first notebook, the Macintosh 100, wasn’t embraced by consumers because it was two big, too heavy, and too expensive" No, that would have been the original Mac Portable (1989), which was all of those things. The Powerbook (not Macintosh) 100 was actually a very light ultra-portable.
Since author Steven Max Patterson and his editors couldn't be bothered to perform basic fact-checking, I stopped reading at that point...
...funnel money to donors who then go bankrupt shortly after...
Without a top-down bureaucracy calling the shops, states can try 50 different methods to control the pandemic, and compare results to see who has the best one. They're not stuck mindlessly doing what Washington has dictated, even if it's wrong.
The CDC is swearing up and down Ebola can be transmitted by airborne infection, but what if they're wrong about this strain?
The federal government is much more likely than the states to continue a wrong course of action long after it's been proven a bad idea than the states. See also: Welfare, agribusiness subsidies, the food pyramid...
...because it might put favored liberal policies or politicians in a bad light. That's why Sharyl Attkisson resigned.
Michael Totten did, and he found a police state overseeing wrenching poverty, complete with shortages for essentials and goods of retched quality.
In short: Communism.
Let's not forget that the best estimates for the death of communist regimes killing their own people is right around 100 million people. Both The Black Book of Communism and R.J. Rummel's Death by Government come up with roughly the same number of people killed.
Communism is incompatible with both human rights and a healthy economy, and never has, never can, and never will meet the needs of its own people or offer better lives than those under capitalism.
Embargoes have nothing to do with it...
...on a computer what it took fifty years of uninterrupted Democratic rule to do in real life!
The way he defines success and failure is framed to say all missile defense fails.
...to end drug prohibition since at least 1996, on both practical and 10th Amendment grounds. Statists love the "War on Drugs" because it gives them more ways to control people.
Meanwhile, President Obama, the first president who openly admitted to using illegal drugs, has cracked down harder on medical marijuana and other uses of "choom" far harder than Bush ever did.
...then sift through it to file tax evasion charges, but somehow keeping email backups for top IRS employees is beyond them because the hard drive crashed and they had to recycle the backup tapes.
Right.
...and you want to prevent those nosy congressmen pawing through your emails looking for felonies...