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Category: government

Monday, 25 February 2013

09:40 – Barbara’s mom called Barbara’s cell phone again yesterday. When Barbara answered, her mom was just repeating Barbara’s cell phone number over and over again. Barbara couldn’t get her mother to respond, so she finally just hung up on her mom and called the nurses’ station. She ended up talking to her mom’s social worker, who interviewed Barbara about her mom’s medical and other history. The mystery of how Sankie was getting their phone numbers was cleared up when the social worker told Barbara that she’d seen Sankie wandering around carrying a slip of paper with phone numbers on it. Barbara told the social worker that she and her sister couldn’t take calls from their mom, particularly at work, and asked her to make sure that Sankie had only Dutch’s home phone number. Barbara is still hopeful that her mom will recover, of course, but I’m afraid that this is the new normal.

I’ll be spending some time this week filling bottles, thousands of them. I’m really glad I decided to buy that bottle-top dispenser. It speeds up filling immensely, even counting cleanup time between different solutions, particularly when I’m doing 60 to 240 bottles at a time. Meanwhile, I’ll also get labels printed for yet another batch of 60 chemistry kits and 60 biology kits. That’s about 5,000 container labels for Barbara to apply. Which means I need to get a few thousand more bottles and caps ordered.

17:01 – Well, the Italian elections are over, and if there’s one thing clear about this mess it’s that Italian voters have rejected “austerity” resoundingly. Bersani and his left-wing Democratic Party did much worse than expected, losing the Senate to a resurgent Berlusconi and his People of Freedom Party and winning only a 35% to 29% margin in the lower chamber. Former comedian Beppe Grillo and his Five Star Movement did much, much better than expected, with solid third place numbers in the polling. Mario Monte, the technocrat imposed on Italy by the EU, was a far distant fourth.

Bersani and Berlusconi hate each other’s guts and their parties’ policies are diametrically opposed, so there’s almost no chance that they will form a coalition. In essence, Italy is now without a government and is likely to remain so until new elections can be held later this year. Which means the ECB will no longer be propping up Italy’s bonds. Which means you can expect to see Italian bond yields start to skyrocket, sooner rather than later. Which means the euro crisis is back, bigger and badder than ever. Not that it was ever really gone. It was just smoldering. Watch it now, as it bursts back into flames worse than anything we saw at the “height” of the crisis. At this point, the most likely outcome is that Italy will crash out of the euro, returning to the lira, and default on its massive debt pile. The follow-on effects for Greece, Spain, Portugal, and France are likely to be catastrophic.

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Monday, 11 February 2013

07:50 – North Carolina is one of several states that are apparently in the early stages of revolting against the federal government. Every day, it seems, the front page of the paper has another article about one way or another that North Carolina is refusing to cooperate with the feds. We’re opting out of the expansion of Medicaid. As of July 1st, we’re reducing the duration and amount of unemployment benefits significantly, thereby becoming ineligible for the federal extended unemployment benefits program. And some local sheriffs and police chiefs have already said that they won’t cooperate with Obama’s proposed new gun control laws, because they are sworn to uphold the state and federal Constitutions. It wouldn’t surprise me if North Carolina followed Virginia, Utah and several other states in seriously considering introducing a silver- or gold-based state currency. And I’m hearing rumbles about some states considering declaring their residents exempt from paying all federal taxes. This could get interesting.

10:55 – I see the pope is going to abdicate at the end of this month. Media reports say this is the first time a pope has resigned since 1415, but in fact Gregory XII didn’t resign; he was pretty much fired from his pope job and demoted to bishop. IIRC, the RCC was then popeless until after GXII died. It seems to me that this is a great opportunity for the RCC to just wrap things up. Don’t bother electing another pope. Just let things wind down. Sell off all the assets and donate the proceeds to the current RCC members pro rata.

11:55 – I just finished filling 200+ 15 mL bottles with 1% phenolphthalein in IPA. It’s a lot quicker and easier to do that with the bottle-top dispenser rather than manually. The problem with manual filling is that the viscosity of IPA is low enough that it’s difficult to pour into the small opening of a 15 mL bottle without having it run down the sides of the bottle. The only problem with using the bottle-top dispenser is that phenolphthalein is extremely insoluble in water, so cleanup is a bit more involved than usual. Fortunately, phenolphthalein is soluble in basic solutions, so I’ll do multiple passes with a washing soda (sodium carbonate) solution, followed by a dozen passes of tap water, followed by a couple passes of DI water. The involved cleanup is why I did 200+ bottles in one run.

