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Saturday, June 20, 2015 - 22:10 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Locked Down

Fair warning: the next month or so could be slow going, as I make that final push towards graduating (finally). Or it might not be. We'll see.

Either way, it will be achieved with the return of McDonald's curry sauce, and Google Chrome's old bookmark manager. And, I only just realised that the ETH light on the fibre internet modem referred to the connection to the router, and not the incoming OpenNet signal, as suggested by the position of the incoming ports. I'd pay good money for a router that's guaranteed to fix itself automatically...

Further, it's been a slow period for news - dinosaurs chomp through box office records, Thailand wins the football gold in the SEA Games, and Greece may be getting dumped out of the European Union again. Same old, then.

Given that the Greek dilemma has been in and out of the news for years, one can't help but form a few opinions. From what I can make out:
  • The Greeks aren't, in general, lazy, going by hours worked. However, they are probably relatively unproductive

    [N.B. On this, I have observed two major reasons for staying late - the first is mostly about "face", of which I have resolved not to care about (i.e. instead of sitting at the desk and surfing the web, I'd rather do it at home, thank you). The second is actual need, though often driven by bad planning (perhaps external). Well, if one is going to put up with this, the job had better pay over the odds.]

  • They have however been retiring early (at least previously), with generous benefits

  • Overall, though, it doesn't look as if most individual Greeks actually benefitted all that much from their loans (especially the younger set, and those not on the civil service gravy train) - the old tale of big public spending on dubious projects redirecting funds to favoured parties, while sticking the bill to the state as a whole, seems likely to be in play (not unusually)

    [N.B. The IMF has discovered that "trickle-down" economics doesn't actually work - who could have guessed?]

  • And, to a certain extent, those who happily lend huge amounts to bad credit risks, should perhaps not be too outraged when they discover that they, well, can't pay (note the direct contrast with the United States, where some states also run perpetual deficits, but this is not a problem because they are all USA! USA! USA!)

  • It doesn't help that tax evasion is something of a self-reinforcing national sport

All told, if one thing is certain, it is that lenders will have to take a haircut on Greek debt, no matter what - short of forced requisition (and we know how well such things tend to turn out), their economy is probably at a point where any savings from austerity would at best be cancelled out by the accompanying fall in output. It is hard to believe that European leaders don't understand this, so most of the brinkmanship's likely to be just for show. Here's hoping they come up with some epic story by the next deadline.

A couple of interesting tidbits relating to the eye - the old myopia treatment of placing weighted bags on the eyes has been revived with hard lens braces, which have been around for a while. More excitingly, colour-blindness seems to have been mitigated with special glasses.

No discount for a guy who skipped National Service with a month remaining, to preserve his place at Cambridge, however - it has cost him eighteen months in the detention barracks. A very sad coincidence of factors. From the looks of it, he should have just beat people up instead...



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