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"Science" is the replacement religion practiced primarily by those who have never employed the Scientific Method and love sci-fi pop culture. They take his word as that of a lord, thus are conflicted when he speaks out against his own church as they perceive it.

He's fucking with their beliefs so they freak out.

BACK TO MY BEAKERS!

http://cdn.makeagif.com/media/3-12-2015/CtIjGa.gif

What? I don't understand. Is he doing this so that people can make gifs out of him acting out the emotions?

sensiblechuckle.gif

*ban


Random GIF
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3Nbi7d86en2F12R9pvMTLg

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This is a looping .gif just waiting to happen.

http://www.joeandmonkey.com/comic/20050223.gif

This came to mind, just substitute Daves now

Take a look at these two charts, if you have a minute.

Spain: left scale is GDP (green) and industrial production & construction (black), right scale (inverted!) is unemployment rate (red)

Greece: same data, same scales

Unemployment tracks industrial production & construction in Greece and Spain, as you would expect. And so does GDP in Greece, but not in Spain.

Why?

It's too big a difference to not wonder if someone's fudging the numbers here to make it like austerity did the trick for Spain.

http://www.reactiongifs.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/picard_clapping.gif

Greece accumulated debt in a foreign currency (Euro). Had they been using a free-floating currency with Greece as the sovereign issuer, it would have been much less of a problem. But that's a different discussion.

You brought up retirement benefits. These benefits have been a major talking point over here in mercantilistic Germany. Unfortunatly, a lot of inaccuracies crept into the debate over time. A closer look reveals that it's not as black and white as it is made out to be. One point at a time...

The effective retirement age, if we look at OECD stats, is basically the same for men in Greece and Germany. The age of 56 is often thrown around as the expected average retirement age for workers in Greece, but that's only for the totally messed up public sector. The average for the private sector is significantly higher, as the OECD numbers indicate.

Yet the size of retirement benefits is even more controversial. There are, in fact, some very dubious practices going on in Greece, which result in rediculous retirement benefits for a select group of people, even at very young ages. Decades of nepotism, that's what it produces. But even so, pension expenditure as a % of GDP was not significantly higher in Greece before the GFC than in Germany. When Greek GDP collapsed, expenditures as a % increased, naturally. Some have gotten absurd benefits, but the majority got a pittance. And as if that wasn't bad enough, Greece doesn't have a social safety net, unlike Germany. There is no welfare. Many people have to take early retirement at reduced benefits to have any income at all.
So I'll say it's bad in Germany. Last decade's changes to our retirement system have a metric fuckton of people (~40% of workers) heading straight into poverty when they retire. It's social security for them, and nothing else. Still, it's bliss compared to what the plebs in Greece now ended up with.

However, even all those beautiful OECD stats have to be taken with a grain of salt. Germany has a working bureaucracy. Everything is documented. Greece is a mess. Therefore, all comparisons are guesstimates at best.

Finally, as long as the Greek economy produces enough goods and services, it is for them to decide how to distribute their wealth. If they want a lavish retirement system, so be it. Our governments opted to create a true underclass of the working poor, and gutted a retirement system that made it through two world wars unscathed. If German retirees want to bitch about their benefits, it should be aimed squarely at our governments and their intentional deconstruction of our social welfare state.

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