Things have been quiet here at this for a few days over Christmas, and are going to be quiet here for a few days more as we enter the final throes of moving house.

The current house looks like a total wreck as we try to sort things out and discard unnecessary items. It has taken me two days just to weed the study room, throwing out vast quantities of paper and miscellaneous ‘stuff’.

Then I got on to packing up my LPs, sigh. LPs in a box are really heavy. As are massed CDs. And the bulky Naim hifi system. What a social and maybe psychological change it is that children now alive will rent most of their home music and films from a digital e-cloud somewhere, and not actually own them. All that sheer weight – gone from their lives.

I wonder if the very idea of private property will start to erode in parallel. There’s an evidently diminishing amount of private, and the value of property (other than land) may tend to lie more in the relationship it represents with suppliers rather than the ‘value’ of the items themselves. Or somesuch.

Back to the boxes. We move out on 5 January so you can expect to hear from me again in a structured way sometime thereafter, or not as the case may be.

In the meantime here is an interesting and readable conversation between two German economists about the future of the Eurozone: is it wiser to stick with the devil you know, or to leap to safety before he throttles you? Never an easy question.

And here is a ridiculous article over at Open Democracy about the volcanic eruption of student anger and militancy in Britain over the last few months. Gasp! According to my spies deeply infiltrated into Leeds University the mass of students hate the ‘activists’ and most of those who went on the coaches to the London demonstrations did so to get a cheap ticket for Christmas shopping.

In any case, what sort of movement is it which rants away about their ‘demands’ that other people (in practice their own grandchildren) should give them money? Looters are no less looters because they are ‘socially networked’. 

Here too is the latest BBRU. The otherwise sensible Chameleon opposes student loans:

“This isn’t a handout, it’s an investment in the future of our society.  Education cannot simply be a debt trap, a step on the learn to earn treadmill that we’re all stuck on for life”.  I wholeheartedly agree.

Am I missing something here? Most students (if they have anything about them) at some point will take out a mortgage to buy a house. That loan will be massively more than the puny sum they pay to get through college. So why is a student loan of the modest proportions now put forward a debt-trap?

Why shouldn’t we learn to earn, as well as earn to learn? Where the hell do you people think things come from?

The Cloud! It’s just there. It gives us cool stuff.

Students! Grow up! Start campaigning against the state’s meddling in your lives and education, not whining for even more of it.

As I was saying, back to the boxes.

I may be some time.