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Category: politics

Friday, 26 October 2012

10:07 – Colin and I finished series five of Heartland and started again with series one. It’s interesting to watch Amber Marshall reset from a 23-year-old woman playing 20 to an 18-year-old girl playing 15. The rest of the cast doesn’t look all that different jumping back from 2012 to 2007, including, oddly enough, Jessica Amlee, who was 13 when the series premiered and 18 as of the final episode of series 5.

The news from the EU remains as bad as ever and getting worse. I don’t think the politicians realize that the lull they’ve had over the last couple of months was merely the EU crisis passing through the eye of a hurricane. The winds are already picking up again. After the premature announcement a couple days ago about the release of the months-overdue tranche of the Greek bailout being released, it’s now clear that it has not been and that Greece has been given until Sunday to agree to the Troika terms. As of now, it looks unlikely to happen. If not, what happens Monday is anyone’s guess.

I’m still working on building science kits, designing new kits, and writing documentation for them. I also need to spend some time cleaning up downstairs, particularly my lab.

11:54 – Since I moved to Dreamhost from the shared server that Brian and Greg ran for a decade or more, I’ve really missed the spam filtering options that I had on their server. So I finally got around to emailing Dreamhost tech support to request some changes.

I have two requests that I would like you to consider enabling:

1. Currently, blacklisting is allowed only by <domain>.TLD. I would like to be able to blacklist by TLD. For example, it would be very useful to allow blacklist of all .CN and .BR domains, along with those from most of the rest of the non-English speaking world outside of western Europe. Ideally, this would be implemented with a page of checkboxes that allowed one to blacklist all TLDs with one click and then un-blacklist the ones you wanted to allow through by clearing the checkboxes for those domains.

2. My former service provider provided a squirrelmail spam filtering option called “discard silently” that permanently deleted the spam emails rather than moving them to a quarantine area. I would very much like to have this option.

Thank you for considering this request.

Read the comments: 140 Comments

Wednesday, 24 October 2012

07:57 – Reuters is reporting that the Greek government has struck a tentative deal with the Troika to release the long overdue €31.5 billion tranche and allow Greece to avoid default a month from now.

As usual, the terms are a joke. No one, including Greece, knows exactly how many people are employed by the Greek government, but it must be more than a million. That’s 10% of the Greek population. Not the working-age population, you understand. The entire population. If Reuters has it right, Greece will announce that 2,000 of these people, about 0.2% of state employees, will be put on notice that their jobs are to be eliminated a year from now. That’s 2,000. Not 200,000, which would have been a more reasonable first step toward reducing the size of government. And the layoffs will be a year from not, not right now. Then, Greece will serve one-year notices on a further 6,250 state employees every three months through 2013. So, Greece is going to lay off, eventually, about 25,000 state employees, or something like 2%. Not 250,000 which would have been a reasonable start. Drop, meet bucket.

As usual, it’s really all about Angela Merkel. She’s running for re-election next autumn, and she wants to make sure she’ll be re-elected. She doesn’t want the euro to collapse until she’s safely re-elected. She’s trying to spend as little as possible to ensure that.

13:17 – Barbara is leaving tomorrow to drive down to the beach with her parents. They’ll be back Sunday. Instead of wild-women-and-parties, I think I’ll just continue the Heartland marathon. I’d made it part way through series five the last time Barbara was away, so the question now is whether I should finish series five and then start series one again, or should I finish series five and then watch the first four episodes of series six before starting the cycle again?

When I mentioned to Barbara that Amber Marshall had gotten engaged a couple of months ago, she asked if I was disappointed. Eh? Barbara knows that I adore Amber Marshall, but it never even occurred to me that anyone would believe that I wanted her for myself. She’s an extraordinarily attractive young woman, and not just physically, but she’s young enough to be my daughter. I told Barbara that, to the contrary, I was delighted for Amber and wished her well. Now, it’s true that if I ever found out that Shawn Turner wasn’t treating Amber well, I’d have at least a passing thought of driving up there and pounding him into the ground head-first until only the soles of his feet showed, but that’s as far as it goes. I am protective of young women, not covetous.

