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Category: politics

Tuesday, 7 May 2013

08:11 – With Barbara’s mom and dad both in the hospital, she and Frances are even busier than usual. They expect Dutch to be discharged late this week, and are looking at assisted-living facilities to decide which are acceptable to have Dutch transferred to. Their mom is being treated for a lung infection, and they’re not sure at this point how long she’ll be in the hospital or whether she’ll be going home to the apartment or will need to go to an assisted-living facility for at least a while. We’re hoping that Sankie’s outlook will improve sufficiently that she’ll be able to return directly to their apartment.

I’m busy putting together subassemblies for a first batch of thirty LK01 Life Science Kits. At this point, it’s all a matter of assembly except that we’re out of stock on bottles of methyl cellulose. I have two liters of that made up, but none bottled. The second bottle-top dispenser I ordered arrived yesterday, so I just need to get some bottles filled. We announced that the LK01 kits would begin shipping the week of 26 May, but we may in fact have them ready to start shipping as early as next Monday.

11:00 – One thing I didn’t think about when we decided to start building and selling science kits is the amount of physical labor involved, particularly as our sales ramp up. I just hauled four cases of goggles downstairs and stacked them. On the return trips upstairs, I’m hauling up finished kits, five at a time. I have about four dozen kits to haul up and more stuff to haul down. And UPS should show up today with a couple cases of 144 glass beakers and several cases of 100 mL graduated cylinders. If I catch Don as he pulls up, I’ll ask him to roll those crates around back to save me having to carry them downstairs.

I tend to think of components as small, light items, which is true individually. How much can a stainless-steel spatula or a glass stirring rod weigh, after all? But put a case of 700 of each of them in a large box along with similar quantities of two or three other “small, light” items, and the mass adds up quickly. At 30, I wouldn’t have thought twice about any of this stuff; at nearly 60, it becomes an aerobic workout. Between hauling components and kits up and down the stairs and walking Colin, I probably get more exercise than most guys my age.

14:56 – Urk. Now that’s embarrassing. I’m starting to clean off my main desk to make room for the new system. I’m going to run it side-by-side with the current system until I’m sure everything I need is migrated over. So, as I was moving piles of stuff off my desk, what did I notice but a stack of five hard drives in those clear plastic form-fitted cases. I looked at the first one: “Oh, well, it’s only 160 GB, not big enough to worry about.” At the second: “Oh, well, it’s only 500 GB.” At the third: “Oh, well, it’s only 1.5 TB.” At the fourth: “Oh, well, it’s only, uh, 2 TB.” At the fifth: “Oh, shit. Another 2 TB drive.” Both 2 TB drives, as best I remember, have never been used other than briefly to test a RAID system. Oh, well. One can never have too many hard drives. I’d completely forgotten I had these. I’ll probably just stick them in an external eSATA drive carrier and use them for portable backup.

16:20 – With Europe already turning into a smoking pile of rubble, I sometimes wonder if Comrade Barroso has been inhaling too much of that smoke: Federal Europe will be ‘a reality in a few years’, says Jose Manuel Barroso

Federated, hell. They’ll be lucky if the EU still exists. The euro certainly won’t, unless it’s a Southern-tier euro, with the protestant Northern tier returning to their own currencies, or perhaps, if they haven’t learned their lesson from this catastrophe, a shared Deutsche Mark under whatever name. I’ve known for years that Barroso, that “former” Marxist, is delusional, but he keeps coming up with even more impressive castles in the sky. Barroso, who defines the term True Believer, no doubt actually believes that not just the eurozone but the EU 27 will fall in with his ridiculous plans. Even now, the UK is teetering on the edge of withdrawing from the EU, and with prominent defections among even his own Tories, Cameron may not be able to hold things together for another year, let alone until the proposed referendum on EU membership four years from now. And what are the chances that Germany, Finland, and Holland will agree to pay not just the Southern tier’s outstanding debts but to continue to subsidize them forever and without limit? I’d say the probability is slightly more than zero. Maybe 0.000001.

