Posts by Rich of Observationz
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PAS was down for a bit last night - I wonder if your unpublish had that effect?
(Actually, I wondered at the time if Russell was switching it off during Media 7 so we could go watch telly instead).
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How do you "register as a jobseeker"? Do they survey agencies, or is that just people that register with Winz? (I can't believe anyone would voluntarily go anywhere near Winz).
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Cracker: Dinner and a Show (Everybody’s…, in reply to Richard Stewart,
No, it's that at a proper level of volume, you can't hear anyone talk unless you're the person being spoken to. People shushing is another reason not to go to granny rock gigs.
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The "Greek bail out" doesn't seem to me to be a bail out of the Greeks, but a bail out of the banks
Exactly.
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Aren't all wrinkly bands like that? They were good and innovative 20 years ago, but now it's all about topping up the bank account.
(Peter Hook was awesome when he DJed at Ink a few years ago, but that was doing something different, and for very little money).
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"The Euro was a load of bollocks from day one, you can't have one monetary policy with multiple different fiscal policies, it can't and never will work over a period of time, it is an impossibility"
"The US dollar was a load of bollocks from day one, you can't have one monetary policy with multiple different fiscal policies, it can't and never will work over a period of time, it is an impossibility"
Something like a third of US spending is by state and local government. Also, the variation in GDP per capita in US states (excluding DC) is 3:1 - the Eurozone variation is 2:1 (excluding Luxembourg).
Truly, the US dollar should have collapsed by now. How can you have Washington and West Virginia in one currency union?
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Mechanically, it would be very hard for Greece or any other Eurozone state to leave the Euro and create a new currency.
- it would be a legal minefield. If I have a contract to be paid Euros, then will that be enforcable if one side is Greek?
- assuming that Greek bank deposits were to be forcibly converted to "new Drachma" the necessary legislation would take months to pass. In the interim, there would be a run on the banks, a bank shutdown, or both.
- all the systems would need to change, which would require IT contractors to be hired. And paid in Euros. Lots of Euros. In advance. [rubs hands]
- once a new currency got created, Greece would have to pay high interest rates to compensate for the currency risk of using a weak, lightly traded currency with an expectation of devaluation.
A much better approach would be for them to keep using Euros but (partially) withdraw from the ECB. That would put Greece in the same position as neighbouring Kosovo and Montenegro, who use but don't issue Euros.
It should be remembered that the most important job of a currency is to act as a medium of exchange for people's daily lives. The secondary role of acting as a form of stored value for capital owners has been allowed to eclipse this. (And the Euro has been very effective at the former - it enables a European to trade in their own currency in a block of 17 states with over 300 million people).
[Some of this I posted on the grauniad previously]
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I think in the future we'll have region-coded Oscars. If you live in market A, the version you receive will contain several wins for people from your home state. Market B will have slightly different results to favour their state.
Consistency will be enforced through ubiquitous content aware firewalling.
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a Murdoch tabloid publishing the credit card details of Greenpeace donors?
I don't think we're expecting a double-page spread of CC numbers in Sunday's SST.
(Given their precarious finances, they'd probably just sign everyone on the list up for a year's subscription).
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I'm hoping Mike Myers can be persuaded to play the title role in "Dotcom, The Movie".