Next up is turmeric reagent, which is a solution of curcumin in IPA. It’s even more of a bitch to clean up, because it stains everything bright yellow, including even glass. For that one, I’ll start with a couple passes of IPA to get most of the staining gone. Curcumin is slightly soluble in sulfuric acid (about 1%), so I’ll follow the IPA wash with a dilute sulfuric acid wash to dissolve whatever curcumin remains. Several rinses in tap water and then DI water should finish the job.

15:25 – An hour or so ago I was surprised to get a call from Barbara’s mom. She was confused, thinking Barbara would be at home. I told her Barbara was at work and that I’d call her and have her return her mom’s call. So, a few minutes ago, Barbara called to say that her mom is going to be released at 2:00 tomorrow afternoon. That throws Barbara’s and Frances’s week into confusion, because the doctor wanted them to have someone with Sankie 24 hours a day. And that doesn’t include Dutch, apparently. So Barbara is going to pick up her mom tomorrow afternoon, take her home, and wait until Frances can get there. I’m not sure what they’ll do after that.

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Sunday, 3 February 2013

09:24 – Barbara’s mom is doing a bit better. Frances stayed with their dad last night and will tonight, so Barbara has a couple days at home off dad-sitting duty. She’s covering Monday and Tuesday nights.

Paul Jones stopped by yesterday to borrow a laser collimator. We talked about having dinner, and Paul mentioned that he and Mary had plans for yesterday evening and tonight. When I mentioned that to Barbara, she said they were probably having or going to a super bowl party today. I, of course, hadn’t realized that today is the super bowl thing.

Netflix sent me email yesterday to announce availability of their remake of House of Cards. We watched and liked the British version years ago, so I added it to our queue. Now I see there are all kinds of on-line articles about Netflix’s “$100 million gamble” and about how Reed Hastings is determined to have Netflix become more like HBO faster than HBO can become more like Netflix. We’ll see. Hasting is flying in the face of conventional wisdom by releasing all 13 episodes of the first season at once, catering to so-called “binge watchers”, rather than stringing them out as HBO would. But Hastings is a very smart guy, and he’s determined to transition Netflix from a content-delivery company to a content-creation and -delivery company. I think he’ll succeed.

Work continues on building more science kits. Barbara got a bunch of bottles labeled yesterday and will do more today. She’ll finish up the bottles for the next batch of 60 chemistry kits and get started on the next batch of bottles for biology kits. This coming week, I’ll be filling bottles.

And I see that Minnesota and Florida are in a spat because Minnesota is trying to tax Florida residents as though they were Minnesota residents. The rule has always been that if one lives in a state for more than half a year, one is a resident of that state for that year. If you spend six months and a day in State A and five months and 29 days in State B, you are legally a resident of State A. There are minor exceptions for military personnel and so on, but that’s always been the rule. Now Minnesota is trying to tax people whose legal residence is in Florida but who take long vacations in Minnesota, the so-called snowbirds. Florida is encouraging the snowbirds just to move to Florida full-time.

Differential state taxes have always been an issue. I grew up in New Castle, Pennsylvania, which is about 10 miles from the Ohio state line. When I was young, I remember my parents driving over to Youngstown, Ohio to buy major items like furniture. They’d have them delivered by truck. Because Pennsylvania charged sales taxes on these items and Ohio didn’t, they’d end up paying significantly less. We have the same situation in North Carolina near the Virginia border. Gasoline taxes are lower in Virginia, so it’s almost impossible for a gas station to stay in business near the border. Everyone drives over into Virginia to fill up. And the recent to-do over Phil Mickelson moving out of California to avoid state income taxes is yet another example, as is Amazon’s ongoing battle with states that are trying to force it to charge sales taxes, as is the “smuggling” of cigarettes from low-tax states like Virginia and North Carolina to high-tax states like New York.

