This sounds like the USA, where all the world economy is sustaining the dollar's value.

You are partly true, since it's a national sport to avoid taxes.
I read that in one of the greek islands, a lot of taxi drivers were "officially" blind.

The real problem is that Greece has to spend 13% of its GDP to pay for its retirees.
It almost twice as much as other european countries, and it will gets worse because the population is older than most other countries, with a lot of unemployment for young ones (probably whose who are leaving the country).

Since everybody wants to profit from the current system, I very much doubt that the problem will solve without cries.
The IMF lost 1.6 billions of euros, so I also doubt that Europe will continue subsidizing the current system.

Not necessarily.

Personally, my back hurts when I'm standing for 10 minutes, when doing my dish-washing.
Of course, the position is not really comfortable, but I have other problems:

1) I have flat feet, so the standing position is painful because it puts strains on my knees. I use insoles.
2) I have circulatory problems in my legs. My mother has the same problems, it became varices for her. I use compression socks
3) I have several herniated discs, so it puts pressure on the sciatic nerve when standing still.

I walk a lot and am weighing around 100kg.

They bought the medallion as it was a diploma, in order to get a job.

You cannot tell them: sorry, your medallion (=diploma) is worth nothing right now.

It's not my argument. Here is the original article in french:
http://www.slate.fr/story/1034...

Yes, there is this theory about redistributing money, but I call that bullshit.

People who take a taxi are not the poorest ones.
When you take a taxi, it means that you can afford it (there is an amusing story about an INA director who spent 40,000 euros on taxis each year).
When you have no money, you use the public transportation (it's reasonably cheap in France).

It's easy to criticize the taxi drivers, because they are too expensive.
If you were in the shoes of a taxi driver, don't you believe that this system is killing your job ?

Right now, programmers and system admins are very expensive.
Let's imagine an Uber for our jobs in a near future.
I'm sure that you'll enjoy this service.
After all, this is called "progress" and "free market" !

In France, it has been shown that Uber's drivers are mostly children from immigrants (in french, the politically correct term is "enfants issus de l'immigration").
Since most of them are jobless, it's a way for them to make money legally.

The problem is that it destroys the jobs of taxi drivers, but does not create new jobs.
A journalist calls this "the 'sharing of remains' economy", where the real jobs disappear, and only some small cheap tasks remain.
The two providers for this kind of economy are Amazon and Uber

It's easy: their routers are assembled by children.
Since they have no health problems, it's obvious that the routers are also safe for pregnant women.

You cannot be perfect all the time.

I'll give you an example from my own experience.

At my company, we had a very good coder. Everybody recognized his competence, and thus he was tasked to write an email tracking system.
2 or 3 years later, he quit the company since he found a better job elsewhere, so we inherited his code.
Sure, it was written clearly, but his system was heavy on resources.
At a given moment, the system stopped working, and I had to check what happened.
As I said, it's not that the code was not clean, but the database design was quite poor, and it was unable to keep the load.
Since the company doesn't want to pay for rewriting the system, the system has now a lot of external procedures to remove the old entries.

This is to show you that however perfect your code is today, it'll be probably ugly in a near future, even if you believe you are a good coder.

Also, about "career enhancement", I believe you have a lot of illusions.
20 years ago, I experienced a massive burn-out (I was programming games at that time), which removed all my illusions about work (I did some psychoanalysis to understand what was happening).
What is important is not your "career", or even "usable code", but what motivates you, and how much fun you have from your work.
You can put the "I am a winner" attitude in front of me, but I really don't care, since I know that you are just faking who you are.

In all my jobs, all the people around me were faking what they were. They want to appear competent, skilled and good at listening to others (this is what their company expects), but they are never themselves, and this requires much less effort than faking it.

It's not that my code sucks, it's just that my understanding improved.
I also started coding in 6502, and was seeking perfection at that time. It was not as easy as you may believe.

Recently, I took a look at my old code, and realized how much I was obsessed on performance (it's natural when you have 1 Mhz and 48Kb of RAM), but I was still able to find some tony improvements. At that time, I was so sure it was perfect !

I have 30 years of coding experience.
Even though I believe I'm quite a good coder, when I read code from 5 years ago, I'm always surprised to realize that I can do better and simpler.

Whatever the state of your code is today, it will be a mess in a few years.

While I agree with your point of view, but I will give you an example where it fails.

Let's suppose that the program you are working on leads to the death of a person.
After analysis, you discover that the bug is due to your carelessness ("it happens").
Your self-esteem of "I'm doing the best job I can do" is shattered.
Will you hide the fact that the bug comes from your incompetence ?
Or will you take responsibility, even though you'll probably be fired ?

It depends on the kind of promotion.
Not everybody dreams to become a project manager.

Not really, but if the pay is good and the job is nice, why not ?
Personally, I have a life outside of my work, so I don't really mind.

That's the least of my worries !
Do you think that the guy who will take your place won't hate you, even if your code is beautiful ?
Do you believe that your company will not fire you if there are problems ?
If the company doesn't care about me, why should I be faithful ?

Finally, I have a personal question: why do you work ?
Is it to receive aknowledgment, money, fame, self-esteem, or something else ?

You are thinking like a manager.
As a programmer, I don't want to be replaced easily, and I don't care about my work when I'll die, or even when I quit my company.
I have no problem to share my knowledge with my co-workers, but why should I write code for somebody who'll replace me ?

Also, unless you write frameworks, I doubt very much that your code will be reused.
It will probably be rewritten.

No, this is not called "Freedom", this is called "Money".

The people who buy these kinds of things want to show that they can buy anything, that is the "power" of money.

Funnily, in China, the guys with money avoid buying gaudy objects.
It's not because they are modest, it's because they want to avoid IRS.

Wrong !
Of course, !=0 is fine when you deal with integers.
But when you deal with floating point values, !=0 does not work.
This is because there are rounding errors, the zero that is displayed can be stored internally as 10^-9, and rounded to 0 because the printing function uses 8 decimals.

You have to use:
fabs(value) > delta
where delta corresponds to the rounding error.
If you work with single precision, you can probably use delta=10^-6
For double-precision, you need to verify the accumulated rounding errors.