Read the paper. Read the other links. It's in there.

Acknowledged that Greece has limited options, but austerity is likely to contract their economy to the point that debt service exceeds their GDP.

You'll need to do some googling, I can't teach a full econ class here. But the TL;DR version is that every country that tried austerity has recovered more slowly than every country that didn't. That and the entire justification for austerity was in that one spreadsheet that turned out to have a glaring error.

But few have been demonstrated to be an artifact of a spreadsheet error like austerity and then shown to be a failure in practice as well as in theory.

If you are a contractor and have a bad month, selling off the tools of your trade isn't a good way to recover.

So you consider the actual paper that destroyed the argument for austerity and showed the spreadsheet error to be a poor reference?

It doesn't help that Greece was forced into an austerity plan in their last bailout. Essentially that kicked off a death spiral. Austerity has already been well discredited (see here, here, and here. Original paper here) yet it keeps being foisted off on citizens everywhere.

I'm not suggesting that Greece should spend money like a drunken sailor on leave, but following a faith based economic theory even after it has been disproven (even to the satisfaction of the writers of the original paper) is not the answer.

I'll tell you up-front that I do believe in a God and that this God is the uncaused cause that set everything else into motion. As this is a personal belief, it won't have much to do with my response to you, but I thought I'd mention it to add some perspective. By "personal belief", I mean "go form your own". I for one cannot stand the mindless group-think experience of most churches I've visited and the "security" of being surrounded by the like-minded is worthless. I think Big Questions like "is there a God?" are things you have to decide for yourself.

The massive mainstream religions have become like a corrupt government. They served a purpose and provided people something they felt they needed, but various control freaks long ago realized they can also be used to control people. Like Jim Marrs says, religion and the monetary system are the two major methods of controlling people. This doesn't mean that currency of some kind has no legitimate use (barter has lots of problems) and it likewise doesn't mean that religion can only control people.

I mean, I've read the Bible. I'm not an expert, but I can say that I'm well familiar with it, specifically the words of Jesus Christ. When I read the words attributed to him, I see exhortations to be humble, to love your neighbor as you love yourself, the importance of forgiveness, turn the other cheek, etc. I've read multiple translations and they all agree on this point. I just can't find any teaching of Jesus that can be construed as "murder, rape, torture, etc are all perfectly acceptable". Those calling themselves Christian and claiming to have read the same Bible should have observed the same.

The actual concern for this comes from the idea that the Creator wants to have a relationship with the created, rather than just watch us like an aquarium or snow globe. It's also believed that people have an inherent longing for such a connection and don't have a full life without it.

The perversion used to control people is this idea that you must behave a certain way and become a certain typecast sort of person or else you're faulty in some serious way. It's just a way to enforce conformity, not in a "top-down" way but in such a way that the conformists themselves would feel ashamed to appear otherwise.

I've also argued to more than one religious person, that I doubt a term like "god dammit" would actually offend any serious God-concept. It seems like a childish position to me, to envision God as some sort of scolding parent. I know human beings who wouldn't actually be offended by terms they dislike; why should Almighty God be more petty than they? It just makes no sense to me.

If you also had multiple witnesses providing written accounts of this, and said unicorns performed what appeared to be miracles in front of large crowds, and many people found this convincing and credible, well then you might be onto something.

My own concept of God includes a desire for us to question everything worthwhile, and this certainly qualifies. Einstein said "the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible". I personally wouldn't want to create mindless robots with no sense of awe or mystery, no genuinely satisfying curiosity; they would never reach their full potential. If I can see what would be direly wrong with that, I assume a being infinitely more advanced than myself can also see this.

If by "unforgivable sin" you refer to Mark 3:22-30 and Matthew 12:31-32, this refers to permanently rejecting the Holy Spirit. In the context of Mark 3:22-30 the Pharisees tried to falsely attribute Jesus's powers to Satan ("ruler of the demons"). This represents a conscious rejection, a misunderstanding so profound that its bearer actively resists truth, even when it happens in front of them. It's the idea of someone seeing an act of God and calling it evil. In many matters not involving religion, this is how psychotic people operate: they've convinced themselves that the wrong thing to do is expedient, justified, expected, etc and therefore good ("greater good" is a common one).

Like Bill Hicks mentioned, I personally suspect that we are God's way of experiencing Itself subjectively. That would make questioning, reasoning, and personal refinement all the more important.

Not exactly a front-page story anymore, but when I read your post, it got me thinking.

Find the jackass playing the cello on the beach and arrest him.

Many employers have inventing a reason down to a science. That's why there are so many rules in the workplace. It makes it easy to find an infraction for nearly anyone they want to get rid of.

Actually, it is. You get a choice, lose your free expression, or risk legal action by formally denying the DMCA claim in the hope of getting your own work back in the public view.

BTW, the DMCA also applies to paid hosting, and self hosting.

That was not a normal M1000. It was clearly (badly) hand made or modified. I know this because I used to make fireworks as a hobby until the ATF started hiking it's skirt up and doing the mousey dance every time someone sneezed.

This is an actual M-1000.The message is clear, don't set off fireworks on the patio furniture.

Some of the ones I made might BARELY qualify as a small bomb but those involved 4 oz. of black powder and a well reinforced tube.

You should note that commercial fireworks are mortar shells, not skyrockets.

Now, how many times has your house burned down in all of that? How many skyrockets in your windows?

I can understand you not wanting it daily for months, but surely on the actual holidays it might be nice to not get all bunched up over it.

Sounds like someone hasn't a single fact to back up his bald assertion.

Whatever gets you through the night.

Excuses are dirt cheap. As long as the firing can be plausibly claimed not to be motivated by racial or gender discrimination, it's not much problem. Examples seen in the wild include "not meshing with the workplace culture", "poor attitude", "not a good fit for the job", "cutbacks", etc.

And that's not even including the tactic of creating so many workplace rules that pretty much every employee will routinely violate one or more of them (and at the manager's discretion, be forgiven).

Bald assertions aren't very convincing, sorry. I might as well reply that the moon is made of cheese. There is a cost in the sense that a replacement will need time to get up to speed, but any other costs are self-inflicted damage.

It doesn't cost anything when you do that. That's what I mean by drop of a hat. You should focus on understanding what someone is saying rather than looking for excuses to be a condescending ass.