Greece and Ireland have now reached the point of insolvency, because they are in the European Union, and its only because they are in the European Union that they have not sunk.

These countries have big problems that the Euro is stopping them from solving…

Lets first look at a country with its own currency.

If the country gets into trouble, the currency becomes worth less against other currencies. As imports now appear more expensive,  the citizens of that country have taken a (hidden!) pay cut relative to imports and exports. More expensive imports mean that the residents of that country consume more indigenously produced products and less imports, this in turn helps the economy of that country to recover.

In addition, exports from that country appear cheaper to the countries that consume them, increasing competitiveness, also helping the economy to recover.

A country in the EU does not have this balancing force, as the value of the Euro is fixed at levels affected by the EG’s strongest members. This means that countries in economic trouble must find another  way to give their residents the pay cut the currency does not deliver.

I see no way to do it. What the EU appears to want those countries to do is:

• Increase taxation.
• Reduce public spending.

Both of these will lead to higher unemployment and a decrease in growth, leading to a downward spiral.

As we live in a democracy,  these options are also not without political consequences and will lead to public unrest (which we are already seeing on both Greece and Ireland).  Because of this neither country appears to be ready willing or able to do anything about the situation. The only thing that has happened is that the rest of the EU has lent them even more money (!) which they will have to repay sometime,  just making the situation worse.

At present neither of these countries can borrow money on the world financial markets, and so must borrow from the European Central Bank which buys up the worthless government bonds from these bankrupt countries. Did I hear anyone say sub-prime, or toxic-bond?

A side issue here is that there are political strings attached to these loans from the ECB,  effectively a transfer of some governmental power to Brussels (France and Germany).  Where will that lead?

It looks like Spain and Portugal may be joining Greece and Ireland in the near future, and keep an eye on Italy and Belgium who also have massive debts…

To me, the single currency seems bad for everyone.  Bad for countries with economic problems, as they have a currency that does nothing to help them. Bad for the economically strong countries, as they have to carry the load.

I really don’t see how lending more money to a bankrupt countries at a higher interest rate helps anyone. That’s just stupid!

My prediction is that unemployment will rise in the problem countries , meaning less tax revenue and less consumer spending, causing a slowing or negative growth, and a downward spiral.

How will that end? Will Brussels end up governing those countries? We will have to wait and see, but it won’t be pretty.

As a soon to be pensioner, I look at the world with different eyes than I did 20 years ago as a wage earner. I am more interested now in things like, inflation, the economy and the governments financial state, as they are all going to affect my well-being as a pensioner.

The way I see it, I am going to transition from being a marketable commodity, to a dead weight carried by the wage earners. It shouldn’t be like this, because all of my working life, I paid into the pension system. The trouble is that the government took that money and used most of  it to pay the existing pensioners and borrowed (spent!) the rest.

The last few years of financial crisis  have meant that the ability of government to pay back the borrowed pension cash has disappeared. As well as this, income (taxes) from working people will seriously decrease in the next 20 years as the baby boomer’s will retire, and fewer workers will be paying for more pensioners.

Doesn’t look good does it?

Ok, so I cannot depend on a state pension, but I have savings!

Well, the world financial system is also not at all well, lets take a look at the Dollar.

The USA currently busy getting into deep trouble, its national debt is now over $13.5 trillion and rising. The current ratio of debt to GDP is 93% and the US Treasury expects it to rise to 103% by 2015.

(http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN088462520100608)

How does the country service such an enormous debt of which nearly two-thirds is the public debt, and is owed to the people, businesses and foreign governments who bought Treasury bills, notes and bonds.? As far as I can see, the only way to service these debts, is to sell Treasury bills, notes and bonds, increasing the debt.

The other one-third is owed by the government to itself, and is held as Government Account securities. Most of this is owed to Social Security and other trust funds, which were (!) running surpluses. The bad news is that these  securities are to be repaid when the baby boomers retire over the next 20 years! These debts  will have to be repaid so that pensions can be paid and old people looked after.

