If one of the top-10 richest people in the world would distribute half of his personal wealth to the poorest one billion, it would be a months salary for each of them.

We can easily provide a comfortable life to 6 billion people. Maybe not iPads and diamond rings, but definitely clean water and a house.

Depends on what you measure. If you measure economy by the usual statistics, it looks good on paper, absolutely. But if you measure by what people get from it, the picture is much less clear. 15% of our children are below the poverty line. 35% of single mothers and fathers are. That's ashaming for an allegedly rich country.

You're an imbecile. If their interest would've been to reduce the deficit, there would have been one hundred other ways to do it.

They like to create the impression it's all based on numbers and economy and so on, but it's all bullshit. The reality is that it's a philosophy. Benefits to unemployed people are cut not because it's necessary to save the economy (one bank's bonus payouts is equal to those savings). It's done because of the assumption that unemployed people are lazy and need to be forced more strongly. Basically, all of this is the brain-child of one top CEO, it's even named after him (Harz), and he's a victim to the assumption that everyone in the world is like him. As a CEO he lives in a cut-throat world of ambitious people, so to him everyone who is not successful must be lazy.

There's a lot more in this direction, but the point is that all these failures of the social system that create a lot of misery and poverty were intentionally created in order to protect the profits of international export companies. Note: Profit of companies. Not of people. That is what's wrong with it. If you need to change things to save people, then it's a noble thing to do what is hard to do. But to sacrifice the people for the artificial constructions of economic law is ethically wrong.

No, that only brough the whole globalization thing home. The real issue is that everything is made in China these days for cents per hour.

But one day, all these chinese people will want to buy all this nice stuff, too. This economy simply isn't sustainable.

But here's the point: The loss was far from unexpected. From what I read, it was absolutely clear that he owed the people he layed off a severance package and he simply didn't pay it. They went to court and made him pay. Nothing unexpected there at all. He should have figured these payments into his restructuring plan, expected and budgeted them.

Lower education, more crime, less infrastructure, more corruption. Still sure it's a good move?

The company was not in trouble because of employee laws. All this is the fallout of a "restructuring", which is just the bullshit bingo word for mass layoffs, which in turn were the result of the company being in trouble.

If your attempt to save your troubled company didn't work because you didn't take into account the effects of your actions, then that is 100% your fault. It's not like these are secret laws only told to you after the fact.

There is no such thing as an unregulated economy. That's just the bullshit bingo word for "company-friendly regulations".

I call bullshit.

So you think the american system is better, where due to lack of such laws, basically everyone has a short-term contract because if you can fire everyone with little consequences on short notice, that is what you have.

Look, I am one of those "hard working Germans across the Rhine". Our government spent the past 20 years or so slowly dismantling the social systems and employee protections that our fathers and grandfathers had spent and risked their lives establishing (I'm not joking, one of my grandfathers was a union secretary, killed by the Nazis for his efforts).

The result is that maybe on paper unemployment is lower, but several million people spend their days in low-pay (I can't even say "minimum wage", because we freaking don't even have that!), temporary jobs. Literally temporary: They hold contracts saying that on day X, they will be out of a job unless their employer offers them an extension. You don't even have to fire them, how convenient.

As a result, average income has dropped, spending on culture and arts is dropping constantly, life expectancy has stopped to rise despite better medicine, and by some statistics a quarter of the population is in a constant state of insecurity because losing your job can snowball into losing your home and everything else because wages are so low you can't build up reserves.

Sorry, I'd rather live in a world where people around me are not in a constant state of fear and stress.

Actually, it is of consequence, because if the CEO knew that his company had more debt than assets and was unable to pay debts due, he probably broke laws, including criminal laws, by not declaring bancruptcy then and there.

That's fine. Another company that can manage will take that market instead. I fail to see where the problem is.

I'm beginning to feel disgusted by these cry-baby CEOs and investors.

Look, it's very simple: There are laws of physics. If your product cannot work with the set of laws of physics we have on this planet, then your product doesn't work, end of discussion. You can't cry over not being able to make the flying car of your dreams because gravity is so mean to you.

There are also man-made laws. If your company cannot work with the set of laws valid in your country, then your company doesn't work, period. You can't cry over not being able to make a profit because they are so mean to you.

It's really selfish, stupid and ignorant to enjoy the nice things that laws and regulations give you, like having a civilized country, safety, clean streets, heck streets at all, the ability to make contracts and enforce them (absolutely essential for every business!) and a thousand other things, and then cry that the evil laws make your business impossible. Quite the opposite, you imbecile! The laws make your business possible in the first place. Without them, you wouldn't have a business, and if you tried the first guy with a bigger club would take it away from you.

As long as you had a reasonable expectation of winning, yes it does. I have one. They decide beforehand if they're going to cover this case or not (if it's a bullshit case where you don't have a snowballs chance in hell, they don't have to), and after that it doesn't depend on winning or losing anymore.

They don't pay me, so I fail to see the difference.

Actually, there isn't one. Spammers pay their ISP, too. Advertisers pay the people who own the cinema, or the radio station or the billboard. So the means of delivery gets paid for in both cases.

Sorry, no difference at all.

Obviously, you are entirely ignorant about recent politics in this country, which copied every neo-conservative idea coming out of US think tanks and added a couple of their own on top of it.

You never learnt the history of social security systems either, or very badly. When Bismarck created the foundations of the social security systems still in effect in Germany, his intention was so right-wing that Republicans would immediately support him as president: He wanted to undercut the growing influence of unions and socialist parties, by creating a stripped-down version of their vision. Now that the working class was not fighting for survival anymore, he could pretend it's a non-issue and catch their votes on other topics.

After WW2, it was the USA that, let's say "strongly encouraged" western Germany and other european countries to adopt what we call "social capitalism", a blend of the cut-throat capitalism of the US and the socialism of the communist countries. A mostly capitalist system with strong social security protections in place. Again the purpose was purely political: America was afraid that especially in war-torn Europe where many people had lost everything, a pure unleashed capitalism with its income gaps and class divides would drive too many people to embrace socialistic ideals, widening the sphere of influence of communist Russia. The purpose was, again, to give people just enough to make the political alternative less interesting.

As for "disastrous results", let's talk about the Wirtschaftswunder and how Germany, #16 in the world by population, became the #1 export nation for many years and has never for the past 60 years not been in the top 3.

The real kicker (and why I switched to AdBlock Edge a long time ago) is that they ask for 30% revenue share on those acceptable ads, and with that they got too much into bed with the advertisement industry.

Especially given that AdBlock now belongs to a group of advertisement companies, and they whitelist all the ads from their network by default.

They sold out, simple as that, and they fight in court not for the good cause (though that is a side-effect and a very good one) but to protect their revenue stream.