Greece – Getting real

It’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Greek politicians buy votes for decades by creating lots of unnecessary public sector jobs and promising inflated pensions (retirement at 50 with pension at 100% of final salary!).  Greek taxpayers regularly evade taxes. Corruption is endemic. Then Greece gets into the Euro by cooking its books so it looks healthier than it is. Not surprisingly, Greece gets into serious financial trouble living beyond its means, to the tune of about €360 billion Euros of debt, and depends on the rest of the EU, principally Germany, to bail it out.  The EU and the IMF do that,  to the tune of €80 billion Euros thus far,  on condition that Greece attack some of its fiscal profligacy by trimming down the bloated bureaucracy and inflated pensions. 

Geek voters can’t take the pain, so they vote in a far-left government that repudiates the reforms.  The EU, not surprisingly, isn’t inclined to pour good money (another €8 billion Euros) after bad, especially since it is obvious they are never going to get paid back, which leads to the current impasse.

 

Probably the Greek government will refuse to budge, because they would promptly get voted out of office if they backed down on their election pledges.  Probably the EU and the IMF will refuse to pony up more loan money they know they will never get back. Probably Greece will eventually default, and probably have to leave the Euro.  Hardly a disaster, because Greece probably wouldn’t have been accepted into the Euro zone in the first place if people had known the true state of their finances.

This of course is the fundamental flaw in the current EU in the first place – monetary union without fiscal union.  It’s like putting everyone in the family on a single credit card, with no controls over who spends how much.

  

Of course some cities (like Chicago) in the US have pulled the same game, and are in exactly the same sort of trouble.

Strongly recommended: The Accidental Superpower

Peter Zeihan was for 12 years STRATFOR’s vice president for analysis. His new book The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder is a blockbuster, well worth reading and thinking about.  In essence he argues that the past 70 years of worldwide growth and (relative) stability was due to the Bretton Wood agreements of 1944, and as America withdraws from these agreements (largely as a result of our unexpected new energy independence from fracking) much of the world will face a grim future while America and a few of its close allies will ride out the storm relatively unscathed.  Moreover, the predicted American success will not come from any brilliance among our politicians, but from the simple dumb luck of favorable demographics and geography.

His arguments are buttressed with an overwhelming amount of supporting material about geography and demographics and trade figures (I’ve had to reread the book several times to absorb it all). But his conclusions are heavily based on highly predictable things, since geography doesn’t change, nor do demographics change very quickly.  This is an important book, particularly as it counters the current Washington hysteria about threats from Russia and China, neither of whom currently has the military or economic potential to be more than annoying, and shortly will be in dire straits themselves.

Recommended: A Net Assessment of Europe

Another recent George Friedman article is worth reading: A Net Assessment of Europe. It follows the two articles of his I recommended a few days ago, and it appears he will be doing a series of these covering different regions of the world.

More on Hi-Fi and suckers

For those interested in a more detailed science-based (as opposed to just unsupported opinion-based) discussion of why some of the expensive high-end trends in hi fidelity audio equipment are just marketing hype, read 24/192 Music Downloads are Silly.

As the author notes, it is not our ears that get fooled but our brains. We expect the more expensive equipment to sound better, so it does. We want the very expensive equipment we just bought to sound better, so it does. And as for the frequent advice to just go the store and listen to the equipment, any competent audio salesperson knows how to make the equipment with the higher profit margin sound more impressive by boosting the bass and/or treble a bit, or boosting the volume a little. In fact, it often only takes a bit of subtle suggestion from the salesperson  – “now listen to how much better this expensive amplifier sounds” – to convince the listener that they hear a difference. Humans are after all highly suggestible, as politicians and advertisers  prove every day.

The only valid test is a true double blind A/B test, where the same music, at the same volume and with the same equalization, is compered without either the listener or the tester knowing which sample is which.  Such tests reveal that in fact hardly anyone can reliably tell the difference between moderate quality equipment and expensive high-end equipment (though really cheap equipment can often be detected), nor between CD-quality recordings and “higher fidelity” 24-bit 192kHz recordings.  In fact, almost no one can even tell the difference between raw CD-quality WAV files and compressed 320kbs MP3 files, and few can even distinguish a difference in 192kbs MP3 files.

Recommended: Two more good STRATFOR articles

George Friedman of STRATFOR has written two more good articles which I can recommend. One is called A Net Assessment of the World, in which he discusses the overall geopolitical situation today. The second article is entitled World War II and the Origin of American Unease, and is also quite insightful.

Visiting an American WW2 Cemetery

On our Rhine-Moselle river trip we made a stop a couple of days ago at the American WW2 cemetery at Hamm, near Luxemburg, the last resting place of about 5000 American servicemen (and 1 woman, an Army nurse) most of whom died in the 1944/45 Battle of the Bulge. Nearby in the German WW2 cemetery lie about 11,000 young German soldiers who lost their lives in the same battle. There is something terribly poignant about all those young people, American and German alike, who could in other circumstances have been the best of friends, but instead cut each other’s lives so short.

 As a group (we are all Americans on this river cruise) we laid a wreath at the central chapel. The superintendent called forth all the veterans in the group, and I found myself terribly moved as a number of old men (we are almost all old in this cruise) stepped forward to form ranks and place the wreath while taps were played.

