That is interesting. Out of curiosity, do you know what the road tax pays for? I mean, 5.63billion was generated from it in 2009, does that go towards maintenance of the roads or not? How much is taken from general taxation to fill the gap?
I am under the impression that road tax + fuel tax + emissions tax pretty much generated a surplus of money, more than is needed to maintain the road/transport infra. As such most of it is used in other areas. As such I doubt general taxation pays for the roads per se.
I guess it depends on where you live, but in the UK cars (and other vehicles) pay for the roads via a road tax, so it would make sense to say the roads belong to "them". At least as far as who pays for most of the maintenance.
Cyclists do not pay road tax, or insurance, or contribute to the maintenance of the roads. If they were registered at least, then I'd hope to see a little less stupidity and recklessness (e.g. when it comes to red lights and junctions).
AFAIK: Short answer. If using a warp drive, 2 seconds passed for the passenger of ship (minus overhead of turning ship around, prepping engines, etc...). Also, 2 seconds would have passed on earth.
The nice thing about the warp drive is that you are shortening the distance between two points, you yourself never go at any fraction of C. As such there is no time dilation. You don't have to go on a long trip thinking about how everyone you know and love would be dead when you came back, even if the trip only took you a few seconds.
Why not install big fans at the front of the train that suck in practically ALL the air in front of the train before it hits, compress it into narrow pipes that run the length of the train and then exhaust at the rear?
Remember, a jet engine does not really need to have a heat engine at its core. You can build an electric jet engine as well, just that it is less efficient and harder to do.
I don't know about this. I mean, like the parent poster I pay a chunk of my health insurance, and the company pays the other half.
I would however still see as myself being taxed as 20%, because the rest of it is not taken from my income. The company has it taken it out of their income.
The argument I've heard for your point of view is that if the company did not have to match your tax, then they would pass on the extra money to you. In my experience it doesn't work that way. I am paid the "going market rate" for my skills, and if they stopped paying a their share of my health tax, the money would not go to me. I would get less benefit, they would make more profit, but more profit for them would not automatically result in my own betterment.
That is not free, it is paid for and supported by those that are working via taxes. The more people who go on social housing, the more tax has to rise to pay for it all.
If everybody didn't work and lived in public housing, who do you think would pay for it?
There is always some scarcity, especially with regards to housing (hint: there is a finite amount of land available). Hence I don't think housing (for example) will ever be free.
Well... I try to buy my food in bulk to last me 2 or so weeks. In which case it more than 30kg, and while the car is about 1000kg, I actually enjoy driving, so I combine the two. I could do it by motorbike if I really wanted to be mass/energy efficient.
For anything like 3kg, I walk. That infrastructure is everywhere already. It is also good for you health, I felt a lot better once I started walking around. There is little need to take the car down to the local shops for the bare essentials.
Oooh, could you give me some more info? My GTX280 cost a lot of money to me, and seems to have some memory corruption rendering it useless for anything but simple 2D displaying. I can't use it as is, and nobody wants to buy a faulty GPU.
What settings to use? How long to keep it in the oven? Do I need to disassemble it? Any instructions on doing it? It would be excellent if I could get it working again!! It would save me having to splash out another few hundred pounds for a new card:/
Not to mention that the parent seems to be living a few decades in the past... I mean, Underground delivery and transportation? Controlled by limited A.I? Has he not heard of Rapid transit systems?
We already have the infrastructure, we already have a good chunk of it automated, in fact parts of the London underground are fully AI controlled. The only reason we have drivers on trains is due to Unions, and the fact that a lot of people have peace of mind knowing there is a person "driving" the train, even if his job consists of pressing a button once he is sure the train is safe to pull out of the station, from there on the computers take over.
Ditto! I kept buying top end Nvidia cards for CUDA work, only to have them die just after the warranty, usually a year or so. I dug out an old Nvidia Quadro 285 card from the early 2000's, and am using it again. Also the 8400gs I got works just peacy for simple CUDA stuff.
It is like they engineer their top end cards to fail after a year or so, no matter what. My GTX 280 never went beyond 50 degrees, and was underclocked to boot (I didn't need all the power). Yet it died after a year or so, about as long as the 8800GTX I had beforehand.
