Atropos

But quite tame in comparison to Greek media the picturing Merkel with a swastika or the Schäuble cartoon where it was implied he wanted to make soap out of Greek citizens in new concentration camps...

Wouldn't help, Deutsche Bank doesn't have too many retail clients, getting reimbursed for 100.000 Euros of deposits doesn't help the typical corporate client much.

Highly unusual for an investment bank, they acquired Postbank to open up a retail channel, but that is < 5% of the size of Deutsche Bank.

Oh sure nobody knows how it will turn out in detail. But it's important to keep in mind what the EU Commission as the decisive actor wants. If companies would be compensated for the retraction of illegal tax subsidies - for example, by only having to pay the legal tax rate of the alternative country they would have chosen - there would be no incentive to avoid these tax deals: Either a) the subsidy is legal under EU law or b) the company gets compensated and receives the best legal tax rate they could have gotten anyway.

But it's just my estimation, I could easily be wrong though. And I'm happy with any outcome, because all lead to lots of billable hours :)

Don't worry about damages claims, EU state aid law > national law. Even if national courts would grant a damages claim, the EU Commission would just order a recovery again, because it would be state aid in another form. Not exactly the same, but the Micula case is similiar: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-15-4725_en.htm

Your misconception is that the action was "completely legal in the law of the country they were operating in". Belgium is part of the EU and the EU rules on state aid are in the Treaty on the Function of the European Union, which is a higher legal source than any national law - even the national constitutional law - of any of the EU's member states.

You need to understand the setup of the European Union and EU state aid law. Part of the idea of the EU is creating a common internal market between the 28 EU member states. For creating a level playing field that is not distorted by state intervention, you have to prevent single member states from giving unilateral advantages to their own companies (ie creating "national champions"). So if member state A gives an illegal subsidy to a company, you could of course fine member state A to prevent this behaviour in the future - but you would not be able to remedy the distortion of competition that already occured because of the subsidy. It is much more efficient to order member state A to recover the illegal subsidy they granted to the company in the first place.

It is quite telling that the Belgian government in this case is actually going to appeal the Commission decision - although the Commission decision would lead to Belgium being granted 800 million Euros!

"Proving" something in a court of law (in criminal law) only requires that there is no reasonable doubt. Providing alternative explanations that are not logically impossible, but exceedingly unlikely, does not help you much. If the Dexter thing occured as written here, proving intentional copyright infringement is very easy.

Bitcoin's usage would go down, legitimate businesses would disappear. Legislation like this is not likely to happen, but this techno-hubris "Governments can't touch us, because we use smart technologies!" is quite ridiculous.

Oh please, in principle you could easily regulate Bitcoin like Heroin, meaning make it illegal to buy/sell, manufacture (mine) etc... While Bitcoin would not disappear, it would become even less mainstream than now. Hopefully this is not possible under constitutional law!

>> It's just bizarre.

That's what I thought about the New Yorker article about Theranos/Holmes (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler) a while back, where it was said about her: "Her home is a two-bedroom condo in Palo Alto, and she lives an austere life. Although she can quote Jane Austen by heart, she no longer devotes time to novels or friends, doesn’t date, doesn’t own a television, and hasn’t taken a vacation in ten years. Her refrigerator is all but empty, as she eats most of her meals at the office. She is a vegan, and several times a day she drinks a pulverized concoction of cucumber, parsley, kale, spinach, romaine lettuce, and celery."

Oh but the current generation of Germans has a moral responsibility to help the current generation of Greeks because Germany got debt forgiveness 60 years ago ???

This is beyond ridiculous and in fact insulting to recent Greek governments. Come on, do you really think the media landscape and average knowledge of voters in 1933 in Germany was anywhere comparable to elections in Greece from 1990 onwards? Germany only became democratic after the 1st world war, had totally unstable governments, a head of state who openly did not believe in democracy (Hindenburg), the great depression hit and SA troops were beating people up in the streets.

Not working less hours, but much less "productive" in an economic sense. See US Patent statistics: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/cst_utl.htm

Even in the boom years of 1999-2008, Greece had like 20 patents / year, while Austria or Finland have 600-900, despite having a smaller population.

Greece supporters do not seem to care about facts at all. Same for the GDP numbers, they always use the graph from 2008, whereas the graph from 1999 is much more enlightening: https://twitter.com/jmackin2/status/615576571890565121

Even in the boom years, the numbers of Greek patents granted per year is ridiculously low, the number of Greek universities in the worlds top-500 is ridiculously low and Greece's rank in the world banks Doing Business report is still the worst of any OECD country - after 5 years of "reforms"!

You are misinformed, according to the regularly performed Eurobarometer polls (http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/eb/eb82/eb82_en....), there is not a single poll since 2006 where more people had a negative view than a positive view of the EU.

The article is about a decision of the UK High Court, not the European Court of Justice, so it only applies to the UK.

