Depths

In the dramedy tradition of Latin-America politics, Honduras Supreme Court and Congress ousted an president who was clearly violating the constitution he was supposed to uphold.

Not even his own party backs him up. Honduras Congress deliberations have been unanimous in this regard.

The Honduras military has been following orders by Honduras Attorney General and Supreme Court.

Now OAS is going to explain Honduras Congress and Supreme Court how to interpret and apply the Honduras Constitution. Kind of presumptuous, I think, to explain two of three branches of a State how to interpret the law they have written.

The only article with some common sense is from The Economist, it ends suggesting to put the burden of the solution on foreign diplomats. But the solution has already been put in place by Honduras: oblige the president to follow the constitution.

Another who's on first? moment.

Pink Elephants

During one week in June:

The Iranian electoral body recognized that 3 million votes of its last poll were cast by people who do not exist. But it is still called an election.

The hondurean president defies rulings by the hondurean supreme court, goes against the hondurean congress, his own party and expects to get away with.

Meanwhile the UE calls to restore the constitutional order in Honduras.

Not even Monty Python could come up with such a senseless plot.

The New Raw Deal

It is no secret that the economic growth and bubbles since the mid nineties until today were financed with north-american consumers money. These revved up the economic engine of the world.

They are leveraged out. Their savings rate was until recently virtually nil. Their debt level was not healthy. Banks became creative to continue lending to keep the ball rolling until hell broke lose.

Now the bottom line question is who is the next group to foot the next economic expansion bill?

China's growth depends on somebody else's expenditures. Europe has another set of problems: demographics, high unemployment, slow recoveries, etc. The rest of Asia?

Geithner's warns of more economic pain ahead for USA, specially in the job market. The most flexible and dynamic job market is going to be dragged down even worse. The average/median salary is going to fall more.

So the natural question to follow would: is the north-american consumer going to save and reduce their leverage or expend to make corporations rich before their jobs are outsourced or the federal government bails the business out?

Interesting questions for lenders, borrowers, and policy makers.

Two-stepping on empty:

American consumers are deleveraging, in other words spending less to reduce their high levels of debt. Their average wage is falling too. 

By most accounts businesses have a lot of excess capacity. Why would they need to invest/spend?

No other country's consumer seems to be ready to step in for american's spending. 

So it is hard to figure out from where the future cash flows for this stock market rally are coming.

On the other end of the spectrum, it is amazing to see how these anti-.... groups are still stuck in 1917. 

One person suggested to me looking at X Movement as a "new way". The first thing one sees in the movement's web-site is a picture of a banner that states: "Abolish Money".

Pol Pot and crew tried this brilliant idea 30-some years ago and starved to death millions of people.

No room for common-sense...or memory.

Here is Johnny!!!!

The funny thing about international politics is that the biggest "critics" of the west, need the west/capitalism to succeed otherwise their standard of living or their regimes fail.

Their dependence on oil prices is big. They haven't figured out another way of creating wealth and rise standards of living on their own since the 19th century.

Some parts of capitalism need reworking but the modus-operandi of accusing "capitalism" and not proposing anything that is meaningful and viable is getting old.

P.S. I read more often Saramago than Grass.

Wise Guys...

Well the Spanish (mine too) PM managed to have his picture taken with the rest of the big boys.

But so did the Dutch PM.

Apparently the price paid by Spain for the picture was high according to the specialized press. The Dutch were invited. The meeting was with the lamest of the duck US presidents.

So after the Azores picture, Trafalgar, all the gold from the New World, Spain still willingly buys the Brooklyn Bridge.

Unbelievable...

Uninvited Guest...

Spain's PM is about to shoot himself in the foot: after crying and whining for weeks that he was not invited to the Financial Crisis Summit, it appears that France's PM is thinking about giving up his chair as EU president so Spain's PM could go.

Other EU members with stronger economies: Sweden (ABB, Volvo, Ericsson, Ikea) Holland (ING, ABN, Phillips, Shell) are out meeting. This was suposedly a European UNION.

Beware of what you ask for: Spain is not part of the G8 or G20, this PM has a history of diplomatic tantrums with the USA, Spain still is recipient of EU help. He has even made fun of fellow European PMs: France and Italy.

The first question would be: if Spain economy is so big , it maybe it doesn't need those moneys.

