skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Greece doesn't actually need any more bailouts (at least, it didn't until last week). They run a primary budget surplus, so all they need from the EU & IMF is some kind of debt restructuring so they can stop all debt payments for a few years while they pass the necessary reforms and their economy recovers. They also need a guarantee that the banks are safe by the ECB to restore confidence, but that doesn't cost any money.
The point was rather to give the fighting appropriate and effective political venues for resolving conflicts and finding effective solutions. There will never be no fighting because that is not possible or at least quite unhealthy. After all, isn’t the point of politics to solve conflicts – which are quite normal and will always be everywhere – in a non-violent way? (Tools for solving conflicts between nations in a non-violent way have always been quite limited – with obvious disastrous consequences, especially as we got better at killing each other.)

However, I do agree that it is sad that fighting is happening along national lines and that ugly stereotypes and propaganda play the role they do.

Just recently I was watching serious and respectable German TV and some expert was – probably unintentionally, but hey that’s stereotypes and toxic thinking for you, it worms itself into your heads – talking about Greeks “hiding” money at home after withdrawing it that would be inaccessible and as such money the creditors would have to pay. This toxic way of framing the conversation is just so sad. Greek people who withdraw their very own money from banks because they are unable to trust those banks are not hiding anything or doing anything immoral or unethical or even slightly impolite. They are the victims in that situation – and we have to be very careful how we talk about people, especially if we generally talk about “Greeks” or “Germans” or whatever.
Costs of doing business in the islands are higher than the mainland, transportation and all.

Under the EU program, money taken away from the working classes goes directly to creditors. Better to give to pensioners, who did 'earn' it, based on their understanding during their working years, and at least return it to the economy.

And no one should work as much as Americans.

And finally, you can't change society overnight. Corruption red tape and over spending exist everywhere, even the US. You can't simply crack down because then capital flight occurs. There's an entire category of economics that deals with this (development economics). It's always a balancing act.

There's many reasons for the Greek crisis, its all too easy to apply moral judgement to a very complicated issue.

Edit - the concept of 'fairness' also has no place in economics. That's for politics or religion. Economists try to achieve the best outcome, not try to decide what's 'fair'.
Dijkstra was a great scholar, but often very extremist in his thinking; probably he was well aware of his extremism and even use it as a tool to over correct some issues.

For instance, he was very right about the goto abuse but the idea of removing a powerful tool from your belt just because can be abused is a bit too much. Here I suspect is happening the same, he was concerned about people learning a lot of languages but not mastering a single one, still that doesn't negate the advantages of master one language and learning more.
> rednecks

Is that really necessary? You could replace that with any other class/race/cultural group and you would be banned in seconds. It needs to stop, and surely HN is a progressive enough place to help begin that process.
Ask HN: Does anyone still read High Scalability?
The economics of in-flight Wi-Fi
It might be a shame when your real-live production-down situation is a multimillion dollar space probe nine years into a mission to capture the first high-resolution imagery as well as collect mounds of scientific data about one of the (ex-)planets in our solar system we know the least about, right after discovering surface anomalies including four suspicious dark spots on one of the body's faces.

This isn't about proving you're worth your salt. It's about "let's get this thing working, ASAP, because who knows when we'll have another chance, since there's not exactly a plan B."
I totally agree. Prudent governments don't allow banks to lend huge amounts of money to dubious states that are in a bubble. Prudent states don't ask poor people to pay private debt that was made public by corrupt governments.

As for your question. If Greece leaves the Euro then it is the end of the euro zone. When Florida was going to default the federal reserve paid for them. That way people has confidence in the dollar. If when a European country is going to default every body screams and runs people knows that they shouldn't have any confidence.
The lawyer is going to tell you not to negotiate with vendors on the phone; you want documentation of the back-and-forth.
That level of generality is too high. The whole point was to prevent Germany and France from going to war again as they had twice in the twentieth century and twice in the nineteenth century.

Promiscuous expansion made ever closer integration harder and less likely and thus actually hurt the purposes for which the union was originally created.

It's like when people complain about the Security Counsel and its permanent members. They are missing the point of the UN. It isn't supposed to be a fair body for global quasi-governance. It is supposed to prevent World War III.
The Story of a Sample That Keeps Coming Back (2014)
It's the same for me. It need's flash? No HTML version? I'm not interested...
By leaving the Euro Greece will have the opportunity to put their country back together without 20 years of crippling austerity. They still need to fix their broken tax system and keep spending with their means but they have a much better chance of doing this on their own terms rather than under the cosh of the Troika.

