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Category: government

Wednesday, 25 July 2012

09:29 – The economic news continues to get worse, with both the UK and US numbers tanking. Nearly the whole world, it seems, is determined to spend massively more than it can afford. There will be a reckoning. It will not be pretty.

It amazes me that people casually treat sovereign indebtedness figures of 100% and more of GDP as though they’re no real cause for concern. People tell me that families run similar or higher debt levels when they buy a house. But there’s a huge difference. When a family buys a house, they’re going into debt to purchase an asset. Over the course of 15 to 30 years, they devote a significant percentage of their “family GDP” to paying down that debt. And when they pay off that mortgage they are out of debt and own a valuable asset. With countries, on the other hand, the debt is structural. They are not going into debt to purchase an asset, and they are not paying the debt down. The converse, in fact; they’re adding more debt every year. And even if they do eventually pay it down, they’re left with no asset.

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Tuesday, 24 July 2012

09:48 – Spain has as much as said that it will require a full bailout imminently, although as a sop to their pride they’re calling their request a “bridging loan”. A bridge to nowhere. And Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands have as much as said that they’re finished subsidizing Greece. The next couple of months are going to be interesting, in the sense of the old Chinese curse.

What I find amusing is that nearly everyone is missing the point. They blame the so-called “austerity” measures for crushing the economies of the bailed-out countries. In reality, they’re misattributing the symptoms of the underlying disease to side effects of the treatment. The tanking economies of these countries are in the toilet not because of the mild austerity measures being enforced on them, but as a result of a decade or more of irresponsible spending and assuming commitments that were and are impossible to meet.

Austerity measures on the level necessary would in fact solve the problems. They would also reduce Greece, Portugal, Spain, and eventually Italy to the living standards of third-world countries. But that reduction in living standards is inevitable no matter what is or isn’t done. These countries partied on borrowed money for a decade. Now the money has run out, and no one is willing to lend them more. It reminds me of the days shortly after the Cuban revolution, when the USSR was heavily subsidizing Cuba.

Cuba: Send money!
USSR: Tighten belts!
Cuba: Send belts!

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Monday, 23 July 2012

10:24 – The eurozone train wreck continues, with Spanish benchmark 10-year bond yields now at 7.6% and climbing, and Italian yields well over 6%. Even more concerning is that Spain’s efforts to make it look as though the market is still supporting their debt auctions by offering only small face amounts at short maturities have failed miserably. Spanish short-term debt yields are now over 6%, a strong indication that Spain is about to lose all access to market funding. In effect, it already has. Right now, only speculators willing to risk their money for short periods at very high yields are buying Spanish debt. The market as a whole is much too risk-averse to put money into Spanish bonds, or indeed leave it in Spanish banks. That giant sucking sound you hear is billions of euros a day leaving Spain. And Italy isn’t doing much better. They’ve just announced that they may not be able to start the new school year this autumn because they don’t have the money to do so.

Meanwhile, Barbara and I are still building science kits. We just added 30 biology kits to inventory, and are most of the way through building 60 more chemistry kits. After that, we’ll build the first batch of 30 forensic science kits, and then start immediately on new batches of biology and chemistry kits.

13:05 – Wow. The NCAA let Penn State off with a slap on the wrist. What would have been an appropriate NCAA penalty for a university guilty of covering up institutionalized child rape under the auspices of the athletic program? How about expulsion from the NCAA? Not just football, but all sports. Permanently. The entire Penn State athletic program should have been eradicated and the corpse left to rot as a warning to others.

14:11 – As usual, Pat Condell gets right to the heart of the matter. American Dhimmi

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Thursday, 19 July 2012

09:50 – The latest IMF report on the eurozone is out, and it makes truly scary reading for anyone who’s invested in the euro, financially or emotionally. Basically, the report concludes that the euro is doomed unless the eurozone takes certain specific actions. That’s a superfluous qualifier, because those actions–debt pooling, eurobonds, and so on–are steps that Germany and the rest of the northern tier are never going to take.

