GREECE AND THE FUTURE

http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/coupland-greece-and-the-curse-of-leisure

hi marg
ya enjoyed it too, liked how long it was. unfortunately, by the end of it he had said enough contradictory things to amount to not saying much. and even a casual glance reveals a lot of sentences that just aren't true. there is a one-percent in greece. there are blue-collar workers, lots of them, and there are an educated managerial/professional class that live differently than the workers or the one-percenters. there are academics and students, lots of them too, there are fishermen, farmers with very small farms who work hard, alot of it hand labor, and yes, a prominent large crowd of civil servants with too-good too-early pensions compared to everyone else (including apparently german bankers) who seem to be a drag on the economy. but there are worse problems. think of the drag in the US on the economy (in the form of taxpayers) from the huge costs of the military and its adventures in search of secure oilfields and economic world dominance, with no actual return you can point to except alot of defense jobs paid for by the taxpayers, which adventures also cost the rest of the world alot of money each year. or the cost and human waste of their prison system of mass incarceration (again, at the expense of the taxpayers).

i am a practitioner of enjoying nothing to do and have always practiced alot. i value an undirected walk, an unplanned day and time to think and do whatever it occurs to me at the time i suddenly feeling like doing (like writing to you). so does mr. coupland. and he has made his own employment basically out of nothing anyone else wanted him to do, which i heartily approve. just like he talks about the greeks doing.

but i don't think the greeks here that i know are any better at that than any other north american. and most americans promised a good pension at an early age for doing a basically pretty slack job, whether growing up in greece or here, would probably leap at it. in the end, the greeks are just humans like all the others, influenced by the place they grow up in and conditions there, which for greece were pretty benign in terms of being protected from invasion and fed from the sea (and land) and housed in some pretty spectacular scenery. not like germany, which is not a hedonistic paradise by any stretch, and has a history of invasion and conflict stretching back a millenium, embedded as it is in a land mass of many small competing countries all pushing the edge of technology ever upward. and it is the german and british and french and US banks that encouraged greece to spend borrowed money both as consumers and as a nation, because they had idle capital wanting to make a return and they got good interest rates for lending to the greeks and also exported to them some of their production that the greeks then bought with the borrowed money. (i've got an old blog about that i will try to find.)

in the end, the european banks are going to have to eat alot of greek debt (which contains no calories) because they can afford it and greece can't and greece will still be in the euro zone and will still be a hedonistic paradise. and part of them will still secretly wish they were greek.

well, that turned out to be a bit of a rant. ;-)
cheers
h

hi encora

just doing lunch dishes and realized that both mr coupland and i missed what i consider the main point to take from the present ongoing euro quarrels, namely that prior to the post-world war two era there might easily have been an invasion or even a war over this much debt. the real news to take away from the whole dragged-out saga is that they are still sitting around a table talking (or not talking) and nobody's babies will be dead in the street, even though germany has all the arms and all the economic muscle. and that is huge. and that speaks more to the future of human life on earth than anybody's currency or debt decisions, whatever they decide. because as europe goes so goes america, china, russia and even the middle east (eventually) though they all would vehemently deny it.

happy face ;-)