The obvious solution is for all states to eliminate income, sales, and excise taxes, putting everyone on a level playing field. If we must have taxes, let’s return to what the Founding Fathers intended: import duties and a per capita tax. Period. I’d suggest $500/person to the city/county, $50/person to the state, and $5/person to the feds. That’s a federal budget of $1.5 billion/year, which should be plenty for them to do everything they should be doing.

12:19 – I’m cutting purchase orders for science kit components. It’s interesting. Back when we started building kits in mid-2011, I was typically issuing POs for 30 kits’ worth of components at a time. Then I started doing 60 kits’ worth, and then 120 kits’ worth. I’m now cutting POs for 250 kits’ worth or more at a crack. That’s likely to be the limit, though, simply because of our limited storage space.

I still have no good idea of how many kits we’ll sell this year. Right now, we’re maintaining roughly a kit per day, which annualizes to 350+ total kits for the year. But that ignores seasonality. In the July, August, September period, we should sell literally 10 or more times the number of kits per month that we sell in slow months. January and February are slow months. Our goal for 2012, our first full year in operation, was 250 total kits, which we easily beat. Our goal for this year was 500 kits, but unless the current run rate is an anomaly we’re looking at easily 1,000 kits for the year, if not more. We may end up having to rent space sooner than I’d planned.

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Thursday, 24 January 2013

07:42 – Barbara’s sister, Frances, took their mom to the neurologist appointment yesterday morning. He changed her medication, which they’re hoping will help their mom’s mental state. Then, yesterday afternoon, Barbara took her mom and dad to the audiologist appointment to get their hearing aids cleaned and tweaked and then went out to dinner with them. A few minutes ago, Barbara’s dad called to say that Sankie wouldn’t get out of bed and said she needed to go to the hospital. Barbara assured her dad that the new medication would take some time to kick in, and that Sankie didn’t need to go to the hospital. As Barbara just commented to me, “At least with your parents it was just one at a time.” She just left to head over to her parents’ place on the way to work.

10:08 – There were a couple of interesting articles on the front page of the paper this morning, one about charter schools and one about state income taxes. North Carolina is now a purely red state, with a Republican governor and Republicans controlling both sides of the legislature. They’ll use that clout to try to get a lot of bad laws passed, but along the way they’re also trying to get some Good Things done.

Donny Lambeth, who led the Forsyth County school board for 18 years and is now a state representative, is championing a law that will allow the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County school system to go 100% charter. Don Martin, the current superintendent of schools, is trying to keep that from happening. Almost 100% of the public school teachers and administrators are against it, of course, because that means they’ll no longer be government employees. They’d be employed by the individual charter schools, which would be non-profits. Like nearly all public school systems, ours pays much, much higher salaries and benefits than most teachers and administrators could ever hope to earn in the private sector. They also have almost absolute job security. If WSFC Schools transitions to 100% charter, all of that goes away. Of course, that’d be a very good thing for taxpayers and the children, but it gores the ox of the teachers and administrators so you can bet they’ll fight to the death to stop it from happening. Let’s hope they fail and we end up 100% charter. Hell, let’s hope we end up 100% voucher. Let the schools compete for students, and let the teachers compete for jobs.

As to the state personal and corporate income taxes, the governor and many in the legislature want to eliminate them entirely and make up the difference by extending the sales tax to apply to services. That might increase the current sales tax by a couple of percentage points. The liberals are howling about “regressive taxation”, of course, but the truth is that shifting to a sales tax to raise state revenues would be much fairer than what we have now. The US has the most “progressive” income tax in the developed world. The poorest 50% of our population pay next to nothing. In fact, many of them actually have negative income taxes; the government “refunds” income taxes to them that they never paid in the first place. The middle class pays about half the income taxes collected, and the wealthy pay the other half. North Carolina is even worse for the middle class. Our highest personal income tax rate is 7.75%, and even those who are just barely middle class pay high rates on most of their income.

