09:02 – I’m so busy and the euro situation is so hopeless that I’m not going to bother to write about it any more. Merkozy are now talking openly about the breakup of the euro and the EU itself, and they’re talking about it as though it’s likely to occur sooner rather than later. Italian bond yields spiked to 8.1% yesterday, which is far past the point of no return. The 7% threshold is very real psychologically for the markets; once yields reach 7%, investors write off the issuer as so likely to default that it’s simply too risky to invest. That in turn causes bond yields to increase further in a vicious circle. So, Italy is gone, which means Spain and then France won’t be far behind. There’s nothing that can be done to stop the collapse–short of the ECB turning on the printing presses, which they’re not going to do–so it’s pointless to continue discussing it. The patient is brain-dead.
Work continues on the biology book. I’m doing a lab session right now on the effects of pollution on succession in microcosms. What fun. Build a tiny little world and then poison it. Forced selection and survival of the fittest.
God I love U-Line!
The ferret managed to ruin their latest mailing on a sale of cartons so I called them up and a real person answered after one ring. I gave her my customer ID, and asked that she’d resend it. Then I asked if she could check my history, because I just really wanted to place a reorder at the sale prices.
No problem, the history was in my inbox in a minute. The whole conversation wasn’t even two.
THAT’S how to make a customer happy.
Gad, I screwed the link on that up…
http://www.u-line.com
Damn, I even screwed that one up!
It’s http://www.uline.com
Boxing and packaging specialists.
Yes, Uline is the way to go for mailing and packaging supplies. I’ve used them hundreds of times.
I was really impressed. So much so that I won’t bother trying to figure out who I ordered bubble wrap from the last time — I’ll just get it from them and damn the pennies.
Au revoir, Europa! You committed suicide.
Soon enough we will join you, short of some kind of miracle.
For fun read Mark Steyn’s and Pat Buchanan’s latest, and then go back a ways and read James Burnham’s “Suicide of the West.” Be sure to take his little test. I did many years ago and came out as a reactionary even THEN. I shudder to consider what I might be NOW.
http://dailyreckoning.com/educated-guessing-game/
This is a good summary of what I’ve seen and predicted over the last few (since 2004, or so) years. (Eeek, that’s seven years!)
It’s a credit bubble, not a debt bubble. It’s happened before and will probably happen again. Some guy wrote a book about how this is a generational phenomenon, and I suspect he’s closer to the truth of understanding these long cycles of boom and bust than anyone else. Akshay will probably ferret out the author…
Perhaps — or perhaps not — I was mistaken in my belief that India would undergo the same deflation in real estate prices that the US and much of Europe has seen. I cautiously hold my breath as the velocity and reporting of transactions are so slow in that “developing country”. Heck, even China has better reporting (true or not) on real estate prices than India!
I’ll continue to insist that rapid deflation (a “bust”) is the only way to lure private capital into the markets and not sovereign debt, and the longer it’s forestalled by government intervention with meddling in the money supply, the longer it will take to get world economies growing again. The IMF isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.
Yet more government and bureaucracy and back-handed theft from the common cookie jar via inflation is an unsustainable proposition. Maggie Thatcher put it best: “The problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money”.
I wish it weren’t true, but the end of his essay notes that, “governments, which are inherently reactionary even in the best of circumstances, will respond with repression. They will not adapt peaceably.” They haven’t done so in the past, so if past results are any indication of future probabilities…
Off-topic, but if your child were dying of a chill, would you hesitate to burn a pound of coal to keep him warm? Multiply that by 7 billion and then solve the CO2/AGW debate.
I sent this out this morning, but find myself asking this afternoon, “What’s the difference between a credit bubble and a debt bubble?” It’s like lice: one is private and the other pubic.
It seems to me that the chart in this article explains a lot about OWS, the education bubble, the non-competitive economy, and more…
Heck, just before my kids started college, I made a big deal of saying there was only ONE THING IN LIFE I would ask of them: get a degree in a field where there are jobs that pay decently–like accounting, graphics design, engineering, IT, teaching. If there is something else they love more, then go to school for that AFTER they get a job that can support them in life.
Lotta good that little talk did. Ended up with art history and math. Years on, now, and they both have multiple part-time jobs, but still relying on family help to get by. Guess I should have been more forceful.
I give my kids the same advice, with the forcefulness being that I’ll help pay for engineering school or similar, but they’re on their own if they go into squishy subjects. Son#1 is a freshman in Chem.Eng. Son#2 is a couple years from college but is heading the same way.
