You mean like every single one of our western countries, socialism or not? Show me the western countries that have surplus budgets. Yes, they exist. They're a small minority. Deficit spending has a very long tradition and is by no means exclusive to Greece.

The problem isn't the budget.

The problem is that far from the socialism you put up as the strawman, the very real corporate and elite socialism is bleeding government accounts dry. Billions are put into fonds to save banks that by rights should go out of business, while their bosses continue to pay themselves millions in bonuses (wasn't that meant to be extra money for good performance?) and yet for the schools and public services, we don't have money.

If you think and operate in a vacuum, yes.

Greece didn't. They suffer from the same problem that many people did when the housing bubble burst: They had been talked into spending a lot by banks offering cheap credits with promises of a glorious future. That and a considerable amount of corruption within the political elite.

Scotland most likely is not the full legal successor to the tribes of that time.

Germany, however, is. And has made a big point of it. Western Germany for decades considered itself morally superior to Eastern Germany because it announced itself loud and clear as the legal successor of the Third Reich and the Weimar Republic and basically the heir in the whole line of german states.

Can't have your cake and eat it.

You see what you did there, yes? European government are laughing because of sentence #1 -- the banks are saved and taxpayers will pay the bill. Just ten years ago, that would have been the most strange reason for a government to laugh that anyone can imagine. Today, strangely, everyone accepts it as perfectly normal.

They have enough money to pay their bills. They don't have enough money to pay the bills and the debt burden. And they've basically been asking "we're drowning, can you stop pushing us under the water so we can take a few breaths?" - but the bureaucrats don't understand appeals to humanity and insist on the rules and contracts and deadlines.

No.

Greece is the example that is being made to cow all of us into compliance, so that exactly that won't happen. When the time comes for the banks to plunder one of the big countries, we will all remember what happened to Greece and will accept the chains.

Especially in Germany, the traitors we call a government have been singing the song of "you have to make concessions" and recently "there are no alternatives" for many years. I remember a time when "there are no alternatives" would have been a shame for a politician to say and he would've been forced to leave politics because finding those alternatives is basically his job. Nobody needs a government whose only activity is to blindly follow wherever circumstances take them.

The funny thing is that Greece already has its budget balanced better than most other countries. What is crushing it is the debt burden, not the income vs. expenses equation.

But instead of speaking about abstract entities, how about we speak about people. All these countries, banks, economic systems and so on are not a purpose in themselves, aren't they? Let's speak about what from a humanity perspective we would rather see: A bank going bankrupt, or a country?

We've all become slaves to the financial system, and the Greek are simply the unlucky slave who is getting the whip to show the rest of us what happens if we don't comply. So strange that so many of us are total imbeciles and root for the whipmaster, not understanding that with a small change in fortunes, it could be their back that's being skinned.

Largely because a big propaganda machine wants you to think that way.

The retirement age in Greece is 65, same as in most of Europe, and they already agreed to raise it to 67.

But the real issue isn't that, but why anyone thinks its a problem. Austrias average retirement age is 58. Which, incidentally, is the same as what lead to the myth of the 55 year old pensioner. You could retire with full benefits in Greece at 58, if you had worked for 35 years. With some easy math you'll understand it means you started work before you were 23 and were never out of a job. Most likely, you were in a craftsman or untrained job, doing physical labor. At 58, you've either made career and continue to work or your body is spent.

55 can only be explained as people mixing truth with lies. You could retire with partial benefits at 55, again the same as many other european countries.

And again, the real issue isn't this at all. If you have considerable unemployment in your country, raising the retirement age does squat nothing for your economy, it will simply shift the burden, because for every old person going out of a job, you already have a young person who could take it and you're preventing it by keeping the old person longer.

You are mixing morals with laws. The two do not always match.

It may be legal to funnel taxes out of a country where you make your profits, but I have not yet seen anyone make a convincing argument that it is (morally) right.

A lot of things are legal, but not moral. Lying to your best friend, cheating on your wife, pissing in the pool.

On the other hand, there are things that are moral, but illegal, usually because laws change slowly or don't cover all edge cases. Fortunately, many countries have a permissive judicial system where a judge and/or jury can decide that yes it broke the law, but in this particular case it's (morally) right to let it go unpunished.