The Quadro has been in use in some form for more than half a decade, and it still does 99% of what I need (Apart from the CUDA stuff, otherwise it would be perfect). Their older stuff seems more solid.
Not the first time the US has supported terrorists, I can think of two more off the top of my head right now, both of which would have been on the CIA terror list while being supported.
Remember, one mans terrorist is anothers freedom fighter, and this extends to those states who sympathise with their cause, and are willing to support them.
Transparent proxy most likely. I had loads of problems with their firewall/censoring software when trying to connect from my O2-based mobile network (giffgaff) to my O2-based broadband (Be). While trying to debug the situation I found out about their transparent proxy system as well. It acts like a MITM attack, sitting in between you and the real server, intercepts everything and rewrites it if needed/told to.
I never solved my issues, and the mobile guys were utterly unhelpful, so just switched away, but I believe they have had this system around for ages, probably so they can filter the Internet watch blacklist.
Still got my N900, still use it actually. I am torn between it and the Samsung Galaxy SII that I got with my new contract.
The SII
* is sleeker,
* faster,
* prettier,
* thinner and has a stunning screen.
The N900 has:
* a nicer UI,
* hardware keyboard,
* A camera that can shoot RAW photo's (I think this is the only phone in the world that can do this, as a photographer this made my day!)
* really flexible (e.g. my SII can't import contacts via bluetooth! All the Nokias I had before could do this, made upgrading so eaasy!),
* infrared (I use it both as a universal remote control, and for controlling my DSLR for long-exposure shots
* FM transmitter with RDS - really useful when I want to play music through a friends car stereo, or not had to fiddle with wires, or have multiple places play the same thing.
* Nice integration of Skype+VOIP+normal phone (no need for it all to be done by a seperate "app", damn android's contact management is useless).
* well built (dropped it god knows how many times, still works like new, one of the N900's that were actually built in Finland)
* loads of free/OSS apps/games/etc, many of which are familiar to me from Linux Desktops.
* An X server, full ssh support, I can even forward my mobile apps to my desktop if needed.
* Hackable! I can set a cron job to send me sms'es, Android has no such access to the underlying system.
* Easy to code for (multiple UI toolkits, libraries and programming languages). Android is really limited here, you have to use their SDK for full potential.
* I can load any OS I want on it, including Gentoo if I was feeling crazy.
* Proper bluetooth support, especially for keyboards! I was shocked to find my SII can't pair to a keyboard and have it work properly to save its life. All I had was a bunch of hacks and apps, neither of which works particularly well. Apparently ICS will fix this, but we'll see...
* This includes bluetooth tethering, which I still haven't got to work on Android.
* No need for a google account!
* On-disk encryption, support for something other than FAT on SD cards
Need I go on? The N900 is in all respects a better and more powerful phone. The SII's only benefits are due to the hardware. If I could load Maemo on the SII I would in a heartbeat.
As it stands, I still carry both phones with me, except that the SIM is in the SII as it is usually in my pocket, due to it not being a brick.
The N900 really was the ultimate geek/hacker phone, and we'll probably not see another like it. It was too powerful for joe average, but the above is why nerds loved it so, and were so angry when MS took over and killed the whole lot.
With a bit more polish, and all the nerds willing like crazy to write apps for it, I believe it could have been a very powerful platform, on par with Android eventually.
compared to the windows phone OS they went with, that is like a toy in comparison, you can see why there is quite a bit of resentment about the whole thing.
I know, my point is that the command line just wouldn't work propoerly. Whenever I tried it tended to eventually lockup, which involved getting someone to the DC to yank the power out and reset it. Perhaps I should have written it better in my original post...
Also, the command line was confusing, and I swear it was based on XML of some sort.
The only thing that worked ok was the web GUI, which I wasn't happy with. I really liked the Sun and HP iLo systems, and they were stable and the command line ssh interface worked, allowing for easy scripting. However I believe the HP machines cost more, which was why we tried to switch to Dell.
Yeah, a remote LAN console that is atrocious if you want (god forbid) use something other than their toy web-GUI to admin it, buggy as hell (prone to lockups), plus it shares the main ethernet port, making out-of-band management impossible (a right PITA if you lose network at the link level).
I've worked on a mix of DELL, HP, IBM, and Sun hardware, and DELL's were by far the most problematic and difficult to admin, but they were a lot cheaper than the others. I guess you get what you pay for...
