Common User Access Standard.

Enough said. ...
The very first to start breaking the rules on a broad scale was - curiously enough - Apple with their we're-doing-everything-different-this-time iTunes programm. UI standards basically went steeply downhill from there on. We've moved so far away from standards that it can even take an expert weeks to get familiar with programms (s)he should be able to operate instantly. On top of that, the software manual has disappeared (I'm looking at you, Adobe)

Handling computers has gotten more difficult, no doubt.

Then we come back to the other problem... picking winners...

Government, frankly, sucks at trying to pick winners... rather it does a better job of picking the losers...

If you really want to see this stuff take off, make burning gas more expensive, put a $2/gal carbon tax on it. Make people switch because it makes sense, not because of free money.

I replaced all the incandescent bulbs in my house, not because anyone paid me, but because it will pay for itself in just over a year, it is a no brainier decision.

If gas for my truck was $6/gal, I might still drive it, but I might limit driving it to when I really need it. It might even make sense to get something that burns a whole lot less gas in addition to my truck, depending on my needs. But as long as gas is cheap, paying for 1/3 of a new car is never going to get me to change my behavior.

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TL;DR: Pick the loser and punish it, don't try and to pick the winner.

You are, of course, correct...

In fairness, Greece's military wouldn't last 72 hours against Germany's, but lets be honest, no one is going to shoot anyone over this, that would be stupid...

On a more serious note, most nations want to do trade with other nations, at some point you'll have assets on ships or in ports or money moving around, it can be taken.

Better to work something out with your creditors rather than face decades of that. Argentina did work out a 30% repayment deal with many of their creditors, but not all.

Actually that's a pretty fair summary of the irrational behavior of the austerity fans.

You should have a look at the graph showing the degree of austerity (using a generally accepted metric) and the rate of recovery.

Note that austerity goes beyond cutting fat, it cuts to the bone and it does it without allowing time to adjust. It's a bad idea the same way it's a bad idea to unload a large stock holding all at once.

Greece has been cutting it's public sector quickly. So quickly that it has damaged recovery.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't that much reduction be fairly pointless? Wouldn't you basically have to make it out of unobtainium (the high-torque parts, anyway... most of it, that is) in order to do useful work with it?

That, and many vehicles are not sold to people, but to companies.

Everything from lawn mowing companies to the utility companies to rental car fleets accounts for a lot of vehicles.

It works in the short run no matter what everyone does, because food is already in the system.

It doesn't work in the long run because what you end up with is a nation that digs ditches and fills them in, doing nothing useful.

At some point, someone has to make stuff, grow food, etc. Why do all that when the government is just handing out money.

It makes us all poorer, not richer. If you hand everyone a million dollars, then a million means nothing.

A nation becomes wealthy and everyone's standard of living goes up when people are more productive, in that they produce more for a given unit of work. Actual production of useful "stuff" is required. This is partly why Greece is in such a mess. They don't make anything. (or much of anything)

Look at the Guardian link I provided. Many of your comments and questions are answered there. It looks at how the degree of austerity measures has affected the rate of recovery for various countries.

Remember, not all public servants are equal. Privatization will cut the count of "public servants", but can actually increase the cost of the service for a net loss to the economy.

Actually, once they have once and for all ceased even trying to pay back the loans, they will be running at a surplus. A bit of currency devaluation will be a boon to their significant tourist trade.

I'm not claiming it is the best possible solution, but since the IMF et. al. won't quit flogging the dead horse that is austerity, it may be the only option open to Greece.

THIS! Mod up!

Don't forget visual impairment. They may be depending on the splat looking thing next to the red thing being the send button. Move it and good luck.

That's the one

Yeah, that's what happens when you don't trademark something. That was the original idea. It makes the name "organic" make more sense, several senses in fact:

Actually having a cyclical system is more "organic" by senses of the word which don't mean "on the USDA approved list" or "has a scary name"

Well that may be so. But as you get older you get less patient with people wasting your time.

Let's say you're 90 years old. You're using a webmail system which does everything you need it to do. Then some manager has a brainwave and suddenly all the functions are somewhere else. How much of the 3.99 years the actuarial tables say you've got left do you want to spend dealing with that?

It's not just 90 year-olds. Take a poll of working-age users and find out how many like the MS Office Ribbon; how many people are cool with the regular UI reshuffling that takes place in Windows just to prove you're paying your upgrade fee for software that's "new"?

I was working as a developer when the news of the Therac 25 problems broke, so I remember it well. You actually have it backwards; it wasn't bad UI design at all.

The thing is mere functional testing of the user interface would not have revealed the flaw in the system. What happened is that people who used the system very day, day in and day out, became so fast at entering the machine settings the rate of UI events exceeded the ability of the custom monitor software written for the machine to respond correctly to them.

If the UI was bad from a design standpoint the fundamental system engineering flaws of the system might never have been revealed.

Sure, but that doesn't make it useful spending...

The government could hire 5 million people tomorrow to dig ditches, then 5 million more to fill them back in.

Lots of money would enter the economy, but no useful work would get done. Such spending makes us all poorer, not richer.