Germany is as aware as anyone that there is no solution to this crisis, short of Germany agreeing to pay everyone else’s debts. Not just current debts, either. Germany would be expected to continue funding deficit spending in the southern tier permanently. The probability of Germany, along with Finland and Holland, agreeing to such a “transfer union” are somewhere between zero and less than zero. So, the euro is going to crash. Or, more precisely, the southern tier is going to crash, whether they’re on the euro or revert to using local currencies.

One of two things is going to happen: either Germany will revert to the D-mark, or possibly to a new currency. Call it the Northern euro. In the latter case, Finland and Holland may join Germany in a currency union, and perhaps a political union. (Everyone is now painfully aware what happens when a currency union exists without a political union to support it. But the cultures and economies of those three countries are similar enough that a currency union might be workable for at least a couple of decades before stresses started to tear it apart.) The second option is that the debtor nations will depart the euro and return to sovereign currencies, leaving Germany, Finland, and Holland with perhaps Luxembourg and one or two other nations using the euro.

German politics is bi-polar about this. On the one hand, if Germany keeps the euro and other, profligate nations leave it, the debts they owe Germany will continue to be denominated in euros, which will remain a “hard” currency. Germany would hope to get at least some of those debts repaid, in hard euros. On the other hand, Germany has in effect co-signed for hundreds of billions of euros in loans to southern tier nations that have no prospect of ever being repaid by those nations. Germany will be on the hook to repay those loans, which of course are euro-denominated. That means that if Germany departs the euro, which would immediately crash to something like 5% to 10% of its former relative value, Germany would be able to buy cheap euros to pay off those debts.

Forget all that stuff about “war guilt” and “European solidarity”. The simple truth is that for Germany, as for everyone else, it ultimately comes down to money. Who will get stuck paying all these bills? Until now, it seems that Germany’s policies have been intended to force weak nations into leaving the euro. But it seems to me that things are shifting now, with the ever-increasing commitments that Germany finds itself tied to. At some point soon, one of two things is going to happen. A weak nation will abandon the euro, which will start the dominoes toppling. Or Germany will finally give up, and abandon the euro itself.

In fact, given that for all intents and purposes the euro is already a zombie currency, it’s possible that both things will happen. Germany will go back to its sovereign currency, and so will everyone else, leaving the euro as a currency without a country.

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Tuesday, 10 July 2012

08:10 – I see that the mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania has cut the pay of all city employees, including himself, to minimum wage. Predictably, the howls of outrage, particularly from the public employee unions, are loud and continuous.

A basic principle of economics is that if qualified people are lining up to apply for jobs with you, you’re paying too much. And there’s no doubt that many of the government jobs in Scranton are overpaid, as are most jobs with most government organizations. I shudder to think, for example, what Winston-Salem pays garbage collectors, a job that’s minimum wage by definition. These people aren’t even required to be able to read.

A minimum-wage job pays roughly $15,000 per year. It seems to me that government at all levels should have three tiers. At least 50% of government employees–garbage collectors, clerks, and so on–should be making minimum wage to 2X minimum wage, with the average for those 50% no higher than 1.5X minimum wage. The second tier, 45% of government employees, should be in the 2X to 3X minimum wage–call it $30,000 to $45,000 per year, with the average for that group no higher than 2.5X minimum wage. That group includes police, firefighters, teachers, and so on, along with most federal employees. The final 5% should be at 3X to 4X minimum wage–$45,000 to $60,000 per year, with the average for that group no higher than 3.5X minimum wage. That group includes management.

11:35 – If you’ve ever wondered what I went through shooting videos for my TheHomeScientist channel on YouTube, here’s a true-to-life example. It’s the uncut version of what was to become a 21 second promo for Heartland. Graham Wardle (Ty) and Amber Marshall (Amy) star in the promo. Amber is a consummate pro. Graham is kind of like me, except he doesn’t make (quite) as many mistakes or need (quite) as many reshoots.