11:14 – How could I have forgotten? The first real web browser, NCSA Mosaic, was released 20 years ago today. I downloaded and installed it immediately, and started browsing the web, such as it was. Back then, my co-worker John Mikol and I were the only people I knew who had full-time Internet access at home. We both had dedicated telephone lines at home that dialed into a modem rack at work. We dialed in and stayed connected 24×7, although that term was not yet common. Our nailed-up dial-up connections did drop once in a great while, but I think my all-time record length for one phone call was something like 18 months. John and I did a lot of neat stuff together. I remember the first time we burned a CD-R disc. At the time, almost no one had CD burners. I forget what the burner itself cost, but the discs were $50 each. John and I watched one as it burned. The burn failed, and John invented a new term that became part of technology jargon. “Well,” he said, “that’s a $50 coaster.”

Oh, yeah, John and I are among a very small group for another reason. We both finished the world-wide web. That is, when we installed Mosaic, we both followed every link on every page that was then up on the web.

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Friday, 18 January 2013

08:07 – We got what looks like a couple inches (~ 5 cm) of wet snow through about midnight, followed by rain and freezing rain. The temperature is now hovering right around freezing, which is going to make Barbara’s morning commute a mess. Colin is enjoying the snow. He’s never seen much of it.

Even with everything else going on, we’re managing to keep up with the demand for science kits. All of the kits are in stock, and we’re building more as fast as we can. The problem is, this is supposed to be a slow time of year, and I’d planned to spend this slow period doing things like pre-labeling thousands of bottles and otherwise preparing for the rush. Our goal for this year is 500 kits, but at the current run rate we’re doing close to that now on an annualized basis, not taking seasonality into account. Factoring in seasonality, if our current run rate holds up, we’d easily do 1,000 kits this year–our goal for CY 2014–and we might do 2,000. That’s why I’m kind of hoping that this mini-rush is an anomaly. If it isn’t, we’re going to be covered up all year long.

11:28 – I certainly don’t always agree with Ambrose Evans-Pritchard–he’s much too Keynesian for my taste–but his articles and blog entries are usually worth reading. Here’s an interesting one: A new Gold Standard is being born

I agree with him that returning to the Gold Standard is a bad idea, but not for the reasons he thinks. He favors fiat currency because he wants governments and central banks to be able to fiddle with the money supply. I don’t. I’ve always been a hard-money guy. Giving any government the ability to create “money” out of nothing always, without exception, ends badly. And, as he points out, central banks and governments are fully aware that the value of the Big Four fiat currencies–the US dollar, the euro, the GB pound, and the Japanese yen–are going to have their value inflated away big-time. No one wants to hold any of them, given a choice. The dollar is still by far the best of the four, and it’s pathetic. Gold and other commodities can’t be inflated.

But gold is a very poor choice of a value store, for two reasons. First, there’s not enough of it. At $2,000 per troy ounce, a kilogram of gold is worth only about $64,000. A tonne (1,000 kilos) of gold is worth only $64 million, and a kilotonne (1,000,000 kilos) only $64 billion. The other, and more important, reason is that a value store should be valuable because of what you can do with it, not merely because it’s rare (in an economic sense). Gold does have many practical uses, but certainly none that require it by the multi-kilotonne.

I would like to see the US dollar become a hard currency again, as it hasn’t been since 1964 (or 1970, depending on how you look at it). But returning to the Gold Standard isn’t the way to do it. Instead, the federal government needs to remonetize our currency by holding a defined basket of commodities for each dollar issued. The value of a dollar might be defined as a combination of so many milligrams of gold, so many milligrams of copper, so many grams of wheat, so many grams of petroleum, and so on. The actual value of those commodities will fluctuate with market conditions, but having the basket contain 100 or 1,000 different commodities minimizes the effects of such fluctuations and would keep the value of the dollar stable. But the key issue is that the government must actually hold the required commodities in the required amounts for each dollar it issues, and must redeem those dollars on demand by accepting a dollar and handing the depositor that market-basket mix.

Of course, you wouldn’t be able to walk into a bank, hand them a dollar bill (or even a $1,000,000 bill) and expect them to cough up the appropriate amounts of 100 or 1,000 different commodities. But the market would take care of that. You would be able to hand over $1,000 or $1,000,000 and receive the appropriate commodity or mix of commodities in the amounts that reflected the current market prices of those commodities.

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Tuesday, 1 January 2013

08:26 – Happy New Year.