17:29 – One of Barbara’s friends picked her up a little while ago to go out to dinner. Before she left, Barbara made me an early dinner. So, I fired up Heartland S5E13 and sat there watching it while I was eating dinner, with Colin begging the whole time. After I finished eating, I lit my pipe, intending to smoke it for a few minutes before I fed Colin. He let me know verbally that he wanted his dinner. I ignored him. He asked again. I told him to give me just a couple minutes. He then walked over to the DVD player, snouted the eject button, turned around, and looked at me. People who haven’t lived with Border Collies would pass this off as a coincidence. Those who have lived with BCs would believe it might have been intentional. Colin has certainly watched me closely many times as I ejected and inserted discs. I’m not 100% convinced it was intentional. Only about 99%.

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Tuesday, 23 October 2012

09:44 – I understand there was another presidential debate last night. Barbara and I watched a Dalziel and Pascoe DVD instead. These debates are all boring. Talk, talk, talk. They need to adopt my proposed debate format: give each of the participants armor and a short sword, and let them have at it.

Although October is one of the slower months for kit sales, we’re still on track to sell maybe 40 kits this month. November should be similarly slow until about Thanksgiving, when sales for Christmas and second semester start to kick in. But we’re in perilously low inventory status on the chemistry kits and particularly the biology kits. Those 15 chemistry kits we just built are dwindling fast, and the new batch of 30 biology kits isn’t ready to go yet. So, the first goal is to get those 30 biology kits finished and ready to ship, followed by a new batch of 60 chemistry kits, followed by yet another batch of 30 biology kits. Oh, and the first batch of 30 life science kits. Those should carry us through the end of the year, or nearly so.

10:37 – Ambrose Evans-Pritchard nails it: Britain has left the European Union in all but name

It has never been in Britain’s best interests to be a member of the EU, other than the common market. For at least a couple of years now, it’s been obvious to anyone paying attention that that’s exactly where Britain is heading. In terms of the common market, the EU needs Britain more than Britain needs the EU, so it’s unlikely that the EU will put up much resistance as Britain continues to withdraw from the other aspects of the EU. As the EU continues to decline and the euro crashes, I expect to see other member countries and countries with strong links to the EU also withdraw, starting with Norway and then Sweden, followed perhaps by Finland and Ireland. It is in the interests particularly of Britain, Norway, and Sweden to remain as far as possible at arm’s length from the EU, and to focus their trade-development efforts on the English-speaking countries and the developing world rather than continental Europe and distance themselves from the increasingly command-driven economies of the core EU members. I suspect that the current UK government is the last that will pay even lip service to maintaining full EU membership.

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Monday, 22 October 2012

08:11 – Oh, great. Not only is North Carolina among the nine “swing states” for the presidential election. An article in the paper this morning says there are about 100 “swing counties” nationwide, of which a dozen are in North Carolina. And we’re one of them. So I guess the flood of spam political phone calls we’ve been getting is likely to get even heavier over the next couple of weeks.

And the IMF is proposing a plan that would wipe out a large amount of the world’s sovereign indebtedness, proposing something I’ve favored since the 1960’s: eliminating fractional-reserve banking. For those of you who don’t follow banking esoterica, fractional-reserve banking is both simple and fundamentally dishonest. It amounts to private, legalized counterfeiting.

When you deposit money in your bank, you deposit it in one of two types of account: a demand-deposit account, AKA a checking account, or a time-deposit account, AKA a savings account. So let’s say you deposit $1,000 in your checking account and $100 in your savings account. With the demand-deposit account, you are not lending that $1,000 to the bank. They are holding your money for you, in a fiduciary role, and you are entitled to reclaim that $1,000 at any time. You pay a fee to the bank for holding your money safely. With a time-deposit account, you are actually lending that $100 to the bank for a specified term, typically six months (check the fine print). The bank is then entitled to lend that $100 to someone else.

