I’ve been trying to help Scalable Informatics customers understand these market realities for a while. Unfortunately, to my discredit, I’ve not been very successful at doing so … and many groups seem to assume supply is plentiful and cheap across all storage modalities. Not true. And not likely true for at least the rest of the year, if not longer. This article goes into some depth that I’ve tried to explain to others in phone conversations, private email threads.

Detroit had filed for bankruptcy protection a while ago. The rationale for this was simple, they simply did not have the cash flow to pay for all their liabilities. They had limited access to debt markets for a number of reasons, and they couldn’t keep cranking up the taxes on residents and businesses in the city to generate revenue. They were between a rock and a hard place. I have a soft spot in my heart for Detroit.

… and believe it or not, I forgot to mention it. This is the first time in company history that we had a backlog going into Q1. Orders being built and tested on the last work day of the year. We grew, not the amount we had originally forecast, but we understand why (and sadly have little control over that aspect). We are working very hard on our appliances … I am blown away as to how perfect a fit they are for folks.

Lets see if this actually materializes. Its pretty obvious as to how hard the media folks tried to spin this with the title. A good rubric for how the US media treats the president and his opposition could be found in this cartoon. With that in mind, read the title of that article, and then note this little tidbit on the inside: Notice the scare quotes around the word treason. Treason has a very straighforward definition in the US Constitution.

This is sad. Here’s the really sad parts of this Not only did they close the parks, but they turned off the web sites The park employees are being ordered to make life as hard as possible for the patrons. None of this had to happen. Had the democrats decided that, ya know, in a political environment where negotiation is the key to advancing agendas, and not a burnt ground strategy, chances are they would be able to get some of what they wanted.

On my vacation in NY recently, I happened to be able to tick off another item on my bucket list. There’s some background to it, but here’s the pics. [ ](/images/IMG_1454.JPG) [ ](/images/IMG_1456.JPG) and [ ](/images/IMG_1459.JPG) The background to this is a short story I’ve been working on for a while. A near future serum run in effect. Should be done very soon, though I’ve been working on it in very short bursts.

[Update] That didn’t take long. Looks like the government is angry about all of this. The leak of the leaks that is. And they are going to try to find the culprit, and prosecute them. Any “Mea Culpas” from them on the fact that this is … I dunno … illegal? Er … no. Most transparent admin … evuh??? I read something last week which made me laugh. It read “tomorrow is Thursday, time for a new scandal”.

Here in the US, we have a number of scandals brewing. Many of those for the party in control of the White House and the Senate would like to have you believe that these are in fact tempests in teapots. In this case, there are at least 2 Nixonian scandals going non-linear here, with a 3rd trying to break through. The political left is doing all it can to wave off one of them, though this is getting progressively harder by the day as more information comes out.

Watching the slow motion train wreck in Cyprus made me wonder exactly whom the target of the money grab was. And more importatly, whether or not the people making demands had any clue that their victory was, at best, Pyrrhic, and at worst, a serious contagion. Any financial system in operation is built upon various levels of trust, implicitly in the case of the least risky capital storage system. You know that you can trust, within reasonable expectations and parameters, that capital that you deposit there can be retrieved later.

Suffice it to say that much hot air was blown over the sequester in the media. Really, there was much tearing of clothes over this. Much righteous indignation that someone in government, somewhere, would have to make (not so very hard) decisions about where to trim budgets. We needed this, as the US government is so completely broken as to no be able to propose a reasonable budget, pass a reasonable budget, nor listen to and work with ideas from other portions of the legislative branch which want to work on reasonable budgets.

Dave Barry in his usual fine form … summarizes our year. The one take away should be … WHAP