Oh, and I think the original article question was referring to networking hardware, not servers, things like layer 3 switches, bridges, routers... places where an enterprise server would be a waste of power and money. Good question though, I don't know of any linux networking hardware that is open:-/
"But currently the problems in the other countries devalue the euro, meaning Germany gets to export at great prices."
Which means that greece could also export at great prices if they actually bothered to produce anything that anyone wanted.
Easier said then done, there is a lot of marketing behind Germany, along with a lot of positive stereotypes about their engineering quality, etc....
When people think Germany, the think high quality engineering, studious and stable country, well educated workforce, beer and sausages.
When people think Greece, they think ancient ruins, philosophy, beaches, hot sun, sea, holidays, parties and natural beauty.
As such when people have a choice between a Greek engineered product, and a German one for the same price, an overwhelming majority would go for the German good, even if the Greek one is just as good (or even better).
The Germans have reputation, which they built up before the EU due to being a phenomenal European power. They have had this reputation for hundreds of years. You can' t just create that for another country.
I've known Greek engineers, I've known them produce stuff that was as good or better than their German counterparts. However nobody wanted to buy it at German prices. In the olden days it was ok, as the drachma was a weaker currency, so their goods were cheaper and they would get purchases from budget conscious buyers, who'd end up surprised by the quality.
However once they joined the Euro, their costs increased to the same level as Germany's, and so they had to raise their prices to remain profitable. This made them about as expensive as the German goods, and their sales dried up. They were too expensive for the budget buyers (who buy from east-europe/China now) while those who bought and paid German prices bought them for their reputation, and would not buy the Greek product.
As a result, they went bankrupt, and one of them ended up moving to Germany, where he now makes Germany money via his taxes. A net loss for Greece and a net gain for Germany, which is an inbalance that just grows with time.
"Basically, Germany gets a huge boost for free and pretends it's all due to working hard"
Rubbish - it is due to working hard. Meanwhile the greeks don't bother to pay their taxes then whine abd bitch like little children when finally it all goes t1ts up.
No sympathy. The greeks made their bed , well its time to lie down.
Reading this, I can't help feeling that I've just been trolled, and perhaps I have (in which case congratulations on Trolling me). However I will complete this anyway, as I've written most of it as is, and adding information to a debate is always a good idea.
Yes, Greece has a problem with overbearing bureaucracy, and yes they have an issue with tax collection and corruption. However that does not negate what the grandparent poster said. He was spot on.
If Germany was not in the Euro, it's DMark would be so strong, that their goods would be uncompetitive with the the rest of the world. They would also not have a captive market (in the case of the rest of the eurozone countries) which can guarantee some exports no matter what.
Trust me, if the eurozone wasn't working out for Germany they would leave. They are not staying the out of the goodness of their hearts, or due to some old war guilt. The fact is that the German government knows what the grand parent posted, they know that they are getting a huge boost for free, they know that the eurozone is helping them immensely.
The problem is that the status quo cannot continue. Germany has sucked up all the production out of the rest of the eurozone (barring Italy and northern countries) and countries are collapsing. So at this point either the EU integrates further, which involves some redistribution of wealth from Germany, by whichever mechanism is chosen (euro inflation, bailouts, etc...), or it starts falling apart (perhaps the development of a "Core" EU of stronger economies, with peripheries that can use a weaker currency).
Sweden found another way to stay out of the euro(and haven't seen any truly negative sideffects of doing so). We signed the Maastricht Treaty but said treaty has certain requirements before allowing a nation to join the euro and puts no obligations on the signatories to attempt to fulfill the requirements. So Sweden did not adopt the euro because the populace turned it down in a general referendum and Sweden has ever since simply chosen not to fulfill the requirements for joining the euro.
It is interesting about Sweden, but I know most new entrants to the EU are obliged to join the eurozone if they want to join the EU. See here on the right for a map.
It might be that the EU decided to change the rules for new entrants, being that when Sweden joined, the EU was something totally different to the political behemoth it is today. Now being part of the EU requires the Euro, which benefits Germany quite nicely really.
Either way, thanks for the insight, always appreciated:)
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.
