It’s a Sunday and I’m looking at items tjat appear in Irish broadsheets.
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Recycling. We like the Re-turn deposit scheme and I use it to fuel my takeaway coffee budget. Last year, more than 877m containers were returned to Irish deposit machines. Killian Woods says that “was made up of 433.2m plastic bottles and 444.6m cans.”
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AI Bubble. The stock market has drifted from reality when looking at valuations compared to the lack of revenue coming from AI subscriptions.
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EU losing microchip battle. When I first arrived in Ireland, Intel’s chips ruled. Today, 92% of advanced microchip manufacturing is done in Taiwan. Ireland is spending €300m on developing large scale next generation microchip manufacturing sites.
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Goldilocks Budget. The newly announced Irish budget increased the grumbling I hear from people traveling for free on Irish public transport. Those local link buses and rail services require capital spending. While sitting in the cheap seats, I listen to people who would rather get money from the government to pay for heating and electricity–both increasing faster than the social welfare allowances.
It is quite remarkable that the average person (including RTE host Brendan O’Connor) consider Ireland’s €9.4bn budget an austerity budget.