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.
This is why the USA needs a balanced budget amendment. With teeth. With no exceptions except for war. Real war, not police actions. WW II war.
I agree, but that should have been done long ago. How is it going to happen now with the bozos we have in Congress?
Moreover, Indiana has had a balanced budget provision in its constitution from the very start, but there have been many years recently when it was not obeyed.
I fear that all a balanced budget amendment would accomplish is to make the Democrats even more determined to raise taxes.
If people (not necessarily Democrats) want to raise taxes to give out goodies, so be it. Mr. Obama is wearing the new Obamacare taxes for his re-election this fall. We will see how well that goes in the general populace.
I am a fiscal conservative and a social moderate. I am rapidly becoming a single issue voter on fiscal issues. But I know several people who are also single issue voters on the abortion issue (anti).
Texas has a balanced budget requirement in our state constitution also. I think that all 50 states do. But the legislature has played with it and when one peeks under the cloth there are all kinds of hidden unfunded liabilities out there. For instance, we just sold 3 billion $ of bonds for road improvements and are going to pay for this out of future gas tax revenues. Guess what is decreasing right now due to more efficient vehicles and lesser truck traffic due to more train utilization? Gas taxes even with 6 million new inhabitants over the last decade.
California gets around the budget by making exaggerated revenue claims that no one believes. So what if we’re $16B off.
The certified revenue numbers for use in the Texas budget come from the separately elected State Comptroller here in the Great State of Texas. That is required by the state constitution. So at least those will not be falsified. Unless that person wants to never be elected again.
We elect everybody here in Texas. Even the Governor and Lt. Governor run on separate tickets. Comes from all the carpet baggers after the War of Northern Aggression.
Without wanting to open the whole can of worms yet again, I will point out that the War Against Slavery had as its stated goal the forced reentry of independent states to the union, and it used draftees — slave soldiers — to accomplish this.
I’ve been making a list of major political hypocrisies for a writing project, and that one right there is a doozy.
Didn’t the South offer freedom to slaves who fought on their side? Bit of hypocrisy there too. If they’re sub-human why should they be freed under any circumstances?
Gun sales up dramatically in Colorado, Florida, and Oregon, attributable directly to the Aurora massacre.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18980974
Boy, Anaheim sure is a dangerous place…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-26/california-community-rocked-by-riots/4155444
Damned WordPress logged me out again, and dropped my password, even though I repeatedly tell it to remember me.
Background checks for firearms up 41% in Colorado.
And here in Vermont we ain’t got no stinkin gun laws. At all. Nothing. Zero.
Thanks for the advice on the eyes and insurance, etc., Ray and everybody who put an oar in on it. We are looking into it, pun intended. Mrs. OFD’s eye bothers her the same way closed as it does open and I am dragging her in to see somebody qualified ASAP, whatever the cost.
Kickstarted another three-dozen or so nodes today on our cluster project; for a while I was doing a dozen at a time. The fun part is trying to do these upgrades on aging hardware; most of the time it works, but the times it doesn’t can fry your brain. I had a node today that just would not boot, no matter what I did. Another guy, our team leader, stopped by, messed around at the console and realized that it WAS installing; we just couldn’t see it. Why not? A loose cable at the back of a rack to the display; something a rank noob should learn to check FIRST before sweating bullets with CLI and scripts and detective work in the software. And I am the dolt that lectures others on always checking that kind of stuff first. Joke on me today.
And I see in my current American Legion mag that Europe is opening a WWII museum now and calling it the European Civil War. Boy, those bureaucratic bozos in Brussels sure need to open a damn history book. Last time I checked the U.S. and the entire British Commonwealth of Nations and the U.S.S.R. were in on that caper in a real big way. The Daily Mail over there got up in arms about it, of course.
The thing is: the balanced-budget amendments need to have teeth. Those teeth need to bite the individual politicians who pass spending bills that exceed the available income. Personal liability? Criminal charges?
But where are the courts? If there is such an amendment, and the government passes a spending bill that is too big, it ought to be possible to take this to court and get the bill thrown out.
By the way, just as a minor point of info: here in Switzerland people almost never pay down the principal on their mortgages. No reason they couldn’t; it just isn’t the usual case.
So the Swiss homeowners aren’t actually owners, they’re renters and the banks own the homes? Or am I misunderstanding something?
Renters with mandatory “assault rifles” who make chocolate, cheese and clocks, and have somehow managed to stay neutral, more or less, since the Middle Ages. A tip o’ the hat to what Stanley Crouch calls “the real white people,” as opposed to white people here, for instance.
58 this morning, drizzly, foggy, t-storms on the way again. Off to Red Hat cluster land again…have a nice day!