Actually yes, if you want to be part of the EU (And get all the benefits of free trade etc...) then you have to join the Eurozone eventually.I believe only Denmark and the UK have the option not to, the others have to eventually. Not joining the EU when you're a tiny country in the region will put you at a massive disadvantage.
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.
Well no, but fundamentally by joining the eurozone you have the same strength of currency as say, Germany. This makes your goods as expensive as German goods, despite the German good being seen as superior. This means:
a) Given the choice, foreign countries will buy the German goods rather than yours, as they are the same price.
b) Locals, given the choice, will buy German goods rather than your own, as they are the same price
Also, the free movement of people will allow your best and brightest to leave, especially as living costs are now the same as Germany anyway.
Eventually your economy will be uncompetitive, your educated citizens will have left, and nobody would want your produce. The only upside to this is that you get Germany's credit rating, and so can take out loans at silly cheap rates.
When all you have available to you is debt, then that is what you use. It is not a direct "Forcing", but leaving no other option to a country is not so much different really.
To me it is not surprising what happened. The EU is essentially built solely to benefit Germany (and to a lesser extent France). This is because the concept of the EU originated with these two countries, so decided to form a Union in order to prevent another big European war, so logically they wrote the original structure to benefit them.
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.
See response above, although I'd have argued that you shouldn't have bailed out the banks at all. They were private entities, they gambled big to make money and lost, and should suffer the losses as well.
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?
And I hope this post illustrates to you that the situation is far from simple, or clear, or how you see it really."blaming everyone but themselves" may actually not be the wrong answer, although I'd blame them for a) Initially joining the Eurozone, and b) being stupid enough to take the bait and get trapped, but politicians are neither the brightest nor the most honest of people...
I'd prefer if they kept movies with the "100db difference". It is far easier to apply a dynamic compressor plugin than it is to undo studio-mastered dynamic compression. In fact, I hope they do the same with music as well, so that eventually we can apply as much compression as we want for a given environment/situation.
Slashdot Mirror
That is interesting. Out of curiosity, do you know what the road tax pays for? I mean, 5.63billion was generated from it in 2009, does that go towards maintenance of the roads or not? How much is taken from general taxation to fill the gap?
I am under the impression that road tax + fuel tax + emissions tax pretty much generated a surplus of money, more than is needed to maintain the road/transport infra. As such most of it is used in other areas. As such I doubt general taxation pays for the roads per se.
I guess it depends on where you live, but in the UK cars (and other vehicles) pay for the roads via a road tax, so it would make sense to say the roads belong to "them". At least as far as who pays for most of the maintenance.
Cyclists do not pay road tax, or insurance, or contribute to the maintenance of the roads. If they were registered at least, then I'd hope to see a little less stupidity and recklessness (e.g. when it comes to red lights and junctions).
AFAIK: Short answer. If using a warp drive, 2 seconds passed for the passenger of ship (minus overhead of turning ship around, prepping engines, etc...). Also, 2 seconds would have passed on earth.
The nice thing about the warp drive is that you are shortening the distance between two points, you yourself never go at any fraction of C. As such there is no time dilation. You don't have to go on a long trip thinking about how everyone you know and love would be dead when you came back, even if the trip only took you a few seconds.
seconded! Awesome! Alas I have no mod points, but what a response!
Why not install big fans at the front of the train that suck in practically ALL the air in front of the train before it hits, compress it into narrow pipes that run the length of the train and then exhaust at the rear?
You mean, something like, say, a jet engine? =)
Remember, a jet engine does not really need to have a heat engine at its core. You can build an electric jet engine as well, just that it is less efficient and harder to do.
I don't know about this. I mean, like the parent poster I pay a chunk of my health insurance, and the company pays the other half.
I would however still see as myself being taxed as 20%, because the rest of it is not taken from my income. The company has it taken it out of their income.
The argument I've heard for your point of view is that if the company did not have to match your tax, then they would pass on the extra money to you. In my experience it doesn't work that way. I am paid the "going market rate" for my skills, and if they stopped paying a their share of my health tax, the money would not go to me. I would get less benefit, they would make more profit, but more profit for them would not automatically result in my own betterment.
That is not free, it is paid for and supported by those that are working via taxes. The more people who go on social housing, the more tax has to rise to pay for it all.
If everybody didn't work and lived in public housing, who do you think would pay for it?