And now France's PM is willing to let him in. I wonder what price tag that chair has.

Unbelievable...

Free Willy...

Has anyone heard about Canada lately? Not me. Apparently, they are happy, with a sound financial system, although a little bit cold. We have heard about everybody else.

So how come did Canada manage to avoid the storm and not Europe? After all Canada is a lot closer to USA than the EU is.

Some of its banks may be in trouble but given it is part of G8 and its economy is a lot larger than that of Iceland, there is barely any piece of news in all the financial and economics media about Canada.

Ahh, nothing can substitute good judgment.

Blue Molasses...

The EU "blue card" is coming.

Simply and politically correct put, it is a good thing but harmless. First, the skilled workers are not coming to Europe in numbers big enough to sustain the policy. Just two British universities are among the top 50 universities (in terms of research and innovation) as The Economist points out year in year out.

That means that to make the measure sustainable, Europe needs to poach those skilled workers from wherever they are (say USA, Australia, China, India) Tough job given the pay scale differences, economic growth differences, job market mobility, etc.

Back to .Net and Visual Studio...

Patent me up, patent me down...

Well, MS and the FSF are at it again. It is a pretty interesting debate.

Having participated in open-source project and used open-source software, I have certainly enjoyed the benefits of both worlds.

I was reading the argument of both legal experts. On the MS side is nothing new. These are our patents and we want to protect our IP.

On the FSF, is where the legal fireworks are because they have/want to prove that software is not patentable. Thus it should be free.

Their argument is that software is a mathematical algorithm (this is my interpretation, and I am not expert in U.S. IP law) and such is made out of numbers and nobody can own numbers.

This argument kind of equates software to natural resources: air, etc. The problem with this argument, I think, is that one can not find Linux, GCC, or Windows floating in the atmosphere or growing in a field. Somebody sat and came up with the algorithm. And it is for this person to decide what it wants to do with it.

Should oil be free too? Could "joe doe" drill where Anadarko has spent thousands of hours of expertise and hefty amounts of money to find oil for free? At least natural resources are easier to spot.

This seems like going the tragedy of the commons route. Not even China is on that road anymore.

Like the lawyers around here say: "es mejor un mal acuerdo que un buen juicio"...

Molasses...

I am still on ironing out and making DevRiot more stable (which is happening :-) but the latest developments around here are really hard to miss.

Well, the EU is launching a campaign to become more energy independent and efficient. It is extremely funny to hear this after Putin wrestled Yukos back from private hands several years ago.

It is not a matter of saying if it was illegal or not. That I do not know and I am not qualified to know. It should have been a red-flag of things to come period.

Few years later, the oil price spikes up. So, I wonder if France, England, Germany, etc, were on holidays or were reading the classifieds only.

This is the slowest reaction and processing of information that I have seen in a while. That USA is in the same boat? USA does not have the structural problems that EU has: demographic problems, higher taxes, employment and new business ventures creation, etc.

So, do not have the foundations to compete in this century and caught reading the sports section?

Spanish politics are a zarzuela. Now the debacle of the ETA negotiations and latests killings is because the opposition is obstructionist, according to the government. Let's see:

How come the opposition can be obstructionist if it has not been able to stop any of the government initiatives this term?

The government and its supporters in parliament have have passed every single initiative they wanted this term. The government put all its eggs on this anti-terrorist basket. The gamble failed.

They should stop the political marketing for a while, face the music, and pretend they are in control.

Code Generation + the perils of Political Marketing...

Well, apparently the Spanish government is starting the contacts with other political forces to create an anti-terrorism policy that has wide support. The funny thing is that they said it as if they were talking about where to buy bread. They are running a country.

So, what were they doing before? No back-up plan? After the 3rd broken cease-fire? Thinking that they were smarter, more illuminated than the rest of human kind?

The funny thing is that they take the same, or worse, attitudes of the foes they most criticized to get into office. Does it sound familiar?

And no, I do not like early elections. These are matters that transcend a poll.

Well, like a marketeer friend of mine, who has worked in political campaigns, said: there is so much you can do with the product you got.

I am currently working the IO/Instrumentation Units compiling/Trimmer. It is coming along fine. It was not as stable as I thought it was.

Bricks & mortar, Bricks & Mortar!...