If only other countries could be so brave.
Ok, let's do this right:

Research is by David Eagleman [0], who has written about it on the web [1] and originally in: Stetson, Fiesta, Eagleman (2007). Does time really slow down during a frightening event? PLoS One. [2]

[0] http://www.eagleman.com/research/time-perception
[1] http://www.eagleman.com/research/110-time-and-the-brain-or-w...
[2] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
> the Eurozone FinMin's have been incredibly patient with Greece

I'm not sure they have. It's just rhetoric to offer obviously unacceptable terms and blame the other party for not accepting them, and it's old-fashioned cruelty to starve a debtor who obviously cannot pay.

I'll add that it's less than persuasive to dismiss Piketty, Stiglitz and Krugman so easily. Their credentials don't make them right, but it takes more than that to write them off persuasively.
Oliver Sacks, in his wonderful essay collection "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" [1], describes a similar case of a soldier, "Jimmy G.", who lost his ability to form memories after being wounded in 1945. Every half an hour or so his memory resets, and so 20 or 30 years later he still thinks that he's an 18 year-old man who just got wounded in the war. There's a particularly poignant moment in the story where his brother comes to visit the man in hospital in the 1970s, and how Jimmy is puzzled why his brother looks so old.

Another well-known case of retrograde amnesia is Clive Wearing, a British pianist who was the subject of a BBC documentary, "Man Without a Memory" [2]. I recommend watching the clip. He describes his "resets" rather terrifyingly as slowly emerging from a sleepless coma. Whenever he sees his wife after such a reset, he leaps up to greet her as if they have been apart for a long time, and his evident happiness and inability to recognize his situation is heartbreaking. (His wife, unbeknownst to him, of course, has since divorced him, which only adds to the poignancy of the scene.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vwigmktix2Y
The problem with Greece is that you can't just forgive its debts. Its deficit is still like 9-10% of GDP. Who's going to lend them money after a sovereign default? It's not lending anymore, it's donating. Heck, all they've been loaned so far is basically donations so that Europe could say to Eurozone members, "well don't anyone say we didn't try".

What Greece needs is a mix of debt forgiveness, market reform (labor market and otherwise) to unfreeze a sclerotic economy which is more about bribing the bureaucracy than actual competitiveness, and a measure of austerity (starting with a later retirement age, and going from there). They were starting to go down that road! They made real progress with economic growth during the recovery! But the reforms were unpopular and might be impossible to do with their internal politics, leading us to the current crisis.

So instead they're going to do the alternate version of hard-and-mean austerity by replacing euros with worthless drachmas and making everyone poorer (hope you don't owe money in Euros). Then they'll either rot for a while in stagnation before gradually getting their act together after all, or they'll turn to Vladimir Putin for bailouts from the great petro-state as long as they last (with all the relevant geopolitical consequences and "screw you Europe" strings attached).
Didn't the Greek government promise that voting "no" was the only way to STAY on the Euro? From what I have seen both sides were promising the same outcome, so the vote was all about who you believed more.
This is a collective action problem. My own lack of fear will have no effect of the actions of CPS if they decide I am a negligent parent because other people could have been afraid to let their kid go camping.
If you read Boing Boing, the NSA considers you a target for deep surveillance
I am astouned by all the comments, who say that "Greeks were getting a shitty deal" or that the bailout terms were somewhat "unfair".

Facts are:
Greece had a spending deficit for several decades now. This spending deficit accumulated to such a big dept, that no investors were willing to lend greece any more money.
18 european countries transferred billions of euros in the last couple of years to greece, to help the country and the people. In return they had an agreement that greece would cut their spending. Greece never lived up to the agreements it made.
In the last weeks 18 european countries offered greece another bailout, where greece would receive several bilions again. In return they asked greece to finally cut spendings.

Now greece voted against this bailout. There are a lot of people in europe (myself included, I am from Germany by the way) who are not willing to transfer further billions of euroes to greece, just so that a socialist party can fullfil its "promises" and increase their deficit.
Safe havens are about saving babies’ lives, not their parents.

Also, no one can force anyone into parenthood since, you know, it’s necessary to at least have sex for that. All the rest is a function of where the baby is actually growing.
What is the difference between "crippling austerity" and "keeping spending within their means"? Isn't the biggest financial problem in Greece the relative enormity of the public sector? Wouldn't fiscal reform basically amount to slashing entitlements and public sector employment?
Easily expandable and redundant storage pool for home servers
Divvy: Sharing the Global Economy
True, but let's keep in mind that they managed a primary surplus despite this huge tax avoidance. This actually should make everyone bullish on Greece: These are not insurmountable problems. I still think that ΣΥΡΙΖΑ is the first party ever that would be fully willing to implement the right reforms (e.g. collecting taxes, etc.) if - and only if - the EU gives Greece a future by restructuring debt. It makes me sad to observe that the so-called institutions let this opportunity pass for stupid reasons (As far as I can tell, the fear of the German/French parties of their electorate and the fear of the established parties in the 'periphery' of newcomers like Podemos). It was the best shot we had to make real progress in Greece, imho.
> a limited resource, like land, and profit from it. Shouldn't the exclusive control over a limited resource

Capital makes money by unpaid labor.

