S&P downgrades Greek and Portuguese bonds

[Berkut]

I share's Marty's sentiment over the Greeks.

Fucking lazy mofos with like 40% of the workforce in the public sector, they thought they will be able to operate their country on foreign money forever. Fuck them let them burn in Zimbabwe hell.

Kind of funny seeing the Hungarian and the Pole get all elitist about another Eurofail country.

[Tamas]

I share's Marty's sentiment over the Greeks.

Fucking lazy mofos with like 40% of the workforce in the public sector, they thought they will be able to operate their country on foreign money forever. Fuck them let them burn in Zimbabwe hell.

Kind of funny seeing the Hungarian and the Pole get all elitist about another Eurofail country.

Nah, we have been doing the exact same shit of course, only on a bit smaller scale perhaps, due to us being non-euro members

[Monoriu]

Saw this on the BEEB Website:

What does the y axis represent?

[DGuller]

Something not good would be my guess.

[Savonarola]

Saw this on the BEEB Website:

What does the y axis represent?

Sorry, I should have included the header.  The y-axis is predicted likelihood of bankruptcy in the next five years.

[Savonarola]

Something not good would be my guess.

It can't ever be good if the Greeks and Portuguese are winning.

[Ed Anger]

Something not good would be my guess.

It can't ever be good if the Greeks and Portuguese are winning.

The Portuguese lead in raping Canadian girls. We have a rape gap!

[Admiral Yi]

This can happen if you owe 10% of GDP or 300% of GDP.

To go bust you only need to be in debt.

A county *can* go bust at any level of debt because going bust is a unilateral act. 

[Iormlund]

Why is a Spanish crisis a sure thing? There level of debt to GDP isn't anywhere close to that of Greece or Italy IIRC.

A crisis would be perfectly avoidable ... if our politicians had the will to do so.

Anyway, Spain has a lot of problems (and thus a lot of room to improve). Solving just one would allow us to weather the storm fairly easily. Fixing several would bring us much closer to our northern friends.

To make a small list:

• Productivity: Despite what many may think Spaniards work a lot of hours. More than Germans, French, Dutch, Swedes and so on. Many of those take the form of unpaid overtime. Yet all those hours don't translate into higher production due to many factors (lack of energy  or motivation after a long day, bad work ethics, outdated or downright chaotic practices, etc).
• Education: This one is linked with the first. We need a big overhaul of education. One that works. Past attempts have failed miserably. Also, university needs to be more expensive and focus much more on research.
• Government service: civil servants cannot be fired. This needs to change. There's a lot of excess weight over there, especially in the Computer Age (curiously enough both my brother and I have created software that render a number of civil service jobs obsolete ).
• Corruption: self explanatory.
• Debt: Many, many people (especially 30-40 year olds) are heavily indebted, having bought during the housing bubble. In many cases paying it all back will take 3 or 4 decades. And payments make fequently up to half the combined income of a couple (basically an entire salary goes to pay the mortgage). You cannot give the banks the keys and forget about the mortgage either. Your entire assets (and usually those of your parents) are backingthe mortgage.
• Labor cost and market rigidity: It is quite costly to keep people long enough for them to be useful in any skilled job. This in practice means there are two tiers of workers: those that are very expensive to fire and those that are completely expendable (youth, mostly). This greatly affects productivity (the former lack the motivation to work hard, the latter will be let go just when they are getting good at a job and replaced with another cheap temp worker).
• Massive unemployment: As a result of the complete annihilation of the housing sector, millions have lost their jobs. And many of those will not get another one. They can't do anything else. They are uneducated immigrants, high school dropouts or heavily specialized in this industry (architects, structural engineers, masons, etc). With a bit of luck some will go back to their countries of origin or migrate to greener pastures, but it will remain a huge problem.
• Growing retirement and health costs: This one is universal in first world countries. Our baby boom generation will retire in 10 years. We need to increase retirement age stat.

Most of those cannot be solved in a matter of months. But we can at least show that we're trying.

[Martinus]

Err, you work long hours because you take like 3-4 hour lunch breaks.

[Iormlund]

Err, you work long hours because you take like 3-4 hour lunch breaks.

I mean hours worked (not counting lunch or commute). Many people regularly work overtime. Most of those do not receive any money for that (like me). My record is not at all impressive (below 70h a week), but that's only because of my illness. My boss fears I might get sick again if I go back on the field, so he has me covering the home front, which means less overtime. However, all my mates in the department have 70+ workweeks regularly. And it's not just engineers. My brother suffers from the same thing as a project lead in a software company. My father did too, working as a junior manager at the bank. The same happens in many, many other sectors (certain vocational jobs, like soldering, suffer less from this, maybe because there are less vocational school graduates than college graduates).

In fact the best thing about being a public servant is that this kind of thing does not happen when you work for the government. Which is precisely why I'm studying to become a mere maintenance worker for the state - instead of a private sector engineering whore. Efficiency at its best.

[The Larch]

Err, you work long hours because you take like 3-4 hour lunch breaks.

Not anymore, we entered modernity a good while ago. It's the kind of thing that all tourist guides babble about.

[The Brain]

Swedes are very productive. We hardly work any hours at all and yet things keep getting done.