Copacetic

David McWilliams deflates our wealth illusion, with a salutary comparison with the property bubble in Japan,

A good example was the fact that in 1988 the land on which the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo sits was valued at more than the entire real estate of the State of California or Canada – the world’s second largest country. By that benchmark, Japan was indeed the wealthiest country in the world. Needless to say, it was all nonsense – not because the Japanese were not wealthy, they were; but the property bubble (which burst in 1990 with dire consequences) had overstated that wealth enormously. The Japanese had income which had been built up over generations from making stuff, but they were not as wealthy as they thought they were.

David goes on to state that when the bubble burst at least the Japanese had a wealth creation industry (manfacturing) to fall back on, what will we do when the so called softlanding catapults us out of our seats and into the aeroplane bulkhead?

We moved house recently and this prompted me to investigate an alternative to my existing broadband supplier (Eircom). I rang NTL last week had a pleasant conversation with with an Irish sales guy who gently persuaded me to ugrade to NTL digital to boot (ok, I was kind of planning to at some point so he caught me in a softened up state).

The NTL man arrived on Tuesday and with a bit of tinkering on my part I had broadband connected all over the house  via wireless by 6.00pm. Its the standard package  (3mb download, €30 a month) and according to the Irish ISPtest its about the same speed as my €45 a month Eircom package.

Two nice touches,

• They texted me to remind me that the guy was coming the day before he was due to arrive.
• I had a problem when I first connected so I followed the instructions taped to the top of the cable modem (power off PC, power off modem, turn on modem wait 30 secs, turn on PC) for a laugh, and hey presto it worked!

Good job NTL…