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Thursday, 18 April 2013

07:58 – The lead article in our morning paper is about the efforts of local Republican state legislator Debra Conrad (formerly Conrad-Shrader; apparently she’s gotten a divorce) and a large group of other Republican state legislators to pass a bill that would (a) allow medical personnel to refuse to participate in performing abortions, and (b) allow employers to exclude contraception coverage from the health insurance they provide to employees. In other words, they’re striving to make North Carolina just like North Dakota, which has, de facto if not de jure, outlawed abortion.

Conceptually (so to speak), I have no problem with either of the measures in their bill. Medical personnel should be free to refuse to perform abortions, just as their employers should be free to fire such people, who are refusing to do their jobs. And employers should not be forced to provide medical insurance that covers contraception. Indeed, they should not be forced to provide medical insurance at all. I’m all in favor of personal freedom. But this bill isn’t about increasing personal freedoms. To the contrary, it’s all about restricting personal freedoms.

This bill is really about forcing women to have babies whether they want to or not. What these maniacs would really like to do, if they could get away with it, is outlaw contraception and abortion, period. In fact, I suspect they’d like to make it illegal for women to refuse to have sex. The only purpose of women, as far as they’re concerned, is to produce babies. Lots of babies, who can then be raised to be good little Christians. Preferably Southern Baptist.

13:03 – I’m glad someone said it: Godless in Boston mourn, too

16:20 – Oh, my. Cyprus has now decided that their bailout isn’t a done deal, but requires approval of their legislature. It’s anyone’s guess what the legislature will decide, but anti-EU feeling is certainly rampant among the legislature, reflecting the feelings of the general population. From the point of view of many Cypriots, dealing with the EU after the bad faith the EU has shown them is simply feeding the hand that bites them. If Cyprus decides not to participate in the bailout, the ECB can no longer legally support Cyprus, which then crashes out of the euro in a matter of days. That’s assuming that Merkel doesn’t order the ECB to continue supporting Cyprus until after she’s re-elected, or so she hopes. In reality, Merkel’s re-election is by no means certain.

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Friday, 12 April 2013

12:19 – The news reports over the last couple of days have said that the Troika was requiring Cyprus to sell its gold reserves, about €400 million worth. As it turns out, they’re not requiring Cyprus to sell those reserves; they’re requiring Cyprus to transfer all its gold reserves to the ECB. In other words, the ECB is robbing Cyprus of its gold at gunpoint. Why is that, I wonder. Could it be that the eurocrats realize that Cyprus has already been pushed too far, and may well decide simply to leave the euro? If so, having those gold reserves would make it easier for Cyprus to return to a national currency. We can’t have that, can we?

Merkel and the rest of the Northern Tier eurocrats are taking an increasingly hard-line approach toward funding bailouts. They’ve announced that under no circumstances will the Troika exceed the €10 billion they have already committed to. If that’s insufficient–and it is grossly insufficient–tough luck. They’ll let Cyprus collapse, convinced that there will be no “contagion”. They’re wrong, in spades, but that’s their attitude. Meanwhile, the other weakling members of the eurozone–particularly Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Slovenia–must have a deep sense of foreboding. The so-called “unity” of the eurozone is rock-solid, unless it’s going to end up costing Germany money. In that case, Germany will tell everyone else to get screwed. As I’ve been saying for a long time, ultimately the eurozone crisis is a cat fight about who’s going to get stuck paying the bills for this abomination of a currency. Germany is determined not to be the one stuck with the bill.

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Thursday, 11 April 2013

07:35 – Poor Cyprus. Until yesterday, everyone seemed to be agreed that Cyprus needed €17 billion to avoid bankruptcy. The Troika would provide €10 billion of that amount as a bailout loan, and Cyprus itself had to come up with the other €7 billion. That was sufficient to gut the Cypriot economy and bankrupt its large banks. But today it turns out that things were worse than first believed, boosting the required total to €23 billion. And Cyprus has to come up with the entire extra €6 billion, nearly doubling its required share. Meanwhile, the Troika expects the Cypriot economy to contract by a disastrous 8.8% in the next year. That’d be bad enough, but no one really believes that prediction. The Cypriot government itself is expecting a contraction closer to 13%, and most economists think even that’s extremely optimistic. My own guess is that a 30% to 40% contraction might turn out to be closer to reality. Poor Cyprus. Until recently, it appeared to be a reasonably prosperous country. Now, it makes the Greek economy look good. And Portugal and Slovenia are now teetering on the edge of collapse as well.

