Cardboard Spaceship

Eurobond - S&P Says "No Way"

One of the options frequently mentioned to solve the Euro problem is to issue Eurobonds, because then the bonds will attract the high credit ratings of the core countries. 

Only the exact opposite seems to be true according to this from Standard and Poors:

"A joint bond issue by euro zone countries would get the weakest member's rating if the issue was jointly guaranteed, the head of Standard & Poor's European sovereign ratings said on Saturday.

Moritz Kraemer said his understanding was that joint euro bonds would be structured along the lines of Germany's jumbo bonds, in which federal states team up to issue debt and each guarantees its own bit.

"If the euro bond is structured like this and we have public criteria out there then the answer is very simple. If we have a euro bond where Germany guarantees 27 percent, France 20 and Greece 2 percent then the rating of the euro bond would be CC, which which is the rating of Greece," he said.  (my emphasis.)  "If it is a joint and not a several guarantee then it would be the weakest-link approach, as we call it," he added."

Which leaves me genuinely mystified as to how this is supposed to work?  A sort of "portfolio of crappiness, assuming you are yoked together" approach might seem hard to quantify satisfactorily...

Burning Man

Hello Spaceshippers, back again.  Whence has I been?  In the local hospital, having my first, and hopefully only, major side effect of the treatment of the Attack of Lumps.

Now, remember, Chemotherapy is where a group of skilled and experienced oncologists fill you full of very toxic chemicals with the aim of killing the cancer somewhat before they kill you.   The degree of "somewhat" can be variable in terms of the type of cancer, how far it has got, and what kind of shape the rest of you is in.

My "somewhat" quotient was quite big I thought, but as I finished the 8th chemo, and waited at the end of the week of nasty smelling everything, and started to wait for it to get better, I suddenly started to feel worse.  Burning tongue, listless, bleh. 

Took some iron treatments, tried resting, just felt worse, so eventually Mrs Spaceship and I went to see the grown ups at the hospital,  whereupon I duly diagnosed as having 39 C of fever, (our thermometer at home claimed I was at 36.8 C, so not so reliable) and was duly given gorillacillin and shoved into a bed on the top of the hospital.  Likely cause, pneumonia or some other related chest infection.

Funny thing was, 39 C should make you sweat like a bucket, or me at least, and have fever symptoms and so on, but I had none of that, I just lay there like one of those stones you use to cook meat in a Mongolian Barbecue.

Five days of that, and a lot of drips, anti-biotics, and so on, and I appear to have shaken it off.   (Very good care team in the hospital, lots of careful follow through.)

Well, It was not unexpected that a battered immune system might get a surprise, but it's nice to be home again.   Hope that was the "somewhat" gap for this illness.

Former Japanese Prime Minister - Tepco Looked at Abandoning the Site, Tokyo would have been Uninhabitable....

Sometimes I wonder if I have right perspective, as I am very disturbed about the situation in Fukushima.   Is this an over-reaction?  Well, turns out that neither I nor anybody else really knew the half of the story.  This is an English version of a story in one of the main Japanese Papers.  Read the following from the recently resigned prime minister of Japan.

Former Japanese Prime Minister Kan Naoto says he felt a sense of crisis that the nuclear plant mishap in Fukushima could obliterate Tokyo and its vicinity, said the Japanese daily Tokyo Shimbun Tuesday.

Kan, who stepped down as prime minister Friday, said, “The week shortly after the accident is the period when I felt the highest sense of crisis,” adding, “The thought of an uninhabited Tokyo made me shudder.”

“At around 3 a.m. March 15, three days after the accident, I got a report from then Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Banri Kaieda that Tokyo Power Corp. was about to withdraw from the nuclear facility. So instantly I summoned the company`s president Masataka Shimizu and asked him to set up a joint countermeasures headquarters of the government and the company at the company’s headquarters,” Kan said.

"Had Tokyo Power Corp. withdrawn from the nuclear power plant, nobody might live in Tokyo now.”

Kan said, “If the power company had pulled out of the facility and left nuclear fuel unattended, the cooling water would have dried out within dozens of hours and the meltdown of reactors would have occurred,” adding, “If this had been the case, radioactive materials several or even dozens of times as much as those leaked in Chernobyl would had leaked. The country was brought to the brink of collapse.”

Wow.  I think that passes without further commentary really.  Except to note, of course, that the reactors melted down anyway, making me wonder what the real situation is right now.

 

 

 

About Being Wrong - I Fail in Diagnosis of Internet iPad Problem...

I was foaming below about a new iPad that I got yesterday, and how come it was lacking basic elements of functionality.  Read on to see how we can sometimes reach completely the wrong conclusions, and so should spend life being modest and thoughtful in the face of other's assumed mistakes...   

This is what I was writing...

"In my job, I have to demonstrate the SAP applications, and the "user experience" is a big part of that.  On the PC and so on, SAP has been well understood for a long time, but with the Sybase acquisition, a lot of emphasis is now moving to things like Blackberry, iPhone, and iPad. 

I was sent a mail saving that I must order one so that I could get up to speed, and start seeing what we can use for banking on the platform.  Bottom line, SAP insists I get a free iPad.  Nightmare, eh?

Lovely, lovely piece of kit. I was not that convinced until I really used it, and it seems to be really very special, and knocks the Blackberry mobile thang into a cocked hat. 

I was lying in bed this morning, still recuperating, with full Internet access, and I then went and did something else, and came back later. 

Safari refuses to believe it is connected to the Internet, despite a working Wi-Fi connection that had offered access some minutes before, otherwise unchanged, and despite my best efforts, it refuses point blank to believe there is an Internet connection.  This is not isolated, we had the same problem yesterday in SAP Lausanne, and I see many complaints about this on the support forums. I've booted the router, the iPad, refreshed network and other settings, and so on.  Nada.  Zilch.

How can you get something as basic as a Wi-Fi connection refresh wrong?  It obviates the whole brilliance of the concept!   That's always what I have felt about Apple stuff, brilliant, until it isn't, and then there's nothing you can do with it.  I had a not dissimilar feeling when I bought a 27 inch iMac, that quickly went back to the (very professional and exceptionally helpful) shop."

STOP THE PRESS!

Turns out that the people demolishing the kitchen have cut the phone cable, by accidentally, as my son used to say.   Now that really would make the Internet unreachable, unless the electrons decide to form some kind of ant line across the smashed tiles to ensure my surfy goodness.  Unlikely.

Sorry Apple!  Your brilliance remains undiminished, and I should look broader for causes.  What a laugh!  I was actually reassured when Mrs Spaceship told me that, as I had begun to seriously think I was loosing my tech mojo...