In the Norwegian boy scouts we did weekend camping in winter, up in the mountains, with below -10C during the day. There was no proper firewood and what we did find was thoroughly wet, so it was impossible to get a fire going.

Or the week long trek over mountain terrain, walking 8-10 hours every day only meeting a handful of people throughout.

Sorry, but a rattlesnake in bucket doesn't impress that much in the 'potentially lethal' department.

It is funny that the GP seems to think London Transport company is charging higher paper ticket prices to get their hands on his unused Oyster card money, rather than the actual higher cost of handling physical money and paper tickets in non-centralized locations. As the proportion of physical paper tickets falls the unit cost of the service increases.

Not according to the calculations provided by MPAA and RIAA.

I support free soda sizes if you support legalizing all drugs.

I saw a rather interesting survey in The Economist (subscribe to their podcast, they're fucking awesome even if you're just a computer geek like me), the survey covered what European country people thought was least corrupt and who worked the hardest.

The survey showed Germany clearly leading on being least corrupt, and leading on working the hardest... Except for the Greek who said they worked the hardest.

True according to reported work hours, yet is someone really 'working' if they're sleeping or otherwise padding?

Well, as I'm currently living in Japan I've seen / studied pretty much the three types of societies that have produced highly competitive industrialized societies. The US (through osmosis of politics, literature and lol), Northern Europe and Japan.

And what many in the US, especially republicans, seem to miss is that social safety net, universal health care, support for parents with young children, etc, are competitive advantages. What social-capitalistic societies have thought us is that rather than chase an ideology, you should implement reasonable social policies and encourage capitalism that is reined in by sensible regulations.

As a manager of an IKEA manufacturing plant (that out-competed local businesses) in the US said on the Colbert Report; we swedes took the lessons of US capitalism and got better than you at it.

Wow, I didn't expect it but (not kidding) you've seriously opened my eyes.

Ignoring for the moment the rather unfortunate comparison you did to China (do you even realize the argument you made there???), when considering the situation in southern europe I at least _assumed_ that the population in general was conscious of the reasons why they were uncompetitive and just acted out of self-interest.

That the family and community business thing you described above is seen as a good thing makes clear that they got no fucking clue. I can hardly think of a way to structure a business environment that would lead to more corruption than that. When your neighbor or cousine's business is threatened by a more competitive smartass from out-of-town, the 'family and community' oriented society would see it as normal to put in any and all obstacles possible.

Fuck that, I guess Greece really is destined to leave the Euro. (And having left a sour taste in the mouth of leaders up north from all those protests and threats to the Euro stability in order to 'renegotiate', etc, reconstruction 'aid' won't be very forthcoming)

What a load of bullcrap.

Do you know how easy it was for me to start up a company in Norway? Required only internet access and a couple of days, and that was 8 years ago.

In greece, you'd be lucky with 10 months and lots of bribes. E.g. check out this article. And there's plenty of renowned international studies into corruption, ease of business, etc, and the Northern European countries top all those.

There's no grand conspiracy, no effort at keeping the south down through infrastructure loans or anything. The countries that are doing excellent through this crisis, e.g. the Northern European countries, do so for entirely obvious reasons.

It might have been slightly naive of us to think that Greece would have taken the out-stretched hand and used it to reform into a prosperous European social-democratic country, not try to steal our watch and rings to waste on wine and dance.

Except there are no charges.

Go ahead, try to dig yourself out of that hole.

If all you do is read the big bold letters, it gets hard to read between the lines.

Congratulations on completely missing the point of the GP.

I hear judges the world over are very receptive to being told to fuck off. It makes them warm and fuzzy inside.

The best part is, many of those "enemy combatants" the Taliban doesn't even need to pay for nor train.

It's no different than secretly filming your roommate having straight sex, and then sending the video to her ultra-conservative parents who disown her for no longer being a virgin fit for marriage.

Context never matters.

I have a better idea, one that has a much lower ratio of intelligent people needing to die.

It involves handing out guns to cyclists and giving them permits to shoot any fucker texting. Even if there's a few fake positives it will be much lower than the number dying due to texting drivers.

Obama isn't as blatant about it, at least he pretends to be a good guy.

Not that I find it acceptable...