As you should imagine, PIIGS is an insult for those who live in those countries. Please abstain from using that term, in the name of a sane discussion.
So, your solution is basically individualistic. Suffer and emigrate. I beg to disagree. I'd rather suffer jumping out of the Euro, at least we would be free and could devalue our debt into oblivion. But that will set fire to the whole Eurozone, so I strongly suspect Germany won't like it very much. If the idea spreads, they may be convinced to allow the Eurobonds and let the inflation go up, but I'm not holding my breath. Anyway, we're fucked otherwise. And I wouldn't need to emigrate to a third world country, I'd be living in one.
Since it's impossible to devaluate our currency to keep competitive
Leave the Eurozone. Don't recall that anyone actually forced you to give up your native currency.
By "anyone" you mean "no one", right? I'll leave the Eurozone. Where do I sign?
To keep us buying their products big time, they lend us money.
Don't borrow. Don't recall that anyone actually forced your governments (or your fellow citizens) to borrow more than they could afford.
If you read my original post, you'll find that I say our governments were actually forced/corrupted into it. The people borrowed money that was wilfully offered to them by the banks. People thought it was OK. Actually, it was the responsibility of the banks/governments to make a decent financial management and prevent unbalances. The common guy is not a financial expert, that's why we pay all those overpaid "experts" in banks and governments for. Funny you don't mention how we were basically paid to ruin our industry and agriculture and become mass importers. Things are so much more pleasant when you ignore what you don't like, aren't they?
To make things worse we had to incur in huge public debts to rescue banks that spent years unsupervised in an orgy of speculative investments.
You had huge pubic debts before your banks had to be bailed out. Don't recall anyone actually forcing your governments to live beyond their means.
No, we didn't. The deficit in Portugal was inside the draconian rules imposed by the EU before the subprime bubble bust. It climbed immediately because of rescuing the banks. I hope you're not an American. It would be quite ironic to receive moral lessons from you.
Ultimately, you can choose to blame everyone but yourselves for the decisions you made. But that won't fix things, so why bother wasting time with it?
So, instead of wasting time being a naysayer, do you have anything valuable to propose?
The problem is that Germany, the richest and most powerful country in the EU is not about caring for the rest of the territory, but using it to export shitload after shitload of the goods they manufacture. Since it's impossible to devaluate our currency to keep competitive, Germany squashes us like flies, because they are so productive and they have the political clout to swing every EU decision in their own interest. They simply corrupt and blackmail any local government trying to protect its country from depredation.
To keep us buying their products big time, they lend us money. Big time. Now we can't pay anymore, and we don't have agriculture or industry left. To make things worse we had to incur in huge public debts to rescue banks that spent years unsupervised in an orgy of speculative investments. Germany blames us for everything and refuses to do anything to rescue Europe from disaster and demands the other countries to sell cheap what's left of their economies, I mean the public services and utilities.
Of course, this is unsustainable. The countries in the raw end of the deal will eventually default on their debts (most of it is fictitious, anyway). German industrials will lose the markets they export to and the German bankers will lose all the borrowers that pay them excruciating interest (that they gladly spend in whores and race cars). Germans will face massive unemployment and austerity (but only after the rest of the Europeans).
But no problem. The German government will tell the people it's the other countries who are to blame. They will say that the "inferior" people didn't know how to manage their finances and ruined the great Germany which so generously gave them so much. Then they will turn to Fascism again and invade the rest of Europe. History repeats again and again and again.
There's only a "debate" in the US and Islamic fundamentalist countries. Here in Europe, evolution is pretty much accepted everywhere. Fuck, even the extremely conservative Roman Catholic Church acknowledges evolution.
Creationism is only an issue where mouth-frothing, ignorant religious nuts are taken seriously and not as the jokes they are, and are allowed to interfere with education.
In my country there are a lot of newspapers, like everywhere else. Almost all of them lose money. I can give you two examples on both extremes:
There's a piece of toilet paper called "Correio da Manhã" (Morning Mail) which is a huge commercial success. 1 quarter is ass-kissing the government, the other is filled with sensationalist news about murders and robberies, the other is about sports, and the last is celebrity gossip + tits n'ass. It appeals to the uneducated masses and exploits the lowest feelings of the human being.
There's a paper called "Público" (Public) which is in the other extreme. Has deeper coverage of the subjects and appeals to an educated audience. It loses money ever since it was founded, it was never shut down, and that scenario is not even in the horizon.
