"It's amazing isn't it? We've got so much information available at the touch of our fingers, yet we can't be bothered to spend the *seconds* it would take to find a source document regarding the matter at hand."

But that might mean us finding out that we were wrong about something, and no one is ever wrong on the internet.

"But I do think it's interesting that very few eastern European EU nations have adopted the Euro so far (and instead, a couple of non-EU eastern European nations like Montenegro have unilaterally adopted it)."

It's because entrance into the EU is staged. It goes something like this:

1) A country expresses interest to join

2) That country must make political changes to meet EU standards- this means matching EU standards on things like product quality/safety, human rights, law enforcement and so on and so forth

3) The country can, once reaching European standards in this area join the political union promising to advance towards joining the monetary union

4) They must then reform and change their economy towards adhering to the standards required to join the monetary union. If they're a poor country, this means waiting until their economy has grown sufficiently to not be too out of par with the rest of the eurozone countries. The EU gives them financial help to do this, and being part of the political union makes it easier because they have free trade as a result of that with the rest of Europe.

5) When they're ready economically, they must join the eurozone.

Now that's how it's supposed to work. The reason most of those countries you cite aren't in yet is because they were relatively poor, and are simply at the political stage having not grown their economies sufficiently to join.

Of course, Greece was one of the early adopters when they were still trying to kick the thing off and at that point they just wanted as much membership as possible to kick it all off. In hindsight Greece should've been lumped in with the not-yet-ready club, because they were fiddling their figures and lying about the state of their economy.

So those non-members you cite aren't non-members out of choice (that only applies to the UK, Denmark, and Sweden), they're non-members because they're not yet ready. Countries like Romania, Czech Republic, Hungary and so forth aren't yet strong enough to sustain the euro as their currency. In reality neither is Greece, and arguably a country like the Czech Republic is now probably a more suitable candidate than Greece, but it's apparently not an option to return Greece to candidate status.

Greece is alone in the region because most of those members in the region are fairly new entrants to the EU, Greece was alone in being a much earlier entrant to the EU- Most of that is down to the cold war. Many of those poorer nations that are non eurozone members but EU members were stuck behind the iron curtain as part of the USSR whilst Greece was not.

So the idea with the EU is that it's a one-way track, you join politically, then you switch economically. Even Sweden is committed to this, but has quite reasonably said "Not until you get your house in order!". Only the two countries with opt-outs, the UK and Denmark can get away with it indefinitely. I don't know why Denmark has an opt-out, but the UK has it because there was no taste for losing the pound amongst the UK public, and the EU really wants the UK to be an EU member because a) It's one of the top 5/6 world economies, b) It's one of 5 permanent UN security councils, c) It's nuclear armed and one of the best militaries in the world, d) It's Europe's political and economic gateway to America and the Commonwealth. The UK therefore got special treatment.

Most of those countries you mention may not be members yet, but they're legally committed to becoming so as part of their EU membership agreement.

I think it's true that Greece could be dropped back to EU member status without being a euro user, but that would require treaty amendments and keep in mind that even the Greeks themselves don't want this because they don't want to lose the purchasing power the euro affords them (Greece is an import economy, based largely on tourism, so a weak currency doesn't benefit them as much as it would a manufacturing economy). Had Greece said 5 years ago "Guys, this ain't working for us right now, we need to print drachmas again and drop to political member until we're properly ready for the eurozone" then I suspect that's exactly where they'd be. But there's no will by them to do that and have less ability to buy massive TVs and Xboxes or whatever, and there's no will by the big eurozone states to see the european project go backwards in this way so it hasn't happened.

So I hope this clarifies euro useage- it's not a choice in itself per-se, it's part of a legal agreement of being an EU member to become a eurozone member when ready. The only countries that is not true for are those with explicit opt outs like the UK.

"Varoufakis was very vocal about the need for the reforms, but he has been forced out (by the EU !)"

Yeah but that was exactly the problem. The EU didn't need someone who was very vocal. They needed someone who was actually willing to do it. Varoufakis was not that person - he's a charismatic populist, he talks the talk but does not walk the walk.

The same thing was true in Italy for a while where you had these very vocal characters saying the right things to try and make everyone happy but not actually doing what needed to be done, but it wasn't until they fucked off and some competent technocrats came in to do the actual necessary that things started to improve.