Fractional-reserve banking corrupts that system, which had worked very well for hundreds of years. In fractional-reserve banking, the bank lends out not only the $100 you placed in your time-deposit account, but most of the $1,000 (typically $900 or more, depending on the reserve requirements in effect at the time) you placed in your demand-deposit account. In other words, they’re misappropriating money that isn’t theirs to lend. The effect is that the bank just creates $900 out of thin air. The result is difficult to distinguish logically from the bank simply counterfeiting $900.

Now, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard gets a lot of the details wrong. Adam Smith, for example, propagated no myths about this. He nailed it completely. AEP is also confused about how money worked in Sparta and Rome. There’s no evidence that Sparta used iron coins, for example. They probably did use iron ingots as a value store, but AEP ignores the relative value of iron then and now. At the time he speaks of, Europe was just transitioning from the bronze age to the iron age, and an iron ingot had significant inherent value. It could, for example, be turned into a sword. But Evans-Pritchard gets the broad-brush issue right. It’s long past time that we eliminate fractional-reserve banking, which is simply institutionalized theft on a gigantic scale.

13:07 – There must be some way to sue political parties for harassment. So far today, I’ve received eight–that’s EIGHT–political calls. It seems to me that despite their free pass from the DNC regulations, political parties should establish a DNC list of their own. That list should be propagated downward to every candidate running under the auspices of that party, from the president to local candidates, and severe penalties should result if anyone violates it.

13:51 – I don’t know why inflation continues to surprise me. Perhaps I’m more aware of it than most people, who aren’t likely to remember exactly what price they last paid for a specific item. But just now I cut a PO for sticky labels and other stuff from iBuyOfficeSupply. To do that, I copied the spreadsheet for the last PO to them, which I issued on 1 May. I ordered two of the same items this time as last time: sticky labels for chemical bottles by the box of 7,500 and sticky labels for running postage labels, by the box of 100. In 5.5 months, the price of the small labels had increased by just over 12.5%, and that of the larger labels by about 13.1%. It’d be interesting some time to go back and compare our Costco receipts from months ago to the most recent one. I’d guess food prices are increasing at the same rate, give or take. This really can’t go on. Of course, the official government inflation figures are grossly understated, much like the official government unemployment figures. Do they really think that no one notices that prices are going up much faster than they admit or that a boatload more people are without jobs than they admit?

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Saturday, 20 October 2012

09:16 – I’ve just set a new policy. If the USPS loses a package, I’m not going to waste any time trying to resolve the issue with USPS. I’ll just write it off and ship a replacement. It happens seldom enough–a small fraction of one percent in our case so far–that it’s just not worth wasting time to get a determination, which I’m told is almost always “we lost it; tough luck”. Even at that, it’s still much cheaper to ship USPS than to use UPS or FedEx. The packages get to their destinations in one to three days, and we’ve had very little shipping damage. So, I conclude that USPS can be very annoying, but they’re still by far our best option.

We’re just about finished packaging chemicals for a batch of 30 biology kits. We’ve also done 30 sets of the chemicals that (so far) will be included in the Life Science kits, which are a subset of those in the biology kits. All of those chemicals–stains and so on–have essentially unlimited shelf lives, so there was no downside to making them up now. In fact, like wines, some stains actually improve with age.

Back when I was a teenager, I couldn’t afford a good microscope. Back then, even student models were extremely expensive, probably the equivalent of $1,500 or more in today’s dollars. One of my parents’ friends gave me a WWI-era Zeiss microscope. I wish I still had it. I think it was probably produced for the German military. It came in a beautiful fitted wooden case that also included an assortment of accessories, including several stains. I remember thinking at the time that there was no way the stains could possibly still be good, since they were at least 50 years old. A couple of the bottles were empty or had dried out, but there were three or four that looked untouched. So I tried them, and they worked very well.

