English vs Chinese Justice

Lord Coke’s ruling that a judge could not be paid with the fines he imposed. Dr. Bonham’s Case, 8 Co. Rep. 107a, 118a, 77 Eng. Rep. 638, 652 (C.P. 1610). 

Judge Dee always expropriates the criminal's property and uses to money to fund his court and its employees. Judge Dee is a historical magistrate who figures in many popular Chinese detective stories. All his cases deal with wealthy, plunderable evildoers.  

The Weekly Chapter: Hebrew Slaves

In our annual tour of the Bible, we are approaching the end, where Moses codifies his laws and prepares the people to enter the Promised Land. Regarding slavery, Moses has very clear views.

How is a Jew enslaved? If he is caught stealing and cannot repay the harm he has caused, he will be sold as slave. No Jew is born a slave. 

Slavery lasts six years. In the seventh year, his owner has to free him and send him away with a suitable present. 

If he refuses to leave (apparently freedom was harder than slavery), the owner will make a cut in his ear to mark him publicly as one who has chosen his abject status. 

I am decided to die a rich Jew

"Negative rates are counterintuitive, unprecedented, insane and downright scary. They are like a parallel universe where everything you’ve ever learned about finance and human behavior is turned upside down." (Yahoo Finance)

Warren Buffett told CNBC that: “I think stocks are ridiculously cheap if you believe ... that 3% on the 30-year bonds makes sense...”

Think. Think like this Jew. Bonds are yielding from nothing to minus something. Their alternative, if you have savings, is stock, paying 2 -5% dividend. Meaning: stocks are cheap. 

Except that they were never higher. 

Why investors are not buying stocks but negative yield bonds? Because they fear a big recession, or a Japanese intractable deflation. 

I took a loan and bought stocks. I am abnormally optimist, there will be no deflation in Israel, and I am going to die rich.


Shabbat Shalom. 

Quantum gravity

We are organisms built to survive and reproduce in the environments that evolved on the surface of this planet. We do not have any built in instrument to investigate reality outside of what is/was necessary for those goals. How can we understand how quantum gravity works? Only by building a thinking machine able to investigate reality and then, like Vger 6, come back and translate it for us.

The StarTrek film about the return of Voyager 6 to meet its maker ends with the human proposing an unsolvable paradox (invented by an Ancient Greek) and the defeat of the thing. It is interesting to speculate what would have happened if instead of self-destruct, V-ger would have transmitted to humanity the knowledge it had collected. It did not and StarTrek proceeded to the next chapter with Captain Kirk stupid as he was before. That is what I remember.

Yet the film's website states that "Decker rewired the relay connection and keyed in the final sequence of the transmission manually. This prompted V'ger to begin transmitting its data, effectively merging with Decker, thus taking V'ger to a new level of existence. At last satisfied with its answers, V'ger disappeared in a blinding flash of white light". 

It was left unsaid what happened to V'ger's data and how it affected humanity. Very unsatisfying end. 

BTW, a Vulcan scientist T'Uerell, after deciphering the secrets of the Borg Collective, uncovered evidence that it was V'Ger who first created the Collective to serve as heralds in its search for its Creator.

The aggravation that is Israel

This morning had a meeting at Mey N. (a city), the water corporation. The bureaucrat in charge of evaluating plans had rejected my plan (the supermarket in case had been operating for the last forty years on a plot zoned for "industry", and to be legal, the zoning had to be changed to "commerce"). (What is zoning?) What was the reason my plan was rejected? It did not follow the five page rules posted on their website. But I did, could you please specify what is wrong? Everything! he smiled. 

With the experience of the normally lazy bureaucrats, that just want me to pay homage to their power and need my finger to point out everything, because the mental effort to look carefully at the drawing and try to make sense of it may damage their grey cells, I felt depressed by what was expecting me. My expectation was fulfilled when sitting in front of the smiling bureaucrat. Where is the water main? I pointed out. And what is this thing here? It is an hydrant. And so. At last he found that the supermarket was part of a building complex and I did not prove that water supply will be sufficient for the thirty different shops in the place. I said I am not going to enter each shop and investigate their water demand. You do it ! He felt he had gone too far, so the negotiation (because that is what it was) ended by agreeing that the surveyor had done a faulty job and will be ordered to measure everything anew.

While in the office, two men were shouting and banging the receptionist's desk. I never stole anything in my life and you say that I stole 20 cubic meters of water! How! It is the water corporation's meter, I had to pay for it, and you made the connection. If it is wrongly connected, it is your fault and should come and correct it. I am wasting my time for the third visit here and no one does anything! What a shitty country (verbatim!). מדינת חרא  The man was really excited and worked up, my companion said leave fast because they will call us as witnesses to violence. That's Israel, my country, the dream of two thousand years. Not exactly what Herzl intended. He wanted us to speak a cultured European language, German or French.  Pic.: The Israel Young Philharmonic.

P.S.: Why I accept these depressing jobs? (1) I am so old that no one will employ me. (2) Most of the work is planning done at home (3) It is relatively profitable. Zoning regulation is a matter of life and death for this supermarket. (4) Teaching in the university is not less depressing. (5) Life itself is depressing, but what is the alternative?