Some people like Varoufakis are simply focussed on making people like them, they say everything right to achieve that, but they wont do what's necessary because doing what's necessary would make many people no longer like them. That's why he had to go - it's not a fucking popularity contest, it's about actually solving the problem.

Tsipras has learnt that the hard way, he's approached leadership as a popularity contest, desperately trying to avoid responsibility for the position he's put himself into, and now he's been faced with a choice between being the guy that finally bankrupted Greece and turned it 3rd world, or being the guy who accepts painful necessity, he's realised that some things are more important than just trying to be Mr Popular. Varoufakis never had that realisation, which is why he just had to go.

If the question was being asked of Gordon Brown when he was pushing the same thing back in 2009, I'd agree, he had no clue. But the thing to bear in mind with Cameron is that he's surrounded himself with tech advisors - from Ian Livingstone, BT's old boss, to Martha Lane Fox, founder of lastminute.com. He's also quite close to Google, having been a key driver in involving them with his Silicon Roundabout initiative. He's also spent a lot of time with Berners Lee on the open data initiative, so whilst I really don't identify with Tory policies, I think credit is deserved in that him and his government are and have been far more tech savvy at least than previous governments, what little good it actually does.

But he's also made comments in the past about how he understands that you can't simply legislate away encryption - he's made reference to the failed attempts in the US at this in the 80s/90s. That's why I think he probably knows full well that that would be a non-starter, and why I don't think for one minute the conclusion IBTimes has jumped to that he wants to legislate for banning of apps is in any way what he was suggesting.

"China has a decade or two of growth over India"

Yeah but I think that's kind of his point. There's no inherent reason China should have a decade or two of growth over India other than the fact that India decide to skip the whole industrial revolution phase and try and jump into competition with 1st world nations on services. It looked good at first, and then it failed, and it failed hard. Mumbai went from being theorised to be the number 1 world financial centre now to currently being sat around 53rd in the world behind such well known financial centres as Almaty, Kazakhstan and Casablanca, Morocco.

The problem is that you can't have a services based economy without a great education system, and whilst India put a lot of money into marketing the propaganda that India has more graduates than the US has people or whatever, it turned out to be complete nonsense because your average India graduate was less well educated than your typical US high school student is at the age of 16.

That's not to say India doesn't have some great universities, and doesn't churn out some great graduates - you only have to look to see how many end up in Silicon Valley in well paid jobs, but the number of actual good universities is pretty poor. For example both the QS and Times world university rankings don't see an Indian entry until 200+, so if India can't even create a university that's within the top 200 world universities then it's at a clear disadvantage in the services sector. Simply sending students abroad to university cannot produce the volume you need.

China is basically pursuing the path of Western development at warp speed, it's going from an agrarian society, through an industrial revolution, to services in the space of 30 or so years - something that took the West a few hundred. India made a fundamental mis-step when it tried to skip that because you need the industrial step to create the necessary infrastructure and to provide the necessary income base.

"but does anyone really doubt manufacturing is on its way out?"

This is nonsense, it may be on it's way out, but you still need to produce those factories one way or another. We're nowhere near, not even close to robots that can self-assemble for any purpose. People are going to be essential in the field for a long time yet, and even as robots do take over some jobs, those robots are still drastically more expensive than 3rd world salaries workers. So whilst they may make sense for high tech manufacturing in the West where salaries are high, the business case just isn't there and wont be for some time in places like India and China. You can't just linger around until the tech does become available and then build all your factories with robots and have robots build your manufacturing base for otherwise India will be waiting another 50 years at which time the rest of the world will have forgotten about them completely.

"China has had rough economic times for the past decade as American manufacturing returns to American robots (at least, if the Chinese stock market is any guide - hard to be certain)."

You say you've researched things considerably before putting your money where your mouth is, but this doesn't even remotely resemble reality. The Chinese stock market has been in turmoil for the past week. not the past decade, and is now stabilising anyway. Over the last decade China has grown rapidly. It's growth has been between 7.5% at it's lowest, and 15% at it's highest since 2005. In contrast India has seen a low of 4% (barely better than developed economies) and a high of 10%. Chinese average growth has been far faster than India over the last decade. Yes Chinese growth is slowing but it's still much higher than Indian growth and that's more a sign of the fact that China has now grabbed most of the low hanging fruit and is having to compete on tougher terms. In India the low hanging fruit is still there, desperately waiting to be picked.