11:26 – This latest EU summit, like all of the other 20-odd EU summits since the beginning of the euro crisis, accomplished essentially nothing. The position of Greece, Spain, Italy, and the other spendthrift states remains unchanged: “We want Germany to pay all of our debts and continue to subsidize our irresponsible spending. Oh, yeah, and Germany can’t dictate terms to us. Just give us the money.” And Germany’s position also remains unchanged: “We’re fed up with paying everyone’s debts. We just want to get out of this mess as cheaply as possible. Ask us for anything other than more money.”

It seems that Rajoy and Spain are finally beginning to realize they’re not going to get the bailout-that-can’t-be-called-a-bailout. If Spain wants to beg money from the ECB and the ESM, they’re going to have to do so explicitly and accept whatever terms Germany insists on. Doing that would finish Rajoy politically, and he knows it. Rajoy is between the proverbial rock and hard place. He’s already made veiled threats to exit the euro, which would inevitably also mean exiting the EU. Spain’s debt for 2012 is essentially all sold already, but Spain is in deep trouble in 2013, when it has to sell hundreds of billions of euros of debt. Spain has zero prospect of doing this at all, let alone affordably, which means Spain is almost certain to default on a massive scale in 2013. Either that, or leave the euro, which amounts to the same thing. Creditors will no doubt be paid back in worthless local currency, artificially pegged to the euro at 1:1.

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Wednesday, 17 October 2012

10:20 – Work on the new batch of biology kits is proceeding apace, but we’re now down to just two chemistry kits in stock. Fortunately, we have everything we need to build 15 more quickly, but then the well runs dry. So, as soon as we finish this batch of 30 biology kits, we’ll start on another batch of 30 chemistry kits. The chemistry kits outsell the biology kits about 1.5:1, and kit sales have slowed seasonally, so the new batches should last us at least a month, if not through the end of November. Of course, starting in late November, kit sales tend to pick up for Christmas and second semester, so we’ll need to get more in the queue.

It’s difficult to see how things in the eurozone could be much worse on the eve of the first full EU summit since June. French and German leaders always hate each other, and Hollande and Merkel are no different. The difference this time is that they’re not keeping it private. Ordinarily, the French and German leaders meet on the eve of an EU summit and essentially agree on the agenda and decisions ahead of time. This time, Merkel and Hollande are in disagreement on everything, and are tossing public barbs at each other. The Greek talks with the Troika have collapsed entirely, with Greece saying there’s no way it’ll agree to the Troika terms. That means Greece runs completely out of money in the next six weeks, with no prospect of getting any anywhere. The markets are closed to them, the IMF won’t bail them out, and the EU won’t bail them out. That means Greece will default, not just on bonds but on public salaries and pensions and payments to the companies that are importing desperately needed food and medicines, or were importing them until they stopped getting paid. Meanwhile, as its price for continuing to support any EU bailouts, Germany is apparently now insisting on an EU fiscal overlord, which simply isn’t going to be accepted by other EU members. Obviously, Germany has already decided that enough is enough, but instead of just saying “nein” explicitly, they’re setting conditions that they know will never be accepted. That way, Germany can at least say “we tried” when the whole pathetic euro edifice collapses.

14:46 – Oh, wait. The Troika and the Greeks have kissed and made up. (Now there’s a disgusting image…) Greece says it’s going to get the long-delayed bail-out tranche in time to avoid catastrophe. The Troika says they and the Greek government have agreed on “broad outlines” of the terms needed to allow the bail-out to go ahead, albeit without additional IMF funds. The truth is, the IMF, the EU, and the ECB are all terrified at what’s going to happen when-not-if Greece collapses. When they talk about contagion from a Greek collapse being “containable”, they’re whistling past the graveyard, and they know it. Of course, as they say, the devil is in the details, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this latest deal, like so many others, collapses as a result of those little details. Yet one more attempt to buy time with smoke and mirrors. The trouble is, they’re running out of time. And smoke and mirrors.