Both are property of huge, extremely rich corporate groups. The former is not very sophisticated, the second is, because its audience is clever and demanding. Both are used to brainwash people and make them believe the doctrines of the One Thought. You could wonder why a corporation would maintain a newspaper that loses money. They don't care. They'll pay what it takes to control the minds. And to control educated minds you have to spend a huge lot of money.
You may like the distortions produced by tube amps (or transistor amps outputting those same distortions via DSP), but don't pretend they're better at reproducing sound. They are demonstrably not.
You're assuming people want something better at reproducing sound. Maybe then don't. That's why people still have nostalgia for old analogue gear, like electromechanical organs and synths, tape reel recorders, vinyl discs, etc. Analogue equipment adds side bands to sound, which people consider "warm" and "rich".
Hell, one way to make an instrument's sound richer is to copy the track to another, detune it slightly and add it in the mix with the original track! How "imperfect" is this?
As a guitar player I can tell you I wouldn't change my valve amp for the best transistor amp. The sound is simply not the same, regardless of the technical details.
Speak for yourself. I live in permanent dread of unicorn farts, and I demand my government do something about this threat! Cut the education and health budget, we need the money!
Why the hell you have to create a specific law for this issue? Forcing people to give their passwords is outright illegal. Don't you have a Constitution? Don't people have basic privacy rights in the US?
If you think Education is free, try ignorance. Which is what you will get if individuals can't pay for their own education and society defected on that.
I'm European. We used to have free college. A lot of my former colleagues are against free education.
They don't like to spend the money they make, on their nice jobs, that they got because they have a degree, that they got because of free education.
But now they have kids and the financial crisis is eating away on their salaries. They like free education again. But it's too late. Education has become a business, and a very, very lucrative one. It's gonna be hard to turn this back again.
Funny how politicians and corporations can manipulate people's lowest sentiments, like greed, so easily to turn them against their own interests. People are so fucking stupid.
I understand that the unit of feet is not common around the world, but do you not know what a foot is? They are the things at the end of your legs that have those 5 toes attached. If you measure it from ankle to toe, it's probably around a foot in length. That's not gonna cut it for any accurate measurement, but should help you visualize the unit of a foot.
Is that an African foot or an American one?
Then there is Google, which will gladly convert from feet to meters, Angstroms, fathoms or whatever other unit of length you want.
Well, that doesn't cut it very well. It's up to the poster or the editors to follow certain bare-minimum quality standards. According to your reasoning he could have posted it in Swahili or Nepalese because "Then there is Google Translate".
You start using feet then proceed to tons (metric or US), then proceed to square kilometers...
If you don't want to use the standard measurement system for all the measures, at least be consistent! Don't use standard units mixed up with US units. It just makes a mess.
The vast majority of people in the world has no fucking idea how much 150 feet is!
You are right about the political part, but Saramago was violently attacked because of that book. He was even a victim of consorship: The government refused to apply his book for an international prize because of the religious issue. He abandoned the country not only, but partly, because of that.
If you ask the average Portuguese on the street what he thinks about Saramago, he'll tell you that he hates the writer's guts for being a Communist and Atheist. Also, the average Portuguese most likely never read a book in his entire life.
Are you suggesting more government regulation is the solution? What about the passengers' inalienable right to die a horrible death in the icy waters without the nanny-state commie lifeboats oppressing them? Why do you hate liberty?
You're wrong. People that believe in those false gods are obviously inferior and God will smite them with all his fury if they don't convert. We the Catholics have been helping the Lord with the smiting for two millennia, with great success!
And we do that because the Lord told us to love everybody and we want everybody to go to heaven.
The Nobel writer Saramago wrote that in his book "The Gospel according to Jesus Christ". It was a fight between gods and the whole crucifixion thing was a stunt to gain territory.
Saramago is profoundly hated for having written that book. He was practically expelled from his own country and exiled himself in a small island in the Canaries.
If searches are really random, controlled by a computer, for example, there's no possible way a terrorist can test the system. He won't get any information out of it.
You and GP are both racist and stupid. Random search is much more secure than profiling. Profiling supplies information to the bad guys about what the authorities are searching for. If they started searching all dark skin guys all the bad guys had to do was to get a white folk to carry the goods past security. There are scientific papers about it.
You two idiots would consider me a suspect, because of the way I look. I'm European, from a Catholic country. I don't personally know any Muslim. I've never even been near the Middle East.
And you do realise there are bad guys who are pinky white Americans do you?
Slashdot Mirror
As you should imagine, PIIGS is an insult for those who live in those countries. Please abstain from using that term, in the name of a sane discussion.
