euccastro

OTOH, it's fortunate that the people that like those things get one obvious place to meet.

Besides the JVM part, this is my take on it: as a language, Racket defines a vast possibility space, which is a superset of that defined with Clojure. You could implement Clojure (barring the JVM) quite naturally in Racket, while the other way around would be impractical. Now, Clojure is a pretty sweet spot in that design space, and someone else has done the immense work to carve it out, define it, implement it, and foster a sizable community around it.

And sometimes I can do fine with no wrapper at all. Not only there's a lot of JVM code available, but interfacing with it is pretty quick, straightforward and smooth compared to wrapping C (or, god forbid, C++) from any Scheme I tried. I found that's very important. You can have lots of code theoretically available for wrapping, but there's more of an impedance mismatch between C and Scheme (think continuations/TCO, garbage collection, type conversion, and the fact that some tools in Racket/Scheme ecosystems will be blind to what happens in C land) so in practice it's a lot more work.

Nah, you'll be fine.

If you're interested into digging deeper, this just came out:

https://purelyfunctional.tv/guide/clojure-collections/

Echoing back the verb is a common way to reply affirmatively in Portuguese and (traditional) Galician. I hear that was common in Latin too. For some old Galician people, replying "yes" to a question is comprehensible but a mark of rudeness.

Alternate title if we're going to point fingers:

"Tom's Hardware Italy editor killed in terrorist act claimed by organization created, funded and armed by the US and some of its puppet states."

I think it's more accurate too.

I remember no big changes, nor any breaking changes, from Python 1.5.2 to Python 2. The major version bump was mostly a marketing move. At that time, a 1.x.y version number didn't look mature enough for some companies.

Hasta siempre comandante!

<3 <3 <3

Yeah, why not?

(Holy f* s*)

Maybe "bank-issued" currency is more accurate for the more traditional kind?

So apparently they really did close Sirkus[1], but they didn't tear down the house and build anything in its place?

[1] :´(

Could you elaborate on Varoufakis' confrontational manners? I think you may be misattributing to Varoufakis some moves by other actors in the Greek government.

As for high stakes... well, the stakes for someone coming into the finance ministry of Greece in this Europe are huge no matter how you look at it.

I don't suppose you mean that discussion is futile because our sources are tainted?

In this case Varoufakis is saying pretty much the same he used to years before he had any political responsibility.

FWIW, @barbijaputa is a contraction for "Barbie hija puta", which would be literally translated as "Barbie, daughter of a whore", although it's best understood as "Barbie the bastard". See her profile pic:

https://twitter.com/barbijaputa

It's not like they're having a lot of trouble pushing around Spain either...

A non-difference is that most of those loans went to service old loans anyway. And the main reason Greece can't get loans on the markets is because its current debt is obviously unsustainable and its position as a deficit country in a badly designed monetary union is hopeless.

I'm not disagreeing categorically, but I don't think it's that one-sided.

I was (i) considering the cascading effect of a Greek exit from the Euro, and (ii) thinking in relative terms: I'm not arguing that Germany will be worse off, but perhaps it has more to lose at this point.

Re: the cascading effect:

http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2011/08/04/why-italy-why-spain-and...

I'm aware that this article describes the dynamics of countries going to the receiving side of EFSF, not of countries leaving the Euro altogether, but I think the perverse dynamics described apply to the latter too.

Relying heavily on exports, as Germany does, may mean you have more to lose in a crisis like this. Consider what happens after a few more European countries stop generating demand for German goods, at the same time that demand from the US is weak too. Demand from the rest of EU and from the US was a big part of what made Germany 'a country like Germany'.

https://www.destatis.de/EN/FactsFigures/NationalEconomyEnvir...

Yes, imports would be unaffordable for Greece with the new currency and that will generate a lot of pain (not that devoting a big share of the national budget to servicing debt is helping a lot), but that will also force the country to correct that imbalance, making what's left of local industry more competitive. That pain would be a price to pay for adapting to a more self-reliant setup, while the one currently being endured (mostly on ideological grounds, I claim) seems more pointless.

Re: tourism, having their own currency to devaluate might help with that.

Re: standard of living, it's not like Greece's current situation, and their prospects within the demands of the memorandum are rosy either.

Corruption and nepotism won't help, but they aren't helping within the Euro either. If anything, those problems are made worse in colonial economies, which the deficit countries in Europe have been, for good and ill, to a large extent.

All in all, a Greek exit from the eurozone is a big lose-big lose proposition for anyone. I don't think it matters a whole lot who stands to lose more. But to the extent that it matters, I think it must be considered in relative terms. Overall, Germany has a better deal in the Eurozone than Greece, and it has more to lose.

Re: the French position wrt the Euro, you'd be surprised:

http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2014/12/26/6265/

Don't be so sure.

Economic policy is not designed for the benefit of "most Germans". I can assure you that life became much better for "some Germans" in the years since the Deutsche Mark, as cheap labor from Eastern Europe drove costs down and profits up, while less competitive countries within the EU couldn't devaluate their currency to rebalance trade flows. Actually, it became so much better that they didn't know what to do with all those euros. So they poured showers of them into said less competitive countries, fostering all kinds of bubbles.

http://blog.mpettis.com/2015/02/syriza-and-the-french-indemn...

When said bubbles exploded, those "some Germans" were bailed out, in great part by money from "most Germans", whatever little could be squeezed from "most Greeks", and "most" people from all countries rich and poor. "Most Greeks" never saw any of that bailout money.

Alas, coming back to the Deutsche Mark will not bring back the good old times for "most Germans". Even if it did, it won't happen because "some Germans" are perfectly happy with the current situation and the power it gives them.

OK. It's just as clear that Greece will not be able to indefinitely refinance its debt. As in, debt will perpetually grow beyond GDP. I don't think this is even controversial.

The US is an anomaly in that it has had the printing press for the world's reserve currency for more than forty years. Whether it'll be able to do so indefinitely is a different question.

Apropos this:

http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/books/the-global-minotaur/

If you read up on IMF's track record, esp. in Latin America, you could be excused to roll your eyes approximately as hard with both versions. I understand that Wikipedia accepts the first definition because it's an official mission statement of the IMF. That doesn't make it any more true in practice.

Euro exit is the nuclear option that Germany wants to keep in order to maintain its hegemony within the Eurozone, but never wants to exercise. The Euro served nobody better than Germany. The day Germany starts facing competitive devaluations all across Europe, recession will be brutal.

The day after Greece gets out the EU will have more and bigger problems than the day before.

No, German banks that made foolish investments should have taken the losses, so the German people wouldn't have to bail them out by proxy.

There is also an economic dimension: (a) and (b) are just impossible. There's no way Greece's debt can ever be repaid in full. All along, this farce has been about bailing out the foolish investments of private creditors (mainly German and French banks) at the expense of the taxpayers of all countries, mainly the "creditor" ones (because they are the ones that could foot the bill after all). The squeeze on the population of the "debtor" countries is mostly about ideology; from the perspective of the (new) creditors, it doesn't even make economic sense to push your debtors further into recession.

Future contracts depend more on the position of a country than on its payment history. Consider Ecuador. It has better ratings and access to credit after it pursued aggressive debt haircuts.