At the start of the summer a famous economist came to Spain in order to speak at a forum of some sort. He praised the current health of Spain's economy and its model (where there is more construction than in Italy, France, and another EU country that I forgot combined)

The problem being is that his argument was: it does not matter that all this construction is for retirees from other European countries. They will need health services once they are here after retiring.

Well, that is if those other EU countries reverse their demographic collapse and have enough young people that make enough money to pay for these retirees.

If one puts the effort of several universities (spanish) to lure chinese students here. Where the local researches are leaving because the "Ramón y Cajal" program is a failure wit the brick and mortar culture one has to wonder what are they thinking?

Amber, Mass Autism?:

After figuring out a way to avoid using Reflection.Emit (although, it is really fun to generate code on the fly) the early versions of Amber's Hosting model has a couple of new features:

• "Hot" service upgrades. The idea is not new: allowing service providers to upgrade their services whitout interrupting the service.
• Reuse of AppDomains. As services come and go, the active, not currently hosting, AppDomains are stored in a "stash" so when the next service comes there is no need to create a new AppDomain (which are expensive to create, specially if there are other services already taxing the server

Well the fires in Galicia have turned into a European tragedy: France, Italy, and Portugal has sent crews.

The French Press reports that most of the fires are targeting potential second/summer home areas which can not be developed because of the forests. It is hard to argue against that after seeing the aerial pictures of some of the fires and their locations.

If I recall correctly one of the effects of autism is that autist people hit/hurt themselves in random bursts.

The summer fires, the Prestige, and other tidbits of Galician "sentidiño" seem like the bursts of an austist society. If that were possible. Not even after the loads of money from the EU, or a century of migrating to other places/cultures seem to help.

It is not that we are dummies. Zara/Inditex is from here, a former CEO of Continental Airlines is first generation Galician-American. There are plenty of examples like these two but as a collective, things are not so clear to me...

In addition Greenland is melting, Europe is baking, jellyfish is taking over the Mediterranean, so who needs intentional fires in one of the few green, forest-rich regions of Europe?

The regional government fires the crewmembers who "did not speak" galician in the spring. Who needs such a dumb leadership?

The opposition waits until the summer to do the "I told you so". Who needs such a dumb opposition?

Unbelievable...

I have been calling the volunteers number for 3 days straight (day and night) no success. The fotographer, that is my wife, asked me to wait. After the Katrina experience (we were in Austin at that time and most of the refugees went to TX) they really need help after the bru-ha-ha and newsworthyness is over.

Less people feel inclined to help then.

NUNCA MAIS:

It is as valid today as it was back then. This phrase summarized the rage, helplessness, and desire of Galicia when the incompetents in the regional government let the Prestige's oil spill become a case in Keystone cops emergency management.

4 years later, and the new incompetents in the regional government have placed themselves in hands of real-estate mafias whose only interest is develop beyond the real needs of a region, re-editing the Keystone cops episode.

The new incompetents in power here, while knowing that summer fires happen yearly, fired hordes of experienced firefighters because they were not credited galego speakers.

The new incompetents in power belong to what is known in spanish politics "nacionalistas". These think that they can make Galicia better "por decreto". So, to be a firefighter around here one needs to speak galician. La-la land politics. This is the way to protect one's motherland.

What the real-estate development mafias did? Set the sorrounding areas of the cities on fire (Galicia is mostly rural and has a lot of forests) to see if they can get arround the building limitations.

Most of the 127 fires were intentional and around 3 cities.

Again, the rest of Spain has to come in a hurry to protect Galicia from galicians.

Enough ranting, I am going to volunteer...

One would think that...

After all the unfulfilled promises that the spanish national team has provided its supporters over numerous soccer world cups, people would react more cautiously to a good match (4-0 over Ukraine on the opener)

After all, Ukraine could have had a bad afternoon.

But politicians from the left to right are trying to score some points. This match reflects the triumph of the Spain as seen from the left, right, up, down, south or north.

Funny, if the team loses in the quarter-finals, as it has happened since 1950, are the politicians going to blame the other side too?

During a weekend when Alonso got closer his second F1 title, and Nadal won his second straight French Open, what is all the fuss about? A good game?

Until Spain reaches the final and wins it, the press should pay more attention to other issues:

Did you know that Wayne Rooney's transfer fee is 8 times the total amount invested in seed money in Spain and bigger than the seed money invested in France (both figures for 2005)?

Ain't that funny?