12:58 – Speaking of shooting videos for my YouTube channel, it’s about time I started doing some new ones. I posted the most recent one two years ago next month, and between writing books, starting the business, and doing kits, I just haven’t had time to shoot and edit any new ones. Amazingly, I still have something like 8,000 or 9,000 subscribers.

My current camcorder is an SD unit that records to mini-DV tapes. There was some discussion in the comments recently about an HD Canon model that records to flash memory and has an audio input. I suppose I should order one of those. There seems little point to recording SD video when a decent HD camera for my purposes sells for $300.

I suppose I should start my first new video by shouting “Stop! Don’t pay the ransom! I’ve escaped!” Or something like that. I’ve been MIA for two years now, and some of my subscribers are likely to be surprised at my return. I suppose I’ll just tell them what I’ve been doing all that time, as well as announcing the biology book and the forensics book, along with their kits. Then I have some good ideas for follow-up videos about some really neat stuff. Some of it’s trivial, but obscure. For example, a lot of home scientists occasionally need some 30% hydrogen peroxide. You can order it from a lab supplies vendor, but it’s fairly expensive and in anything but the smallest amounts requires paying a hazardous shipping surcharge. But there’s a trivially easy method that requires no special equipment to concentrate drugstore 3% hydrogen peroxide to 30% or higher. I think I paid something like $1.59 for a quart (almost a liter) of 3% hydrogen peroxide at Costco. That’ll yield about 100 mL of 30% peroxide.

Sometimes the USPS rates make no sense whatsoever. We normally ship kits in a USPS Priority Mail Regional Rate Box B. I just processed an order for two chemistry kits from a woman in California, which is Zone 8. Those two boxes would have cost $15.46 each to ship in the RR Box B, but substituting a Priority Mail Large Flat Rate box cuts the cost to $14.65 each. The FR box is larger than the RR box and its weight limit is 70 pounds, versus 20 pounds for the RR box. So why is the FR box $0.81 cheaper to ship to Zone 8? I just slide each pre-packed RR box into a FR box and thereby saved myself $1.62.

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Monday, 2 July 2012

14:37 – I’ve spent most of the morning on the phone, on-hold, being transferred among, and talking with representatives from various US government organizations, ranging from the US Postal Service to the Department of Commerce to the Department of Defense to (I am not making this up) the Census Bureau.

I was trying to find out how to fill out a form properly, more particularly PS Form 2976-A Customs Declaration and Dispatch Note. The Census Bureau was actually the starting point, where the instructions on the form directed me for information about filling out Box 11, which is descriptively named “EEL/PFC”. I might have figured it out myself if they’d used the expanded form: “Exemption or Exclusion Legend/Proof of Filing Citation”.

I learned that I really, really wanted an EEL rather than a PFC, because the latter is a lot more work. The EEL is basically the quick-and-dirty no-paperwork option. To use it, you must meet two requirements. The first was easy enough. The value of the individual shipment has to be $2,500 or less. Our kits sell for about a tenth that or less, so that wasn’t a problem. But (there’s always a “but” with government crap) the second requirement was that the shipment contain nothing restricted. Restricted in the sense of having potential military or terrorist uses. Stuff like ultra-centrifuges for separating fissionable isotopes. After spending three hours on the phone, with everyone saying “I don’t think high school science kits will be a problem, but you need to make sure…” I finally got to someone who knew how to resolve the issue. I visited a web page where I could “self-qualify” as exempt. So now all I need to do is write “30.37a” on line 11 (and possibly “EAR99” although I couldn’t get a definitive answer for that) and on line 17 “NLR” or “No License Required”. I think.

So then I called USPS support to verify that I knew exactly how to fill out the form. The woman I spoke with said everything sounded fine. In fact, she thought I could just leave lines 11 and 17 blank, but said it wouldn’t hurt to write what I’d been told to write in them. She also suggested that for the first shipment I should visit the local post office just to verify that everything was correct. So, Thursday (Wednesday is a USPS holiday and I didn’t want to ship the day before a holiday) I’m going to drive to post office and ship my first kit to Canada. We’ll see what happens.

