Category: politics

09:27 – The biology book is complete and off to the MAKE production crew. We’re finished with it, other than a QC pass or two, where we’ll do a quick check of the PDFs before the book actually goes to the printer. Amazon says the book will be available on 22 April, and I suspect that’s pretty accurate.

I’m off now to finish putting together purchase orders for the biology kits and more chemistry kits. Once I get those issued, it’ll be back to work on the forensics book re-write.

I see that there are Greek riots scheduled for today. Merkel cut Greece loose months ago, and it’s finally coming home to roost. As I predicted months ago, that 30% “haircut” for Greek bondholders turned into 50% and now appears likely to reach 80%, nominally. In fact, as I said, it’s actually going to be a 100% writedown, as Greece rapidly heads toward complete bankruptcy, with Portugal not far behind and Spain and Italy in the on-deck circle. The dominoes are starting to topple.

The fallout from the collapse of the euro isn’t likely to affect the US as deeply as some people seem to fear. US banks have very limited exposure to European debt, and exports to Europe are a fairly minor part of overall US production. Although clearly the exposure varies from state to state, on average US states probably do less than 2% of their business with Europe. Even if that disappears entirely, which it obviously won’t, the impact on US businesses will be relatively minor. The same can’t be said for China, however. China, which is leveraged out the wazoo, exports a large percentage of its overall production to Europe, and that export business is declining fast. That loss is already approaching levels that are catastrophic for China, and it looks like it can only get worse. Expect to see Chinese goods get cheaper as China tries desperately to keep exports up by increasing volumes to the US.

08:06 – Friday the 13th falls on a Friday this month…

FexEx showed up yesterday with a couple thousand polyethylene dropper bottles, 100 dozen 15 mL, 50 dozen 30 mL, and 20 dozen 125 mL. With what I already have on hand, that’s sufficient for the first batch of 56 biology kits. We’re still debating how many biology kits to stock pending publication of the biology lab book. We want to strike a balance among timely delivery, working capital allocated to inventory, storage space for finished-goods inventory, and freshness of the kits. I have second sources (and usually third and fourth sources) for all of the components, so back-ordered components shouldn’t be a problem. Working all-hands-on-deck, we can probably build and ship 100 kits a week, so if there’s a real flood of initial orders we should be able to keep up with only short shipment delays. I hope.

Work continues on the final lab session. I’d planned to finish it today, but it looks like that’s not going to happen. I should be able to finish it over the weekend.

One of the first things on my to-do list after I get this book complete is to upgrade my main office system. I am running, believe it or not, Ubuntu 9.04. It’s just short of three years old, and even security updates were discontinued long ago.

The problem was again made evident yesterday. My Epson V300 scanner arrived on Wednesday, so yesterday when I decided to take a break I figured I’d set it up and see if it worked. It didn’t, of course. It required newer versions of some system utilities, and those simply aren’t available for Ubuntu 9.04.

So, come 1 February, I’m going to back up all my stuff, pull the current system drive, pop in a new 3 TB Barracuda, and install a current Linux. The question is, which one. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to install the current Ubuntu, which by all accounts has completely gone off the rails. I’m thinking about installing the current Kubuntu, but I’m certainly willing to consider alternatives. What I want is a good desktop Linux, ideally one that’ll recognize my scanner and other stuff automagically and Just Work. Same deal on stuff like networking my system to Barbara’s and the den system. So, which is the best desktop Linux out there?

14:19 – Oh, boy. S&P is getting ready to downgrade the sovereign debt ratings of France and Austria. For Austria, no longer being AAA will be annoying but not critical, at least for the moment. For France, losing its AAA rating is catastrophic. France now officially joins the rest of Club Med. And the FANG nations are now the FNG nations.

09:22 – Well, this latest summit was widely considered to be the last chance to save the EU and the euro. Instead of concentrating on the immediate crisis and coming up with measures to address it, the participants focused on how to avoid future crises, doing essentially nothing to deal with the current mess. They fooled no one, nor was their attempt to make the UK the scapegoat successful.