"Does the word "symbol" in my initial post confuse you? What about the word "inspiration"? As in "half the people my age I know who work in tech were inspired by NASA and science fiction". It's important for mankind that our reach exceed our grasp."

You're exactly right, but whilst India has neither the infrastructure to maintain growth in this sort of area without massive state subsidy, and whilst it completely fails to provide an education system that is sufficient to fulfil those aspirations that that symbol creates for the vast majority of it's people then still, what's the point? It's no use inspiring people to want to travel into space if you have not the means to give them the education required, nor to grow the sector due to lack of infrastructure.

India has a population of 1.25 billion people, but only about 0.5 billion of those people are able to match Western standards because that's all their institutions are able to support, and sure that's enough to get them a space station, but not much else.

China in contrast has made a point of starting from the beginning and following through every step, it has the infrastructure from the ground up, and more and more universities are reaching Western standards. China has 7 in the top 200 vs. India's none for example.

15 years ago India and China were the golden boys of the world economy, the up and comers, both expected to be the top two world economies. China is on track in second place, India fell by the wayside at 9th place, just beneath Italy - you know, one of the PIGS nations of economic crisis fame.

It's possible now that India has a relatively new leader they can finally turn things around, there's really nothing stopping them other than political will, but they've ultimately lost a decade.

"The choices are communications you (GCHQ/MI5/etc) may not be able to decrypt, or communications that anyone may be able decrypt."

Actually I think that's exactly what he was gunning for, having followed the original announcements and speech. This Australian IBTimes article seems to be putting a completely different interpretation on what was said at the time.

At the time, Cameron was talking about increasing funding and tools for the security services, as such, it seemed pretty clear he was talking about bolstering the ability of the security services to crack encryption be it through making it easier to perform MITM attacks, or by simply increasing funding for crypto research aimed at breaking common encryption.

Cameron is a prick, there's no doubt about that, but he isn't stupid. Even he knows a ban on certain applications would never work.

I don't even know why the IBTimes has come up with this theory now, 2 months after the queens speech. It seems like a classic case of sensationalism for hits. The timing is about 2 months too late, and the content seems to be entirely speculation with no evidence.

The communications bill is bad news for sure, but every time I see nonsense that distracts from what's really contained like this I'm becoming more and more concerned that stories like this may well be getting thrown out there to distract from the bad things it actually contains. I think they figure if they get the internet riled up arguing over something the bill doesn't and will not contain, then there'll be no debate over the problematic things it does contain which can then pass without debate because no fuss was made about them. If nothing else they can claim the bill is now fine because they climbed down over things the internet was arguing about even though those things were never really drafted to be in there in the first place.

If this did make it into the bill, sure, argue about it, but there's no evidence of anything like this right now, there is however evidence of things that should be argued for that aren't there - like the enforcement of the fundamental principle that police and security services should not be able to access private data without warrant.

That's why the obvious solution is to move somewhere where the local mob doesn't have any presence.

These people had the money and resources to do that but they chose not to and to remain complicit.

Head abroad, claim asylum if need be, and work with the police there. It becomes impossible for them to follow you and touch you. The strength these organised gangs have is also their weakness- you're absolutely right that in their home territory they have tough and sophisticated networks, but as soon as they start trying to dabble in those networks elsewhere, in someone else's territory, they're out of their depth and in trouble - they'll need local criminal support to do what they need to do, but criminals tend not to like other criminals infringing on their territory.

I'd wager the life expectancy of a couple of Italian-American mobsters from Chicago in somewhere like Croydon, South London, for example is probably about the duration of a couple of jabs with a knife. That's assuming local informants haven't already tagged you to the police because you stood out like a sore thumb. The best bet is probably to pay someone local to do the job, but in a country like the UK you'd be hard pressed to find someone who had the resources to both do it, and do it without being caught and without you similarly being tagged.

I'm not saying it's still without it's risks, but I'd wager the risks are still lower than working with them in the hope that they wont suddenly decide you're a loose end, a risk, or surplus to requirements regardless.

