Font Size:     

Category: politics

Monday, 25 March 2013

09:55 – If you believe Merkel and the eurocrats, the Cyprus Crisis is now “over”, and with only one fatality. Cyprus itself, which has been gutted. Off-shore banking, the core of the Cypriot economy, has been killed deader than King Tut, leaving only tourism as a significant source of revenue. (Until now, banking was about 70% of the Cypriot economy and tourism 30%. So, literally overnight, 70% of the Cypriot economy has disappeared.) In a nation of about one million population, the banking collapse alone will eliminate tens of thousands of high-paying jobs, leaving mostly only low-paying service jobs in the tourism industry. The follow-on effects, including plummeting property values, are likely to be as bad as the bank collapse itself.

Meanwhile, the €10 billion bailout boosts Cyprus’s indebtedness to about 150% of GDP. The former GDP, that is. As the GDP of Cyprus collapses with the loss of off-shore banking, its actual indebtedness is likely to end up at 300% to 400% of the new GDP. And the IMF says this is sustainable? What planet are they living on? In the next two to three years, Cyprus will inevitably suffer an economic collapse that will make the Great Depression look like a minor blip. And the worst of it is that this is only the first bailout. Just as with Greece, Cyprus will inevitably need more bailouts, with increasingly harsh terms. Cyprus is now on life-support, just waiting for Germany to pull the plug.

12:39 – This morning Jeroen Dijsselbloem, head of the Eurogroup of eurozone finance ministers, announced that the Cyprus bailout, with its seizing of depositors’ assets, is a template for future bailout actions within the eurozone. This afternoon Angela Merkel, big boss of the eurozone, ordered Dijsselbloem beheaded for being foolish enough to reveal her plans in public. Meanwhile, Putin and (particularly) Medvedev, who are livid at the eurozone’s confiscation of Russians’ assets, very probably including some of their own personal assets, already have plans well underway to punish German companies who do business in Russia by freezing and confiscating their assets. And a little mole tells me that capital flight from Southern Tier banks including French ones, already high, is fast increasing. I expect that by the end of this year the capital controls currently being implemented in Cyprus will spread to the Southern Tier countries. This isn’t going to be pretty.

Read the comments: 40 Comments

Sunday, 24 March 2013

09:00 – The patience of Germany for continuous bailouts of other eurozone countries has now obviously been completely exhausted. At this point, Germany obviously doesn’t care whether Cyprus meets its terms for a bailout, believing that the “contagion” can be contained. They’re wrong, but that’s what they believe. For Cyprus, the point is moot anyway. Either way, Cyprus has been written off. Its economy is based on off-shore banking, and that no longer exists whether or not Cyprus is bailed out. To Cypriots, it must seem as though this catastrophe has occurred overnight, but there’s no question that Cyprus has now become the new Greece, with all that implies. And Cypriots are pissed, feeling abandoned and betrayed by the rest of the eurozone, particularly Germany. They’re screwed either way, and my guess is that this week they’ll tell the EU to get screwed. That means Cyprus defaults, crashes out of the euro, and returns to its local currency, but at this point I think most Cypriots no longer care.

Read the comments: 45 Comments

Friday, 22 March 2013

07:51 – Congress has given the US Postal Service no relief, insisting that it must continue 6-day service. However, some in congress, along with USPS officials, have pointed out that congress has not specified which types of mail must be picked up and delivered on Saturdays. So the USPS currently intends to proceed as planned, dropping Saturday pickup and delivery of all types of mail except Priority Mail and Express Mail, primarily packages, as of this summer. This change would have zero effect on our business, as we ship our kits by Priority Mail.

I asked our mailman yesterday how this change would affect him, other than the fact that he’d then be working only Monday through Friday, with weekends off. He said it wouldn’t affect him or any the other full-time staff that had permanent routes. The main effect would be on the employees who covered those routes on the full-timers’ days off. I asked him how many of those would have to be retained to cover Saturday Priority/Express Mail pickup/delivery. He said that our zipcode has 36 routes, all of which could be covered on Saturdays by only two or three people.