Nor was there any sign of their so-called “big bazooka”. I was about to say “stupidly-named big bazooka”, but in fact it’s well-named when you think about it. Ordinarily in a situation like this, people talk about bringing out “the artillery”, crew-served weapons that fire large and effective charges. A bazooka was a personal weapon that fired a small and usually ineffective charge, which makes the comparison exact with what the EU had done to date. They’ve essentially lined up to piss on a 5-alarm fire, and nothing decided at this most recent summit changes that.

One of the reasons we redesigned the latest batch of chemistry kits was to allow them to fit into a USPS priority mail large regional-rate box rather than the priority mail large flat-rate box we’d been using. The large regional-rate box is just enough smaller than the large flat-rate box that the earlier version of the kit wouldn’t fit.

The upside to the change is that we expected it to reduce shipping costs. The large flat-rate box costs $14.95 to ship anywhere in the US, including Alaska and Hawaii. The large regional-rate box costs anything from $5.81 to $14.62, depending on the destination.

So, yesterday I drove out to the post office to mail the first batch of the kits in regional-rate boxes. When I got to the counter, the guy told me that the USPS didn’t offer counter service for regional-rate boxes. He could still ship them, but he’d have to charge me standard priority mail rates according to the weights and destinations of the boxes. If I wanted the regional-rate postage rates, I had to generate the label on-line with postage. Crap. I’d never been able to get the USPS Click-N-Ship web site to produce a label. When I tried to produce a test label, the site just went into an endless loop.

After he weighed the boxes and told me the postage cost for each, I told him I didn’t have any alternative, so to go ahead and ship them. The postage costs were all over the place, but all were higher than they would have been for regional-rate. For example, one box going to Pennsylvania would have been $6.88 under regional-rate postage but ended up costing $10.95 under standard priority mail rates. Another, going to New Jersey, would have been $8.06 regional rate, but cost $12.40 at standard PM rates. Another, going to New Hampshire, would have been $10.51 regional rate, but ended up costing $17.45, which is actually more than the large flat-rate box would have cost. And so on.

I drove home fuming, because I’d seen nothing anywhere on the USPS site that mentioned that local post offices don’t accept regional-rate boxes at regional-rate postage rates. So I spent a while looking around the USPS site, and finally found one place where it does mention that. Otherwise, I’d have fired off a nasty email to the Postmaster General. I may do that anyway, because the notice is extremely easy to overlook. Most people who’d used Priority Mail flat-rate boxes would probably assume, as I did, that if the USPS accepted flat-rate boxes at the counter they’d also accept regional-rate boxes.

But the story does have a happy ending. I’ve made my last trip to the post office. While I was on the USPS site, I decided to try once more printing a sample Click-N-Ship label. This time it worked. Apparently, even though I had the latest available Linux version of Adobe Reader installed, it wasn’t compatible with the USPS web site. I got rid of Adobe Reader and just used a native Linux PDF reader, which worked fine.

So, no more carrying boxes out to the post office to ship them. USPS will pick them up at my front door. Printing labels and postage on-line also provides a discount over the rates charged at the counter, even for flat-rate stuff, and they include delivery confirmation for free. It’s a no-brainer to use the on-line service, and I would have been using it all along if I’d been able to get it to work.

With the USPS pushing so hard to get people to buy postage and print labels on-line, I have to wonder if this is part of a larger plan eventually to eliminate local branch offices. When you think about it, there’s not really much need for them, and they are extremely expensive to operate both in terms of staffing and facilities costs. There are all kinds of places that rent PO boxes. You can buy stamps at Costco. A huge percentage of mail volume comes from corporate mailers, who don’t need the services provided by local branches. Closing all of those local branches and firing the staff would go a long way toward putting the USPS on a sound financial footing.

10:47 – The Open/Libre Office standard dictionary never ceases to surprise me with what’s included and what’s not. As I write the biology book, I’ve had to add a large number of pretty common scientific terms to the dictionary, so I’ve gotten used to it. But today I typed the phrase “monocotyledonous or dicotyledonous”, fully expecting to see squiggly red underlines for both words. Nope. Both were already in the standard dictionary.