We got four chemistry kit orders yesterday, which took us down to only three remaining in stock. I’m not too concerned, because we have everything necessary to assemble another dozen quickly, followed by 18 more once the shipment of beakers arrives. But we did decide to boost the size of the next batch of chemistry kits from 30 to 60, because these things are starting to sell pretty quickly.

I also posted a forensics landing page and forensics kit page. As of now, we’re accepting pre-orders for the forensics kits, although we won’t be shipping them until next month.

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Friday, 29 June 2012

08:24 – The news stories from the EU Summit-of-the-Month report that Merkel has backed down. Nothing could be further from the truth. With regard to the only thing that matters–Germany paying everyone else’s bills–Merkel hasn’t yielded a centimeter. The EUrocrats have simply spun a couple of minor decisions to appear major. All they’re about is allowing the leaders of Spain, Italy, and France to save face. Nothing has changed. There’s been a minor decrease in Spanish and Italian bond yields, but that’s unlikely to last long. The euro comes out of this conference no better off than it was going in, and probably worse. As always with the EU, it’s Videri Quam Esse.

I just issued a big purchase order for kit components to one of our three major wholesalers. I’ll get the other two issued today. Which means this weekend we need to get the piles of boxes that are currently stacked in the library downstairs to make room for the new piles of boxes that’ll be showing up soon.

17:29 – Even the columnists for The Telegraph, who are usually quick to see through the EUrocrats’ smoke and mirrors, are missing the point entirely this time. The so-called agreement they reached does not guarantee Spain and Italy anything. Everyone is talking as though Spain and Italy can now draw on EFSF/ESM funds to recapitalize their banks without those loans showing up on sovereign balance sheets and without implementing austerity measures. That’s wrong. Germany retains the absolute right to veto any such disbursements, and will do so unless Spain and Italy comply with previously-agreed conditions. Neither country can meet those conditions, which are economically and politically infeasible. In other words, Spain and Italy both walked away from the conference claiming that they’d gotten what they demanded. They did no such thing.

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Wednesday, 27 June 2012

07:40 – I just started reading An Unmarked Grave: A Bess Crawford Mystery. It’s set during WWI. Bess is a British nurse serving in France. She could be my grandmother, literally.

My father’s mother was born in 1893. She trained as a nurse, and joined the US Army when we declared war on Germany. At the time, women were allowed to serve in the US Army only as nurses, and all US Army nurses were women. Age 24, she went to France and spent the rest of the war caring for wounded and ill US soldiers. She survived the flu epidemic. That’s all I know. I don’t know if she served at a field hospital or a base hospital in Paris, or both. She never talked about it. Nor did my father, who may himself not have known.

In fact, grandma wasn’t much for telling stories about the past, period. The only one I remember was the one about December 7th, 1941, when she said she was literally almost lynched as a German spy. She’d hung a quilt over the railing to air it out. Unfortunately, the quilt (which we still have) was white with a pattern of large red swastikas. At the time, my grandmother and other quilters still thought of the swastika as an obscure Indian symbol. Even so, grandma had some quick talking to do to calm down her outraged neighbors. Someone had reported it to the police, who came out to interview her. I think I remember my dad saying that she also got a visit from the FBI. She must have satisfied everyone, because she wasn’t arrested. They let her keep the quilt, which she packed away for 20 or 30 years.

13:05 – We just got an order for seven chemistry kits, which is the most we’ve sold to a single buyer. I think the previous record was four. That order takes us down to eight chemistry kits in stock, with another 30 nearly ready to assemble. I had planned to do 30 forensics kits as the next batch, but I think we’d better do 30 more chemistry kits next instead. Given that we don’t expect orders to peak until August/September, it looks as though we’ll sell a lot of kits this year. Now, the only problem will be keeping up with the orders. We’re still shipping the same day for orders we receive before 11:00 a.m. our time, but that’s likely to start slipping soon.