Work on science kits continues.

14:04 – As of this morning, I still had 600 each of the 50 mL and 100 mL plastic beakers on backorder with one of my main suppliers. This is a show-stopper for us. We’re out of those beakers, which are in every kit we offer, and we can’t build more kits of any type until we get more. So I just checked with another of our major suppliers, who had 6,000 of the 50 mL and 8,000 of the 100 mL beakers in stock. I just issued a PO for 1,000 of each and notified the first vendor to clear the backorder. A thousand of each is sufficient to build 500 of the CK01A chemistry kits or 1,000 of any of the other kits, so we should be in good shape for the next few months anyway. I hate tying up working capital and storage space on a lot of units of particular items, but not when the alternative is running out and ending up dead in the water.

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Sunday, 7 April 2013

08:48 – We decided not to continue our subscription to Acorn TV beyond the 30-day free trial. There’s just not enough content there to make it worth our while. It’s not the price, which is only $3/month or $30/year. It’s the hassle of figuring out what’s on when on Acorn and keeping track of what we’ve watched on Acorn streaming versus what we’ve watched on Netflix streaming. If Acorn had any sense, they’d offer to merge their content with Netflix’s in return for a small monthly license payment, maybe $0.10/month per Netflix subscriber. Acorn would make more money without having to run its own streaming operation, and Netflix’s catalog would improve. My guess is that Acorn hasn’t done that because they have the rights to stream the material themselves but not to sub-license it. None of this would be a problem if the powers that be would just rationalize copyright, reducing it to one year at most and then putting everything into the public domain.

Colin has a new little friend. He now likes to visit Sophie, Kim’s five-month-old Yorkshire Terrier puppy. The two of them go tearing around in circles in Kim’s front yard, with Sophie chasing Colin and Colin trying to herd her. She’s fast for a little girl. The expression on his face the other day was priceless when Sophie ran between his front legs, underneath the length of him, and back out between his back legs. At first, Kim was afraid Sophie would get hurt playing roughly with Colin, but he’s very careful not to step on her. She’s about the size of Colin’s head, maybe four pounds or so, but she’s fearless. Periodically, the action stops when Colin goes into his herding crouch. Sophie walks over to him and they touch snouts. Then she reaches up and licks his nose.

11:30 – I see that the Portuguese government is on the verge of collapsing, which calls into question the Troika’s continuing bailout. If Portugal, like Italy, is unable to form a new government quickly, it’s likely that Draghi’s promised unlimited backstopping of Portugal’s sovereign bond yields will not be honored, thereby putting Portugal quickly into default. Germany is fed up with paying the bills of the southern tier, and at some point will simply refuse to continue doing so. Merkel wants the election this autumn out of the way first, but her voters are growing increasingly restless. At some point, the whole house of cards is going to come tumbling down. It’s possible that Portugal will cause that to happen, but I think it’s more likely that Italy will be the straw that breaks the camel in half. An increasing number of economists are betting that Italy will be the first eurozone country to depart the euro, although Portugal, Spain, Cyprus, and Slovenia are also likely candidates. Greece, of course, is hanging onto the euro for dear life. Without the euro, Greece is completely toast. Of course, with the euro, Greece is also completely toast.

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Wednesday, 3 April 2013

07:48 – The city of Stockton, California is declaring bankruptcy, driven under by the costs of government services, primarily pension and retiree health-care costs. It’s not the first, and won’t be the last, city or state government to find itself in that position. What we’re watching is just the early manifestations of a phenomenon that’s going to come back to bite us. Unions, particularly public-employee unions, have extracted promises to pay that are unsustainable. They would be unsustainable even in a good economy. In the bad-and-getting-worse economy we’re in now and likely to remain in for at least the next several decades, believing that these commitments will be met is delusional.