There is always some scarcity, especially with regards to housing (hint: there is a finite amount of land available). Hence I don't think housing (for example) will ever be free.
Well... I try to buy my food in bulk to last me 2 or so weeks. In which case it more than 30kg, and while the car is about 1000kg, I actually enjoy driving, so I combine the two. I could do it by motorbike if I really wanted to be mass/energy efficient.
For anything like 3kg, I walk. That infrastructure is everywhere already. It is also good for you health, I felt a lot better once I started walking around. There is little need to take the car down to the local shops for the bare essentials.
Why use the car at all for something that small?
Oooh, could you give me some more info? My GTX280 cost a lot of money to me, and seems to have some memory corruption rendering it useless for anything but simple 2D displaying. I can't use it as is, and nobody wants to buy a faulty GPU.
What settings to use? How long to keep it in the oven? Do I need to disassemble it? Any instructions on doing it? It would be excellent if I could get it working again!! It would save me having to splash out another few hundred pounds for a new card :/
Not to mention that the parent seems to be living a few decades in the past... I mean, Underground delivery and transportation? Controlled by limited A.I? Has he not heard of Rapid transit systems?
We already have the infrastructure, we already have a good chunk of it automated, in fact parts of the London underground are fully AI controlled. The only reason we have drivers on trains is due to Unions, and the fact that a lot of people have peace of mind knowing there is a person "driving" the train, even if his job consists of pressing a button once he is sure the train is safe to pull out of the station, from there on the computers take over.
Ditto! I kept buying top end Nvidia cards for CUDA work, only to have them die just after the warranty, usually a year or so. I dug out an old Nvidia Quadro 285 card from the early 2000's, and am using it again. Also the 8400gs I got works just peacy for simple CUDA stuff.
It is like they engineer their top end cards to fail after a year or so, no matter what. My GTX 280 never went beyond 50 degrees, and was underclocked to boot (I didn't need all the power). Yet it died after a year or so, about as long as the 8800GTX I had beforehand.
The Quadro has been in use in some form for more than half a decade, and it still does 99% of what I need (Apart from the CUDA stuff, otherwise it would be perfect). Their older stuff seems more solid.
Not the first time the US has supported terrorists, I can think of two more off the top of my head right now, both of which would have been on the CIA terror list while being supported.
Remember, one mans terrorist is anothers freedom fighter, and this extends to those states who sympathise with their cause, and are willing to support them.
Transparent proxy most likely. I had loads of problems with their firewall/censoring software when trying to connect from my O2-based mobile network (giffgaff) to my O2-based broadband (Be). While trying to debug the situation I found out about their transparent proxy system as well. It acts like a MITM attack, sitting in between you and the real server, intercepts everything and rewrites it if needed/told to.
I never solved my issues, and the mobile guys were utterly unhelpful, so just switched away, but I believe they have had this system around for ages, probably so they can filter the Internet watch blacklist.
The 0.001% they don't monitor would probably be their emails, and the politicians emails. So pretty much what they wanted to begin with!
Depends... how much was your hourly rate? :P (sorry, had to...)
Still got my N900, still use it actually. I am torn between it and the Samsung Galaxy SII that I got with my new contract.
The SII
* is sleeker,
* faster,
* prettier,
* thinner and has a stunning screen.
The N900 has:
* a nicer UI,
* hardware keyboard,
* A camera that can shoot RAW photo's (I think this is the only phone in the world that can do this, as a photographer this made my day!) * really flexible (e.g. my SII can't import contacts via bluetooth! All the Nokias I had before could do this, made upgrading so eaasy!),
* infrared (I use it both as a universal remote control, and for controlling my DSLR for long-exposure shots
* FM transmitter with RDS - really useful when I want to play music through a friends car stereo, or not had to fiddle with wires, or have multiple places play the same thing.
* Nice integration of Skype+VOIP+normal phone (no need for it all to be done by a seperate "app", damn android's contact management is useless).
* well built (dropped it god knows how many times, still works like new, one of the N900's that were actually built in Finland)
* loads of free/OSS apps/games/etc, many of which are familiar to me from Linux Desktops.
* An X server, full ssh support, I can even forward my mobile apps to my desktop if needed.
* Hackable! I can set a cron job to send me sms'es, Android has no such access to the underlying system.
