Talk about having a bad day at work. Poor bugger, driving along, minding his own business, and is blown up twice. Ranks right up there with Wiley Coyote. Beautiful.

bugger. how very rude of them. *discard

@RedSky

Selling assets and, to a certain degree, the reduction of public employment is an unreasonable demand. There's too much controversy about the effects it has, with me being clearly biased to one side.

Privatisation of essential services (healthcare, public transport, electricity, water) is being opposed or even undone in significant parts of Europe, since it generally came with worse service at much higher costs and no accountability whatsoever. Therefore I see it as very reasonable for Syriza to stop the privatisation of their electricity grid and their railroad. There are, of course, unessentials that might be handed over to the private sector, but like Varoufakis said, not in the shape of a fire sale within a crisis. That'll only profit the usual scavengers, not the people.

Similarly, public employment. There's good public employment (essential services, administration) and "bad" public employment. Troika demands included the firing of cleaning personnel, who were replaced by a significantly more expensive private service. And a Greek court decision ruled the firing as flat out illegal. For Syriza to not hire them back would not only have been unreasonable financially as well as socially, it would have been a violation of a court order. Same for thousands of others who were fired illegally, according to a ruling by the Greek Supreme Court.

Troika demands are all too often against Greek or even European law, and while the previous governments were fine with being criminals, Syriza might actually be inclined to uphold the law.


On the issue of reforms, I would argue that the previous governments did bugger all to establish working institutions. Famously, the posts of department heads of the tax collection agency were auctioned for money, even under the last government. Everything is in shambles, with no intent of changing anything that would have undermined the nepotic rules of the five families. Syriza's program has been very clear about the changes they plan to institute, so if it really was the intent of the troika to see meaningful reform the way it is being advocated to their folks at home, they would be in support of Syriza.

Interventions by the troika have crashed the health care system, the educational system and the pension system. Public pension funds were practically wiped out during the first haircut in 2012, creating a hole of about 20 billion Euros in the next five years.

I would like to address the issue of taxation specifically. Luxembourg adopted as a business model to be an enabler of tax evasion, even worse than Switzerland. In charge at that time was none other than Jean-Claude Juncker, who was just elected President of the European Commission. He's directly involved in tax evasion on a scale of hundreds of billions of Euros every year. How is the troika to have any credibility in this matter with him in charge?

Similarly, German politicians are particularly vocal about corruption and bribery in Greece. Well, who are the biggest sources of bribery in Greece? German corporations. Just last week there was another report of a major German arms manufacturer who paid outrageous bribes to officials in Greece. As much as I support the fight against corruption and bribery, some humility would suit them well.


As for the GDP growth in Greece: I think it's a fluke. The deflation skewers the numbers to a point where I can't take them seriously until the complete dataset is available. Might be growth, might not be. Definatly not enough to fight off a humanitarian crisis.

Surpluses. If everyone was a zealous as Germany, the deficit would in fact be considerably narrower, which is a good thing. Unfortunatly, it would have been a race to the bottom. Germany could only suppress wage growth, and subsequently domestic demand, so radically, because the other members of the Eurozone were eager to expand. They ran higher-than-average growth, which allowed Germany to undercut them without going into deflation. Nowadays, Germany still has below-target wage growth, so the only way for Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy to gain competetiveness against Germany is to go into deflation. That's where we are in Europe: half a continent in deflation. With all its side effects of mass unemployment (11%+ in Europe, after lots of trickery), falling demand, falling investment, etc. Not good. Keynes' idea of an International Clearing Union might work better, especially since we already use similar concepts within nations to balance regions.

Bond yields of Germany could not have spiked at the same time as those of the rest of the Eurozone. The legal requirements for pension funds, insurance funds, etc demand a high percentage of safe bonds, and when the peripheral countries were declared unsafe, they had nowhere to go but Germany. Also, a bet against France is quite a risk, but a bet against Germany is downright foolish. Still, supply of safe bonds is tight right now, given the cuts all over the place. French yields are at historic lows, German yield is negative. Even Italian and Spanish yields were in the green as soon as Draghi said the ECB would do whatever it takes.

The current spike in Greek yields strikes me as a bet that there will be a face-off between the troika and Greece, with very few positive outcomes for the Greek economy in the short run.

QE: 100% agreement. Fistful of cash to citizens would not have solved any of the core issues of the Eurozone (highly unequal ULCs, systemic tax evasion, tax competition/undercutting, no European institutions, etc), but it would have been infinitely better than anything they did. If they were to put it on the table right now as a means to combat deflation, I'd say go for it. Take the helicopters airborne, as long as it's bottom-up and not trickle-down. Though to reliably increase inflation there would have to be widescale increases in wages. Not going to happen. Maybe if Podemos wins in Spain later his year.

