Undoing accidental negative mod, was going for +1 Funny. :)

Yes, because we're all the same. Obviously...

You shouldn't have been down-voted. There was a lot of pretty radical nepotism, there was a story of a subway cleaning lady making making 6 figures, that's insane -- probably an event with a magnitude of singular occurrence, but gives you an idea of how far things had gone. Those people getting fired was the right thing to do, but it only resulted in a temporary surplus, not growth. Different measures were/are required.

You're right of course, I was just sharing my personal experience growing up (hospitals, schools etc.).
Tax evasion is jokingly said to be the national sport.

The crazy thing is that people don't pay taxes because the gov is corrupt and will pocket the money but then keep voting for the same people, Greece has been mostly influenced by 2 political families since the day before forever.

Of course, that is only one of the causes for the current situation, there's always some conflict affecting this place, hell there was an overthrow of The Junta (as referred to by natives) as soon as '73. Always broke, always in debt, always something fucked up going on.

Things kept piling up that were not being dealt properly after each occurrence, either to stabilize, repair or plan for growth. People tend to focus on one thing, but there has been a lot of pressure building up. So many things stacked crooked, I guess it's my generation's fault to face a similar disturbance as almost all others before it.

That's nothing, wanna see desperation? Look for the rise in support for the neo-Nazi criminal enterprise disguised as a political party, New Dawn.
All the while talking about the good old days (i.e. ancient Greece, birthplace of democracy), reconciliating that with their beliefs must have taken some serious mental gymnastics.

I do the same rant/joke too, although in mine I also suggest selling a couple of islands, we've got like a bazillion of them. They're already running like crap, generally neglected, bad infrastructure, people with cardiac episodes being flown in super puma helicopters to nearby islands where there's a doctor.

Sell a couple to the EU, the Germans can build and run things, the French, Italians and locals can handle the touristy stuff, hell I'd move there permanently.

I'm not any kind of authority on the matter, nor have I done any non-trivial research just what I see on the news and what I've gathered by talking with people here, but some surpluses that we got to see in the papers occasionally were a direct result of the austerity measures.
By that I mean something akin to firing 30% of your employees and then showing the investors all the money you managed to save, given a few more quarters the actual repercussions of that decision would become clear, i.e. lower productivity, eventual net loss.

Yeah there were more money in the country's coffers for a while, but it wasn't due to economic growth. Most people here who've managed to keep their jobs work a lot more than before with little to no pay (and I mean 6-8 months of no pay) and not leaving because if they do they won't be able to find another one, and just hope that the situation will improve and they'll eventually get paid. That's the opposite of growth.

And the equally occasional improvements in the national stock market (few points up every now and then) get undone soon after.

I could be wrong though, you may have a different source of information for what you said. Just letting you know what I'm seeing from the inside.

That did happen, but it's not like anyone had a crystal ball. It was that we had all seen the results of the 2 major parties' work over the decades and they kept making matters worse. A change was needed. Who the hell knows what's going to happen now.

Not even the people in charge do, from any side. Obviously the austerity measures that have already been implemented had a negative impact, making it impossible for the country to grow economically and pay its outstanding debts.

This is a seriously complicated and screwed up situation and everyone just keeps blaming everyone else (and depending on who you ask, even themselves).

Also, as an addition to my previous comment, you should have said 60% of Greeks "can't seem to come to terms with reality".
40% of us tried to be reasonable and play it safe with a matter of such importance.
I know gross generalizations sound cool when you're on your soapbox, but give credit where credit's due (pun intended).

You're right in general, but regarding the remark about gettings things for "free"; can we switch the generic "Greeks" to "Greek politicians"? Because us Greeks in general have gotten jack shit for free, if anything, we've been paying for everything twice.

Free health care: passing doctors money under the table to get them to work on you.
Free education: Having to spend tons of money and time for private tutoring.
(In both cases, with a crumbling infrastructure.)
Democracy: Pretty much the same stacked 2 party system as any other nation, with extra corruption sprinkled on. I'm talking about major parties, not nutty ones with inconsiderable amounts of supporters. The currently governing party did shake things up though, broke the 2 previous major parties' taking turns, not sure if that is for better or worse, we'll found out in a few days.

And it's not like we've had it easy on taxes either, middle class families having their income taxed in half and paying out of pocket for all the things those taxes should have bee going to in the first place.

Worst thing (so far) has been formatting a PHP date() DB timestamp wrong for entries associating users and payments. I think it was something like accidentally using 'M' for both month and minute.
At the same time, there was a bug somewhere that periodically caused only one of the 2 tables to be written to, when we noticed that the tables were out-of-sync we immediately jumped to the timestamps to make some sense of the situation, which of course didn't work in this case.

Took only a few hours to sort out since we could use other available information to fix it, but it was my 1st or 2nd real job at around 18 so I figured I was canned; I wasn't though, it was one of those "lesson learned, watch out for it next time" situations -- my boss was really frustrated though.

1. Says so in your signature already.
2. I'm fully aware of your political beliefs which you rightly guessed that I do not espouse. "We" Greeks did jack shit, the ancient Greeks built the Parthenon along with a number of other really impressive feats. And the Telly Savalas thing was indeed funny, but that's not what prompted me to criticize your taking pride in an ancient civilization's accomplishments, just because you happen to share some traits, out of dumb luck.

Ran out of mod points but discussion is encouraged anyways, and it's not like my getting slightly off-topic can mess with the site's currently declining quality (even though this particular news article isn't half bad).

My political views (asked in Greeklish) are not relevant, it's best you judge my remarks on their merits.

The dude keeps mentioning his nationality at every chance, as if dumb-chance geographical placement at the time you pop out is somehow a point of pride. His choice of quote is the least of his problems.

Also, sharing some geography with a cool civilization that lived a few thousand years before your time, whose accomplishments had absolutely nothing to do with you, does not increase your cachet one iota. Yes, iota is Greek!

What the hell is wrong with the author, basing his proposition on a premise that was already proven to be wrong by reality? Wasn't the leak a probable negative? Didn't it outweigh the probable positives?