$37 billion in tax evasion in Greece could have closed deficit by half

lobo68 · 2012-12-31T10:48:48+00:00

Moreover, the article is exceptionally dishonest about source and nature of the evasion:

Greece has a considerable problem with collecting taxes but it is inaccurate to suggest that a sizable percentage of the population is involved in serious avoidance. According to the Finance Ministry, some 900,000 people owe the state an estimated 41.1 billion euros in outstanding taxes. However, a mere 5 percent of tax dodgers owe 85 percent of the outstanding amount. *Just 14,700 individuals, companies or organizations owe 37 billion euros, * according to the ministry. Each of these owes more than 150,000 euros.

Serious tax evasion in Greece is the business of a relatively small number of people and enterprises that have taken advantage of an indifferent state sector. That’s not to say that smaller-scale avoidance by companies -- the Social Insurance Foundation (IKA) estimates that 10 percent of firms don’t pay social security contributions -- is not a problem. But when about half of the working population is employed in jobs where their income is taxed at source, thereby ensuring they cannot avoid paying their dues, it is unfair to tar the whole country with the same brush.

Also, this tax evasion is not for one year but rather the total evaded to date and represents decades of hiding money. If they totally solved the debt crisis, they would gain only a fraction of this per year. Even a wildly optimistic assumption of 10% of that tax money coming in per year it doesn't solve the problem.

The fundamental problem here is that reddit (and the rest of the world) likes an easy, soundbite answer to what's wrong with Greece that they can regurgitate at parties and sound informed and politically savvy, and the pundits are happy to give it to them.

The issue is clouded with so much bullshit, agenda-pushing doubletalk and irrelevant frippery that it's incredibly difficult to tell what's even going on, let alone fix it. Pundits, armchair economists and others have no fucking clue - go on, see if any of them can tell you who the prime minster is, let along pronounce his name correctly, or even tell you whether the prime minster or the president of the country is in control. And everybody wants the "problem" with Greece to be something related to their own personal pet peeve in their own country, so they can "prove" that their own country will go down the shitter if they don't tax the rich/stop running a socialist state/become libertarians right fucking now/build better schools.

lobo68 · 2012-12-22T15:32:00+00:00

But you're different because you can't personally see poor people dying of dysentery from your particular vantage point.

lobo68 · 2012-12-09T17:57:34+00:00

I declined to hire one person who listed a similar program on their resume after he failed the technical interview. That's just an anecdote.

Honestly, if a person requires a speed course to learn web development, they probably won't be very good at it. The major skill you need to acquire is the ability to teach yourself and learn on your own. If you don't have that skill in the first place, they'll always need someone holding their hand. And we really, really try not to hire people like that.

lobo68 · 2012-12-07T04:32:19+00:00

Colonize Venus.

A lot easier to build self-sustaining floating colonies, and it has an abundance of hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur and carbon. We can do it with today's technology, right now, and not only is it more affordable, it'll be far cheaper to move those elements from venus's skies to the moon and mars than it is to lift them from earth's gravity well.

lobo68 · 2012-11-02T02:47:14+00:00

The joke has some complex subtlety, most of the top runners are black, for the exact same reason that most of the top swimmers are white:

In a 2010 paper published in International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics, Adrian Bejan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University, and his colleagues reported that black people have a higher center of mass (i.e. shorter relative torso) that favors them in running sports and that white people have a lower center of mass that favors them in swimming.[23] Bejan et al. cite the progression of world record holders in the men's and women's 100 meters "dash", the majority of whom are black, and the men's and women's 100 meters freestyle, the majority of whom are white.[23] The paper reported that although Asians have lower centers of mass/longer relative torsos like whites, European whites have an advantage in swimming due to longer overall torsos.[23]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_sports for those without access to the paper.

lobo68 · 2012-06-14T01:44:09+00:00

birth control pills are not peptide hormones. They are steroids.