So, your solution is basically individualistic. Suffer and emigrate. I beg to disagree. I'd rather suffer jumping out of the Euro, at least we would be free and could devalue our debt into oblivion. But that will set fire to the whole Eurozone, so I strongly suspect Germany won't like it very much. If the idea spreads, they may be convinced to allow the Eurobonds and let the inflation go up, but I'm not holding my breath. Anyway, we're fucked otherwise. And I wouldn't need to emigrate to a third world country, I'd be living in one.
Leave the Eurozone. Don't recall that anyone actually forced you to give up your native currency.
By "anyone" you mean "no one", right? I'll leave the Eurozone. Where do I sign?
Don't borrow. Don't recall that anyone actually forced your governments (or your fellow citizens) to borrow more than they could afford.
If you read my original post, you'll find that I say our governments were actually forced/corrupted into it. The people borrowed money that was wilfully offered to them by the banks. People thought it was OK. Actually, it was the responsibility of the banks/governments to make a decent financial management and prevent unbalances. The common guy is not a financial expert, that's why we pay all those overpaid "experts" in banks and governments for. Funny you don't mention how we were basically paid to ruin our industry and agriculture and become mass importers. Things are so much more pleasant when you ignore what you don't like, aren't they?
You had huge pubic debts before your banks had to be bailed out. Don't recall anyone actually forcing your governments to live beyond their means.
No, we didn't. The deficit in Portugal was inside the draconian rules imposed by the EU before the subprime bubble bust. It climbed immediately because of rescuing the banks. I hope you're not an American. It would be quite ironic to receive moral lessons from you.
Ultimately, you can choose to blame everyone but yourselves for the decisions you made. But that won't fix things, so why bother wasting time with it?
So, instead of wasting time being a naysayer, do you have anything valuable to propose?
The problem is that Germany, the richest and most powerful country in the EU is not about caring for the rest of the territory, but using it to export shitload after shitload of the goods they manufacture. Since it's impossible to devaluate our currency to keep competitive, Germany squashes us like flies, because they are so productive and they have the political clout to swing every EU decision in their own interest. They simply corrupt and blackmail any local government trying to protect its country from depredation.
To keep us buying their products big time, they lend us money. Big time. Now we can't pay anymore, and we don't have agriculture or industry left. To make things worse we had to incur in huge public debts to rescue banks that spent years unsupervised in an orgy of speculative investments. Germany blames us for everything and refuses to do anything to rescue Europe from disaster and demands the other countries to sell cheap what's left of their economies, I mean the public services and utilities.
Of course, this is unsustainable. The countries in the raw end of the deal will eventually default on their debts (most of it is fictitious, anyway). German industrials will lose the markets they export to and the German bankers will lose all the borrowers that pay them excruciating interest (that they gladly spend in whores and race cars). Germans will face massive unemployment and austerity (but only after the rest of the Europeans).
But no problem. The German government will tell the people it's the other countries who are to blame. They will say that the "inferior" people didn't know how to manage their finances and ruined the great Germany which so generously gave them so much. Then they will turn to Fascism again and invade the rest of Europe. History repeats again and again and again.
There's only a "debate" in the US and Islamic fundamentalist countries. Here in Europe, evolution is pretty much accepted everywhere. Fuck, even the extremely conservative Roman Catholic Church acknowledges evolution.
Creationism is only an issue where mouth-frothing, ignorant religious nuts are taken seriously and not as the jokes they are, and are allowed to interfere with education.
In my country there are a lot of newspapers, like everywhere else. Almost all of them lose money. I can give you two examples on both extremes:
There's a piece of toilet paper called "Correio da Manhã" (Morning Mail) which is a huge commercial success. 1 quarter is ass-kissing the government, the other is filled with sensationalist news about murders and robberies, the other is about sports, and the last is celebrity gossip + tits n'ass. It appeals to the uneducated masses and exploits the lowest feelings of the human being.
There's a paper called "Público" (Public) which is in the other extreme. Has deeper coverage of the subjects and appeals to an educated audience. It loses money ever since it was founded, it was never shut down, and that scenario is not even in the horizon.
Both are property of huge, extremely rich corporate groups. The former is not very sophisticated, the second is, because its audience is clever and demanding. Both are used to brainwash people and make them believe the doctrines of the One Thought. You could wonder why a corporation would maintain a newspaper that loses money. They don't care. They'll pay what it takes to control the minds. And to control educated minds you have to spend a huge lot of money.
This shouldn't be labelled +5 Funny, it should be +5 Insightful.