I cannot help but reflect what madness, what political incompetence on both sides  led us into all the senseless devastation and lost lives in World War 2, and wonder whether the world isn’t repeating this madness today. Our Middle Eastern wars haven’t produced as many American deaths, but it has produced tens of thousands of physically and/or mentally damaged American soldiers whose lives and whose family’s lives will be blighted by their disabilities for the rest of their lives. And of course millions of the native residents of Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan have been killed, wounded, and/or displaced in the senseless fighting

Traveling through the Rhine and Moselle valleys one learns about the many invasions and conflicts that have washed over these areas repeatedly since before Roman times right up to World War 2. What, one wonders, would it take to permanently restrain the inevitable ambitions of demagogues (President Putin comes to mind)  and religious fanatics (the IS comes to mind) and end this senseless cycle of destruction.

About Hi Fi equipment and suckers

There are some items, like watches, cars, wines and hi fi audio gear where people with enough money (more money than sense, some would say) spend inordinate amounts for little or no real gain. A $250,000 Rolls-Royce is no doubt better constructed than a $25,000 Chevrolet, but is it really 10 times better, especially on a slow daily commute? A $50,000 Patek Philippe watch certainly has more status than a $50 Timex, but it doesn’t really tell time any better – certainly not $49,950 better.  And as several researchers have shown, even people who fancy themselves wine experts often can’t really distinguish $10/bottle wines from $200/bottle wines in blind tests.  In fact in one published test experts confidently rated two glasses of wine quite differently in a blind test, although both glasses were in fact poured from the same bottle.

The world of hi fidelity music has always had roughly three levels – (1) the cheap boom-box level for casual listening of popular music, (2) a mid-level where a reasonable living-room system might cost $1000-$3000 including speakers, receiver/amplifier, and cd player.  Above that (3) is a stratospheric level where people obsess about things like $7000 audio cables (Pear ANJOU Speaker Cables), $200,000 hand-built amplifiers (Dynaudio Arbiter monoblocks), $40,000 speaker sets (Waterfall Audio Niagara Platinum Speakers) and $8000 headphones (Final Audio Muramasa VIII).  I have no doubt that to a very experienced audio engineer with decades of experience in the studio these may possibly sound a bit better, but are they really $20,000-$300,000 better for the average listener?

I am thinking about this right now because my Logitech Duo wireless music devices just died. They were discontinued several years ago and support/repair is almost nonexistent, so I had to replace them. In the process of researching on the web what was available these days (I went with Sonos devices) I discovered - typical for the web - numerous highly emotional and acrimonious debates on such subjects as whether it was worth buying expensive external DACs (digital to analogue converters) for the Sonos Connect, and whether 16-bit digital files (CD quality) were adequate for “real” audiophiles or whether one had to move up to 24-bit files, which are not supported by the Sonos system.

Of course many of these people are absolutely convinced they can hear differences with more expensive equipment (especially expensive equipment they have just bought) but few have really done blind A/B tests, and if they did many would no doubt be surprised and dismayed to find out that they really couldn’t reliably tell which was the output from the more expensive system. 

In fact human hearing isn’t really all that good compared to many other creatures.  At our best when we were young we may have heard a range from about 10 Hz to 20k Hz, and by the time we are old enough to afford expensive audio equipment, and to have lived with loud city noises, rock bands and music around us for several decades, our hearing is much worse, especially at the upper end.

The spirited debate about 16-bit vs 24-bit music files is largely based on a faulty understanding of the physics involved. Despite the prevalent myth that more bits somehow gives more “accurate” music, it really only gives more dynamic range (loud to soft), and 16 bits already encompasses the entire loud-soft range (up to about 96 db, about the sound standing next to a loud gas lawn mower.) that the human ear can comfortably listen to. A 24-bit range just pushes the upper end to about 144db, which is about the ear-damaging sound level standing right next to a 155mm howitzer when it is fired.  For studio work where the digital files are going to be merged and manipulated, it may well be worth working in 24-bit formats to avoid introducing rounding errors, but 16-bit final output is more than enough dynamic range for any meaningful music listening.

What does actually make a difference in the “accuracy” of digital music is the sampling rate. There is an arcane thing called the “Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem” that says that to accurately digitally record a wavelength of frequency x one needs to sample at  least 2x times the frequency plus about 10%. CDs sample at 44,0000 samples per second, which happens to be 20k Hz times 2 plus 10%, meaning that (not by accident)  standard CDs already sample at a rate capable of accurately recording up to the  maximum 20k Hz frequency that a young person can hear, and far better than most of us older folks can hear.

The upshot of all of this is that, once again, as with cars and wines and watches, a lot of people are apparently being sold very expensive stuff that they really don’t need for their purposes with appeals to “status” and “more expensive is better”.  I suppose this is a natural feature of any economy.  As the old saying goes ‘There's a sucker born every minute”, except that it is now probably down to every 10 seconds or less.

If I had enabled comments on this blog I would no doubt be swamped with emotional and outraged flames from people who have sunk a lot of money into their expensive audio systems (or cars or watches or wine collections) and desperately need to believe their money was well spent. As a classical music lover with normal adult ears, I find my rather modest mid-level system (320kbs MP3 files or internet streaming stations fed through the Sonos wireless system to a $500 Denon receiver and $100 AR-6 speakers) more than adequate, and in fact I really can’t hear the difference between 320kbs files and 160kbs files, or even some 128kbs files, so even my setup is probably overkill.