Here’s what I think is going to happen. Ultimately, all of these government pension and health-care promises will be broken, and all of them will be transferred to the existing Social Security and Medicare programs. Retirement and health-care programs for all federal, state, and local government employees–including military and congressional retirees, post office employees, and so on–will be folded into Social Security and Medicare, along with all resources that have been set aside to fund these separate programs. Nor will government programs be the only ones affected. Most or all private retirement programs will also be folded into the big tent of Social Security and Medicare. Ultimately, it’s not going to matter what you were promised. What you’re going to get is what everyone else gets: Social Security for a pension and Medicare for retiree health care. And that’s all.

14:05 – In breaking news, CBC has renewed Heartland for a seventh season.

I’ve always hated manual labor, and I despise getting sweaty. When I was a kid, my mother used to tell people that after he’d had a bath and a change of clothes my brother could walk out the back door, stand on the porch for 30 seconds, turn around, and come back in filthy. I, on the other hand, could play all day in a mud puddle and come back in cleaner than when I’d started.

So what I’ve been doing this morning, assembling chemical bags for the chemistry and biology kits, is not one of my favorite jobs. But at least I now have most of what I need to take our finished goods inventory on both kits to between 40 and 50 each. Except, of course, beakers. I was expecting those to arrive right around now, but when I talked to our supplier last week she told me they’d not gotten them in as expected and that she hoped they’d arrive this week. Oh, well. We have a dozen or so of each kit in stock, which’ll hold us for some time. If the delay gets much longer, I can always cancel the beaker order and get them from one of our other suppliers that does have them in stock.

And I’ve changed plans for the antibiotic test papers that we are including in the life science kits. Originally, I planned to run 8.5×11″ sheets of chromatography paper through one of our laser printers to cover the paper with edge-to-edge labeling in a small font: “SUL” for sulfadimethoxine, “NEO” for neomycin, and so on. The problem is, running that paper through the printer changes its absorption characteristics, and what’s worse it changes them unpredictably. I’d done some testing on an unprinted sheet (which absorbed about 8 mL of solution) and made calculations accordingly. Each sheet is about 600 square centimeters, and I wanted a concentration of 100 micrograms per square centimeter. It was easy enough to figure out how much solution I needed and of what concentration. Until I found out that apparently the fuser of the laser printer messes up the absorption characteristics of the paper. Crap.

So I went to Plan B. Costco sells 12×18″ sheets of construction paper. It’s acid-free and heavy weight. It’s also about a tenth the price of chromatography paper. At first, I ordered white construction paper, intending to trim it to 8.5X11″ and try running it through the laser printer to see if the fuser affected it. Then I realized that there was a potentially much easier solution. Instead of using the laser printer to label the different kinds of antibiotic test papers, I’ll simply use different colors of paper for different antibiotics. So I ordered three different colors. The minimum order from Costco was three 50-packs of each, which should be a lifetime supply of construction paper. I’ll have to test the paper to make sure that the dyes have no effect on bacterial growth, which I’m guessing they won’t.

Sometimes I wonder how Costco does it. The construction paper colors I bought cost $1.39 per 50-sheet pack, with a minimum order of three packs. So each of the three colors was $4.17, for a total of $12.51. That included free shipping. This paper isn’t light. IIRC, it’s 76-pound basis weight, so nine 50-papers of 12×18″ paper has some heft to it. I know UPS would charge me more than $12.51 just to ship that much weight. I’m sure Costco gets a better deal from UPS than I do, but that much better? And, to top it off, Costco didn’t combine the order. I ordered the nine packs yesterday. UPS just showed up with one of the three-packs a few minutes ago. The other two three-packs are supposed to arrive tomorrow. I can’t help thinking that Costco must have lost money on this transaction.

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Monday, 1 April 2013

07:46 – We finished the first quarter of 2013 with kit sales about 5.5 times those of Q1 2012. Of course, we’re now selling three major kit types, versus only one back then. Still, we’re far ahead of our original goal of a 2X increase in overall sales for 2013 over 2012.

And, although I never thought I’d find myself saying this, the only Cypriot leader with any sense appears to be its religious leader. Archbishop Chrysostomas II, who last week called for the Cypriot political leadership to refuse to kowtow to the EU and to depart the euro, has now called for the resignation of the Cypriot political leadership. And for Cyprus to depart the euro. This while, in an incredible irony, the Cypriot political leadership is now begging Greece (Greece!) to bailout Cyprus with a €2 billion loan. Greece! Good luck with that.