The USPS unions are utterly opposed to any changes to Saturday delivery for the obvious reason. If dropping Saturday delivery of first-class and junk mail allows the USPS to reduce staff by a factor of 12 to 18, from 36 to 2 or 3, what would be the effect on employment of the USPS discontinuing 2nd-class and junk mail entirely? Only a small percentage of our mail is first-class. Nearly all of it is 2nd-class (catalogs) and junk mail. If those were eliminated–leaving only first-class, Priority, and Express mail–the USPS could reduce its delivery staff by some very large percentage. If 2 or 3 people can cover this zipcode for Priority/Express mail pickup/delivery, how many more would be needed to add first-class mail to the mix? Four or five?

10:11 – I’ve just been running some numbers, trying to get a handle on what’s likely to happen for the rest of 2013. One of the comparisons I ran was on kit revenues by month versus year-ago. In December 2012 kit revenues were 4.4 times those of December 2011. In January, February, and March 2013 versus the same months in 2012, kit revenues were 6.9X, 2.8X, and 8.8X, respectively, for an average of about 5.7X.

One commenter the other day suggested that I just buy a year’s supply of everything and keep it inventoried. The problem with that is two-fold: first, I don’t really know what a year’s supply is. If I order in enough for 5.7X last year’s kit sales, that’s 1,500+ kits’ worth. Second, there’s the issue of storage space and working capital. So I’ve decided to buy large quantities only of those items that are single-source and, based on our previous experience, are likely to be backordered at some point. Stuff that I can get from two, three, or four of our wholesalers I won’t worry about. So I may end up with 1,500 spatulas in stock, 600 dozen of the thick cavity slides, and so on. That, we can deal with. What I don’t want to have to deal with inventorying is 40 gross of beakers or 750 dozen test tubes or 125 dozen 100 mL graduated cylinders.

12:26 – I just ordered another two cases of the Sterilite 6-quart plastic storage bins from Home Depot. With the case of 60 we just received, that gives us 180 total bins, plus the 37 that I’d bought earlier in the store. I’m going to keep 30 of the bins for building chemical bags, small parts bags, and so on. The other 187 will be used for storage. I just checked and found that the Sterilite bins will easily hold more than 60 of the 30 mL bottles and twice that many of the 15 mL bottles. With our current kit lineup, we have 142 chemicals to store and roughly 100 more equipment and component items. Many of the latter don’t need storage bins. For example, we order goggles by the case of 100, and they stay in those cases. Same deal for items like beakers and so on. Subassemblies like chemical bags and small part bags are much too large for these small bins. A batch of 30 of those bags fills a good-size box, so we store them in, uh, good-size boxes.

Read the comments: 28 Comments

Wednesday, 20 March 2013

08:46 – One of the most annoying things about Netflix streaming is that they drop titles with only a week’s notice. One series we’ve had in our queue for probably a year has been gradually bubbling toward the top. Last night, I brought our queue up in my browser, intending to move it to the top so that we could conveniently sample it on our Roku. Unfortunately, availability of that series is now listed as “until 3/25”. There are 50+ 45-minute episodes, so there’s no point to starting it now. Netflix must know how long they’ve licensed each movie or series for, so what’s the point of waiting until a week before their license expires to let viewers know how much longer it’ll be available? They should list the expiration date as soon as they add a title to their catalog.

I see that Cyprus has become The Mouse that Roared. Cypriot legislators rejected the Troika’s (read, Germany’s) bailout terms without a single vote in favor, even though those terms had been modified to protect depositors with balances of €20,000 or less. Merkel must be spitting nails. Germany now has the choice of backing down, which it can’t do, or watching Cyprus crash out of the euro. That’s assuming that Cyprus doesn’t come to some agreement with Russia, which Merkel has explicitly forbidden. No matter what happens, things look ominous for the EU, the euro, and Merkel’s reelection chances this autumn. It will be ironic if tiny Cyprus, which accounts for something like 1/500th of EU GDP, is the straw that breaks the euro’s back.

