07:35 – Poor Cyprus. Until yesterday, everyone seemed to be agreed that Cyprus needed €17 billion to avoid bankruptcy. The Troika would provide €10 billion of that amount as a bailout loan, and Cyprus itself had to come up with the other €7 billion. That was sufficient to gut the Cypriot economy and bankrupt its large banks. But today it turns out that things were worse than first believed, boosting the required total to €23 billion. And Cyprus has to come up with the entire extra €6 billion, nearly doubling its required share. Meanwhile, the Troika expects the Cypriot economy to contract by a disastrous 8.8% in the next year. That’d be bad enough, but no one really believes that prediction. The Cypriot government itself is expecting a contraction closer to 13%, and most economists think even that’s extremely optimistic. My own guess is that a 30% to 40% contraction might turn out to be closer to reality. Poor Cyprus. Until recently, it appeared to be a reasonably prosperous country. Now, it makes the Greek economy look good. And Portugal and Slovenia are now teetering on the edge of collapse as well.
Work on science kits continues.
14:04 – As of this morning, I still had 600 each of the 50 mL and 100 mL plastic beakers on backorder with one of my main suppliers. This is a show-stopper for us. We’re out of those beakers, which are in every kit we offer, and we can’t build more kits of any type until we get more. So I just checked with another of our major suppliers, who had 6,000 of the 50 mL and 8,000 of the 100 mL beakers in stock. I just issued a PO for 1,000 of each and notified the first vendor to clear the backorder. A thousand of each is sufficient to build 500 of the CK01A chemistry kits or 1,000 of any of the other kits, so we should be in good shape for the next few months anyway. I hate tying up working capital and storage space on a lot of units of particular items, but not when the alternative is running out and ending up dead in the water.