I’m also placing purchase orders for larger numbers than I’d have believed just a few months ago. Yesterday, I ordered a case of 216 9V batteries and 4,000 coin envelopes. Chemicals that I had been ordering 100 g at a time I’m now ordering 500 g or a kilo at a time. By necessity, I’m spreading out, with raw materials, components, subassemblies, and finished inventory stacked all over the place. Fortunately, Barbara has a sense of humor about it. At least so far.

16:14 – Oh, yeah. With regard to the failed two-day EU summit that commences tomorrow, don’t even bother reading the news articles. The two sides’ positions are already set in concrete, and they’re entirely irreconcilable. France, Italy, and Spain demand that Germany pay their bills, but refuse to give Germany any control over how its money is to be spent. Germany, personified by the new Iron Lady, Angela Merkel, says that’ll happen over her dead body. And she means it. There’s really not any reason to hold this summit. If Germany does not give France, Italy, and Spain what they’re demanding, the three of them collapse, Italy and Spain sooner and France a bit later. If Merkel tries to give them what they want, she’ll be overruled at home, if not crucified. She’d certainly lose the election next year. And, even if somehow Germany agreed to pay all the bills, that simply means Germany will be dragged down with the rest. It’s not going to happen. Everyone knows it’s not going to happen. And yet everyone talks about this summit as though there’s actually even the slightest hope of anything being accomplished. Cloud-cuckoo land indeed.

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Saturday, 23 June 2012

08:54 – I see that Sandusky has been convicted of raping children and is awaiting sentencing. He may spend the rest of his life in prison, which isn’t enough.

Meanwhile, I saw an article on CNN the other day that argued that pedophiles can’t help being pedophiles. They’re born that way. And I agree, just as heterosexuals can’t help being heterosexual and homosexuals can’t help being homosexual. Pedophiles are hard-wired from birth to be sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children. There’s no way to change that. But we as a society can demand that pedophiles not act on their attractions, and penalize them if they do so. Hanging, drawing, and quartering seems about right to me. Having sex with children–and by “children” I mean people who have not yet reached puberty–is beyond the pale. Children cannot consent, and having sex with someone who does not consent is by definition rape.

One thing we could do to help prevent pedophiles from having sex with children is relax the ridiculous restrictions on “child porn”. Ban actual child porn, that which involves actual children having actual sex, fine. But right now, fake child porn is penalized just as heavily as real child porn. Drawings of children engaging in sex acts or CGI simulations are just as illegal as actual images or video. Legalize “child porn” that doesn’t involve actual children and you give pedophiles an opportunity for a fantasy sex life that in most cases would substitute for the real thing.

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Friday, 22 June 2012

07:50 – I had one of those days yesterday that was, as Pournelle says, eaten by locusts. At the end of the day, I’d worked hard all day but felt as though I hadn’t accomplished much.

In retrospect, though, I guess I actually did accomplish a fair amount. It was just that it was a bunch of small stuff. I processed orders and shipped a couple of kits, answered in detail several queries about kits, did more research on shipping to Canada, reviewed the Preface for the forensics book, did final assembly of a dozen chemistry kits to add to inventory, made up boxes and started assembly on a new batch of 30 chemistry kits, downloaded and burned the current version of Linux Mint, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Speaking of Linux Mint, I really have to do something about my main office system. It’s quite elderly, although still fast. (It’s an Intel Core2 Quad Q9650.) But it’s running Ubuntu 9.04, which hasn’t been supported for a long time. This system was scheduled for replacement 18 months ago, but I never got around to it. Barbara’s old system failed, and the only system we had available at the time was the six-core Core i7-980X box that we built as the Extreme System for the 3rd edition of Building the Perfect PC. That one that was to be my new system, but she’s using it now. Meanwhile, my den system has also failed. That was the mini-ITX system we built for the book, and I need to do something about it as well.