A woodshop is inherited by an heir. The carpenter comes in and creates furniture - let us say tables. The material for the table - wood, screws, varnish etc. cost $80. This would also include other costs - if a saw blade costs $100 but is good for 100 tables, then that 1/100 of a sawblade ($1) is included in the $80.

The table sells for $100 in a store attached to the woodshop. So all totalled inputs are $80, and the labor from the carpenter produces $20 of wealth per table.

The carpenter produces two tables an hour, and works for eight hours a day. So the carpenter creates $320 worth of value a day. The carpenter keeps all the wealth he creates for the first six hours a day - his daily take home pay is $240.

However, the carpenter is not paid for his labor for the last two hours a day. He is working for free, with all wealth generated going to the heir. This is surplus value he is generating, which is expropriated by the heir. This is where the profit comes from.

All modern rentier wealth is generated through these means. In the case of farmland, it is similar to the woodshop and carpenters, except we have workers, mostly of Mexican descent, working unpaid at the end of the day picking fruit in the Central Valley for those who took control of the land after Commodore John Sloat sailed his warships into Monterey Bay in the 1840s.

If the farmowner rents houses to the braceros, it is the same process, just one but removed. The landlord is not working for rent, the person doing the work to create the wealth is still the renter, it is just one level of abstraction. Usury is similar - moneylenders don't work for the wealth - they collect interest from those who do. Ultimately the value of all commodities derive from the work needed to create it. It doesn't take a lot of effort to collect and commoditize rainwater, so water is cheap. To find and mine gold takes more effort, so it is more expensive.

The social relationship of expropriation of unpaid time is what is important. It is all social relationships. There are no signs pointing down from the heavens saying who owns what. If it did, the farmland taken in California at gunpoint would belong to the Indians and Mexicans who lived there, not the heirs of that thest 175 years ago. With the profits derived from the labor of fruit-pickers, the theft continues to this day. As it does in the air-conditioned offices of Kifer Road and Market Street.
Payshares Simplifies Money for Everyone
I know I will be treated as an extreme futurist, but we live in this little tiny spec called Earth and we're all in this together. The idea that there are laws about environmental protection in one country and none in others, calls to the idea that we should just have a single unifying country called "world" and keep the current separation only for cultural reasons.

The EU was a step in this direction but it seems that yet again centralization of power ended up making things worst. So from one end I'm happy that Greece gets to go its own way and escape centralization that forced it into a shitty situation. On the other hand though, this breaks the dream I had of building a system which would allow better collaboration between nations, and most of all, better understanding of the real issues that we're facing as a species (overpopulation, climate change, food scarcity, etc..).
"They run a primary budget surplus" if you don't count the payments on all the loans.

Sorry, but if I borrow a million dollars, build some business that generates profits which are less than the payments on the loan, it's not a surplus. It's called default.
You're point are all at a high level valid, but in raw Euros, countries who are already financially stretched will be asked to write-off tens of billions of Euros, which they will have to finance through increased debt.

That's tens of billions removed from their taxpayers.

If you're a national of another country who is currently undergoing painful austerity and Greece gets significant debt forgiveness, wouldn't you want the same for yourself?

Ireland, Spain, Portugal have all taken significant pain to their economies, do you thinnk their leaders can easily ask their tax payers to take more to bail the Greeks out?

And then if they do, would they not want their own debt forgiveness? The rest of Europe can't sustain a large number of countries seeking debt write-downs...
> navigate to a change without saying 'n' to every change you want to skip

This tool sounds great, but in case you didn't know, 'git add -p' supports '/' to search for a matching hunk.
Had their economy grown, they could have afforded the payments. This is the real problem, and the bailout doesn't fix it.
It seems in some ways that the solutions proposed by these anxious wealthy are limited or perhaps too simplistic. While I applaud their indulgence in supporting a $15 minimum wage, that doesn't mean much if commodity prices grow to erase those gains. It also puts further pressure on the remaining members of the "middle class" as they are the primary consumers of minimum-wage based services and will also be the ones to support the higher wages as costs are passed along to consumers.

For decades our relatively equitable societies (minus racial inequalities and other gradually ebbing social issues) have been dismantled by these folks in the upper echelons of wealth and their willing conspirators in the upper-middle class and middle class in order to arrive at the situation we find ourselves in today.

