Comment Re:Same price for Windows 7 and Windows 8. (Score 1) 172
As a Greek, you're paying for someone else's money anyway.
There, fixed that for you.
As a Greek, you're paying for someone else's money anyway.
There, fixed that for you.
What would exiting the Euro actually accomplish?
A lot. First of all, the money system could be in the hands of society instead of the other way around, as it is now. This could change the very definition of money for the Greeks.
The current situation in Europe is that all the nations are under control of the European Central Bank. NOT the other way around, as the ECB is an independent institution. This independent institution however has the power to grab as much money from the nations as they want (through the "stability pact"). Even so, it is just a bank, but with the right to print money.
Now you all know how fiat money is made, right? You have to give (well, promise) a valuable thing to the bank (the "security"), the bank puts in in the books, says "hey, we have an extra amount of money in the books!" and "lends" it out to you. I put the word "lends" between quotes, because it is not lent, but created by this bookkeping fraud. The money never existed before the loan. Off course, holding their laugh, the bank says that they are doing something risky by lending your own value out to you, so they ask usury. In Newspeak: interest. So, basically, you pay the bank to hijack your security.
There is off course a downside to this piramid scheme: the usury that you have to pay extra has never existed and can only be generated by new loans! At some point you are lending so much to pay the usury (thus bringing more and more valuable items to the bank as security!), that loads get refused, and you will have to default or plunder even more resources to give away to the bank. That is where Greece is right now. The Greeks have nothing to loose, as they have been plundered to the bone already.
Now what would happen if society itself (represented by the goverment for example) could issue money? In that case money could become "effort for the greater good of society" instead of "bottomless debt to an independent company". The government could pay "made up" money to people building roads, providing healthcare, etc. That money can then circulate further within society. The difference would not be that the money is made up (it is made up now also), but that money would actually get a real value. Off course, the goverment can always "unmake up" the money with taxes. But hey, taxes can be much lower. Instead of requiring high taxes in bank-debt to pay to road-building companies and to repay it and more to the ECB, the money can become its own tax! You pay in effort to society instead of in bank debt to the bank!
Off course there is a catch: everything depends on how wise the amount of money is chosen to be paid to society. Too little, and society will issue its own currency (and pay in sigarettes, for example). Too much, and nobody will believe the numbers. Vary too fast, and the money will be unreliable. I really wish the Greek goverment a lot of wisdom.
As an aside, if the government prints the money, they can set the rules as well. A ban on usury ("interest"), for example. Or a ban on speculation that is no more than a gambling game. Or even negative interest (some local currencies feature this) to encourage people to keep the money circulating.
All in all, getting control over their own money is the best (and I think the only) option left to Greece.
Do you have any idea how much it would cost the tax payers to try to *replace* all that embedded technology?
A lot less then trying to work around systems that cannot be maintained, let alone be repaired and are therefore utterly broken. Have you any idea how many security leaks their software must have? Even if they upgrade Windows for a few MegaBucks, all the libraries used inside the software remain unpatched. Heck, if somebody from China wants to be anonymous on-line, it is probably easier to do through the US Navy than through any Chinese server.
Good thing Slashdot isn't in the EU
Are you sure? Tax havens like the Netherlands are "home" to a huge lot of companies who are only there on paper to avoid taxation. However, there have already been a lot of lawsuits by such companies abusing Dutch treaties. So many in fact, that other countries are thinking of revoking all their treaties with the Netherlands.
Given that nuclear energy producers are not required to have an insurance against nuclear disasters (at least on this side of the Pond), is insurance included or is it as usual "delegated" to society? The calculator itself refuses to run without cross-site scripting attacks from Google, so I could not check.
If it serves as a "basis for discussion", you can bet it serves a political rather than a technical purpose.
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
