Translation, please

Now I know that even the Brits don't understand each other, and it really is multiple countries under the same flag.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5058853.ece

"Council workers in Swansea erected a road sign informing motorists in Welsh: “I am out of the office at the moment”.
Swansea council staff were designing a bilingual road sign barring heavy goods vehicles from a street in the city and had consulted an in-house translation service.

As the translator was not available, an automatatic e-mail response was triggered in Welsh which read: “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.”

Staff mistakenly thought that it was the correct translation and had it printed on the sign beneath the message in English, which read: “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only”.

The council has taken down the sign at the junction of Clase Road and Pant-y-Blawd Road after Welsh speakers spotted the mistake."

And here I was thinking 'It happens only in India'!

Time and date

There are some things which I simply refuse to understand- one of them is the concept of daylight savings time.

I knew that last night, the clocks were turned back an hour, to take us back into winter time. But still, today, I was quite surprised to find that the clock on my laptop said 10:30, while the regular clock said 11:30, and it took me a brief second to remind myself to set the wall-clock correctly.

I've heard explanations about the need to save energy being the driving force to convince whole nations to adopt this timely exercise (trying to make a PJ there, in case you didn't get it!). But I'm not buying it. Most people here end up working long hours anyway, so how are we saving any energy? All the offices in Canary Wharf are lit up all night, when nobody's working; so where's the energy saving? In the US, Mountain time follows daylight savings, except the Navajo nation (excluding the Hopis in Navajo nation who do follow daylight savings). Confusing? Good, that was the objective.

Just leave the clocks be!

Who's paying for it?

It's been such a crazy time, that wherever I turn, people are talking about which firm's losing money. Today, I read 2 articles on Bloomberg News- one about the IMF helping out Pakistan to avoid it defaulting, and another about a potential default by Argentina for the second time in a decade. Makes one wonder about country risk. If in this global economy, there is relatively freer flow of capital, then eveyry country across the world is invested either directly or indirectly in the sub-prime/ credit crisis. So, while the carry trade was at the peak of being lucrative, firms were borrowing in Japan to invest in high-rish, high-return assets. So, there's a whole lot of money that Japan has lent to non-Japanese debtors. At what point will Japan get up and say, 'okay, party's over; time to repay those pesky borrowings'? Or will Japan have to keep throwing good money after bad to keep firms/countries afloat so that they'll make enough money elsewhere to repay the yen borrowings? What about China- I had heard enough about how China is squeezing the world economy and can potentially bring it to its knees imply by selling some ABS. As I heard it, all these CDOs and CDO^2s were being bought by Chinese investors, who now had leveraged so much that its was in their best interests to keep the markets afloat, until such time as the government decided to squeeze the Western governments. This certainly makes for a lively conspiracy theory, which a lot of people would probably wager on considering the current state of the world economy and how it's the Chinese, Japanese and Singaporean banks that are keeping the market afloat. Conspiracy theory anyone?