I guess it depends on how productive the smart watches become. Maybe 10-15 years ago, you could still find politicians openly state that they do not use computers, that they never read emails but only get them printed out by their secretaries, that they do not own or use a mobile phone... Nowadays, that is not very common anymore, and I don't believe it is the generational change alone, I believe it is due to a change of the cultural attitude, not engaging with technology like email or mobile phones makes you seem backwards and even a bit incompetent. Maybe "smart watch" vs "dumb watch" will turn out the same? But I guess nothing precludes the Swiss watchmakers from producing expensive smart watches, that will be both functional and a fashion statement.

The "not going homeless" already exists in European welfare states, you do not need Basic Income for that. The main difference with basic income is that it would be paid to people who could work, but choose not to. This might not make a difference in most cases, but the edge cases could be really expensive: If you are 63 and can retire at 65, wouldn't basic income give you an incentive to travel the world for 2 years? Same for a high school student delaying college for 1 or 2 or 3 years...

Would the basic income only apply to high income countries or worldwide? Because I feel that it would be extremely unfair and maybe even unethical to give every US citizen a basic income for life, while people elsewhere die from hunger.

You were complaining about lacking enforcement by the EU in your other comment. Firstly this is misplaced in this case - there is no central EU telecom regulator so it is up to the national member states to enforce it. Secondly the quoted prices accurately describe reality once a cross-border element comes in - the EU cannot regulate your home market; for this reason, SMS are cheaper for me when I'm abroad then when I'm home as well.

If it is true that the tariffs do not apply for you, then just write an email to your telecom regulator, for example Spain would be http://www.cnmc.es/

This is just blind EU hate, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_roaming_regulati... how war the roaming charges have dropped over the years.

The costs are much lower than in geographically near but non-EU countries like Switzerland or Norway.

The fine amounts being thrown around are mostly bad journalism. The law allows a fine of up to 10% of annual turnover, but even in most hard-core cartel cases, they will not go into the upper bound. And especially in this case, it is not clear if Google will be fined in the end at all - the Motorala SEP case ended without a fine as well: http://www.fosspatents.com/2014/04/eu-settles-sep-antitrust-...

I'm sorry, but this is a ridiculous way to think! You give me 100 Euros that I promise to repay later. When "later" comes, I refuse to pay. My brother finds this humiliating and to protect the family name buys the debt from you for 10 Euros. Should I now be able to say to him "Hey, a smart hedge fund would have only paid 1 Euro for this debt - you pushed 9 Euros of book losses on me, that I had nothing to do with! I'm getting taken advantage only to save the family name!"

Nevermind the theoretical principles involved, the actual numbers are quite different from what you probably believe: All in all, around 200 Billion Euros of private creditor debt was restructured:

1) 107 Billion Euros were simply written off

2) 62,4 Billion Euros of old private bonds were exchanged into new private bonds

3) Only 29,7 Billion Euros were paid out to private creditors and shifted onto the books of other Eurozone governments.

Sometimes using fewer words enhances clarity. Country A has debts of 100 Euro. The debt gets restructured by 50% so that Country A now only has debts of 50 Euros. How has this transaction magically pushed losses onto public books of Country A?

Actually, the highest investment in Greek government bonds was by Greek banks, see "The Greek Debt Restructuring: An Autopsy" by Zettelmeyer/Trebesch/Gulati.

You are using the anti-bailout and anti-banker rhetoric from the bailouts in the financial crisis, but this situation here is totally different: Greece borrows 100€ from a bank, cannot repay it, so there is a huge debt haircut and Greece only has to repay 50€. Now an argument can be made that the haircut should have been even bigger, but there was no shifting of "bankers losses onto public books".

You can make the argument that the other EU countries taxpayers had to cover Greek debt to banks (including Greek banks) with their own taxpayer money - but that is something that only the other EU countries could complain about!

The EU's competition authority has actually launched an antitrust investigation into this in January 2014: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-14-15_en.htm

It's a really complicated issue though, but hopefully, geo-restrictions will vanish at some point in the EU, either by legal or political force.

Small nitpick: EU has 28 member states, everybody always forgets about Croatia :)

1) Spanish and Italian ten year bond yields are around 1,50, an all time low. Obviously the market doesn't think that Greece defaulting would have a huge impact on them.

2) Sweden and Switzerland both have strong currencies and are doing fine. Greece's problems have very little to do with the Euro: Look at rankings like the Doing Business Report, Transparency International's Corruption index, rankings of economic competitiveness - in all these rankings Greece is doing horribly! Look at the ARWU rankings of top 500 Universities worldwide (http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2014.html): Greece has 2 Universities in the top 500, Sweden has 11 and Switzerland has 7 (highly ranked) Universities. Look at patent filings, for example the US Patent office (http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/cst_all.htm): Sweden had 2413 patents filed in 2013, Switzerland had 2466 and Greece had 70 (!!!). Considering the countries comparable population size (Greece is biggest), this is a HUGE disparity!

Does anybody know if this is in the "idea" stage right now or if it is a working product?

If I understand correctly, this is a project by a team of University of Toronto undergraduate students for a competition to receive 100,000 $ seed funding by IBM and continued access to Watson. It seems to me that the stated goals are incredibly ambitious // hard to reach with these resources?