As I expected, the Demopublicans and Republicrats have kickcanned the fiscliff for another month or two. Morons. And Obama has announced that new gun control laws will be his top priority. Geez. This from a man who is constantly surrounded by a Schutzstaffel of heavily-armed SS agents. I’d have at least a bit of respect for the bastard if he’d dismiss his bodyguards and walk around unprotected like the rest of us. Hypocrite.

Meanwhile, our business has started 2013 catastrophically. We haven’t sold a single science kit since last year.

10:42 – After struggling with forum spammers for a long time, I finally decided to close down our phpBB support forums on our own server and start new forums on Google Groups.

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Monday, 31 December 2012

07:33 – The Democrats and Republicans are still locked in a struggle at the top of Reichenbach Falls. I’m hoping that the Democrats are Moriarty and the Republicans Holmes, but I’m afraid they’re both going over the edge this time. Well, not afraid, really. I still think they’ll come to an agreement, but only to keep the old tax rates for middle-class taxpayers and perhaps to keep milk prices from doubling. And even that level of agreement may take another month or more, although I’m sure the tax rates will apply retroactively.

Housecleaning continues. Barbara has already gotten a lot done, and we’ll get more done today and tomorrow. Today we’re starting on the Augean Stables, AKA my office.

10:04 – After only a couple of hours, we’ve already cleaned up the floor of my office and the top of my main desk. Next up is my secondary desk or perhaps my tertiary desk.

Oh, and after finding purchase orders, invoices, packing lists, and assorted other paperwork scattered in piles all over my office, Barbara has decreed that from now on she’s taking over responsibility for all paperwork. In my defense, I keep copies of POs on my computer, and I’ve never been late paying an invoice. I just treat the paper itself with disdain. At least I do keep all of it.

14:22 – My office is about 90% clean. I still need to clean off my secondary desk and do a bit more on my tertiary desk. While we were cleaning my office, Barbara found an easter egg: five spare 30-round AR-15/Mini-14 magazines that I’d forgotten I had. Maybe I should see if a DC TV station wants to interview me.

And our business year is officially over. We just shipped our final science kit of 2012. Like the first kit of the year we shipped back in January, this one was a CK01AG chemistry kit.

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Wednesday, 5 December 2012

07:35 – We started watching Rescue Me on Netflix streaming last night. The writing so far is excellent, and it has a good cast. The Big Three have always been a staple of American TV drama series: cops, doctors, and lawyers. I’m surprised there aren’t more fire department shows. I guess they’re more costly to shoot. Barbara likes this one, although she says it’s a “guy show”.

We got a chemistry kit order yesterday from a woman in Canada, who wanted to order the US version of the kit and have it shipped to a US address. Figuring she was visiting friends in the US, I told her the kit should arrive Saturday, and asked if she’d still be there then. No problem, she said, she’d just drive down and pick it up when it arrived. As it turns out, it’s only a three-block drive.

I built a dozen of the new chemistry kits yesterday. I would have built more, but I had only a dozen of one of the subassemblies shared between the two chemistry kits. We’ll build 60 more of those subassemblies this weekend.

11:48 – The question needs to be asked: Is Europe Suicidal?

That eurozone countries would even consider the idea of abdicating sovereignty to the EU Supreme Soviet in Brussels makes that a reasonable question. That Britain would even consider remaining a member of the EU with such a kamikaze club in prospect suggests that Cameron has been ingesting hallucinogens. What Cameron should be doing as quickly as possible is withdrawing unilaterally from all EU ties other than the common market. At the same time, he should be strengthening ties with the US and Canada, including applying for membership in NAFTA. Geopolitically and culturally, UK interests align with those of North America, not Europe.

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Thursday, 29 November 2012

07:34 – Front page article in the newspaper this morning about a young local couple that are in the running for Parents of the Year. They’re both 20 years old. He was playing video games at 5:00 a.m. when their 2-week-old baby disturbed him. So he did what any father would do; picked her up by the neck and punched her to death. The woman, like all mothers, paid close attention to her new baby. Around 2:00 in the afternoon, she finally got around to checking on the baby and found her dead. Before calling 911, the two of them discussed their options. Among those were hiding the body, claiming the baby had been kidnapped, and fleeing to the mountains. He’s charged with first-degree murder; she with accessory after the fact. No word on what’s happened to their 15-month-old son, who presumably is in the care of social services.

