07:48 – The city of Stockton, California is declaring bankruptcy, driven under by the costs of government services, primarily pension and retiree health-care costs. It’s not the first, and won’t be the last, city or state government to find itself in that position. What we’re watching is just the early manifestations of a phenomenon that’s going to come back to bite us. Unions, particularly public-employee unions, have extracted promises to pay that are unsustainable. They would be unsustainable even in a good economy. In the bad-and-getting-worse economy we’re in now and likely to remain in for at least the next several decades, believing that these commitments will be met is delusional.
Here’s what I think is going to happen. Ultimately, all of these government pension and health-care promises will be broken, and all of them will be transferred to the existing Social Security and Medicare programs. Retirement and health-care programs for all federal, state, and local government employees–including military and congressional retirees, post office employees, and so on–will be folded into Social Security and Medicare, along with all resources that have been set aside to fund these separate programs. Nor will government programs be the only ones affected. Most or all private retirement programs will also be folded into the big tent of Social Security and Medicare. Ultimately, it’s not going to matter what you were promised. What you’re going to get is what everyone else gets: Social Security for a pension and Medicare for retiree health care. And that’s all.
14:05 – In breaking news, CBC has renewed Heartland for a seventh season.
I’ve always hated manual labor, and I despise getting sweaty. When I was a kid, my mother used to tell people that after he’d had a bath and a change of clothes my brother could walk out the back door, stand on the porch for 30 seconds, turn around, and come back in filthy. I, on the other hand, could play all day in a mud puddle and come back in cleaner than when I’d started.
So what I’ve been doing this morning, assembling chemical bags for the chemistry and biology kits, is not one of my favorite jobs. But at least I now have most of what I need to take our finished goods inventory on both kits to between 40 and 50 each. Except, of course, beakers. I was expecting those to arrive right around now, but when I talked to our supplier last week she told me they’d not gotten them in as expected and that she hoped they’d arrive this week. Oh, well. We have a dozen or so of each kit in stock, which’ll hold us for some time. If the delay gets much longer, I can always cancel the beaker order and get them from one of our other suppliers that does have them in stock.
And I’ve changed plans for the antibiotic test papers that we are including in the life science kits. Originally, I planned to run 8.5×11″ sheets of chromatography paper through one of our laser printers to cover the paper with edge-to-edge labeling in a small font: “SUL” for sulfadimethoxine, “NEO” for neomycin, and so on. The problem is, running that paper through the printer changes its absorption characteristics, and what’s worse it changes them unpredictably. I’d done some testing on an unprinted sheet (which absorbed about 8 mL of solution) and made calculations accordingly. Each sheet is about 600 square centimeters, and I wanted a concentration of 100 micrograms per square centimeter. It was easy enough to figure out how much solution I needed and of what concentration. Until I found out that apparently the fuser of the laser printer messes up the absorption characteristics of the paper. Crap.
So I went to Plan B. Costco sells 12×18″ sheets of construction paper. It’s acid-free and heavy weight. It’s also about a tenth the price of chromatography paper. At first, I ordered white construction paper, intending to trim it to 8.5X11″ and try running it through the laser printer to see if the fuser affected it. Then I realized that there was a potentially much easier solution. Instead of using the laser printer to label the different kinds of antibiotic test papers, I’ll simply use different colors of paper for different antibiotics. So I ordered three different colors. The minimum order from Costco was three 50-packs of each, which should be a lifetime supply of construction paper. I’ll have to test the paper to make sure that the dyes have no effect on bacterial growth, which I’m guessing they won’t.
Sometimes I wonder how Costco does it. The construction paper colors I bought cost $1.39 per 50-sheet pack, with a minimum order of three packs. So each of the three colors was $4.17, for a total of $12.51. That included free shipping. This paper isn’t light. IIRC, it’s 76-pound basis weight, so nine 50-papers of 12×18″ paper has some heft to it. I know UPS would charge me more than $12.51 just to ship that much weight. I’m sure Costco gets a better deal from UPS than I do, but that much better? And, to top it off, Costco didn’t combine the order. I ordered the nine packs yesterday. UPS just showed up with one of the three-packs a few minutes ago. The other two three-packs are supposed to arrive tomorrow. I can’t help thinking that Costco must have lost money on this transaction.