09:56 – Hmmm. Our new neighbors, Grandon and Shanee (shaw-nay; she’s part Shawnee), were pruning the maple tree in their front yard yesterday afternoon while I was walking Colin. As they stacked branches at the curb for pickup, I got to thinking that a tree-ring section might be a good thing to include in the life science kit. So I just went over and carried a nice-size branch back home. It’s roughly 1.5 meters long and ranges from about 5 to 7.5 cm in diameter, with at least a meter of the length usable for sections. I’m not sure if I’ll include a tree-ring section in the kit, but at least this way I have the raw material at hand.

14:55 – In a shocking development in the Cyprus crisis, senior Cypriot politicians are now being accused of moving their own assets abroad before the bailout/haircut/capital controls were announced. Apparently, dozens if not hundreds of individuals and accounts may be involved. A special three-judge panel has been created to look into these allegations. How could anyone believe that honorable politicians would use insider information to protect their own assets, knowing that everyone elses’ were going to be confiscated? Oh, wait.

16:00 – Netflix has really refined their suggestions of what we might like to watch. Not just the individual series, but the categories they sort them into. When I checked the Netflix streaming home page a few minutes ago, looking for new stuff we might like to watch, I was surprised to see a new category.

pissed-off-wives

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Saturday, 30 March 2013

08:35 – The situation in Cyprus is rapidly turning worse, a lot worse. On Thursday, the government was saying that capital controls would be in effect for a week; on Friday, they were saying capital controls would be in effect for a month. In reality, they’re likely to be in effect forever. I’m trying to think of even one example where capital controls were removed once implemented. The most recent close example is Iceland, which announced “temporary” capital controls at the start of its banking crisis. Five years later, they’re still in effect. And the knock-on effects of Cyprus imposing capital controls is already being felt in Malta, which also has an out-sized banking sector. Even Luxembourg, which has the highest GDP in the world, is extremely concerned, and rightly so since its banking system is more highly leveraged than any other in the world. And capital flight from southern-tier banks continues to accelerate. No sane person wants to keep their assets in southern-tier banks, so they’re moving them to German, Dutch, and other northern-tier banks as fast as they can, making the imbalance steadily worse.

And the situation in Cyprus itself continues to deteriorate quickly. The second-largest bank, Popular Bank, is in the process of being shut down. Accounts of €100,000 and under are being transferred to Bank of Cyprus, the largest bank. Equity and bond holders in Popular Bank lose 100% of their investment, except the ECB, which holds about €9 billion of Popular Bank debt. That debt is also being transferred to Bank of Cyprus, and is sufficient to doom that bank. Meanwhile, Cyprus announced yesterday that the “haircut” to be suffered by unsecured Bank of Cyprus creditors (other than the ECB) will be a nominal 62.5%. It’s actually much worse than that, because the remaining 37.5% will be converted to shares in the Bank of Cyprus at an inflated valuation, which shares are already nearly worthless and will quickly become entirely so. So, excepting of course the ECB, unsecured creditors in Popular Bank will suffer a 100% haircut, while unsecured creditors in Bank of Cyprus will suffer a nominal 62.5% haircut, which in reality is a 100% haircut, or so close to that as not to matter.

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Thursday, 28 March 2013

09:45 – Amidst all the furor about Cyprus, few have commented on the real implications of the imposition of capital controls to prevent capital flight from Cypriot banks: the euro has been shattered as a common currency.

The fundamental characteristic of a common currency is that it can be spent anywhere within the common currency area and has the same value anywhere within the area. This is now officially no longer true of the euro. Euros in Cyprus are now worth much less than euros elsewhere in the eurozone because they cannot be spent freely, either in Cyprus or in the rest of the eurozone.

For the last three years, the eurocrats have been trying desperately to prevent the collapse of the euro. Now, at a single stroke, they themselves have destroyed it. The euro is a fiat currency, and like all fiat currencies has no inherent value. What apparent value it has exists only because people pretend that it has value. Without that pretense, the euro is worth literally only the paper it is printed on. By preventing Cypriots from spending their euros, the eurocrats have destroyed that pretense.

