Well, it's not just Germany. There's Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Austria etc. doing great, for example.

Now of course, economy is a complex beast, but compare the deficits in this table with the US 2014 deficit of 2.8% of GDP (which was a record low). You'll see that most EU countries are doing better or much better than the US even though the EU as a whole is doing slightly worse as some of the large southern economies are pulling the rest of us down.

So, as is always the case these days, news reporting skews the general picture to be (much) worse than it already is. That the southernes aren't doing to good is furthermore not exactly news... They've always done poorly, one way or another... (So why someone thought it would be a good idea to include them in the Euro I don't know.)

Note also today's news that even if Greece didn't pay back their loans, it wouldn't be a disaster, and could be handled quite nicely. Not that we don't care, it's a precedent we don't want set, but still. The worst is over. And if you're looking for economic stability, go to Northern Europe. South of the Alps is and has always been a crap shot. And stay out of the east if you don't know what you're doing... :-)

We'd be happy to pay those people. But the current system doesn't allow us.

But this isn't news to you...

I don't know about american unions, but as I said in other posts, that's most definitely not true about northern European unions (let's call them "Germanic" for short). Not by a long shot. We have the highest standard of living indices known to man, lowest inequality, and well running economies (much better than the US), and some of the strongest unions on the planet. In fact, many big business leaders admit in private that it's the unions that make it easy to do business here. It levels the playing field when it comes to employees, everybody knows the rules, and you don't have to suffer strikes all the time, but can negotiate instead.

Even such well known leftist bastions as the IMF and OECD have finally come to the conclusion that income inequality hurts economic growth. Yes the almighty economic growth of the whole nation.

In Sweden we increased our financial inequality in the nineties due to our banking crisis. And even though we've had very good growth since then, the IMF believes we have lost a substantial amount due to the increase in income inequality. If we had kept our old system we would be much richer now as a country, and as a people.

How do you fix this? Easy, redistribution tax the rich, and let the money flow to the relatively poorer. Says the IMF and the OECD. Bloody communist bastards the lot of them... Yeah, right.

Probably not too long ago. Check out Volvo cars (built in Sweden) or Volvo trucks (built in Sweden, and Swedish owned). To just name two. There are many others.

Now of course, we've been non white for the last 30 years or so. Still going strong. If you lot would just stop starting wars all over, or at least take care of the refugees we wouldn't have to. The town of Sodertalje (home to Scania) took in more Iraq refugees than all of the US of A. Combined.

Then again, if you weren't so hot on wars, the Norwegians couldn't export their "Raufoss" rounds to you, so there's that...

Fact of the matter is that we have a very positive trade balance with you, even considering how small Sweden is. So a lot more shit gets done here, than over there... A lot more...

Nope. The unions in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and, to a lesser extent, Norway, for example, are much stronger than the unions in the countries you mentioned. As far as Europe is concerned the countries you mention are on the lower half when it comes to union strength. (Which is clear if you notice the antics they get up to. A strong union wouldn't have to behave like that.)

So, no cigarr. Try again.

Why? If the workers are supposed to just smile and take it when they get laid off, and get another job, why shouldn't the same be true of businesses? If the workers had more power and used it unwisely the company would just go bust, and the owner would have to get another job, which is how free market capitalism is supposed to work... How is that different?

In fact, with powerful unions comes a more responsible work force, not less. If everyone's job is at stake, then you have to tread carefully. Otherwise, how could we in northern Europe have large multinational companies when we have some of the strongest unions in the world? Our current PM was a former top union boss, and lo and behold, there wasn't any mass flight of Sandvikens and SAABs...

This is the main one. We bought out 386:s with the "best" hardware of the day, i.e. the stuff that was reported to work best with the MS-DOS games of the time and that didn't cost much. We were students and didn't have any money. Just the base system basically broke the bank.

All BSD systems of the era basically started with, "First make sure you have this technically the most beautiful hardware". When we cried "We don't have that, we have this", the answer was invariably "We don't care about you, we don't care about that piece of shit card/disk/whatever, we wouldn't write a driver even if you sent us the equipment".

Linux OTOH was inclusive. If someone/everybody used a piece of hardware, that hardware got supported quicker, since more people depended on it. Instead the kernel/drivers adapted to the flaws of the hardware, instead of turning up its nose at it.

So even if we could pirate several other Unix systems, AT&T lawsuits be damned, they wouldn't run anyway, and was hence out of the running before they even got started.

No, they have friggin laserbeams on their heads!

Yepp. They're the only ones right now. The physicists won't touch it with a ten foot pole...

Nope. It was just worse. When I was in telecoms we tried to build a "router" (big iron) on our own custom hardware, with full vendor support (as in source code if we wanted it), based on windows NT instead of Solaris. (And of course we built the hardware to suit the OS/application. Not the other way around).

Crashed and burned leaving not as much as a flake of soot behind. Couldn't be done. What the Redmond people told us turned out to be simply not true as in "didn't work the way it was documented to work". And nothing much else worked either.

So, building on VAX/VMS worked. Industrial strength. Building on Unix/Solaris (and a few others), worked as well. Also industrial strength. WIndows NT. Not even close.

Today it's based on. You guessed it; Linux.

.

"am I supposed to ignore GNOME's outstanding interface designs?"

Uhh? What? Where's this outstanding interface design, and why haven't they told anyone about it?

Look, we're not ignoring it. They just haven't shown it to us! Please, why keep that a secret and release Gnome 3 shell instead?

Well, at least in northern Europe we add iodine to table salt. Don't know that we add much fluoride.

Well, many of the US military combat postings are barred to women, but that is changing (slowly), so there is active work going on in putting more women in those specialities.

The pentagon's blanket rule against women in combat postings was only lifted in 2013, so you have to give it some time.

Uhh? I guess you are on the young side if you think that courses of old were designed with the objective of attracting students. Only thirty years ago let me tell you that courses and programs were designed with the expressed and implied intent that they were what you needed to know and what you thought of it be damned.

The "it has to be fun or else" came much later, with the millennials and gen-Y:ers. We gen X:ers we slogged through, and if we didn't like it, well, there's the door. Don't let it hit you on the way out.

This approach to teaching of course had drawbacks, I'm not saying it didn't. But it also had some advantages, that have fallen by the wayside in the last two decades, that's not something that should be forgotten either.