Yeah but apparently these guys had plenty of money too. If a gun to your kids head was a real threat you'd get them the fuck out of the country and out of reach of these guys pronto.

There are very few organised crime groups that have a worldwide reach and many countries are no go zones for them.

"Who, Microsoft? You're seriously going to talk shit about Starbucks for tax-dodging compared to Microsoft? That's horribly ignorant. Or, more likely, disingenuous bullshit."

No I'm not, I'm not arguing one is better than the other. I'm arguing in agreement with the person you originally responded to - that Starbucks is the coffee world's version of Microsoft. But in your vehement need to attack Microsoft you've once again simply missed the point.

In arguing to me that Microsoft is also a tax dodger like Starbucks you're simply reinforcing our point that Starbucks is just like Microsoft in a different market. You're agreeing with us whilst trying to disagree because you're blinded by your need to attack MS and forgetting the point you tried (and failed) to make in the process. It's silly.

"Nothing prevents your "local" chains from exploiting the same strategy. Your government is at fault for enabling it. You didn't think it worked for you, did it?"

You mean apart from not having the resources to set up a large multi-national tax dodging operation because they don't have the funds to run at a loss in another country to gain marketshare in the first place? It doesn't matter whether the government enables it or not, it's still wrong however you spin it, and as you said, it's just the sort of thing that Microsoft does.

I don't care about Starbucks or Microsoft, I'm not arguing in favour of one or the other, I'm pointing out that your arguments as to why they're different actually demonstrate why they're the same, but again, because you have this belief that Microsoft is an uncomparable evil and no other company should be compared you're repeatedly missing the point that there are a lot of comparable companies in many markets.

I get it, you hate Microsoft, I can even perfectly understand and sympathise with why, it's wholly deserved on Microsoft's behalf, but there are companies that frankly deserve as much hate as Microsoft for nearly the exact same reasons, and Starbucks is one of those companies. For everything you argue Starbucks does right you can find something equivalent or similar that one can argue Microsoft also does right, but it's not simply what they do right that's in discussion, it's what they do wrong - and they very much align similarly there also. You can't ignore Starbuck's negatives focussing only on it's positives and then only look at Microsoft's negatives completely ignoring it's equivalent positives and say "See, they're totally different!", you have to look at the negatives and positives of each, and when you do, you'll realise that they're really not all that dissimilar.

Again, for example, it makes no sense to claim Starbucks pays a reasonable salary so is totally different to Microsoft and completely incomparable as you did because you've ignored the fact that if there's one thing Microsoft does, it's pay a fucking decent salary too. Doing one or two things right like paying a decent salary doesn't magically make one good and not the other, it's either both, none, or a recognition that companies can be overall bad in spite of a handful of arguably good things they do.

The problem is that most of the defence that you level in Starbuck's favour can also be levelled in Microsoft's favour, thus is the benefit of cherrypicking to make a point:

Pay?: Yep, Microsoft is one of the best paying companies in the world. Trump Starbucks there hands down.

Consistency?: Yep, one of the driving reasons Microsoft is succesful is because they've always been good on legacy support. Your Word docs can still be opened by Word more than 20 years later, and many of your 20 year old Win 95 apps still work just fine.

Underpaid suppliers?: Nope, Microsoft has had no need to do that. It can afford market rates and still turn a massive profit.

But you're missing the negatives, and some of your positives are false. For example, how about the fact that outside the US it exploits the international nature of it's business to fiddle tax giving itself an inherent profit advantage over indigineous corporations in the market it operates?

In the UK almost everyone agrees Starbuck's coffee is shit compared to the competition, but when the competition is at an inherent 21% profit advantage it's not hard to see how Starbucks can undercut, open more stores, and blow more on advertising than the competition and still make additional profit.

Now you can certainly argue that what Starbucks does is legal (though that's actually in dispute, and under investigation) but it's not ethical in much the same way that Microsoft got away with a lot of what it did as legal, but certainly not ethical.

You argue that Starbucks put the competition out of business by simply competing and not by dropping prices to kill the competition and then raising them again, but even that's wholly false and in fact on of the key criticisms levelled at Starbucks - that's how it got a foothold in the UK in the first place.