Barbara mentioned to me the other day that she’d been talking with Amy, one of the neighbor kids. Amy starts 9th grade next autumn, and told Barbara that she was taking all honors and AP courses next year, including biology. She’s very interested in science, and want to pursue a career in science or medical research.

The other day, I ran into her dad, Steve, while I was walking Colin and mentioned to him what Barbara had told me. He’s very pleased that Amy is doing well academically and plans to go on to major in science in college and grad school. I told him that if Amy wants to get a jump on next year’s science that we’d be happy to give her one of our biology kits, assuming he and Amy’s stepmother, Heather, approve.

Yesterday I was walking Colin when Amy got off the school bus. We talked and she said her dad approved, although Heather was a bit concerned because one of her own experiences in high school chemistry had resulted in an explosion. I suspect Heather isn’t really strongly opposed to Amy doing home science, since Heather herself is a licensed pyrotechnician. And, like nearly all sciency kids, Amy would love to blow things up.

So I gave Amy a copy of our biology lab book, and told her that, if her parents approved, Barbara and I would give her what she needed to do the lab sessions.

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Wednesday, 27 March 2013

08:10 – I see that Netflix streaming now has series 5 of Mad Men available. I’d almost forgotten we had that title in our queue. We watched series 4 on DVD in April 2011. I seem to remember that there was a delay in shooting series 5.

And I’ve just started re-reading Colleen McCullough’s First Man in Rome series, the first book of which centers on Gaius Marius and Sulla. It’s as good as I remember it. McCullough is a first-class historian, and this book, although fiction, reads like a serious history of Republican Rome. McCullough put more time and effort into just her glossary than most authors put into an entire novel.

I did the same calculations last night that I remember doing the first time I read this book, back when it was first published. McCullough is talking about the cursus honorum, the sequence of offices held by Romans on their ways to becoming consul. Sulla, who is high-born but poor, is dreaming of pursuing the cursus honorum, but has no hope of accumulating the wealth needed. To be a senator, he needs to prove to the censors that he has an income of at least one million sestertii per year, and even to become a knight he requires 400,000 sestertii per year. So I calculated that in today’s money. As it turns out, with the spot price of silver currently around $28/ounce, one sestertius is pretty close to one current US dollar. So, Republican Roman equites (knights) had incomes that would put them into today’s 1%, and Republican Roman senators would be today’s IRS millionaires.

When Barbara got home yesterday and found I’d unpacked those 11 boxes and put away their contents, she said I should have waited for her to help because she’s stronger than I am and in better shape. I scoffed, and pointed out that I could still bench-press 90 pounds. Aha!, she countered, she could bench-press 90 pounds. Aha!, I pointed out, 90 pounds is what a girl bench-presses. In reality, I could still bench-press guy weight, call it 250 pounds. Okay, I admit it. I don’t know for sure that I could still bench-press 250 pounds, but I suspect I could.

10:24 – Geez. Hard on the heels of demanding that Cyprus commit suicide in exchange for a $13 billion “bailout”, the eurocrats are now demanding a $15 billion increase in their budget for 2013. Not a budget of $15 billion, you understand. A budget increase of $15 billion.

Cameron and the Tories are livid, and Farage and the UKIP are whatever beyond livid is. This budget increase translates to UK taxpayers “contributing” about $2 billion more, or roughly $125 per UK family. Just what they need in this economy. What’s worse, Cameron has no national veto, because this budget increase can/will be passed by majority vote. It seems to me that it’s long past time for the UK to make a definitive statement by withdrawing entirely from the EU. The only benefit the UK receives from EU membership is the Common Market, and that would survive a UK withdrawal. Cameron has delayed much too long holding a referendum on UK membership in the EU because he knows a referendum would go heavily in favor of withdrawal. Despite the evidence, Cameron remains a committed europhile. If he continues on this course, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Nigel Farage and the UKIP go from a minority party to running things. Cameron and the Tories scoff at that idea, but I think they’re just whistling past the graveyard.

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