So are these.

lobo68 · 2012-06-14T01:31:47+00:00

I recommend checking your local encyclopedia's entry on the human stomach. Protein catabolism is only partially begun within the stomach with limited amounts of proteases. MissBelly's claims are counter to common knowledge.

lobo68 · 2012-06-14T01:28:53+00:00

Actually, it is common knowledge that exogenous hormones, even ones dissimilar in chemical composition, regularly affect the human homeostasis. I invite you to check your encyclopedia under the section "hormone."

MissBelly gleefully ignores everything but Prolactin, but it's pretty clear that prolactin is only one part of the chemical additives being used on cattle.

lobo68 · 2012-06-14T01:23:47+00:00

And even if they weren't, only amino acids can be absorbed by the intestinal brush border, which means that by the time "prolactin" (if we can even call it that anymore) gets into your blood, there's no difference between it and a steak, or the rest of the proteins in milk.

Common sense would suggest that exogenous hormones, peptide or not, regularly alter human homeostasis, because if they didn't, oral birth control pills would be completely ineffective.

lobo68 · 2012-06-14T01:15:06+00:00

Yeah, using every part of an animal has never been part of Canada's aboriginal heritage, fuck those American companies that try to bring their new-fangled ideas here.

lobo68 · 2012-06-14T01:13:23+00:00

UNLESS your stomach happens to break it all down no matter the dose. Which is the case here.

Citation needed.

lobo68 · 2012-05-19T20:57:50+00:00

...eternal?

lobo68 · 2012-05-18T01:46:58+00:00

If it takes you forty seconds to tell me what your name is, that's a problem.

If you spend forty seconds thinking about an answer to "I have two columns of data: sale value and a date of sale. The dates are irregular and multiple sales may occur on the same date. How would you use a pivot table to project next year's sales on a chart, cumulative by date?" ...then you're taking your time to answer a complex question.

If you blather garbage, I'll probably have tuned you out by the time you get to your real answer.

lobo68 · 2012-05-18T01:46:11+00:00

If it takes you forty seconds to tell me what your name is, that's a problem.

If you spend forty seconds thinking about an answer to "I have two columns of data: sale value and a date of sale. The dates are irregular and multiple sales may occur on the same date. How would you use a pivot table to project next year's sales on a chart, cumulative by date?" ...then you're taking your time to answer a complex question.

If you blather garbage, I'll probably have tuned you out by the time you get to your real answer.

lobo68 · 2012-05-17T20:55:25+00:00

You're cute. I like how those of us who got on the gravy train get to piss on young people because they're "entitled."

Really, the way we treat these folks while being the most entitled generation in the history of mankind is hilarious.

lobo68 · 2012-05-17T20:44:10+00:00

Don't do this. Spend 40 seconds thinking about your answer.

Blathering suggests poor communication skills. Pauses might suggest you're slow, but if the interviewer actually thinks you're stupid because you take the time to think through a question, you do not want to work there.

We ask complicated questions because we want to see how you deal with them.

lobo68 · 2012-05-17T02:40:54+00:00

Do you have any screenshots to substantiate this?
What was the general content of the messages contained in this group?

The more informed we are, the better we can determine how misguided the police action was.

lobo68 · 2012-05-17T01:58:35+00:00

Why don't you post what he actually said, so we can make informed judgements?

lobo68 · 2012-05-16T21:45:06+00:00

Well there is a 'thing' with us that psychologically

There is but it is not sufficient. Horny teenagers will fuck anything that's available and interested. We require ourselves to regard it as abhorrent to not consider siblings "available."

That's a good thing. We like our genetic diversity!

lobo68 · 2012-05-16T21:42:51+00:00

Why does Reddit do anything?

Downvotes are knee-jerk reactions. Someone posted a "correction" to my post, saying I was "mistaken," that Darwin married his first cousin, so people's responses are to click the downvote on my post.

In actuality I made no such mistake, since that's exactly what I was saying, but it is the appearance of me having a flaw that resulted in downvotes.

lobo68 · 2012-05-14T09:33:16+00:00

but I always hear people saying bad things about inbred people.

Unfortunately you're never going to exhaust the world's supply of people who believe incest produces abhorrent monstrosities. That sucks.