They are not the same. Tax evasion is illegal, tax avoidance is at the very least a gray area, and in the extreme way most corporations implement it, certainly not moral.

Last week. Whiteboard marker, to be precise, but if we had a blackboard in the meeting room, it would have been a piece of chalk.

Everyone who knows something about presentations also understands that Powerpoint is a horrible abuse and failure in at least as many situations as those where it is a useful tool. There are things that you can best show in animated slides, others are best described with prosa text, yet others with short and memorable phrases. In addition, everyone learns slightly differently. Some people can't remember anything in a lecture unless they take notes while for others watching all the slides or the scribbles on the blackboard is the most important and for yet others hearing the professor / teacher / workshop-giver is the main part.

The so typical and almost always wrong our-one-size-fits-all Microsoft approach will not solve any problems, it'll make it worse.

If kids these days don't know how to express themselves with pen & paper, then maybe that is something you should teach them? It's a useful skill, and even though I've been a computer guy since the C64 was state-of-the-art, for some tasks I still prefer a notebook over any iPad app, and the reasons are purely practical.

It's more than hiding, it's actually a trend. Google "Chaos Cinema" - there's some great analysis on how it came to be and what goes into it (camerawork, lighting, sound - much more than just short cuts).

...there are serious people and then there are clowns.

I'm the first to stand up and say that feminism in its current incarnation is just as evil as any other -ism and regularily crosses the border into misandry. However, portraying strong women in a fantasy world is not an attack on manhood.

Firstly, there's the fantasy aspect. Secondly, there is nothing wrong with strong women, and especially if you're a real man you aren't afraid of them. If you're a weak man, of course, who nurtures his illusion of superiority by surrounding himself with people even weaker than himself...

Unless the movie carries an "all men are evil" message, and from what I've seen and read so far that is not the case, I think in an ocean of stereotypical man=hero, woman=princess-in-need-of-saving Hollywood crap we can enjoy one movie every now and than that shows a different facet of life.

We've all seen and heard this kind of government behaviour before: In the communist countries.

In Eastern Germany there was a failed popular uprising in 1953. One of the most famous authors of that time, Bertold Brecht, coined a phrase following it that became immortal: If the government is not happy with the people anymore, wouldn't it be easier to dissolve the people and elect a new one?

He is spot on for today as well. It used to be the parliament would represent the people, and if we felt dissatisfied, we could dissolve it and elect a new one that represents us better.

But in almost all western countries, politicians have taken control of the political process that was intended to control them, and basically you don't have a chance to actually get a new government. You can choose different names, but they don't really mean different things. And more and more you hear politicians talk about their subjects (oh wait, isn't that the wrong way around? Yes, actually it is, but we're moving back to medieval mindsets!) in a way the reminds you of Brecht.

Then you want to stay away from Steam, because there are whole forums filled with people telling you that when something breaks, not only can't you play your games, Valve also doesn't give a fuck and will be about as helpful as a dead parrot.

If you think that many people use Bootcamp anymore, you're stuck in 2010. What I see in Windows stuff running on Mac is running in VMWare or Parallels.

Because the only graphics that exist in the world are the high-end games that were intentionally written for hardware that didn't even exist at the time of programming, yes?

Wake up, man. High-end gamers have long ago become the minority, ever since the rest of the world discovered that you can use computers to play games. "My little pony" games outsell most of the games reviewed in gaming magazines except for the top 20 or so. Farmville has more players than World of Warcraft had even at its peak.

Occulus Rift is a cute toy for a gamer, but for people working in the 3D design sphere, it could have been a tool. I'm talking visualisation, architecture, construction, event management. Everything where a look at what it will look like before you build or make it can save you thousands or millions. Now have you checked lately what creative people use? I sat down in a room full of design people less than two weeks ago, and every single one of them had a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. Zero windows computers in the room. You think they're going to give a fuck for your technical argument about driver support? If it doesn't support what they're working with, they'll not be using it, and that's it.

Go fuck yourself.

'nough said.