In high school, the band instructor was encouraging me to go to music school. I declined, on the reasoning that I want to eat every day. Coincidentally, my first wife was “a musician”, who taught school just to make a living. Many of her friends were “musicians”, who waited tables or clerked in stores or mooched off their parents because of course they couldn’t make a living as musicians.
Amusing additional note: When I was 15 I was deciding between medical school and engineering school. My would-be* girlfriend’s father was a doctor, so I got in to see an autopsy. I was fine until the intestines came out, but the overall event steered me to engineering school.
* Would-be on her side, though I wouldn’t have been averse. She apparently had the major hots for me, to the extent that people teased her and joked about it in my presence, but I’m as thick as a brain-damaged brick and never caught on.
I’m planning on giving my daughter similar advice as she grows up. I’m also going to do whatever I can to encourage her to try it out before she gets a degree. If she wants to be a chef, I’ll encourage her to get a job in a restaurant, even if it’s only washing dishes or saying would you like fries with that? I think she should learn as much as she can about the field before she goes to the trouble to get a degree.
I probably would have majored in Computer Science in college rather than Electrical Engineering if I had better information. The only two programming languages I knew when I made that decision were BASIC (with line numbers) and 6502 Assembly Language. I preferred the latter, but not enough to spend my life writing programs in it. When I taught myself Pascal, I finally found a useful language that I could see writing non-trivial programs in.
I’ve been giving that same advice to siblings who are parents of my four nieces, probably to no avail. So be it. And our own son majored in honors history, and his first jobs were at a chain restaurant, a chain car rental place, a chain phone store, and now he’s finally in a startup doing business intel/analysis, mainly because a friend hooked him up. \
Daughter is gifted at languages and at 19 already knows, Latin, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Greek and wants to learn German next. She is looking at a double major in languages and international commerce at McGill. We shall see. Lately the OCW has been more attractive, along with the plethora of music interests.
SteveF says:
Amusing additional note: When I was 15 I was deciding between medical school and engineering school. My would-be* girlfriend’s father was a doctor, so I got in to see an autopsy. I was fine until the intestines came out, but the overall event steered me to engineering school.
* Would-be on her side, though I wouldn’t have been averse. She apparently had the major hots for me, to the extent that people teased her and joked about it in my presence, but I’m as thick as a brain-damaged brick and never caught on.
With several young doctors in the family, I can safely say that the profession tries to weed out the weak-stomached at the beginning. My cousin, the anesthesiologist, says you cannot be squeamish around blood, but — unless you are actually going to be a coroner — the likelihood you will ever see things like intestines spilling out of anyone, is pretty slim. In most of the operations he works on, they do not even open up the body cavities anymore. But in his first year, they did everything they could to identify the faint, and move them out of the profession, if necessary.
I have known a couple people during my life who tried nursing, but found that the sight of blood sent them over the edge, so they chose another career. I was kind of squeamish around blood, but the reason was because I thought if I lost more than a few drops of my own, I was on the road to imminent death. However, my doctor daughter in-law once informed me that there are 7 liters of blood in the average person, so you can spill quite a bit before it gets really serious. When they drew a vial of blood from me, I always thought I immediately felt worse, but she once laughed at me for that, and said I could not possibly notice such small amount was missing. Sure enough, they took 2 big vials from me not long ago, and it did not phase me in the least.
One thing I should say about nurses, is that my opinions were incorrectly shaped by my best friend’s grandmother, who was a nurse all during my early childhood. At an impressionable age, she once described her job as “cleaning up messes”. With the job I am now doing, I have heard quite a few nurses questioned pretty specifically and intently about their work and specific knowledge. You HAVE to be smart to get qualified as a nurse these days.
As for having a girl falling for you and never realizing — geez that happened to me, too. Apparently, she told everybody but me, and when I finally found out, it was just days before we moved from Tiny Town to Naptown — which, back in that day, was far enough away that it spelled death to any possible relationship. Apparently, her attachment had gone on for over a year, and she had even managed to get herself seated behind me in both math and history classes. Generally, I am not one who ever has wanted to live my life over again or go back ‘with what I know today’. But that is one relationship I sure wish I could have checked out. It is also the reason I became very direct in my own life about things like that. Ever after that incident, I made it clear early on, to every girl I was interested in, exactly how I felt. Not all reciprocated, but at least I did not hold it in for a year, like the girl behind me. She, too, was a doctor’s daughter. Some things are possibilities and some not; no harm in finding which is which, but there sure could be regrets for not exploring.