* Easy to code for (multiple UI toolkits, libraries and programming languages). Android is really limited here, you have to use their SDK for full potential.
* I can load any OS I want on it, including Gentoo if I was feeling crazy.
* Proper bluetooth support, especially for keyboards! I was shocked to find my SII can't pair to a keyboard and have it work properly to save its life. All I had was a bunch of hacks and apps, neither of which works particularly well. Apparently ICS will fix this, but we'll see...
* This includes bluetooth tethering, which I still haven't got to work on Android. * No need for a google account! * On-disk encryption, support for something other than FAT on SD cards
Need I go on? The N900 is in all respects a better and more powerful phone. The SII's only benefits are due to the hardware. If I could load Maemo on the SII I would in a heartbeat.
As it stands, I still carry both phones with me, except that the SIM is in the SII as it is usually in my pocket, due to it not being a brick.
The N900 really was the ultimate geek/hacker phone, and we'll probably not see another like it. It was too powerful for joe average, but the above is why nerds loved it so, and were so angry when MS took over and killed the whole lot.
With a bit more polish, and all the nerds willing like crazy to write apps for it, I believe it could have been a very powerful platform, on par with Android eventually.
compared to the windows phone OS they went with, that is like a toy in comparison, you can see why there is quite a bit of resentment about the whole thing.
I know, my point is that the command line just wouldn't work propoerly. Whenever I tried it tended to eventually lockup, which involved getting someone to the DC to yank the power out and reset it. Perhaps I should have written it better in my original post...
Also, the command line was confusing, and I swear it was based on XML of some sort.
The only thing that worked ok was the web GUI, which I wasn't happy with. I really liked the Sun and HP iLo systems, and they were stable and the command line ssh interface worked, allowing for easy scripting. However I believe the HP machines cost more, which was why we tried to switch to Dell.
Yeah, a remote LAN console that is atrocious if you want (god forbid) use something other than their toy web-GUI to admin it, buggy as hell (prone to lockups), plus it shares the main ethernet port, making out-of-band management impossible (a right PITA if you lose network at the link level).
I've worked on a mix of DELL, HP, IBM, and Sun hardware, and DELL's were by far the most problematic and difficult to admin, but they were a lot cheaper than the others. I guess you get what you pay for...
Oh, and I think the original article question was referring to networking hardware, not servers, things like layer 3 switches, bridges, routers... places where an enterprise server would be a waste of power and money. Good question though, I don't know of any linux networking hardware that is open :-/
"But currently the problems in the other countries devalue the euro, meaning Germany gets to export at great prices."
Which means that greece could also export at great prices if they actually bothered to produce anything that anyone wanted.
Easier said then done, there is a lot of marketing behind Germany, along with a lot of positive stereotypes about their engineering quality, etc....
When people think Germany, the think high quality engineering, studious and stable country, well educated workforce, beer and sausages.
When people think Greece, they think ancient ruins, philosophy, beaches, hot sun, sea, holidays, parties and natural beauty.
As such when people have a choice between a Greek engineered product, and a German one for the same price, an overwhelming majority would go for the German good, even if the Greek one is just as good (or even better).
The Germans have reputation, which they built up before the EU due to being a phenomenal European power. They have had this reputation for hundreds of years. You can' t just create that for another country.
I've known Greek engineers, I've known them produce stuff that was as good or better than their German counterparts. However nobody wanted to buy it at German prices. In the olden days it was ok, as the drachma was a weaker currency, so their goods were cheaper and they would get purchases from budget conscious buyers, who'd end up surprised by the quality.
However once they joined the Euro, their costs increased to the same level as Germany's, and so they had to raise their prices to remain profitable. This made them about as expensive as the German goods, and their sales dried up. They were too expensive for the budget buyers (who buy from east-europe/China now) while those who bought and paid German prices bought them for their reputation, and would not buy the Greek product.
As a result, they went bankrupt, and one of them ended up moving to Germany, where he now makes Germany money via his taxes. A net loss for Greece and a net gain for Germany, which is an inbalance that just grows with time.
"Basically, Germany gets a huge boost for free and pretends it's all due to working hard"
Rubbish - it is due to working hard. Meanwhile the greeks don't bother to pay their taxes then whine abd bitch like little children when finally it all goes t1ts up.
