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.
Germany, and Greece and the Euro: it ain’t over till the fat lady sings. Just wait, they’ll find a way to kick the can another few months down the road.
Oh, yeah, you’re probably right. The problem is the cost. Right now, every month they buy is going to cost them probably another year of misery. Lost decade, hell. They’re already looking at lost multiple decades.
But that later misery is for later, and there’s an election coming up
soon.
I take it I’m not the only one to find a lot of wisdom in Heinlein’s
writing?
Ah, a week from hell. Late on Sunday night, the main playout computer at the radio project died. Spent the last 2 days over there. Of course the station is listener-supported, so funds are quite limited, and there was no real backup clone for that situation. There are 2 other studios for origination, and that was employed, but programming cannot be exactly the same as it is when coming from the main studio.
Turns out that the CPU fan, which is tension-mounted to a plastic ring screwed to the motherboard, broke the plastic flange that the tension-spring latches onto. Fry’s sells only the fan, not the broken ring screwed to the motherboard, so I decided to replace the broken computer with the hardly-used computer in the talk studio, about 5 minutes from the main studio. Bought 2 2Tb 3.5 SATA drives and installed them. Fry’s also does not sell the little plastic rails that allow drives to slide in and out of the cages (Fry’s is fast becoming a completely lost cause; they did not have HP60 inkjet cartridges in stock either). Also got one of those external USB drive connectors and started the process of formatting and transferring a good 500gb library. Formatting 2 drives was nearly a 4 hours project, then the transfers were 6 hours more.
Now I was into the second day, and I spent most of it recovering things like Firefox bookmarks to weather and program download sites, and configuring Winamp to the M-Audio card we use. BTW, the Firefox recovery was a snap; just transfer an SQL-Lite file from one drive to the other while Firefox is closed and you have both the bookmarks and history from the old installation transferred to the new. There are times I love Firefox. Spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get the new sound library drives to share across the network. That is imperative, because much of the programming comes in on a Mac, and it could see and authenticate to the playout machine (XP/SP3), but could not read folders on the drives. Given an infinite amount of time, I probably could figure it out, but I decided we needed to call in our real guru, who is a woman that works in hospital IT nearby with a mix of PC’s and Macs, and will get the networking figured out in a few minutes instead of many hours.
By the time I left late last night, everything was working acceptably for the main station operator, and he was happy, so I was, too.
Only one thing left to resolve. M$ Sound Recorder, which was used to pre-record things like weather and some voice-only material, will not work on any computer with more than 2gb of RAM. Old machine had less than 2gb; new has more. M$ knows of the problem, but has no intention of fixing it. So, I guess I have to get Audacity configured for that task. Sound Recorder had a shutoff at 60 seconds, which was not helpful, but most announcements were either 60 or 30.
Now, one day off to recover, and all-day video jobs the rest of the week.
Robert is correct; each month of time the Euros or we here in North America buy, via hook or crook, probably means another year or more of utter misery down the road. Nobody cares, nobody reads history; if it happened before they were born it didn’t happen. So we can easily imagine the southern Med tier of countries to look somewhat like Uganda or Namibia only with mostly Caucasians in another year or two at most, and the northern tier into the UK following in a year or two after that.
We will probably look like Greece looks right now at this point, and may fall back to circa 1900 eventually, with no juice, no net, no IBM, no HP, no SpaceBook or tweets. And praise God Amighty, no tee-vee. Also, no more Happy Motoring. There may be intermittent radio and if some clever people put their minds to it, we may get local railroads and power plants up and running again in certain areas that might tend to foster that sort of thing, inner-city Detroit or Cleveland or South Central not so much.
Us old farts will be sitting as close to the hearth as we can get on those long winter nights and telling tales of the wonderful Fifties and Glorious Sixties and Disco Seventies and Go-Go Eighties and how the big box stores held shelf after shelf of spectacular products and we could hop in the cah and drive forty miles to pick up a six-pack of Bud Lite and a carton of ciggies and a video rental without blinking an eye.
Eventually the grandchildren will get together and concoct knockout drops from an old formula they find in one of Robert’s chemistry lab kits, and we will be thusly knocked out via our hot chocolate or hard cider some night and hustled out to the back forty to freeze quietly in our sleep. Tiresome old buggers at rest at last….
“Eventually the grandchildren will get together and concoct knockout drops from an old formula they find in one of Robert’s chemistry lab kits, and we will be thusly knocked out via our hot chocolate or hard cider some night and hustled out to the back forty to freeze quietly in our sleep. Tiresome old buggers at rest at last….”
OK, I laughed at that.
See, I have a sense of humor! Dark…but hey, these are dahk times…
In Switzerland, we’ve been seeing a strange struggle that is only going to get worse. Wealthy people are doing anything they can to get part of their assets out of the EU, with lots of them moving assets (or their entire households) here. The EU is doing anything it can to keep and tax their assets.
In France, Mr. Holland wants to impose massive tax rates on the rich, and is shocked at their lack of patriotism. Instead of voluntarily paying 70% tax, some of them moved out of France! The cheek! So now he is trying to find some legal way to tax expats.
One of the German states (Nordrhein Westfalen) pays criminals to steal data from Swiss banks, and even arranges false identities for them afterwards. The German government was shocked, just shocked, when Switzerland filed criminal charges against the bureaucrats who organized the theft.
What the EU politicians don’t understand is that the total amount of money they can get from their wealthy citizens isn’t a drop in the bucket copmpared to the huge problems they have created. Just like “tax the rich” in the US: all the assets of the wealthy wouldn’t even touch the national debts.
Switzerland just provides a convenient external focus for the politicians, to distract their voters from the massive local problems. Being rather surrounded and outnumbered, it’s likely to become politically uncomfortable. But no worries, the EU just got the Nobel Peace Prize, they surely wouldn’t do anything unfortunate…