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Sunday, 14 October 2012

08:19 – With three weeks left until the election, both campaigns are starting the final push. I don’t know how it is in other, non-swing states, but here we’re being subjected to a barrage of campaign phone calls and fliers. I’ve been averaging a couple phone calls a day from the presidential campaigns, and that doesn’t count the ones from the campaigns for state and local offices. I can’t wait for this to be over.

09:36 – I need to make up two liters of Benedict’s qualitative solution. I have the 34.6 grams of copper(II) sulfate and 346 grams of sodium citrate I need, but I just realized that I’m fresh out of sodium carbonate. So I just put a kilo or so of sodium bicarbonate in a glass baking dish and stuck it in the oven at 450F. At that temperature, two molecules of sodium bicarbonate quickly decompose into one molecule each of sodium carbonate, carbon dioxide, and water. In half an hour or so, I’ll have a baking dish full of pure anhydrous sodium carbonate.

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Saturday, 13 October 2012

08:49 – I just watched the original video posted by Amanda Todd, the 15-year-old Canadian girl who killed herself after being tortured on Facebook and physically assaulted, all because as a seventh grader she made the mistake of flashing her boobs on a webcam video.

Apparently no one–not her family, not her friends, not her teachers, no one–was able to help this girl. When I read the news story, I went over to Google Images to see what the girl looked like. That’s where this image came from. And among the top image results was one that was truly nauseating: a post from 4chan asking if anyone had the picture of Amanda’s boobs. Jesus.

14:55 – While I was walking Colin earlier today, I stopped to speak with one of the neighbors. He asked me who I thought was likely to win the coming election. I told him that unless something changes drastically, I expect Romney to win in a landslide. I’ll be surprised if Obama wins 221 electoral votes, let alone 271. And I suspect that’s what’s going to happen for the same reason that Obama won last time. Few people actually supported Obama’s ideas, to the extent he had any. They were voting for Obama as not-Bush, and this time I suspect people will vote for Romney as not-Obama.

People understand that things are bad in this country and that Obama hasn’t done anything to make them better. I think people will vote for a change, even though many are aware they’re really just voting for the same-old same-old. Still, given only two realistic choices, I think they’ll pick the not-Obama one.

North Carolina is supposedly a “swing state”, but I don’t sense that locally. I see many fewer Obama signs now than I saw four years ago, and if Obama loses North Carolina’s cities he has no chance to win the state. Rural North Carolina will vote overwhelmingly Republican. I suspect the same is true in the other so-called swing states as well. Obama’s liberal constituency, blacks, labor union members, and so on will vote for Obama, no matter what. The religious right and most of those who are well off will vote for Romney, no matter what. But I think those in the middle, the ones who don’t particularly want to vote for either candidate, will vote for Romney simply because he’s not-Obama. We’ll see.

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Friday, 12 October 2012

09:30 – We didn’t watch the vice-presidential debate last night, but, from all accounts I’ve read, Ryan won despite being outnumbered two to one. Instead of wasting time watching that, we chose to waste time watching the final four episodes of the final season of Despicable Housewives on Netflix streaming.

Speaking of despicable, the school fund-raisers are at it again. One of the neighborhood girls stopped by trying to sell magazines for her school fund-raiser. What possesses people to put 14-year-old girls in this position, not to mention putting their neighbors in that position? I almost told her that no one wants these overpriced magazines. No one. I’d rather just hand her money. In fact, they need to stop sending these kids out to raise money, period. What kind of lesson are they teaching them? We pay federal, state, and local taxes to support the schools. The kids shouldn’t be forced to raise more money themselves by begging from their neighbors. It’s demeaning.

