Cardboard Spaceship

Tarzan Doesn't Seem to Need Jane Anymore...

After my last rather serious post, here is a funny Xmas toy moment from FailBlog.  As it says in the video, "Tarzan doesn't seem to need Jane Anymore..."

Dubai Bang Bang Wallop

I have not been posting much this week, as I have been busy, and also I had another attack of Doomer's block.  Doomers block is what happens when you think, "I should write something in my blog" and so you look around the room trying to think of whimsical thoughts about kittens and so on, but what actually comes to mind is:

"Feck!  Feck!"  We're all doomed."  And as my ex-boss at SAP, the nicest man who ever fired me once said.

"I do read your blog H, honestly I do, but there's only so much pain a man can take."

Well, what finally made me crack was the somewhat less than amazing news that Dubai has welched on it's debt.  I mean seriously, who ever thought that building cramped, tacky, luxury villas on a sand bar in the middle of nowhere with a foul climate, and such poor infrastructure that the luxury beaches are actually open cast toilets, would turn out to be a bad idea.  What could possibly go wrong?

Well, it turns out that cashflow is an issue, and Dubai ain't got any right now, so they are in big DooDoo, and in one of the biggest financial PR disasters I can recall, they dropped a bomb into the world's markets by casually announcing, as the markets closed for the local holiday, that they would be pushing back their debt payments from Dubai World by six months. 

The three lead paragraphs from the London Times sum it up rather neatly. 

"Fears of a dangerous new phase in the economic crisis swept around the globe yesterday as traders responded to the shock announcement that a debt-laden Dubai state corporation was unable to meet its interest bill.

Shares plunged, weak currencies were battered and more than £14 billion was wiped from the value of British banks on fears that they would be left nursing new losses.

Nervous traders transferred the focus of their anxieties from the risk of companies failing to the risk of nation states defaulting. Investors owed money by Mexico, Russia and Greece saw the price of insuring themselves against default rocket."

In other words, everyone started running around with their hair on fire, doing whatever they could to get out of this situation. 

This is worrying, not because of the default of Dubai per se., but that fact that sovereign default is now looking like a real possibility.   The bank's balance sheets have not recovered from the earlier losses.  Standard and Poors gave a very chilling account of the state of the banks earlier this week.  

If you look at the real core tier one assets of the banks, not including hybrid debts, then the picture of the world's banking health look very poor.   UBS, which has the Spaceship's small amount of cash has a ratio of 2.2.% under this approach, when using a less conservative approach it claims to have 13%.  Citigroup and the Japanese banks are little better.  HSBC is the world's best capitalised on this measure with 9.2%

So, if we look at HSBC, the potential default in Dubai has knocked 7 or so percent of its value, and other banks have suffered equally.  This means that banks that are going to try and float shares to make up their holes in the balance sheet, like the beleaguered nationalised LTSB, are going to face severe issues. 

It makes no sense why debts that were bad on a bank's balance sheet would suddenly be Okay, because they moved into the government's pocket.  Because the pockets may just not be big enough.

Enjoy the show, you've paid a lot for the ticket.

Climate Change Fraud?

The servers at the Hadley Climatic Research Unit have been hacked, and e-mails and other documents have been taken and spread liberally around the Internet.  Why is this interesting, well, because they show what looks like some pretty damning evidence of data manipulation to make the case for global warming. 

Sample from one Phil Jones, talking about the fact that rather than increase as predicted, global temperatures have actually declined in thelast few years.

"I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline."  

Read more about the significance of this here .

Well, the issue with this is, in the midst of a huge economic dislocation, potential huge problems with the resource overstretch on the Earth, with overpopulation and resource depletion, and these knaves are trying to make us destroy industries, and launch some of the greatest effort misallocations in history to solve a problem that may not even exist outside of their seemingly less than open and trustworthy efforts.

I have a lot that I want to blog about, but when I try to compose in the main typepad editor, it collapses the browser. I have tried Firefox, and IE, as well as a clean reboot, and a logout and login. Annoying.

Aircraft Can't Fly Underwater...

A while back I read a great Ward Nerd piece at the Exile, which is a hotbed of rather full on opinion and comment, but one that hits the mark more often than you might suspect. 

The original article was about how the Chinese had come up with a missile that renders the whole US aircraft carrier notion redundant.  

"The Chinese military has developed a ballistic missile, Dong Feng 21, specifically designed to kill US aircraft carriers: “Because the missile employs a complex guidance system, low radar signature and a maneuverability that makes its flight path unpredictable, the odds that it can evade tracking systems to reach its target are increased. It is estimated that the missile can travel at mach 10 and reach its maximum range of 2000km in less than 12 minutes.” That’s the US Naval Institute talking, remember. They’re understating the case when they say that, with speed, satellite guidance and maneuverability like that, “the odds that it can evade tracking systems to reach its target are increased.”

You know why that’s an understatement? Because of a short little sentence I found farther on in the article—and before you read that sentence, I want all you trusting Pentagon groupies to promise me that you’ll think hard about what it implies. Here’s the sentence: “Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack.”"

Now, I think that the War Nerd really has it right on a lot of this stuff.  But it is interesting to see that this making to the mainstream press, with this piece on Bloomberg. 

"The missile could turn this region into a “no-go zone” for U.S. carriers, said Andrew Krepinevich, president of the Center for Strategic and Budget Assessments in Washington"

So Americans need to expect problems if the Chinese decide to uhmmm....  reunite with the rogue province. 