Valve amps don't feed loudspeakers directly. They can't output the current for it. A transformer is always needed.
You may like the distortions produced by tube amps (or transistor amps outputting those same distortions via DSP), but don't pretend they're better at reproducing sound. They are demonstrably not.
You're assuming people want something better at reproducing sound. Maybe then don't. That's why people still have nostalgia for old analogue gear, like electromechanical organs and synths, tape reel recorders, vinyl discs, etc. Analogue equipment adds side bands to sound, which people consider "warm" and "rich".
Hell, one way to make an instrument's sound richer is to copy the track to another, detune it slightly and add it in the mix with the original track! How "imperfect" is this?
As a guitar player I can tell you I wouldn't change my valve amp for the best transistor amp. The sound is simply not the same, regardless of the technical details.
I like that idea. Enslave your people, fire them when they're worn and hire new slaves. What can possibly go wrong?
Speak for yourself. I live in permanent dread of unicorn farts, and I demand my government do something about this threat! Cut the education and health budget, we need the money!
Why the hell you have to create a specific law for this issue? Forcing people to give their passwords is outright illegal. Don't you have a Constitution? Don't people have basic privacy rights in the US?
If you think Education is free, try ignorance. Which is what you will get if individuals can't pay for their own education and society defected on that.
I'm European. We used to have free college. A lot of my former colleagues are against free education.
They don't like to spend the money they make, on their nice jobs, that they got because they have a degree, that they got because of free education.
But now they have kids and the financial crisis is eating away on their salaries. They like free education again. But it's too late. Education has become a business, and a very, very lucrative one. It's gonna be hard to turn this back again.
Funny how politicians and corporations can manipulate people's lowest sentiments, like greed, so easily to turn them against their own interests. People are so fucking stupid.
If you're going to call others ignorant, at the very least use proper spelling.
I understand that the unit of feet is not common around the world, but do you not know what a foot is? They are the things at the end of your legs that have those 5 toes attached. If you measure it from ankle to toe, it's probably around a foot in length. That's not gonna cut it for any accurate measurement, but should help you visualize the unit of a foot.
Is that an African foot or an American one?
Then there is Google, which will gladly convert from feet to meters, Angstroms, fathoms or whatever other unit of length you want.
Well, that doesn't cut it very well. It's up to the poster or the editors to follow certain bare-minimum quality standards. According to your reasoning he could have posted it in Swahili or Nepalese because "Then there is Google Translate".
You start using feet then proceed to tons (metric or US), then proceed to square kilometers...
If you don't want to use the standard measurement system for all the measures, at least be consistent! Don't use standard units mixed up with US units. It just makes a mess.
The vast majority of people in the world has no fucking idea how much 150 feet is!
You are right about the political part, but Saramago was violently attacked because of that book. He was even a victim of consorship: The government refused to apply his book for an international prize because of the religious issue. He abandoned the country not only, but partly, because of that.
If you ask the average Portuguese on the street what he thinks about Saramago, he'll tell you that he hates the writer's guts for being a Communist and Atheist. Also, the average Portuguese most likely never read a book in his entire life.
Only in the US. The word "football" means a different sport everywhere else in the world.
Are you suggesting more government regulation is the solution? What about the passengers' inalienable right to die a horrible death in the icy waters without the nanny-state commie lifeboats oppressing them? Why do you hate liberty?
You're wrong. People that believe in those false gods are obviously inferior and God will smite them with all his fury if they don't convert. We the Catholics have been helping the Lord with the smiting for two millennia, with great success!
And we do that because the Lord told us to love everybody and we want everybody to go to heaven.
The Nobel writer Saramago wrote that in his book "The Gospel according to Jesus Christ". It was a fight between gods and the whole crucifixion thing was a stunt to gain territory.
Saramago is profoundly hated for having written that book. He was practically expelled from his own country and exiled himself in a small island in the Canaries.
If searches are really random, controlled by a computer, for example, there's no possible way a terrorist can test the system. He won't get any information out of it.
Read this
I'm not talking about rights. Random is a safe choice algorithm, profiling is not.
You and GP are both racist and stupid. Random search is much more secure than profiling. Profiling supplies information to the bad guys about what the authorities are searching for. If they started searching all dark skin guys all the bad guys had to do was to get a white folk to carry the goods past security. There are scientific papers about it.
You two idiots would consider me a suspect, because of the way I look. I'm European, from a Catholic country. I don't personally know any Muslim. I've never even been near the Middle East.
And you do realise there are bad guys who are pinky white Americans do you?