Shakedy

Granddaughter. 

Survival strategy

  My clients are back from their August vacations in Europe and are anxious to start building. Each day I am paying rent for the place and cannot start building because YOU have yet to produce the building permit! YOU, the culprit, is me. It is me that do not allow them to proceed with their projects, not the bureaucracy. Lately, their tone is becoming ugly and menacing, they want to come to my office and turn the tables and break the chairs on my head. They have frightened poor engineer me.

How to protect myself? Since my kindergarten times I am aware of the hostility I provoke. When the teacher asked a math question to all the class, I was always the first to jump and full of enthusiasm, shout the answer. The others hated me. Thus I learnt to moderate/hide my capabilities. Till now I am very fast learner and worker. I answer very fast and cannot imagine that anything I say or write would hurt anyone. I cause no harm, my intentions are pure, my words factual and true. It does not make me appreciated or loved.

Google and Facebook are perceived as monstrously powerful and they are sued a hundred times per minute. The EU has fined them for billions. What is the survival strategy of Google? They changed their name to Alphabet, and adopted an infantile, meaningless logo (above). Pure kindergarten colors, simplest of the fonts, nothing remotely menacing. I too should change my engineering logo (water flowing from a pipe) to something freaked-out-idiot-friendly, like a big brown stuffed teddy bear or so. Nothing to do with water engineering. 

On whatsup most of my contacts use extreme non-menacing avatars. Themselves half naked playing with a large ball on the beach. Or the picture of a lovely baby. No one could imagine the hardened evil bastards they really are.

Molina por que no toma

Working music, better than Mozart. My brain works better if I am not thinking but busy following the cumbia. I was born with a Colombian soul. Muevete Mi Negra!

Zimbabwe's Coming Famine

Organizations that follow African agricultural situation are alarmed by Zimbabwe's rising food prices. 

Seasonal livelihood strategies continue to be constrained mainly as a result of poor 2018/19 harvests, worsening economic challenges, and decreasing water availability and access, especially in arid areas, limiting household incomes. Agricultural and non-agricultural casual labor opportunities are very limited as better-off households have no or limited resources to pay for the labor. In-country and international remittances mainly from South Africa are below average.  As cash shortages continue, the use of mobile money has increased in both rural and urban areas is eroding disposable incomes owing to high service charges or rates.

The world is taking for granted that African nations will periodically suffer food supply crisis and need help to feed themselves. But Zimbabwe is a farmer's paradise and its inability to grow food is not "normal". A generation ago it was exporting food in quantities. Who destroyed Zimbabwe? I for one remember and know. It was the British left wing anticolonial movement of the eighties. They were (and are!) so sanctimonious and high-minded. They attacked the farmers under the illusion that they were expropriating what Nature was giving, not working hard in the middle of dangerous and unhealthy Africa. They were totally disconnected from reality. Thinking about the intellectuals general disdain for reality, I realize that Mao's policy of sending millions of students and academic workers to the countryside  to learn how and by whom their food was being produced, was justified. Mao was no peasant but had a clear idea of reality and may have been shocked by the emergence of the new class of Communist intelligentsia. May be the English Left needed to spend a few years in Africa to connect with its reality. That would have avoided the coming famine in Zimbabwe. 

Proud Ghost Dad

I ghostwrite my little daughter's seminar papers. I got a 95 and am proud of it. For sake of truthfulness, most of the writing is hers, my contribution is at best marginal, but let me feel good. I am surviving a fiery, cursed August. And it is not over yet.

She'll start teaching at a newly organized tichon (high school) in a half empty new town. They are a collective of young, idealist, leftist teachers, and families are moving to Harish to get their children registered in this elite democratic/communist outfit. 

Black August

This summer is hot and difficult for me in Israel. I can hardly focus and work. Yesterday I spent three hours in a meeting in the Ministry in Ramla, while my subject was not even touched. I sat and learned about Listeria and food factory planning. I am having a bad bad day. This morning I had an important meeting and I forgot it.

The bourse is falling all over the world, Trump's trade war is upsetting the world's monetary system, which anyway was unsustainable. America was being bled white, the industry was moving to China. It is a financial storm and I feel powerless even to try to understand it.

New Cuban Missile Crisis,This time in Romania

I am old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Russia positioned nuclear missiles in the Island of Cuba, close range from Washington. Kennedy received a nervous fit and forced Hrushchov to take them back. Fifty years after, America is positioning short range nuclear missiles on the Soviet border, creating a mortal threat to Moscow and tightening an already tense situation. Craig, an anti-Semitic politician, describes the new situation and blames … Romania.

"After falsely accusing Russia of violating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), Washington unilaterally repudiated the treaty. Thus did the US military/security complex rid itself of the landmark agreement achieved by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev that defused the Cold War... resurrecting the specter of nuclear war by the deployment of US missiles on the borders with Russia."

Farewell to illusions

Clark's book The Farewell to Alms shows that the population of England underwent selection in the last thousand years, as the upper middle class replaced the lumpen that died off. Clark bases his conclusions on the systematic study of family names, a method that seems rather unreliable to me. Ashkenazi Jews had no family names, for example. But the English are different.

