Not sure I was quite as strong on 'Greeks are victims' as you make out. That said, I like the idea of using Poland as a comparison country. Let's agree that Poland has been far more sensible than Greece over the last 10 years, and so isn't in anywhere near the same hole Greece is now in.

So, what now? Greece can only pay the creditors if someone gives them more money. You won't, so assuming other people take your stance, that means the creditors won't be paid. After that comes banks being refused cash and the general populace unable to withdraw cash.

Within Greece the next step will be a spectacular depression with unemployment so high it makes the current 25% look like a dream. Eventually the Drachma devalues enough that Greece emerges and everyone left gets on with their lives. Maybe 10 years of that? Outside Greece the cost of the default will be increased interest rates across Europe for a number of years.

If they stay with the Euro that's a little more complicated since they can't devalue their currency. I'm not really sure what would happen there, my gut reaction is the rise of a barter economy / informal currency.

That's my guess, what's yours?

Let's continue whoever57's analogy.

Your family have lived in a house for generations. A few years ago the house needed a bunch of work adding rooms and generally upgrading it to fit your new status as members of the respectable middle class. You didn't have the cash but you had the status and rates were cheap, so you took out a bank loan to cover it. As that loan came due, your husband lost his high paying job and had to take a cut.

So you begged with the banks and eventually they agreed to lend you more money, but at a higher interest rate. Paying more interest on less money is tough, the house continues to need work to keep it in good repair and you continued to not quite make ends meet. You go to the banks and beg for more money so you can keep paying the interest and repairs but the banks say no, they say you need to live within your means.

You promise to do that, and you quickly 'adjust' your finances to show how it's all going to work out. The bank sees through the farce immediately but he's a greedy fellow and with you agreeing to add 200 more basis points onto the rate, it's gotta be good for him. If you default, your cousin will probably cover it anyway so it isn't much risk.

You keep struggling, and you have to beg the banks for money every month. This starts to annoy and worry the banker, so he starts taking an increasing interest in your life. Don't do a good repair here, just leave the window broken... Don't send your kids off to uni, educate them at the local community college. These things save a little cash, but they also lead to you having to spend a whole lot more time looking after the house instead of making money. Even worse, your kids having a lower level of education means they can't get such a high paying job to help out which is a real problem since your grandparents have now retired and are moving back in.

You get desperate and crawl to the bank begging for more and more. They look over the situation and say, well, maybe, but you have to cancel all expenditure. House repairs, who needs them? Further education, completely abolished!

You hold a family conference. What to do? Give in to what the bank wants and destroy your family's future? Or default and have the bank potentially take possession of your family home. Put like that, it isn't such a hard call, you tell the bank to f. off and wait too see what will happen.

Who's at fault? You for living beyond your means? Yep. You for lying to the bank? Yep. The bank for accepting such an obvious lie? Yep. The bank for loaning money to someone that couldn't possibly pay it back? Yep. The bank for insisting on austerity measures that will have a negative long term fiscal impact, yep.

Does that help?

I would guess over half the debt has been repaid, depending on how you count. The austerity measures have been running for 7 _years_ now, and the interest rates Greece has been paying are pretty steep compared to what a government would normally pay. The whole situation reminds me of Africa, where the interest rates are set low enough that the country does not default but high enough that the loan is never repaid.

Let's retroactively reset the interest rate at something fair - say what Germany paid over the same period. Then recalculate how much Greece owes based on this more generous interest rate. That way not a cent of Greece's debt is waived and so there's little incentive for Greece to lie next time, but every banker who thought they'd get rich by charging huge interest rates in expectation of a bailout is left with a very modest profit.

Also I agree on prison terms. I think there's plenty of people on both sides that would have acted differently if they'd thought they'd end behind bars. Let's give the upcoming generation of fat cats something to think about

*shrug* You can't? I'm pretty sure it was bankers doing it.

And... do you really believe the bankers lending them the money didn't know?

And what, make a whole heap of European bankers really rich?

Those loans were made irresponsibly, to a country that the bankers knew could not afford to repay them. The people who made them didn't expect to get paid back by Greece, they expected to get paid back by another EMF bailout of Greece.

Yeah, some responsibility lies on Greece for taking money they couldn't repay, but I think more lies on European bankers for giving Greece money they knew couldn't be repaid. It's time for Greece to default, have its debt wiped and be left to recover. That will mean some European banks lose a lot of money. If that's your money, then perhaps you should have thought about that before you lent it to someone clearly unable to avoid bankruptcy.

Per the article, the bill passed the state legislator with "overwhelming" support, which tells me that there would be enough support for a veto override; although I have to admit, I didn't look up the actual vote tally and compare it to the vote tally required to override a veto.

The skeptic in me says he vetoed it as political cover, expecting his veto to be overruled. The article says that the bill "overwhelmingly" passed both Louisiana chambers. This way he can say "I stood up for privacy and against big government" knowing that his veto wasn't going to stop it.

Would he have vetoed it if it barely passed?

Don't forget the big pharma lobbyists, too!

Big Mother is SO BIG that when she sits around the house...

There you go.

"Keeping servers fully blind as to the data they're working with is an open field of academic research. It's not something that Google or Facebook or Twitter or DropBox or whoever are holding back from because they hate privacy. It's just a really hard problem."

How is this a hard problem? The Spideroak cloud storage service does this; uploaded files are encrypted before they leave your machine. Even the file names are secret; the servers have zero knowledge of the file's name or type or contents.

Sure, and delegated authority over an account is a well established process at all banks. It would be technically easy to add your trusted friend to your list of 'authorised users' and have them able to withdraw the money. Or issue your friend with their own card linked to your account.