"The world economy is probably knackered, whatever we might do now."

This assessment comes from George Monbiot writing in the Guardian.  He is talking about the onset of Peak Oil which they aslo wrote about a week ago, as the IEA seemed to be forced to overstate the reserves, and hence overstate our degree of comfort, in the existing energy supplies. 

He is duly pessimistic about the world economy, as with no cheap transport, no cheap goods.  Makes sense, doesn't it?

But what he rightly points out is that farming, and hence our food security depends on the fossils fuels as a major input.  Read the article to get the context, but this should make you sit up and take notice. 

"Wyn Evans, who runs a mixed farm of 170 acres, has been trying to reduce his dependency on fossil fuels since 1977. He has installed an anaerobic digester, a wind turbine, solar panels and a ground-sourced heat pump. He has sought wherever possible to replace diesel with his own electricity. Instead of using his tractor to spread slurry, he pumps it from the digester on to nearby fields. He's replaced his tractor-driven irrigation system with an electric one, and set up a new system for drying hay indoors, which means he has to turn it in the field only once. Whatever else he does is likely to produce smaller savings. But these innovations have reduced his use of diesel by only around 25%."

Oh crap. 

Oil Reserves Overstated?

For those of you who are concerned about the state of the world, one of the main issues is the potential or otherwise that the world will run out of Oil, a phenomenon called Peak Oil. 

Only, guess what, in order to avoid frightening the bejeesus out of everyone, the IEA has been distorting the real reserves in the world, so we might even have reached peak oil already.  So the price drop in the last few months, although now reversing, looks likely to have been a blip. 

Damn, as if the economic news wasn't bad enough. 

Despair Squid

I always joke that if I ever write a sitcom, it will be called "Geneva, an everyday tale of expatriate folk."  Only problem is, even if I just wrote the simple unalloyed truth of our daily lives no-one would believe it, because it is too bizarre.

As you will see from the predecessor post, life has been a bit rough here in the Spaceship over the last few hours.  One of our neighbours caught up with us on a dog walk, and casually refused to do the obligatory francophone air kissing, "because I am on chemo."  Turns out she has an advanced cancer of the lung, and metatheses.  All discovered in the last week or two.  She seemed remarkably calm, I would be a wreck in those circumstances.  I wish her the best for what will be a tough trial.  She has courage, I have to say, she showed us a photo of her wearing the wig she has bought for when her hair falls out.  It was a shock to say the least.

Then Mrs Spaceship was talking to another good friend, giving advice on what to do about her daughter, who seems to have a significant depression, when the doorbell went and one of our neighbours came in.  As Mrs Spaceship is a psychiatrist, and as far as I can tell, a good one, so many of the worried of the neighbourhood turn up looking for advice, which is fine, as being part of a village means giving as well as taking.  So, classic presentation, she turns up looking nervous and out of sorts, and wants to speak to my wife.  I could tell that it was a drive by emergency, so I offered her a glass of wine, and started to ask what was wrong.  Then she started asking why we were spreading rumours about her getting divorced.   (We do not gossip here in the Spaceship, the village is too small, and we know too much.)  So I just thought bollocks to that, and told her to get out of my house.  Very stressful exchange of views followed, just what I did not need.  Anyway, we patched it up, but that's more than I wanted for a quiet Monday evening.

To add to this, the drivebyer then went to the one person whom we had mentioned it to, to ask if she knew if it was really the case that the couple in question were divorcing, and gave her a rough time as well, so the poor woman showed up on our doorstep in tears and we had to calm that down as well. 

Then, just when life could not really seem to get more turbulent, a very good family friend who was at school with Mrs Spaceship called, and told us that a mutual friend had died.  Alasteir Scott, RIP  A talented and gifted man, whose life has been cut short.

I could do with less real life right now.  It seems that as we hit middle age, (I am 44 at the time of writing,) for some people, the centre cannot hold. 

"TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;"

Yeats.

Big Night for Not Good News...

Dunno.

Here at Newlands mansions its been... real.  Bit too fucking real.

One of our neighbours has terminal cancer.

One of our good friends is looking, possibly, at a divorce.

Another good friend has a daughter with severe depression...

Another of our good friends has died, a famous travel correspondent...

And others...

Crap. 

I hope for the best....

Thousandistas

Reading my old buddy Hugh's blog.  (It's him who got me started, the bastard.  Can I have my life back now please...)

He was talking about the passing of the good blue collar jobs in the USA, as in the collapse of Detroit, Flint, etc.  He got a comment from one of his regulars of which he has legion, which I am going to reproduce in full because it speaks volumes about how life is for the young of today.  Not least in highly underemployed and economically traumatised Spain. 

"That con­ver­sa­tion about white-collar jobs is four years old in Spain.

This is the short ver­sion: The peo­ple who were in their 20-30s in the 1970s saw that a Uni­ver­sity degree made a big dif­fe­rence in your job and salary. They made their kids (anyone born 1970  –  1985) study, and that young gene­ra­tion belie­ved for a while that we could do the same trick as our parents. Get a degree. The job will follow.

We now have a word for peo­ple of my gene­ra­tion with a hand­ful of degrees: mileu­ris­tas. Thou­san­dists. As in, someone who makes around 1,000 euros a month. There’s so many of us, no one’s willing to pay us more than a (barely) living wage."