Another  factor is interest rates, they are low right now, what happens if they increase? Remember, the amount of interest a borrower pays is normally directly proportional to the risk he presents. Does this mean that as the national debt increases, the interest that the Treasury must pay on the securities will increase? If it does the amount of debt will go into an upward spiral…

I also see that the US Treasury is busy increasing the money supply, which is generally seen as a way to accelerate inflation. Interest rates are also influenced by  inflation.

The only saving factors I see are:

• An explosion in GDP, so that the larger debt can be serviced. This is unlikely to happen, as the drag of the national debt has a negative on the GDP. (According to Republican Representative Dave Camp; ”The president’s economic experts say a 1 percent increase in GDP can create almost 1 million jobs, and that 1 percent is what experts think we are losing because of the debt’s massive drag on our economy,”).
• A large reduction in the dollar exchange rate, making the debt look smaller, and increasing the competitiveness of US exports and increasing GDP.  Unfortunately this makes it harder for the US to borrow, pushing it towards default.
• Rampant inflation, which will also make the debt look smaller.  This will also have the benefit(?) of giving US citizens a pay cut and making US exports more competitive and increasing GDP. Unfortunately this also makes it harder for the US to borrow, pushing it towards default.

Note that factors 2 and 3 are bad for the world because, as we have seen, the US economy is tightly coupled to the world economy, as demonstrated by the sub prime mortgage crisis.

A large proportion of the debt is owed to foreign governments, meaning that if there is a severe devaluation of the Dollar, or america defaults, the effects will be felt worldwide, and just in case you are sitting in Europe and feeling smug, it can, and is,  happening here. ( http://www.miprox.de/Schuldenuhr.html)

Here are some interesting links:

http://www.federalbudget.com/

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN088462520100608

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Federal_Debt_as_Percent_of_GDP_by_President.png

http://useconomy.about.com/od/fiscalpolicy/p/US_Debt.htm

http://useconomy.about.com/u/ua/usdebtanddeficit/national_debt_relief.htm

http://www.stern.de/wirtschaft/news/maerkte/deutscher-staatshaushalt-schuldenberg-noch-hoeher-als-befuerchtet-1546041.html

Since Python 1.5 there have been many improvements to the language, and I have religiously read the release notes of every new release in an attempt to stay up to date. My success was mixed, and I occasionally come across better ways to do things that were introduced in later Python releases, that passed me by somehow.

I plan to share them with you here….

Lets start with the ubiquitous dict

Dictionaries are wonderful things that can be used in all sorts of ways. Having a built a dictionary of values though, you will eventually need to retrieve data from it. Here is the first trap for an older user, I always want to write something like:

if dictionary.has_key(key):

data = dictionary[key]

….

This has of course been superseded and nowadays one writes:

if key in dictionary:

data = dictionary[key]

….

Note that if you want to return a default value if the key is not in the dict, you can use the get() method.

When iterating over a dictionary it’s a similar story:

for key in dictionary.keys():

…..

has been improved an you can use:

for key in dictionary:

……..

Naturally if you want to change the dictionary inside the for loop, you will have to use the keys() method to obtain a list to iterate over, just like in the old days!

I hope you found that useful …

I bet you thought that I’d got bored and gone away to new and more interesting things.

Well you thought wrong!

In fact I’ve been busy moving house, decorating, laying floors, and all those other knee destroying things that go with having a bank as your landlord.

After 9 months in the new place what do I have:

• Less free time than ever.
• Bad Knees.
• Tennis elbow.
• A current account balance in free fall.

Why do people buy houses? Its a supreme act of idiocy dammit!

Security I hear you say. Bullshit! A landlord is more likely to listen to your entreaties than a bank manager who knows exactly how deeply in the financial shit you are, and can look at your financial status with a clickety click of the keyboard.

Investment I hear you say. Bullshit! If I invest my hard earned cash in unit trusts, I get at least 9% pa. If I invest in a house, I pay 5% pa + repairs on the house + insurance in case the damn thing burns down. I wont even go into the costs of mad women with credit cards furnishing new houses here, as it may severely damage my bedroom rights.

