07:57 – Reuters is reporting that the Greek government has struck a tentative deal with the Troika to release the long overdue €31.5 billion tranche and allow Greece to avoid default a month from now.
As usual, the terms are a joke. No one, including Greece, knows exactly how many people are employed by the Greek government, but it must be more than a million. That’s 10% of the Greek population. Not the working-age population, you understand. The entire population. If Reuters has it right, Greece will announce that 2,000 of these people, about 0.2% of state employees, will be put on notice that their jobs are to be eliminated a year from now. That’s 2,000. Not 200,000, which would have been a more reasonable first step toward reducing the size of government. And the layoffs will be a year from not, not right now. Then, Greece will serve one-year notices on a further 6,250 state employees every three months through 2013. So, Greece is going to lay off, eventually, about 25,000 state employees, or something like 2%. Not 250,000 which would have been a reasonable start. Drop, meet bucket.
As usual, it’s really all about Angela Merkel. She’s running for re-election next autumn, and she wants to make sure she’ll be re-elected. She doesn’t want the euro to collapse until she’s safely re-elected. She’s trying to spend as little as possible to ensure that.
13:17 – Barbara is leaving tomorrow to drive down to the beach with her parents. They’ll be back Sunday. Instead of wild-women-and-parties, I think I’ll just continue the Heartland marathon. I’d made it part way through series five the last time Barbara was away, so the question now is whether I should finish series five and then start series one again, or should I finish series five and then watch the first four episodes of series six before starting the cycle again?
When I mentioned to Barbara that Amber Marshall had gotten engaged a couple of months ago, she asked if I was disappointed. Eh? Barbara knows that I adore Amber Marshall, but it never even occurred to me that anyone would believe that I wanted her for myself. She’s an extraordinarily attractive young woman, and not just physically, but she’s young enough to be my daughter. I told Barbara that, to the contrary, I was delighted for Amber and wished her well. Now, it’s true that if I ever found out that Shawn Turner wasn’t treating Amber well, I’d have at least a passing thought of driving up there and pounding him into the ground head-first until only the soles of his feet showed, but that’s as far as it goes. I am protective of young women, not covetous.
17:29 – One of Barbara’s friends picked her up a little while ago to go out to dinner. Before she left, Barbara made me an early dinner. So, I fired up Heartland S5E13 and sat there watching it while I was eating dinner, with Colin begging the whole time. After I finished eating, I lit my pipe, intending to smoke it for a few minutes before I fed Colin. He let me know verbally that he wanted his dinner. I ignored him. He asked again. I told him to give me just a couple minutes. He then walked over to the DVD player, snouted the eject button, turned around, and looked at me. People who haven’t lived with Border Collies would pass this off as a coincidence. Those who have lived with BCs would believe it might have been intentional. Colin has certainly watched me closely many times as I ejected and inserted discs. I’m not 100% convinced it was intentional. Only about 99%.