Work continues on the new science kits.

11:20 – It seems that the Bank of England has finally realized that the Big Four UK banks are sitting on a boatload of PIIGS sovereign, bank, and corporate debt, something like $250 billion total. Because they don’t mark to market, these banks are carrying that $250 billion at book value on their P&L statements, when in reality it’s worth significantly less. Sir Mervyn King, the outgoing Governor of the BoE suggests that these four banks require recapitalization to the tune of $50 billion or so. I don’t think that’s going to be enough. In the long run, $250 billion is closer to the correct number.

And, speaking of the long run, the BoE has an interesting graphic in its latest Financial Stability Report. Based on CDS premiums, they estimate a 5-year probability of default for various EU countries. Greece, of course, has a 5-year probability of default of > 100% (I know, but that’s what the numbers say…), so it isn’t even present on the graphic. Portugal is currently around 60%, Ireland and Spain about 40%, Italy around 30%, and France 15%. I think these numbers are low, because they don’t take into account the domino effect; when Greece finally collapses, investors’ attention immediately shifts to the next weakest country, causing it to collapse, and then on and on until the whole row of dominoes falls. My gut reaction is that the probability of France defaulting within five years is probably in the 80% to 90% range, with the others correspondingly higher. There’s only so long that the inevitable collapse of the euro can be staved off with smoke and mirrors. I have to admit that Merkel is doing a good job of that so far, but the tools she has available are about used up.

15:45 – As I knew it would when the latest Greek deal was announced a couple of days ago, it’s falling apart already. The IMF is really getting tired of empty promises and bogus economic forecasts. As should be obvious to anyone, Greece has absolutely zero chance of ever paying back that $400 billion mountain of debt. If the EC/IMF/ECB were using sane accounting practices, they’d already have written off all of it. As things stand now, all of the Greek debt held by the EC/ECB is effectively uncollectable. The IMF, recognizing that even as senior creditor, it is unlikely to be able to collect more than a small fraction of what is owed to it, even if the eurozone debt-holders get nothing, the IMF is determined not to throw good money after bad. And Holland and Finland feel pretty much the same way. They know that the money they previously lent is lost, and they’re not about to take any more of a hit by lending still more.

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Wednesday, 28 November 2012

08:10 – The house diagonally across the street from us has been vacant for more than a year. Barbara mentioned last weekend that she’d seen a young couple looking at it with the real estate agent and then returning on their own to shoot some pictures. I ran into the real estate agent yesterday while I was walking Colin. He says the young couple has the house under contract. Of course, nowadays that’s no guarantee, but it looks like there’s a good chance it’ll soon be occupied again.

I just had Colin out in the front yard and saw the woman who lives across the street out in her front yard with her dog. Thinking she’d be pleased, I told her that the house next to hers was under contract to the young couple that Barbara had seen looking at it over the weekend. Her only response was, “I hope they’re not black.” Geez. I never have any idea what to say to comments like that. I almost replied, “No, Barbara said that they’re both nice young white men.” Presumably she dislikes gays as much as she dislikes blacks. So I just told her I didn’t know what color they were and asked her what difference it made.

I swear that the people who write many TV series must have science dictionaries on their desks. When they’re writing a scene that involves science, they must just flip the dictionary open to a random page, stick their finger down, and use that word. How else to explain nonsensical dialog that contains apparently random strings of sciency words? On one episode of Rizzoli and Isles, the pathologist (Isles) was explaining something to the detective (Rizzoli) about a death and said (with a straight face) that something had interfered with telophase. Eh? She never did explain whether she was talking about telophase in meiosis or telophase in mitosis. Why don’t the producers of these series hire a scientist–any scientist–to tell them when their plots and dialog make zero sense?

Barbara is going out to dinner tonight with a friend and then to a Celtic music performance. That means it’s wild women and parties for me. Either that, or I’ll watch Heartland reruns.

11:29 – Angela Merkel says she’s very optimistic that the eurozone crisis will be solved in her lifetime. Merkel is 58. The average life expectancy in Germany is 80. Allow me to translate what she really means: “I’m very confident that the eurozone will not collapse until after I am reelected next autumn.”

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