So between your cherry picking of positives (one of which is simply wrong) and your failure to recognise that you can also make the exact same argument for Microsoft by simply picking the positives and ignoring the negatives you seem to have wholly missed the point that Starbucks is a lot more like Microsoft than you wish to believe.

I don't know if this is because of your rabid hatred for Microsoft, or because of ignorance of Starbucks, but one way or another the GP is exactly right to compare the two, and you're exactly wrong to say they're different by citing things with the implication that Starbucks is ethical when Microsoft can similarly make the same claims you defend Starbucks with.

I'm a little surprised at the original asker's question, and his suggestion that the UK may be culturally behind on this aspect because what you say is true, of the US.

I've had 5 dev jobs at different employers and all of them have allowed home working. To address your points relative to the UK:

(1) I don't think this is true in the UK, developer salaries are still very much on the increase and have been for years. Companies are still stuck having to improve terms and salaries to get the necessary staff. If you can't go to market and receive job offers from at least 3 different employers with reasonable salary and benefits packages in the UK in the space of a couple of weeks as a software developer then you're doing something very wrong.

(2) I've never even heard of stacked ranking being used in the UK. I'm not entirely convinced that some elements of the way it's done in the US and used to determine redundancies would even be legal here.

(3) I don't think outsourcing in software is as prevalent here as it is in the US, I've worked at employers that used it but it's always been used in addition to, not instead of home grown talent. Experiments in outsourcing to India at places I've worked have always been failures, it's a classic case of you get what you pay for and the quality of developers being put forward by Indian outsourcing companies is beyond a joke - it costs you more to pay people locally to fix their code or even rewrite it than if you'd just hired a wholly local team in the first place. We do have offices in Eastern Europe with large teams of developers, but these teams are managed by the developers back here.

(4) Again, I don't think that's really the case here. I've seen companies that try and emulate that Silicon Valley trend but it's usually the small companies that don't know any better having dreamy ideas of being Google telling themselves that if they just do what Google do it'll all be great, but it never works like that because they don't have Google's budget to pay insane salaries so rapidly realise they need other sweeteners instead.

But beyond that there are other reasons why working from home shouldn't be a problem in the UK, not least because in the latter half of last year the UK government enforced a legal obligation on all employers to properly consider requests for flexible and home working:

https://www.gov.uk/flexible-wo...

This change in law means that unless there's a good reason to deny your request, it should be allowed. That means employers have to either start rationalising and sensibly justifying their reasons for denial, or they must simply allow it. Simply saying "No because that's different to what we've done before and we don't like change" isn't a valid response.

Personally I've tried home working in a number of different ways across various companies. At some employers it's typically been one or two fixed days every week, only adjusting if necessary to turn up for meetings. At others I've typically just homeworked during crunch time - the employer needs a 7 day week out of me for a couple of weeks running, and in return I get to do that 7 day week from home and get to bank the extra hours I do as leave. I didn't mind this, I did 22 days straight but then got all my weekend days (and a bank holiday back) so was able to use them to have a whole week and a bit off a week later post-delivery.

But I typically like to do it around certain tasks, if we're in the product concept and design phase where there's a lot of back and forth, and a lot of discussions over ideas and a lot of decision making then I come into the office. If I'm doing a rather solitary task like just churning through a bug fix list, putting together a detailed design doc once all the decisions are made, or trying to find a solution to a complex problem without any outside support then I much prefer doing that from home where I can focus on the task at hand with no interruptions, and with the benefit of an extra hour in bed of rest due to not having to commute. My current employer lets me work from home one day a week, and if there's reason to do more, I just let the director know and it's done. They usually get more hours out of me, I usually go halves on the commute- so whilst I typically take back the time on the morning to have a lie in or get something done, I usually use what would've been the commute home to put extra effort in - they get an extra 45 minutes, I get an extra 45 minutes and the train company and road network has one less person to try and cram in for a day.

There are plenty of jobs in the UK that don't do homeworking, but it shouldn't be hard to find those that do, and those that do will only become more prevalent with the government's latest push to let people work flexibly. It's frankly win-win for everyone - it means less pressure on commuter trains/roads/buses, it means less of an environmental burden from commuter pollution, it means employees are happier, it means employers don't necessarily need as much office space, and it can mean more productivity too if done sensibly. It benefits the government and hence the tax payer, it can benefit the employee, and it can benefit the employer. Another reason the government is pushing it is because if it means people can get from their house to pick their kids up sooner than they could from a place of work that it means there's less need to subsidise child care too - there are a lot of ways in which it can help wider society.