California elects it’s controller too. But of course the Gov, the legislature and most state offices are firmly in the grip of the democrats and the unions. The only thing that really goes to the right is tax increases. They usually only get those by falsifying the purpose. You know, health or education; it’s for the children. Most the the electorate thinks you can just sell bond and get whatever you want. We may be in debt but we’re going to start building a high speed train even if it only goes between Madera and Bakersfield. Pure union pork.
Anaheim is a perfect example of what starts to happen when the taxeaters become the majority.
something a rank noob should learn to check FIRST before sweating bullets with CLI and scripts and detective work in the software.
Has nothing to do with a NOOB mistake. It has to do with not seeing the forest for the trees. You have become too involved and needed a different perspective.
Many times in my software development career I have been stumped by code that did not work in spite of my insistence the code was correct. After hours (or days) of frustration I finally bring someone else in to go over the code with me. I sit them down and starting explaining the logic, what the line of code is doing, etc. when wham, the problem hits me in the face. The person brought in to help leaves without saying a word.
Having the additional person forced me to look at my code from a different perspective. Sometimes having someone who knows very little ask what you think are stupid questions will trigger a light.
Has nothing to do with lack of technical skill.
OFD, I mostly agree with Ray but I think the root cause is not
forest-trees. That’s a symptom. The root cause is likely the very long
hours they’re making you put in. News flash for managers: people get
fatigued, and fatigued people make more mistakes. I think managers
forget this, if they ever knew, because they’re not the ones being woken
up at 0300. They have netslaves for that.
SteveF: Depends how you see it, I suppose. In the US, you (stereotypically) have a 30-year mortgage. If you actually stay in the same house for 30 years, and never refinance, then in 30 years you will have paid off the mortgage. In fact, most people move around, move to bigger and bigger houses, at least until they are nearing retirement age, so very few people ever have a paid-off mortgage. So, in that sense, most US homeowners are also not really the owners of their houses – the banks are.
Here, there’s just no requirement to pay more than the interest due. You can, but there is no requirement to do so. If you don’t, then your mortgage doesn’t decrease. Since most people move around here as well (granted, less than in the US), there’s little effective difference.
Bad cables (mostly connectors) are, IMO, the single biggest cause of problems in any equipment that involves electricity. Last year, the main news radio station in Indy was dead silent for over an hour. Aside from the fact that it happened only a couple weeks after a brand-new chief engineer took over, and he was—as yet–completely unfamiliar with how to get audio patched around from their 100% digital studio to the transmitter, it turned out that the problem was a wire that broke off a terminal strip (those are meant to be more-or-less permanently-fixed affairs) in the distribution room—so trying to switch studios made no difference. How did that happen? Apparently, the wiring harness pushed against a rack door, and every time the door was opened or closed, it pushed/pulled on the harness, alternately pushing and pulling the individual wire in question, until it broke.
Rumors were that 6 people worked continuously for more than 45 minutes before figuring out how to get audio routed around the trouble to the transmitter, and it took even longer to trace things to the point of finding that broken wire at a terminal screw strip.
These days, the work of building new studios and transmitter installations is done by contract, so station employees are seldom involved. Apparently, there were no wiring diagrams for anybody to look at, as the contractor had never provided them. He and his crew installed the system, left, his company broke up, and half-a-dozen years later: no drawings, and no way to get any.
I have found that just about 90% of non-functioning equipment and 100% of intermittent ones, is cabling/wiring in one way or another—including inadequate wire gauge, poor grounding (especially in audio and video, where shielding on cables sometimes breaks in mid-run), and bad wiring to the cable connector.
My motto is always check cables first, then look elsewhere. Funnily enough, I come upon situation after situation where people are scrambling, thinking something is wrong with the computer, something wrong with the mixing board, something wrong with the microphone. “Have you checked all cables?”
“Well, no.” And sure enough, there lies the problem.
We did both today, checking cables, connections, switches, etc., and alternated with mind-bendingly boring and tedious scouting through dozens of pages of CSM code trying to find out why the eff twelve nodes in a series could, first, not be connected to via rconsole, and then, would not boot into the upgrade install process. Only those twelve, out of a hundred and fifty-five. We did this for hours, inside the raised-floor data center, where it is in the forties for temperature, and in addition to other stuff we were already doing. At 7 PM tonight, we threw up our hands and called it a day. Tomorrow is another one.
And tonight I get home after a 12-hour day and spend more hours hacking away at mortgage company paperwork, which they keep sending back to me with more changes needed and corrections and so forth, really busting my nads. Closing date of August 7? Excuse me while I pick myself up off the floor here….