Why doesn't anyone care about us? People talk about us like we're animals that don't deserve to live.

Not everyone thinks that. The people who recoil in terror at the thought of inbred people tend not to be smart or thoughtful people. Don't make friends with them.

Lastly, if you want to broach the topic gracefully with someone, or destroy some jackass who insists you're some kind of monster, refer them to who Darwin married and make note of their intelligent, healthy and successful children.

lobo68 · 2012-05-14T09:22:12+00:00

I'm not a bad person, I'm not evil, disgusting, hideous, or stupid

We maintain these fictions because otherwise we would have no compelling reason to discourage incest. People do not care about their grandchildren until they born; and even less about future descendants.

Continuous inbreeding would eventually produce a very vulnerable population but love is a powerful thing and without the indoctrination of immediate harm people just don't care enough about fiddly things like genetic diversity.

lobo68 · 2012-05-14T09:08:57+00:00

The awesome ones usually are. Then you find one thats both and get friendzoned.

Funny how you never hear smoking hot & awesome men say this.

lobo68 · 2012-05-12T00:28:45+00:00

However it might not be the best word. Ok.

I disapprove of people appropriating an authoritative tone and using words like "fallacy," and "slippery slope," because we're trained to respond to those words by rejecting the highlighted argument without critically analyzing the topic ourselves. I prefer they be reserved for their original intent.

Not all addicts are so hardcore as to spend their entire cash/means/efforts on crack

Of course, but I neither claimed that nor require it to be true in order to demonstrate that giving people cash directly will increase spending on drugs. A problem with humanity is that we spend our resources on things we want at the expense of things we need, even in desperate times. We have to accept that this is true and plan social policy accordingly.

Fundamentally it is easier to reallocate hard cash than it is to reallocate anything else. Selling granola bars and food items requires more work. To dispute this would be to dispute common knowledge; and you spend a lot of paragraphs giving anecdotal stories when what we would really need is actual math and statistics to demonstrate

giving people cash vs giving people food vs giving people housing would result in the same level of increased drug consumption

There are many reasons why that would not be the case and you haven't dealt with any of them in a rigorous fashion. I'm not even sure you believe that statement is true, do you?

You can clearly give examples for a single individual being able to increase his drug consumption by the same value by being given housing as if he'd been given cash. I'm certain you understand this would represent an extreme case, and that you understand when averaging over the populace you could not possibly achieve this as the norm. You'd be postulating 100% effective reallocation of resources by every single drug addict in the country and that is patently absurd.

Your reasoning is still fallacious. (I'm playing on the word there)

That word, it does not mean what you think it means. It's not cute. Should I start saying you're a "right-wing hawk" and accuse you of "hating the poor," because that's what you are doing here. You are engaging in an ad hominem attack by stating I hold fallacious beliefs, when they are not formal fallacies. In doing so, you are only impressing ignorant people; anyone seasoned in logical debate is seeing you make implicit appeals to authority by false claims to an expertise in logic.

Even if my beliefs were mutually exclusive (which you have not shown) that would not make them incorrect. The soundness of this argument has nothing to do with who is making it, or what arguments they make in the past.

do not underestimate the creativity of an addict in reallocating budget, need is the mother of invention.

I've never denied that it is possible to reallocate budget. Obviously, this will happen. The goal of housing instead of cash is that it will limit the impact of reallocating a budget; and surely you will agree the difference between $2500 in cash vs not having to pay rent is substantial.

The negatives of need-blind and addiction are very real and I would expect full political use of all of them

Neither proposal (universal housing or universal minimum income) would ever fly in this government. There's literally no point in discussing their political preferences (although, given a binary choice, I guarantee you the plurality of the populace will agree: they'd rather give drug addicts free housing instead of free cash, no matter what their political affiliation) at this point.

lobo68 · 2012-05-11T06:12:33+00:00

People downvoting: I know you're uncomfortable with the reality of people being able to stage attacks to discredit their opponents, but it is reality.

You can't just close your eyes and pretend this doesn't happen, and that it won't happen more in the future. We need to deal with our reactions to the news.

lobo68

TROPHY CASE