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You are aware that in Spain workers received two weeks of legally required paid severance for each year of employment.
Yes, I am. And so do workers in Germany and Sweden as well, as has already been pointed out in the above discussion. If you're looking for some horrible labor market crusher, you'll have to look harder.
This doesn't necessarily invalidate your broader point, but Spain does, in fact, have an extremely inflexible labor market. The World Economic Forum’s 2012 Global Competitiveness Report ranked Spain’s labor market 134th out of 142 countries. For example, under a policy originally introduced during the Franco era, a company must pay a laid-off long-term worker 1.5 months of salary for every year he's been employed at the company.
Germany also has severance pay. But I'm afraid your information is outdated. Spanish laws set severance pay to 20 days' wage per year of employment limited to at most 12 months' wage. Also, that Global Competitiveness Report ranks Spain as a whole at 36th place (improvement from previous years).
Spain is now mostly paying for its own mortgage bubble and unstable economic structure endorsed by government since early 1990s.
I have a question for you, how well do you think Germany's & Sweden's export economy would be doing without Spain & Greeze keeping the Euro down? The European Union is a scam perpetrated by the West of Europe on the East of Europe.
Given how much they spend on saving Spain and Greece, they might actually be better off. If Greece didn't fake their economic statistics to get Euro in the first place, the whole EU would be better off now. So you should be more careful talking about scams.
If the country was on the Drachma and went into recession, the government could print like crazy and people would suffer from the inflation but there would be a silver lining. The weak Drachma would make Greece an attractive tourist destination as foreigners would find that their Dollars, Euros, Rubles, etc. were now more valuable.
You know, Greeks can actually lower the prices themselves. They don't need a separate currency to lower their real income.
This IS exactly what caused the crisis and keeps it "alive", the economic circle is broken. Money has to change hands for the economy to thrive...
This part of your post is correct. The rest is dead wrong. Most of Europe already tried boosting consumption through scrappage programs and it didn't work.
Countries like Japan, America, and northern Europe, where factories often have the latest tech, have far fewer unemployed young people than countries in southern Europe or India. The biggest problem is inflexible labor markets that make it hard to hire/fire and modify jobs.
Labor laws in Germany and Sweden are among the most inflexible ones in Europe but both countries are doing pretty well compared to the rest of Europe regarding unemployment.
Spain and Greece didn't have a problem with inflexible labor market. They had (and still have) a very serious problem with money circulation. Both countries had very high self-employment rate just before the recent crisis (25+%, three times higher percentage than Sweden or Germany), huge services sector and small industry. Their international income was mostly from tourism, not export of goods.
So I have a question for you: What happens when most of your customers run out of money? When you're a medium or big manufacturing business, you'll find new customers who have money. When you're self-employed and working in services, you'll go out of business. When 25+% of the entire country are self-emloyed people working in services, even a short recession can trigger massive domino effect.
I guess I didn't write my point clearly enough the last time so I'll try again:
There are 30 people in the room. All of them claim divine enlightenment. 10 of them are truly enlightened. 10 of them had bogus hallucinations which seem like enlightenment to them. The rest are frauds. How do I separate the truly enlightened people from the other two groups with higher success rate than rolling dice to decide?
As a skeptic, I don't deny the possibility of something that cannot be conclusively disproven. But on the other hand I refuse to waste time investigating something like that until someone puts something tangible on the table to back up their incredible claims. For example answering the above question and explaining why the answer works. More specificaly, why the frauds who know the answer can't use it to appear more enlightened than they really are.
The reason why none of this can ever be proved, is because what skeptics take conclusive proof of falsehood, is actually the truth they are denying at work. They are completely justified in reaching the conclusions they do: because they have reached to correct conclusions according to the viewpoint to which they subscribe. Unfortunately that viewpoint (whilst being far from worthless) does not account for everything. While someone continues treat external proof as the only standard to be considered, they will forever lock themselves away from the truth, even though it is in the name of truth they do the locking!
