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.