Same for the last paragraph. The ECB could have stuffed the EIB to the brim, which in return could have funded highly beneficial and much needed projects, like a proper European electricity grid. Won't happen though. Debt is bad, even monetised debt during a deflation used purely for investments.

In the current situation, "structural reforms" is used to subsume two entirely different sets of measures.

The first is meant to remove what you previously mentioned: corruption in all the shapes and forms it takes in Greece, from a (intentionally) broken tax system formed over decades of nepotism to a bankrupt national media in the hands of oligarchs. The institutions of the Greek state are precisely what you expect when a country has been run by four families (Papandreou, Samaras, Mitsotakis, Karamanlis) for basically five decades.

This kind of structural reform is part of Syriza's program. Like you said, it'll be hard work and they might very well fail. They'll have only weeks, maybe a few months to undo significant parts of what has grown over half a century. It's not fair, but that's what it is.

The second kind of "structural reform" is meant to increase competitiveness, generally speaking, and a reduction of the public sector. In case of Greece, this included the slashing of wages, pensions, benefits, public employment. The economic and social results are part of just about every article these days, so I won't mention them again. A Great Depression, as predicted.

That's the sort of "structural reforms" Syriza wants to undo. And it's the sort that is expected of Spain, Italy and France as well, which, if done, would probably throw the entire continent into a Great Depression.

I'd go so far as to call any demand to increase competitiveness to German levels madness. Germany gained its competitiveness by 15 years of beggar-thy-neighbour economics, undercutting the agreed upon target of ~2% inflation (read: 2% growth of unit labour costs) the entire time. France played by the rules, was on target the entire time, and is now expected to suffer for it. Only Greece was significantly above target, and are now slightly below target. That's only halfway, yet already more than any democratic country can take.

They could have spread the adjustment out over 20 years, with Germany running above average ULC growth, but decided to throw Greece (and to a lesser degree Spain) off a cliff instead.


So where are we now? Debt rose, GDP crashed, debt as percentage of GDP skyrocketed. That's a fail. Social situation is miserable, health care system basically collapsed, reducing Greece to North African standards. That's a fail.

Those are not reforms to allow Greece to function independently. Those are reforms to throw the Greek population into misery, with ever increasing likeliness of radical solutions (eg Golden Dawn, who are eagerly hoping for a failure of Syriza).

So yes, almost every nation in Europe needs reforms of one sort or another. But using austerity as a rod to beat discipline into supposedly sovereign nations is just about the shortest way imaginable to blow up the Eurozone. Inflicting this amount of pain on people against their will does not work in democratic countries, and the rise of Syriza, Podemos, Sinn Féin, the SNP and the Greens as well as the surge of popularity for Front National and Golden Dawn are clear indicators that the current form of politics cannot be sustained.

Force austerity on France and Le Pen wins the election.

Meaningful reforms that are to increase Europe's "prosperity" would have the support of the people. And reforms are definatly needed, given that the Eurozone is in its fifth year of stagnation, with many countries suffering from both a recession and deflation. A European Union without increasing prosperity for the masses will not last long, I'm sure of it. And a European Union that intentionally causes Great Depressions wouldn't be worth having anyway.

Yet after everything is said and done, I believe you are still absolutely correct in saying that the pro-austerity states won't blink.

Which is what makes it interesting, really. Greece might be able to take a default. They run a primary surplus and most (90%+) of the funds went to foreign banks, the ECB and the IMF anyway, or were used to stabilize the banking system. The people got bugger all. But the Greek banking system would collapse without access to the European system.

Which raises the question: would the pro-austerity states risk a collapse of the Greek banking system and everything it entails? Spanish banks would follow in a heartbeat.

As for the morality of it (they elected those governments, they deserved it): I don't believe in collective punishment, especially not the kind that cripples an entire generation, which is what years of 50+% youth unemployment and a failing educational system does.

My own country, Germany, in particular gets no sympathy from me in this case. Parts of our system were intentionally reformed to channel funds into the market, knowing full well that there was nowhere near enough demand for credit to soak up the surplus savings, nowhere near enough reliable debtors to generate a reasonable return of investment without generating bubbles, be it real estate or financial. They were looking for debtors, and if all it took was turning a blind eye to the painfully obvious longterm problems it would create in Southern Europe, they were more than eager to play along.

If it was on a closed road then it's great. I love the video and I'd love to have a go. But on an open road what they were doing was so stupid it doesn't bear thinking about.

