11:00 – Autumn weather has really arrived in Winston-Salem. Our highs for the next few days are to be in the mid-50’s (~13C), with lows in the low 40’s (~5C). Now if only we’d have a hard freeze to kill all the mosquitoes.
Barbara is cleaning house this morning, after which we’ll work on biology kits. She still has a couple sets of bottles and a bunch of sets of envelopes to label, and I have solutions to make up.
12:02 – It sucks to be a Greek in Greece right now, and it’s going to get a lot worse quickly. The ECB’s Asmussen has just rejected Greek pleas for more time, which, as Asmussen correctly points out, is actually a request for more money. Time is, after all, money.
As Greece said earlier this week, it runs out of money next month. Not just money to repay outstanding loans and bonds. Greece runs out of money, period. That means no money to pay government salaries, including those of the police and military. No money to pay pensions. No money to provide even basic health services. No money to import desperately-needed food and drugs. No money, period. And no one is willing to lend them any more. At this point, Greece is already a failed state. Its last hope was the €31.5 billion bailout tranche, which has been held up for months and looks almost certain to be a chimera.
For years now, Greece has pretended to be attempting to comply with the Troika’s terms, while in fact simply ignoring them. For years now, the Troika has been pretending to be convinced that the Greek government is actually trying to comply with their terms, while being aware the whole time that Greece has never made any attempt to do so and has no intention of doing so. I’ve known all along that Greece and Greeks would eventually pay the price for 30 years of partying on borrowed money. When something can’t go on, it eventually stops.
For years now, everyone has been completely aware that Greece was going to crash eventually. And the truth is that no one really cared about Greece and Greeks then, and no one really cares now. All the EU ever cared about was preventing the crash of Greece from crashing the euro itself. The general feeling is that Greece and Greeks are going to get what they deserved all along, and they’re going to get it good and hard. If that €31.5 billion tranche isn’t granted, which I don’t expect it to be, expect to see Greece descend into complete chaos beginning late this year. By January, I expect to see Red Cross and UN humanitarian relief teams thick on the ground in Greece. Greece will become a fourth-world country by then. And, even if that tranche is somehow miraculously granted, that puts off the collapse only for a few months. Greece is going down, big-time.
Yup. I posted my basic agreement with this scenario in yesterday’s area after reading this one first, about par for me.
We have leaves turning like crazy up here and the nights are getting much crisper but it doesn’t seem as cold as the autumns I remember so far. We shall see; this is the big Columbus Day weekend, I guess, although the actual day is, last I knew, still five days off. And we don’t celebrate it anyway; our day is for Leif and his boon companions a thousand years ago. Before they were sent scrambling by skraelings.
As I’ve said before, I expect it to get bad here in the US, but I don’t expect it to happen as soon as you apparently do, and I don’t expect it to be nearly as bad as you do. The US has inestimable advantages over Greece, starting with the fact that we have a sovereign currency. Also, with the exception of some REMs and a few other relatively minor items, we’re self-sufficient and can remain so. In particular, the US and Canada between us have everything we need to, if not flourish, at least survive the coming bad years. What Canada lacks, we can make up for them, and vice versa. In particular, the US and Canada both are immensely wealthy in energy. With energy, you can accomplish anything.
In short, I don’t expect anyone in the US and Canada to starve or freeze to death, and I don’t expect any widespread rioting. We’ll be poorer than we are now, and we’ll all have to work harder, but I think that’s about it.
As to the rest of the English-speaking world, Australia and New Zealand are in relative good shape. Not as good as Canada and the US, but they’re likely to muddle through as well. The UK is going to have it a lot tougher. If I were the UK, I’d be distancing myself as far as I could as fast as I could from the EU in general and the eurozone in particular, and building even stronger trade and economic ties with the US and Canada. They’re going to need our help.
I don’t agree. Oh, on average you’re correct. However, those of us who actually work, work at something productive and at the end of the year pay into government more than we receive, will be no worse off. The legions of parasites, the useless bureaucrats and the welfare queens and the “private” corporations which can’t turn a profit without suckling at the government teat, will be in a world of hurt.
(And I’ll stand back and laugh at them. And carry a spare magazine in case they throw a temper tantrum over the loss of their free ride.)
“we have a sovereign currency…”
How long is that gonna last? House of cards, etc.
“…I don’t expect anyone in the US and Canada to starve or freeze to death…”
There have been folks in upstate NY and northern New England already who’ve had to choose between groceries and heating oil in the winter, and luckily last winter was really mild. This one could be a doozy.
“…I don’t expect any widespread rioting…”
Watch when the store shelves go empty after three days and the lights are out, esp. in the major cities. St. Louis had a really unusual ice storm a few years back and those things happened, just short of extreme hardship and potential violence. Some of our inner cities have long already been combat zones.
You are also apparently banking on decent political leadership here in North America which I find inexplicable. We have had anything but for a very long time now, which is the main reason we’re in the shape we’re in.
“…those of us who actually work, work at something productive and at the end of the year pay into government more than we receive, will be no worse off. ”
We will be punished and our production confiscated, as it is already but on a much larger scale, to keep the whole enchilada rolling along. They are bleeding the goose that lays the golden eggs but that can only go on for so long. (wow, all those food analogies, gotta rustle up some grub now…)
I figure we are somewhere between the years 1851 and 1856 again, prior to the Great Default and a major shit-storm. Where it stops nobody knows…
Greece can still print Euro notes and, perhaps more ominously, mint Euro coins, at least until the materials run out…
No, they can’t. Anything they print would be counterfeit. The ECB prints euros and produces euro coins. And that’s assuming that Greece could afford the paper and ink, which they can’t.
It turns out that Greek Euro notes indeed are produced elsewhere, but they do produce their own coins…
http://www.ibiblio.org/theeuro/InformationWebsite.htm?http://www.ibiblio.org/theeuro/files/files.nat/greece.s01.htm
I have a silver Greek drachma with the head of Alexander the Great on one side and the other has a lion. Had it since I was a kid. Also have a silver denarius with Vespasian on it, and some bronzes from Constantius, Constans, et. al. Maybe the local shopkeepers will take them in place of the rotten fiat greenbacks and copper-clad counterfeits when we need a loaf of bread ten years from now.
Hey, quick low-tech question for photogs and others; how does one separate standard snapshots that have become stuck together by getting wet?