12:20 – I’m building kits today. We’re getting low stock on the CK01A chemistry kits, with less than a dozen in finished goods inventory, but the real problem is the BK01 biology kits. I shipped one this morning, which takes our remaining stock down to one. I just finished putting together another 30 of the biology kit small parts bags, which was the last thing I needed for another batch of 30 biology kits.

The real problem is that the biology kits include a 12-pack of deep cavity slides. These aren’t the common well slides. They’re three times the thickness of a standard microscope slide–about 3.2mm versus 1 mm–and have a deep cylindrical cavity through most of their thickness. Only one of our vendors carries them, and they’re backordered through 15 May. After I build these 30 biology kits, I’ll be down to only eight packs of the thick cavity slides in stock. That means we’ll have only 38 biology kits available to carry us from now until mid-May. I don’t think that’ll be enough.

We’ve already decided to delay introducing our new LK01 Life Science Kit from 31 March until about 1 June, because it also includes thick cavity slides. I guess we’ll just continue to build stock of the biology kits without the thick cavity slides. If we get more than 38 orders for biology kits between now and mid-May, we’ll just ship what we have and back-order the rest of the orders.

Read the comments: 30 Comments

Monday, 18 March 2013

10:51 – There seems to be a great deal of surprise that Cyprus has stopped asset transfers in preparation for stealing up to 9.9% of bank depositors’ account balances. I’m not sure why anyone is surprised. That’s what governments do. They call it a “tax”, and they can do it anytime they want and in any amount they want. That kind of thing happens in the US and other first-world countries as well. It just happened with ObamaCare. And it’s even more likely to occur in places with undemocratic, dictatorial, autocratic, unelected governments, like the EU. Cypriot bank account holders should be thankful that their government, at the insistence of the Troika, stole only 9.9% or less of their account balances. They could have stolen it all.

So, Cyprus becomes the fifth eurozone nation to be bailed out, following Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain. Italy can’t be far behind, and France not far behind Italy. When those two go, it’s game over for the euro. Meanwhile, the Protestant northern-tier nations look on, dreading the day when those bills come due, while the Catholic southern-tier nations continue to run up huge bills they have no hope of ever paying. Merkel is mortgaging Germany’s future solely to improve her chances of being re-elected this autumn, which looks increasingly unlikely to happen. And the downward slide of Greece has already passed the “developing nation” third-world level, and is quickly headed for whatever’s worse than third-world. And, as much as I’m glad not to be European and particularly not on the euro, I keep thinking that it can happen here. In fact, if we don’t soon start taking a meat-axe to spending, it will happen here.

Read the comments: 51 Comments

Monday, 4 March 2013

09:21 – Barbara spent the night over at her dad’s place. She’s home tonight and then pulling a double over at her dad’s place Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Frances is doing Thursday and Friday nights.

Frances called yesterday because she was concerned about a redness around their dad’s injury. She decided to haul Dutch over to the private emergency care place to have it looked at. They said it was no big deal, but prescribed an antibiotic and saline irrigation. Frances picked up the antibiotic, but Barbara said she’d stop on her way over after dinner to pick up the 0.9% saline wash they’d suggested. I told Barbara I’d make it up right here in the sink and save her the trouble of stopping at the drugstore. I just dissolved 9 grams of table salt in a liter of tap water, and didn’t bother to autoclave it. After all, more airborne bacteria will settle on Dutch’s skin during the irrigation than are present in a whole liter of tap water.

Science kit sales have picked up over last month. In the first three days of March, we’ve sold five kits, and we’re averaging about 0.80 kits/day year-to-date. That’s pretty scary, given that in the first three months of 2012 we averaged about 0.12 kits/day. This is our slowest time of year. Factoring in seasonality, that puts us on track to sell 1,500 kits in 2013, assuming we can build and ship that many.