13:03 – Boy, am I not going to do business with U-Line. Back before we started the business, I ordered some stuff from them: shipping boxes, bubble-wrap, shrink-seals, and so on. I remember thinking at the time that their prices were a bit lower than local suppliers, but their shipping charges were outrageous. If there’s one thing customers really, really hate, it’s when a vendor attempts to making shipping a profit center.

So, this morning I got email from someone who wanted to know if we’d sell him just the six stains in the biology kit. Sure, why not? So I quoted him a price. All of those stains will fit in a USPS Priority Mail small flat rate box, which costs $5.15 to send anywhere in the US.

But I got to thinking. First-class mail is a very good deal for light packages, although it’s available only for packages that weigh 13 ounces or less. Those half-dozen stains would weigh well under 13 ounces, so I went to the USPS web site to check out how much first-class mail would cost. Even a 13-ounce package costs only $3.65, and it’s more likely this package would weigh maybe 6 ounces, which is $2.46 worth. Just as interesting to me is that I could send that package to a Canadian address for less than $5, versus the $30+ it costs to send it to Canada using Priority Mail International.

Just two problems. First, the USPS web site allows me to print postage labels for Express or Priority Mail, but not for First-Class mail. How strange is that? I guess they’re trying to keep the local post offices in business or something. Well, there is one alternative. Rather than using their web site to produce the postage labels, I could download and install an application that does the same thing, but allows me to print first-class, parcel post, and other postage labels. The only problem with that is that it won’t install under WINE, so I’d need to run an actual Windows box. Either that, or perhaps Virtual Box. The other problem, of course, is suitable boxes. The boxes that USPS provides are for use only with Express Mail or Priority Mail, NOT with first-class mail.

So I went over to the Uline site and found suitable boxes. I was going to order two sizes, one about the size of a DVD writer and a second about twice that size. They had those boxes for $0.42 each and $0.44 each, with a minimum order of one carton of 50. So I added one carton of each size to my shopping cart, for a total of $21 plus $22 or $43. Note that these boxes are, small, light, and are shipped flat, so this wouldn’t have been a bulky or heavy shipment. Uline offered me only one shipping option, UPS ground. Obviously they would ship from a warehouse not far from us, because they said delivery would take one business day even UPS Ground. Their shipping charge? About $21, or nearly 50% of the order amount. So, assuming that perhaps there was a minimum shipping charge that made that charge so high, I added another box of boxes for $21. That took me from $43 to $64 for the merchandise. It also boosted the shipping charge from about $21 to about $32. Once again, they were charging me about 50% of the merchandise total for shipping. So, I’ve written off Uline as a vendor. I’ll get what I need locally.

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Thursday, 11 October 2012

08:06 – The other shoe dropped yesterday when S&P finally downgraded Spain’s sovereign debt by two levels, to one level above junk status. That was actually a gift, although Spain professes to be shocked that it was downgraded at all. But as the markets are perfectly aware, S&P should long ago have downgraded Spain to pure junk status. Italy is next.

And, speaking of wishful thinking, the MSM are reporting that Merkel’s position on Greece has softened and that she will likely approve more time and perhaps more money for Greece. I note that Merkel said absolutely nothing about granting Greece more time, let alone more money. She was too polite to say so, but Merkel along with the rest of Germany has already written off Greece. Any actions she takes now will be aimed at minimizing the adverse impact of Greece on Germany, not on helping Greece. German taxpayers are already on the hook for roughly a trillion euros of bad PIIGS debt. Enough is enough.

I’m one of those rare people who are being pursued by both major parties: an undecided swing-state voter. Not that there’s any chance at all that I’d vote for Obama. The last four years of Obama have been catastrophic; the country might not survive another four years with him as president. Romney isn’t much better, but he is marginally so in some respects. So, the question is, do I vote for Gary Johnson, who would actually be a good president but has zero chance of winning, or do I vote for Romney, who’d be only marginally better than Obama but has a good chance of winning? I really would hate to see Obama carry North Carolina by one vote.

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