Why do we buy houses then? Well I think its some instinct that comes from the time when there were no bank managers, and the size of your cave was used to attract crumpet. (Incidentally I think cars as an investment are just as stupid, but I’ll go into that later.)

Oh well, do as I say, not as I do,

It all goes to show I’m as big a prick as the next man….

Ham radio has had repeaters for many years, they are systems placed at a good VHF/UHF locations that receive and re-transmit signals, allowing communications between stations that could not otherwise be in communication.

Now with the event of voice over IP it was natural that someone would write software allowing repeaters to be connected to the Internet, allowing someone to use a PC as a sort of extended microphone and speaker, attached to the repeater of their choice.

Well the latest step in this particular line of development is that I can now connect to my local repeater using my hand held transceiver, tell the repeater to connect to another repeater via the Internet by entering the node number using the DTMF keypad on my transceiver (Each echolink node has a unique number), and then have a conversation with anyone within range of that repeater.

The long and short of it is that I can now easily contact any ham who lives within range of an echolink connected repeater anywhere in the world, using a hand held transceiver.

Thats pretty cool, and way cheaper than using a handy…

I wonder what the next step will be?

If you are licensed, I can be reached via the repeater DB0EL (Node 7385) when I am listening. My call is DL4MGJ.

It’s taking longer than I thought though…..

What I have realized is that blogging is a way of staying in touch, and I’m beginning to think that it does have some advantages over e-mail.

When I write someone an e-mail, I hope for a reply. The recipient feels obliged to send a reply, and when he does, I feel obliged to reply to his/her e-mail and so it goes on…

When I write a blog, I don’t expect a reply, but I am contacting people who know me and who read the blog. I know that when I read a friends blog’s it’s almost like receiving an e-mail, but with no obligations. Of course if something in the blog raises a question or comment, I am still free to send an e-mail or call them (preferable), just as they are.

So there you have it, I will probably be blogging for a little longer than I thought….

As you have probably gussed, I am not a great football fan.

I did start to watch the Germany Italy match, but after 10 minutes of nothing really happening, I grew bored and went back to NASA TV and watched the shuttle perform its first orbital correction.

What I did see though was that a new rule has been added to the game since I played it in school. I haven’t seen the wording yet, but it must be something like:
“If you are tackled and loose the ball, throw yourself to the ground in the most spectacular way you can manage.” It seems that if the fall is spectacular enough, the referee will give you the ball back.

I was very impressed with some of the falls, being really convinced that the player had at least a complex fracture of the fibula, only to see the player get up totally unhurt. Really amazing….. This really must be suggested as an Olympic discipline. Points could be awarded for air time, number of ground rolls, and how convincing the expression of pain was…

So the World Cup? As far as I can tell the situation is a follows

• England (My home country) Out…
• Germany (My country of residence) Out…
• Portugal (Age old allies…) Out…

That leaves me with the choice of France or Italy to support in the final.

mmmm Maybe NASA can launch something on Sunday?

The built in spell checker chokes on the word blog!

Oh well, nobodies perfect, and its not exactly the end of the world… Funny though dont you think…

I guess I will go look for a way to add to the spell check dictionary….

OK, so what do I have to say that is generally interesting? um, er, probably not a lot…. So why am I wasting Internet bandwidth and free server space? well to be completely honest, I really don’t know… I guess I find things that are new (at least to me) interesting and want to try them out…

Here are a few details about me:

I am an Electronics engineer and programmer…

I have been programming now for over 30 years…

I have experience in the Unix kernel, control systems, RF engineering, digital electronics and much more. I have programmed in most programming languages at some time or other. I don’t like Java (Much too bloated) or Perl (A real mess of a language). I do like “C”, “C++” and “Ruby” , but my language of choice is “Python”.

Why do I like “Python”? Well it is really cross platform, It is maintainable, and you can do allmost anything with it. It is good for quick 2 liners as well as large projects. You can do the most amazing things with its introspection and run time object building features and so on… If you have not yet tried it, you are missing out….

Well that’s all for now… Lets see if blogging holds my attention..

Don’t hold your breath though..