No sympathy. The greeks made their bed , well its time to lie down.
Reading this, I can't help feeling that I've just been trolled, and perhaps I have (in which case congratulations on Trolling me). However I will complete this anyway, as I've written most of it as is, and adding information to a debate is always a good idea.
Yes, Greece has a problem with overbearing bureaucracy, and yes they have an issue with tax collection and corruption. However that does not negate what the grandparent poster said. He was spot on.
If Germany was not in the Euro, it's DMark would be so strong, that their goods would be uncompetitive with the the rest of the world. They would also not have a captive market (in the case of the rest of the eurozone countries) which can guarantee some exports no matter what.
Trust me, if the eurozone wasn't working out for Germany they would leave. They are not staying the out of the goodness of their hearts, or due to some old war guilt. The fact is that the German government knows what the grand parent posted, they know that they are getting a huge boost for free, they know that the eurozone is helping them immensely.
The problem is that the status quo cannot continue. Germany has sucked up all the production out of the rest of the eurozone (barring Italy and northern countries) and countries are collapsing. So at this point either the EU integrates further, which involves some redistribution of wealth from Germany, by whichever mechanism is chosen (euro inflation, bailouts, etc...), or it starts falling apart (perhaps the development of a "Core" EU of stronger economies, with peripheries that can use a weaker currency).
Sweden found another way to stay out of the euro(and haven't seen any truly negative sideffects of doing so). We signed the Maastricht Treaty but said treaty has certain requirements before allowing a nation to join the euro and puts no obligations on the signatories to attempt to fulfill the requirements. So Sweden did not adopt the euro because the populace turned it down in a general referendum and Sweden has ever since simply chosen not to fulfill the requirements for joining the euro.
It is interesting about Sweden, but I know most new entrants to the EU are obliged to join the eurozone if they want to join the EU. See here on the right for a map.
It might be that the EU decided to change the rules for new entrants, being that when Sweden joined, the EU was something totally different to the political behemoth it is today. Now being part of the EU requires the Euro, which benefits Germany quite nicely really.
Either way, thanks for the insight, always appreciated :)
Leave the Eurozone. Don't recall that anyone actually forced you to give up your native currency.
Actually yes, if you want to be part of the EU (And get all the benefits of free trade etc...) then you have to join the Eurozone eventually.I believe only Denmark and the UK have the option not to, the others have to eventually. Not joining the EU when you're a tiny country in the region will put you at a massive disadvantage.
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.
Well no, but fundamentally by joining the eurozone you have the same strength of currency as say, Germany. This makes your goods as expensive as German goods, despite the German good being seen as superior. This means:
a) Given the choice, foreign countries will buy the German goods rather than yours, as they are the same price.
b) Locals, given the choice, will buy German goods rather than your own, as they are the same price
Also, the free movement of people will allow your best and brightest to leave, especially as living costs are now the same as Germany anyway.
Eventually your economy will be uncompetitive, your educated citizens will have left, and nobody would want your produce. The only upside to this is that you get Germany's credit rating, and so can take out loans at silly cheap rates.
When all you have available to you is debt, then that is what you use. It is not a direct "Forcing", but leaving no other option to a country is not so much different really.
To me it is not surprising what happened. The EU is essentially built solely to benefit Germany (and to a lesser extent France). This is because the concept of the EU originated with these two countries, so decided to form a Union in order to prevent another big European war, so logically they wrote the original structure to benefit them.
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.
See response above, although I'd have argued that you shouldn't have bailed out the banks at all. They were private entities, they gambled big to make money and lost, and should suffer the losses as well.
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?
And I hope this post illustrates to you that the situation is far from simple, or clear, or how you see it really."blaming everyone but themselves" may actually not be the wrong answer, although I'd blame them for a) Initially joining the Eurozone, and b) being stupid enough to take the bait and get trapped, but politicians are neither the brightest nor the most honest of people...
I thought it sounded like a new naming scheme for Ubuntu :/
Anyone else think of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Bistromathic_drive when they read this?
I'd prefer if they kept movies with the "100db difference". It is far easier to apply a dynamic compressor plugin than it is to undo studio-mastered dynamic compression. In fact, I hope they do the same with music as well, so that eventually we can apply as much compression as we want for a given environment/situation.