Yes there are people that take the piss, but frankly, if they're taking the piss at home you can be rest assured that when you think they're in the office working they're actually just browsing the internet, tossing it off chatting around the water cooler, or pissing off to hide in the toilets, to "grab a coffee" or "go for a smoke break" every 5 minutes anyway. Unproductive staff are unproductive staff- the solution to that one is to figure out why they're unproductive.

I understand some people just don't like it and can't adapt to it, and that's pretty understandable. Part the reason it works for me is because I did full time post-graduate studies whilst also working a full time job, the studies were nearly all done at home, so to get everything done in my life I had to learn to be disciplined at home.

Your views match precisely with what I've heard about the culture in places like Silicon Valley, but we have a completely different culture here in most of the UK in my experience.

Joining the euro is a condition of being in the EU though, the UK is the only country with an explicit opt-out. New members have to join once certain conditions are met, and whilst countries like Sweden are dragging their feet they're still legal obligated to.

So a backwards step away from the euro is effectively a violation of EU rules, which means out of the EU too.

It's been on the rise for a while now. It's been on the rise with UKIP in the UK, the FN in France, Golden Dawn in Greece and others elsewhere.

It's an inevitable reaction to global financial turmoil stemming back to 2008, so yes it can certainly be eliminated by improving the health of the world economy, but I don't think that in itself justifies giving Greece a free ride because the implications of giving Greece a free ride could in themselves cause more problems elsewhere.

Greece has long been a hot bed of far right and far left nationalism- from various terrorist groups, through to a disturbing amount of Greeks that went to help commit atrocities in former Yugoslavia including the Srebrenica massacre. As awful as it may sound, it is perhaps better to simply let Greece return to it's status quo and contain it and let everyone else ditch the nationalist sentiment than it would be to give Greece a free ride and give cause for nationalism to take hold through the rest of Europe.

There are also cases, as with Russia, whereby we tried to help bring them aboard the global economic boom over the last 15 years, but whereby all it meant was they got stronger and used that strength to drive their far right nationalism through their neighbour's backyard. It seems preferable therefore that Russia is poor and far-right nationalist, than wealthy and far-right nationalist. In some cases like with Russia, you couldn't win either way if you wanted to when the majority of the population are fundamentally just far right in their views.

So yes the rise of nationalism concerns me, but I don't think we can assume we can rid ourselves of it any time soon. I think the best option is to eliminate it where we can, and contain the rest of it. There are promising signs - in the UK for example Scottish nationalist ambitions were thankfully struck down in a referendum that was even slanted towards the nationalist view and UKIP underperformed at the general election.

Every party has stood for election and said they're against the Interception Modernisation Programme and each that has gotten into power has subsequently had one or more home secretaries that have all backtracked once in that role and started arguing hard for it.

If you want to know why, it's because they all got told what Snowden told the rest of us - that GCHQ is already doing it anyway, but that's it's completely illegal.

The Interception Modernisation Programme is simply an attempt to make legal what is illegal and nothing more. That's why home secretaries all turn tail on this once they get into power - they realise they're overseeing a mass programme of illegal interception and try and fix it.

The difference now is that we all know about it because of Snowden, so it all looks even more embarrassing for Theresa because we all know the reason she wants to give - "I'm overseeing law breaking and I want to not be doing so" but she's of course too scared to give it. She can't deny it any more, it's well established that her department is complicit in illegality.

That's one explanation. A more simple and succinct explanation though is simply that Greece agreed, legally, that the debt was settled decades ago.

So it really doesn't matter on any of the reasoning, Greece was happy with that settlement back then, and when you sign a legal document agreeing to a settlement you don't get to renege on it decades later when it suits otherwise frankly Athens owes the world an awful lot more for the many ancient Greek conquests.

When a debt is considered settled, it's considered settled, end of. We don't need to argue reasons for Germany not paying Greece more, Greece agreed a legally binding agreement that it doesn't expect and wont ask for more from Germany in war reparations and that's the end of it.