Where there's a will...

Peter has a pair of cherished glasses. He calls them his "all-purpose glasses" because he can use the computer, watch TV and even see things on my computer from his own seat. They were his second pair of reading glasses, prescribed around 15 years ago. Now he has new glasses for reading small print and for driving, but won't give up the old ones.

The problem started when he sat on them and broke one of the arm pieces. We couldn't really mend it, as it's a rimless frame:

We managed to attach the arm in a very precarious way and it was getting on my nerves, but Peter wouldn't stop wearing them. Yesterday I had enough and rummaged through all the drawers until I found a very old pair of sunglasses roughly the same size as the cherished ones. Peter found these sunglasses on the ground near his car many years ago. We proceeded to dismantle the old frame (the bits that held the lenses together, to be exact). The lenses were slightly larger than the ones in the sunglasses, so Peter went to his tool cupboard and came back with a rasp. I carefully trimmed the lenses (without any measuring or anything) and they finally fitted!

Here are the remains of the old frame and the sunglasses lenses:

And here is a happy bunny, wearing his "brand new" cherished, all-purpose glasses:

It's true: "Where there's a will, there's a way!"

The elephant in the room

I feel a rant coming. Watching the news can have that effect...

The western economy is tanking. America is in turmoil and the Eurozone is a mess.

Earlier this year I wrote a post about it on Palingates, where I looked at the games being played by politicians, the big corporations and the banks. They dominate the economy in the West, playing with monopoly money while the Chinese expand their manufacturing industry... and their wealth.

We wanted cheap goods and China obliged. In a country with no unions or any protection for the workers, labour is cheap and plentiful. There are no environmental regulations either.

In the West there are many millions of people unemployed. Where are they going to find work? What industries are left? Can the existing sectors create wealth or just the illusion of wealth? Manufacturing is almost dead. We have the brains to advance technology, to move money around, to make day-to-day life easier. But the real work is being carried out elsewhere. The sector that creates wealth is gone and we are left with the sectors that came into existence to service the complexities of that once flourishing, wealth creating manufacturing sector.

In the US and in Europe, there's much talk about austerity measures. The banks created an almighty mess, countries are going broke, so the solution is to replace governments with technocrats. Who are they? Bankers! How neat...

I named this post "The elephant in the room" because for all their talk about job creation, western leaders make no mention of reviving or strengthening the manufacturing sector. Nobody wants to upset the Chinese because they're the only ones in a position to bail us out... with real money.

We gave them the crown jewels of capitalism and now we have to pretend we're still wealthy. All we have left is a pile of pretend money and a bunch of technocrats deciding the fate of a pretend economy.

Watching the news these days is like watching a perverse reality show.

Rant over.