They have promoted favorable propaganda through their media organs that has poisoned the minds of the laboring classes towards collaboration, towards entrepreneurialism, and self-agency. They have defunded and neutered social institutions that worked contrary to their goals, even if innocuously like the attempts to destroy quality public education and labor protections.

They have introduced a culture of consumption in place of production and individual industry to better capture a greater share of the productive gains furnished by technological and social advances. They have turned whole sectors of life into cut-throat for-profit industries such as health care and education.

And the worst part is that they have been incredibly effective in convincing the average person that they have a better deal with a 1 in a million chance of striking it rich through individual luck than a more pragmatic chance at general comfort through social collaboration with their fellow humans. Their propaganda has succeeded wildly in programming many people to distrust government or cooperation in favor of a nihilistic anti-humanist lifestyle of consumer consumption simply because it is more conducive to social control and easing their ability to maintain their positions in society.

How then do they propose to put this genie back in the bottle, having now let it loose these past several decades?
This is about kids. If the kid exists both parents are responsible for it, no exceptions. That’s the overriding doctrine in the law. This is the basic doctrine I very much do support. Both parents are supposed to be equally responsible for their offspring once it is in the world, no ifs and buts.

That the mother has the ability to not make the kid exist in the first place is a function of where the baby grows up, nothing more, and basically completely unrelated to that.

Can we please talk about this basic doctrine and not weird edge cases?
"Its deficit is still like 9-10% of GDP."

This is very wrong. Greece has run primary surpluses in recent years. They will probably miss that goal this year, but not by 9-10% of GDP. Forgiving Greek debts would solve the problem.

http://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2015/02/greece-and-primary-s...
Good for the Greeks to stand up against bullying and remaining somewhat dignified (as much as they could be after years of destroying their society at the whim of the "austericides").

That said, the vote means lots of pain coming their way, and Euro or not, their economy will take the hit now and the North will pretty much be able to buy half of the country at garage sale prices. Talk about some value investing for "deserving" German and French banks: you lend recklessly, get bailed out by your debtors, then you buy the damn farm.
As they mention, BeanShell was already serving this purpose, and really would provide a great foundation for building what is needed. The fact that it hasn't been updated much kind of speaks volumes of the importance of this effort.
It's a similar issue that we see in the US. There are a number of people (and the entire Constitution) that pushes for state level decisions unless it's absolutely necessary at the Federal level. This approach creates a more unified country because people are able to make their own decisions and live with them.

States are able to compete economically. People are able to move within the country to states with policies more in line with their own views. States have to have balanced budgets while the Federal government...well...doesn't.

There's a push in this country lately to do everything at a Federal level though, which creates constant tension because effectively people are trying to push their views on each other rather than simply pushing them on their own states and bearing the consequences internally.

At the same time, people become righteously offended at this concept. For every New Yorker I ask "Would you like Texas to govern New York?" I get another who is determined that New York should be able to dictate policy in Texas.

The cognitive dissonance is maddening.
From reading on about how Greeks avoid taxes pretty publicly and blatently[1], this is more than a generational issue. It seems like it's buried deep in the culture now.

"A 32-year-old chef in Athens says his income taxes are automatically deducted from his monthly paychecks. But every time he buys something and is given an option to pay less if he doesn’t ask for a receipt, he says yes."

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/greece-struggles-to-get-citizens...
I don't understand the question, relative to my statement.
You're right, my bad! I should have said "Aristotelian mechanics" instead of "Galilean mechanics". Galileo saw his physical intuitions but, being the scientist he was, corrected them.
The transfers to greece of the last few years were to a large extent a way of transferring private debt of german and french banks to the general EU populace.

Overall, I agree - greece needs to get its house in order and that involves making tough decisions, cutting jobs, lowering benefits, etc. They don't have the revenue to support the quality of life that they want to provide.
This is interesting. I wonder how many other large government bodies meant to unify multiple different cultures have hit this at some point, and what percentage has failed. The US seems to be a notable success, but at the time of its establishment, the colonies were not /that/ different.

It kinda makes me think of a chart showing which states benefit more from federal tax dollars than they pay in (https://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelpinto/2987025203/ which politifact says is "mostly true" http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jan/...).

I don't think there's much resentment from the blue states towards the red states for this specific difference, though.
> if you don't count the payments on all the loans.

That's the definition of primary surplus.

> but if I loan a million dollars, build some business that generates profits which are less than the payments on the loan, it's not a surplus

Greece does not get the loans now - that money is already gone. The key insight from the "primary surplus" is that a haircut would work, because Greece could be self-sufficient once the debt burden is gone.