At some point a leap of faith must be taken - not even a very big one. Nothing is lost by doing so, but much is gained (understatement of the century). You'll still be just as skeptical and rational on the other side. The process of investigation and experimentation still completely applies. The context is just changed slightly. You won't suddenly start blindly beleving everything someone says near you. You'll just have a MUCH richer world of possibilities in which to be conducting your invesitgations. (There is also a high probability that you'll spent large amounts of time trying not to laugh as you debate with people who don't get it.)
You're missing one huge problem here: Other people can get different supernatural experiences using slightly different methods than you and arrive at conclusions which contradict yours. How do I as an impartial observer decide which one of you is correct and who should I choose as my teacher?
Making ANY leap of faith leaves way too much space for complete bullshit (even though it's nice and coherent bullshit). Requiring independently verifiable proof leaves none. That's the point.
Your "put simply" phrase is somewhat applicable, but highlights a major downfall of the skeptical viewpoint: it can only ackowledge certain classes of truth.
I'll answer with a philosophical question: What's the point of a truth that has no practical application with verifiable results?
Sorry but repeatability, coherency and consistency of the experience among many people still doesn't add any validity whatsoever to a claim of some supernatural experience. For example lots of drugs create experiences which are repeatable, coherent (at least from the users' perspective) and consistent, but those experiences still aren't real. There are also many ways to trigger drug-like mental states without actually using drugs. Here's a first-hand account: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqc0roZTZSA (the interesting part is between 30:00 and 40:00 but the entire video is worth watching).
Phillip K. Dick summed it very nicely: "Reality is that, which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." If you want to prove that your supernatural experience is real, the answer is not making the skeptic try it too. You need independent verification from someone who didn't try it and doesn't believe it. You have to show some practical effects of your experience, for example that you can use your supposed new knowledge to correctly solve problems that others can't. And then you also need to check that those who couldn't solve those problems gain the ability after undergoing the same experience. Put simply: If you can't show, you don't really know.
The fact that you can't freely copy it doesn't mean that things are unduly restricted, it just means you have an ass-backwards notion of what innovation means.
Yes it does. I challenge you to try inventing something new for example in physics without touching just four things: general relativity, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and electromagnetism. Hint: It's impossible because those four things encompass all of known physics (hell, even general relativity and quantum mechanics alone would be enough but whatever). Just to find a completely new field of physics for yourself where you could be free of this arbitrary restriction, you'd have to start in one of the four thus failing the task.
Innovation always builds on the past. If you can't copy, you can't build on the past. If you can't build on the past, you can't innovate. And if you only allow the big players to innovate, you'll get cool and shiny stagnation.
Simplify the tax code, if, once that has been done, there is still a problem with companies offshoring profits (not just that some companies are doing it, but that enough are doing it that it creates a problem) then is the time to introduce your suggested solution.
We're talking under an article that gives you all the proof you need that the additional solution is necessary:
The Caymans-operated subsidiary owns the rights to use Facebook's intellectual property outside the U.S., for which Facebook Ireland pays hefty royalties to use. This lets Facebook Ireland transfer the profits from low-tax Ireland to no-tax Cayman Islands.
I believe I just said that.
However, even if you simplify tax laws as much as possible, it'll still be possible to offshore profits by buying expensive nothing from shell companies incorporated in tax havens. This trivial accounting trick will bring your taxable profits close to zero. Apart from simplifying tax laws, you also need to make an official list of tax havens and make a new law which states that money paid to companies incorporated in those tax havens is never recognized as tax-deductible expenses.
The way to go is to penalize corporate ownership complexity and reward simplicity. As a bonus, you can do both by removing a lot of crap from tax laws.
If done right, more shell corporations and more complicated corporate structure should also mean more tax burden, not less. That's the direction we need to go.
If you learn one useless thing every day, in a single year you'll learn 365 useless things.