So I think I’ll order a replacement Intel Atom motherboard/processor for the den system, rebuild it, and convert it to Barbara’s system. (She mainly does web browsing and email on that system, so the six-core system she’s using now is gross overkill.) I’ll then do a quick refurb on Barbara’s current system and convert it to my new main office system and retire the current one to stand-by status. To replace the den system, I’ll just build a microtower system with a low-power processor.

11:04 – I just ordered an Intel D2700MUD Atom motherboard/processor combo and a 2GBx2 Crucial memory kit for it. I wasn’t about to order anything ever again from NewEgg, so I searched Amazon.com. Amazon didn’t stock that board, but several of their vendors did. I decided to order from PC Rush, which had a large number of excellent reviews. Their price, including free shipping, was $85.55.

I added the item to my cart and then searched the PC Rush storefront for compatible memory. Compared to NewEgg’s search system, Amazon’s sucks. I wasn’t able to find any compatible memory on the Amazon PC Rush storefront. Or perhaps I could have, if I’d been willing to scroll through 300 pages of items from that storefront. So I Googled PC Rush, went to their site, and added the BOXD2700MUD to my cart. Then I went over to the Crucial website and used their configurator to search for compatible memory for that board. It returned only one hit, on the CT2KIT25664BC1067 2GBx2 kit, for $29.99 with free shipping. So I went back to the PC Rush site, which also had that kit, but for $36. I added it to my cart anyway, figuring it was worth the $6 difference to have to place only one order. But when I added that memory kit to my cart (which already contained the motherboard with free shipping), my shipping cost went to $16 for ground shipping. Geez. So I deleted the memory kit from my cart and submitted the order for the motherboard only. It took me about two minutes to order the memory kit on the Crucial site, and saved me $22.

My first thought was to install this motherboard and memory in my mini-ITX den system, but I think instead I may install it in a new Antec Sonata or other micro-tower case–I have plenty of those sitting around–and put it in Barbara’s office to replace that six-core system. The Atom is much, much slower than the Core i7 she has now, but she probably won’t even notice the difference using the system for web browsing and email. I, on the other hand, need as much CPU as possible for doing stuff like video production. I’ll just pull her hard drive from the big system and put it in the new one. Then, with a quick upgrade to the current Linux Mint, she’ll be good to go. I’ll do a quick clean/re-furb on the six-core system, put in a 3 TB drive (which has been sitting on my desk for months now), and rebuild my main system. My current system will go under the desk, not plugged into anything, and sit there moldering in case I need an emergency replacement. Then I’ll probably order another D2700MUD and memory for it and use those to upgrade my den system.

14:07 – With the exception of Angela Merkel, eurozone “leaders” are delusional. Here’s yet another example. At today’s summit of the Big Four (Germany, France, Italy, and Spain) leaders, those leaders spent their time discussing a “growth pact”. The summit was followed by a press conference. A typical headline is something like “Europe’s Big Four Agree €130 billion stimulus package, 1% of EU GNP”. All hail the €130 billion growth package. The problem is, it’s not a €130 billion package; it’s a €10 billion package. That is, only €10 billion is “new money”. The rest is imaginary–leveraging that €10 billion to €60 billion using accounting smoke and mirrors and demonstrably false assumptions–or money that’s already been spoken for and allocated. The eurozone leaders, including unfortunately Merkel, seem convinced that the markets are stupid. The markets will shrug this off, just as they shrugged off the so-called €100 billion Spanish bailout, which hasn’t even been requested yet, let alone approved, let alone paid.

Meanwhile, we keep seeing articles about Merkel coming under pressure. Merkel is not under any pressure. There’s nothing the EU, the IMF, the US, or anyone else can do to force her to pay the outstanding debts of the rest of the eurozone. Her voters across the political spectrum don’t want her to do it. She doesn’t want to do it. She’s not going to do it. Even if she were inclined to do it, the German constitution prohibits her from doing it. And even if she ignored her own convictions and the German constitution, German citizens would crucify her if she did it, perhaps literally. It’s just not going to happen. And yet it’s the only hope for the eurozone, which is why everyone keeps talking about it as though there’s even the tiniest probability of it occurring.

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