If someone was driving up that road and he hit them at the speeds he was going he'd damage their car undoubtedly. Does he have insurance for that? I'm going to stick my neck out and say he doesn't. Is he happily going to hand over a few hundred bucks to get the repairs done properly? Is he going to supply a hire car while the work is being done? Is he going to cover the increase in their insurance? No he's fucking not.

Add to this the trauma the driver would go through if the guy on the board was badly hurt. Even if an incident isn't your fault it can still have a serious effect on someone.

How dare he put other people at these risks. Even if they can't close the road there are loads of ways they could deal with this situation. Having a spotter at the bottom of the hill with a radio would be a good start...

I hate shit like this. I completely understand the thrill of the speed. I'm lucky enough to get to drive some very fast cars on track days and the feeling of speed is one hell of a rush. But it's on a track, I know what I've signed up for and everyone else out there has signed up for the same thing. But on a public road? Not interested. The risk of hurting others just isn't OK.

As for buses not counting, if he'd smashed into the front of the bus and hurt himself he'd have buggered up a bus full of people's days. The driver couldn't just drive away, he'd have to wait for the police and again try to sort out how it's going to be paid for. All the people on the bus would have to wait around and all because this tit thought his five minutes of fun is way more important than everyone else's lives.

Nope. This is unintentional comedy gold.

I don't know what kind of "doctor" this woman is, but she clearly doesn't understand mass.

Yes, there's a lot of space inside an atom, but that means bugger all when describing the mass. Mass is the resistance to being accelerated by a force.

So no lady, you can't just "cross out" mass. If you could, we'd all be flying around at relativistic speeds since the energy required would be negligible.

ROFL.

You can actually set an end time for YT embeds now by editing the code like this:

<iframe width="485" height="363" src="//www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/zbnPfDa4yhE?start=5&end=149" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true"></iframe>

Which comes out like this. Has a tendency to bugger up sometimes if the viewer skips around or what have you, but in principle the functionality it there. If you don't want a start time use ?end= instead of &end=.

Hey, finally had some time to bugger with this computer. My hosts file already had 2 entries, sending me to the old VS. No clue how that came about...

Pretty sure they electrocuted the little bugger too. Get a load of its reaction when it touched the power lines at 1:52.

Yeah, saw it last night. Unfortunately, it's not going to have any effect.

First, the Prime Minister is extremely well liked, even by people who don't agree with him. Second, the opposition are borderline incompetent. They've been handed any number of easy political victories in the last few months and managed to do bugger all with them.

But the most depressing thing is that most people just don't seem to care .The prevailing attitude is "if the government really want to read my texts or emails, who cares? There's nothing interesting in them anyway".

At which point I usually slap them.

Police are just people - they can't be perfect! We need to offset their incompetency by demanding that people be perfectly docile to them! You instantly shift the onus onto the subject without even thinking about it you poor hard-boiled, institutionalised, dangerous old bugger.

So in other words, police get paid the same amount for an easier job and we shift the responsibility of the problem (which you seem to accept exists, albeit you see it as a problem with people not having a tendency to go limp when physically attacked by strangers) to anyone who aren't the police.

Might i recommend a career in shepherding where absolutely no thought needs to go into the mindset and wishes of the sheep?

The point I'm driving at is that this is one of the cases where I think the end justifies the means.

People can take away what they like from watching it. "Aww poor kid", "Man those wrestlers are nice", "What a pack of bastards, exploiting the little bugger"... And that's fine, I'm not trying to tell people how to feel.

But one little guy who was suffering got a bright moment in the sun. I don't care if they go full idiot and publicise the shit out of it because it was worth it. Hell, I'd be pleased if self interest caused more people to be "altruistic" to high note themselves. It's the core of things like Ronald McDonald house, which is a PR exercise in it's purist form and yet still helps.

And if they hadn't publicised it, being an Australian who doesn't actually watch much wrestling, I probably wouldn't have heard of it at all.

Perhaps it is, but until I saw this I didn't know the story. It's a story that deserves to be told regardless.

And yeah, the poor little bugger probably had a better 9 years than many other kids on this planet get, but the thing is, it's not about how you or I feel about it, it's how it made Connor feel.

Whether it's cynical exploitation or honest, a little boy got to have a brighter moment in what was otherwise a pretty shitty existence. If only we could all say we'd done as much.

Bugger...
*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/We-Are-From-Tatooine

Ah bugger, I had a skip through to see if there were any obvious lip synch mishaps but it seemed to be kosher... =\

This is my last stab... =D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QkmmDvkLSI