Why hide permanent links on the home page? I kept clicking on the video to open into new tabs, but they expand on the home page. Bah!

Usually when I submit a video, I go back to the YouTube page it came from to copy/paste the title/description or watch it again and get some detail for the tags/description/channels.

With this new mouseover menu thing, every time I come back to the page, the Submit Video window has disappeared. It's a wee bit annoying to have to scroll through that menu again. More annoying is when I have multiple VS windows open and I have to scroll through the menu on each one to the Submit Video tab to find the one I've already going. Most annoying is when part way through a submission my mouse happens to pass over one of the other items in the Watch menu, and my whole submission content gets erased. GRRRR!!

It'd be better either if that window -- and perhaps any window with a form -- could stay open while there's any user input on it and didn't get wiped out when the user mouseovers another menu item, or if we went back to having a normal dedicated full-screen non-hair-trigger-disappearing submissions page.

It feels like stepping through a glass menagerie to use that form.

One of the first things I do whenever I set up a clean install of Windows is to set the default view for every folder to "details".

A single column of content allows me to cycle the content through my stationary point of focus. I can stare at a fixed spot and just let my free-scroll mouse wheel do the work. Which is simply great for quickly browsing for interesting content.

Multiple columns of content, however, force me to scan by constantly changing my point of focus. The new design does precisely that, it makes me devote much more time to every single entry unless I reduce the tab's width to intentionally force the layout to organise its content in a single column.

But it's the same issue for almost every news site out there, so I guess I'm just too old for this shit. /rant

Biggest complain I have is there' NO FUCKING WAY to tell visually which window is the active window.

I managed to employ a stupid hack to allow a COLOR to be used in the title bar (because by default the title bar is the same color as the rest of the window and there's no built-in way to change that), but that just makes all the windows the same color instead of all the windows the same non-color, but there's still no way to make the ACTIVE window a different color.

It's extremely frustrating to keep typing into the wrong window then ALT-tabbing around trying to get focus to the fucking window you mean to be working in.

Ugh.

8:18 – "Germany is very financially responsible".

The clip makes a few good points, twists others and omits some central issues. But I want to comment on the quote above most of all, because it forms the basis for all kinds of arguments and recommendations.

The claim that Germany is financially responsible stems from what has been paraded around domestically as the "schwarze Null" (black zero), meaning a balanced budget. Given how focused most economic debates are around the national debt or the current budget deficit, it shouldn't come as a surprise that not running a deficit evokes positive responses in the public. If there has ever been an easy sell, politically, it's this.

However, it's not that simple.

For instance, the sectoral balance rule dictates, by pure accounting identity, that the sum of public balance, private balance and external balance is 0 at all times. In case of Germany, this means that the balanced public budget (no surplus, just a fat zero) requires a current account surplus of the same size as private savings – or an accumulation of private debt. For someone to run a surplus, someone else has to run a deficit. In this case, foreign economies have to run a deficit vis-á-vis Germany, so that neither the German government nor the German private sector have to run a deficit.

The composition of each sector is another topic entirely, but the point remains: no surplus in Germany without a deficit in the periphery. If everyone is to be like Germany, Klingons have to run the respective deficit.

My question: is it financially responsible to depend on other economies' deficits to keep your own house in order? Is it responsible to engage in this kind of behaviour after having locked yourself into a monetary union with less competitive economies who have no way of defending themselves through currency devaluation?

Second point: capital accounts and current accounts are two sides of the same coin. If Germany runs a current account surplus of X%, it also runs a capital account deficit of X%. Doesn't explain anything, but it's the same for the countries at the other side of these trade imbalances. Spain's current account deficit with Germany meant a capital inflow of the same size.

Let's look at EuroStat's dataset for current accounts. Germany had run a minor current account deficit during the late '90s and a small surplus up to 2003. From then on, it went up, up, up. Given the size of Germany's economy within Europe, that jump from 2% to 7.5% is enormous. Pre-GFC, the majority of this surplus went to... yap, PIIGS. Their deficits multiplied.

Subsequently, capital of equals size flowed into these countries, looking for investments. No nation, none, can absorb this amount of capital without it resulting in a massive misallocation, be it stock bubbles, housing bubbles, highways to nowhere or lavish consumption. Michael Pettis wrote a magnificent account (Syriza and the French indemnity of 1871-73) of this and explains how Germany handled a similar inflow of capital after the Franco-Prussian war: it crashed their economy.

As Pettis correctly points out, the question of causality remains. Was the capital flow a pull or a push?

The dataset linked above says it all happened at just about the same time, in all countries. It also happened at the same time as Germany's parliament signed of on "Agenda 2010", which is the cause of massive wage suppression in Germany. Germany intentionally lowered its unit labour costs and undercut the agreed upon inflation target (2%). German employees and retirees were forced to live below their means, so the export sector could gain competitiveness against all the other nations, including those in the same currency union. Beggar-thy-neighbour on steroids.

Greece overshot the inflation target. They lived beyond their means. But due to their size, it's economically negligable. France stayed on point the entire time, has higher productivity than Germany and still gets defamed as the lame duck of Europe. Yet Germany, after more than a decade of financial warfare against its fellow members of the EU/EZ, is hailed as the beacon of financial responsibility.

Mercantilism always comes at the cost of others. And the EU is living proof.

They're greyed even after typing your comment?

Nothing comes to mind. Nothing has changed on the server recently.

If you're in Chrome can you hit F12 and see if there are any JS error messages on the Console tab?

It would be nice if surveillance equipment (Stingrays, etc) were included in this list, but the rozzers are free to get all the military grade gizmos they need to keep tabs on your ass.