13:01 – I see that Latvia has formally applied to join the eurozone, which is kind of like formally applying to board the Titanic. After it’s already hit the iceberg.

I think it’s safe to say that no sane person, including sane politicians (if there is such a thing), would want to be a member of the eurozone. If you’re in one of the dozen or so worse-off countries, the euro is choking the life out of your economy and causing severe social unrest that may end in revolution. If you’re in Germany or (decreasingly) Austria, Finland, Holland, or Luxembourg, being in the euro means you’re on the hook for paying the multi-trillion euro bills of the worse off eurozone countries. What’s not to hate? Crappy taste. More filling. Geez.

Read the comments: 32 Comments

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.

Read the comments: 5 Comments

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.

Read the comments: 39 Comments

Thursday, 27 December 2012

08:02 – With only four days left, it looks likely that we’ll go over the “fiscal cliff”. My bet is that congress will extend the Bush-era tax rates for the middle class, while allowing the other tax increases and spending “cuts” to occur, except perhaps extended unemployment benefits. The core problem, out-of-control spending on social programs and the military, won’t be addressed. As we’ve seen in Europe, politicians are quite capable of ignoring unpleasant realities for years or decades on end, if that’s what it takes to continue getting them re-elected.

09:19 – We met our goal of selling 250 science kits for CY 2012. The goal for CY 2013 is 500 kits, which I think we’ll be able to do. Of course, the bulk of those will sell in the second half of the year. The first four months of the year will be slow, and we’ll use that time to prepare for the pickup in sales volume that starts in April/May and then turns into the rush in July through October.

Barbara has more time available during the winter months because she’s not doing yard work. So, starting the first of the year, we’ll be labeling bottles and envelopes, thousands and thousands of them, and putting together subassemblies for the various kits. We’ll start with a first pass of 60 to 90 sets of each. Once those are complete, we’ll do another batch of 60 to 90, and keep repeating that until we run out of time.

Many of the chemicals in the kits are stable indefinitely, so we’ll also fill those bottles ahead of time. Some chemicals are stable for years rather than decades, so we’ll hold off on filling those until closer to the time they’re needed. Overall, my goal is to have as much work done as possible by the first of July to allow us to assemble 300 kits on-the-fly in addition to having 100 or so kits ready to ship.

Read the comments: 73 Comments

Thursday, 13 December 2012

07:28 – Only eight days left until the end of the world, and Barbara and I haven’t even started to make preparations. Oh, well. Another year, another apocalypse. When the world ended last year, we didn’t even notice. I did move Army Wives to the top of our Netflix streaming queue. Series six releases on the 18th. Barbara enjoys that series, so we’ll have to get it watched before the world ends on the 21st.

We continue to build and ship science kits.

14:08 – Fareed Zakaria actually gets it: Should America try to be like Scandinavia?

I’ve mentioned this “free ride” problem many times before. For the last six decades or more, Americans have carried the rest of the world. For sixty years, for example, we’ve paid the vast bulk of the defense budget for all of Europe, not to mention the Pacific Rim. America out-innovates the rest of the world put together, and the rest of the world uses those innovations, most of which were paid for by US taxpayers, while paying little or nothing for them. Americans pay the overwhelming majority of costs to develop new drugs, including those developed by big pharma companies in other countries. In addition to American taxpayers heavily subsidizing research, directly and indirectly, Americans also pay much higher prices for the drugs that result from that research. Even our friends and allies, including the UK and Canada, pay little or nothing more than the production costs of those drugs, with their national health services threatening to ignore patents and produce the drugs themselves if drug companies don’t sell to them at cost. The US has contributed trillions of dollars in foreign aid, direct and indirect, with no return. There is no balance here. That’s why I’ve suggested, only half in jest, that the IRS should begin collecting income taxes from every country on earth. One percent of GDP is reasonable, and at that they’d still be getting a hell of a deal.

Read the comments: 51 Comments
// ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- // end of file archive.php // -------------------------------------------------------------------------------