Now I am reading that Iceland was settled a thousand years ago by a 50% Norwegian and 50% Irish population. However, the current genetic composition is 75% Norwegian and 25% Irish. There was differential selection, just like Clark discovered.

These results are applicable to every group of humans. Extract your own conclusions. Keep it quiet. 

The tongue is the best

A small cave in Gibraltar called El Sidron was the hiding place of the last surviving family of Neanderthal humans. The bones of the twelve show that they had been surprised by cannibals, cut into pieces, their skulls broken to extract the brain, and their mandibles scratched with flint knives by someone intent in devouring their tongues. Neanderthals had red hair and were heavy, up to 200 kg. We know the identities of the cannibals: they were you and me. Africans are innocent, their alibi is that they were at that time far away in Africa. 

The Persistance of Lead Contamination

My interest in lead contamination started with the "National Emergency" of Flint, Mich. some year ago. The more I learn about the issue, it appears more and more dramatic. Lead persists in the environment forever, and it not only reduces IQ but also fertility. Surprisingly, it is a Catholic religious blog has an excellent article on the subject, while the professional water media almost never deals with it. I always considered Catholicism as the most intellectually satisfying religion, more than Judaism (I am a Jew but not because the intellectual worth of the Talmud but because my ancestors were all Jews and so shall I die too) and incomparably more rational than the Islam.  Why are Catholic padres worried about lead instead of counting the angels dancing on a pin?

Lead pollution provides an entire suite of family planning services—everything from puberty delay to male and female fertility reduction to chemical abortion. Indeed, colonial-era commentators recommended lead as an abortifacient. In Flint, Michigan, lead pollution has increased fetal death by perhaps as much as 50 percent and reduced overall fertility by more than 10 percent. A study of a temporary lead spike in Washington, D.C. showed similar results: huge increases in fetal death rates and substantial declines in birth rates. But most people probably assume that, despite a few crises in a few places, their childbearing plans are safe from lead-related problems.

Most people are wrong. Recently, a working paper titled “Toxic Truth: Lead and Fertility,” published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, used air-pollution data from the 1970s and 1980s to demonstrate that the presence of lead molecules in the air altered local fertility rates in those decades. Later, the reductions in lead emissions brought about by environmental regulations raised the national birth rate by about 6 percent. 

The comments section is worth reading too. 

Did the Romans' exposure to lead, not only in the water supply, but in pewter drinking vessels, cosmetics and even from wine sweetened with lead acetate affect fertility levels?

There are probably too many variables to say, but it is certainly true that the birth-rate was a matter of concern to Augustus and the other Julian Emperors, as witness the Lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus and the Lex Papia Poppaeia, which restricted or extinguished the inheritance rights of unmarried (coelebs) or childless (orbi) people and transferring them to the heirs or legatees with children. Again, it is remarkable how, of the 311 Patrician houses mentioned by Livy, only nine survived into the Augustan age.

That there was a fall in population is certain.

Pic.: Spices and herbs and ceremonial powders and alternative medicine remedies imported from South East Asia have very high - dangerous levels of lead. You have been warned. 

Trump the Puppetmaster

Trump sent out a short tweet that suggests that the USA vs China trade war may not turn into WWIII. The world financial markets, depressed for the whole last week, suddenly received an injection of adrenalin and NASDAQ is jumping 1%. The whole world has been hypnotized by Trump and is trying anxiously to read his lips. That's power. Yesterday I commented to my wife that TEVA seems to be bankrupt, closed my eyes and visualized TEVA's worldwide distribution network and asked myself: If that is not a moan, what is a moan? and bought more of the same. Today there were some good news about its former opium pushing business and lifted strong.

I am working hard. Remembering Trotsky's comment that he felt most happy in the prison cell where he was incommunicado while well supplied with paper, ink, journals and books, and he could write all day and night. I have the same temperament.  

HaAretz fishwrap horrorized: Israeli college separates girls from boys !

Today's Front Page news. 

HaAretz discovered a college that against Ministry of Education's orders has separate sitting arrangements for male and female students. Myself attended the all male Mariano Moreno college in Buenos Aires, and the girls went to the mysterious Liceo Numero Tres a few blocks down street.

If all the progress achieved by humanity in the last fifty years is mixed colleges, well, I for one don't see much or any progress. So much ado about nothing, so much fury and fuss over a trifle. 

Tyler Cowen explains negative interest rates

"Some of the negative nominal premium comes from the fact that you need these govt. securities for collateral, REPOs, clearinghouse margin, etc.
That doesn’t explain *the change*, but this point is often overlooked and it makes the puzzle somewhat less mysterious.
In part, negative nominal (and real) rates reflect a scarcity of good opportunities *at the margin*, but of course inframarginal opportunities may be fine.
If you wish to try a further de-weirding of this, it may reflect a truth about agency problems rather than absolute pessimism.
If capital is relatively plentiful, and talent is super-scarce, and you don’t know how to find marginal talent, you may be stuck just storing your money.  But when talent and liquidity are combined — say Mark Zuckerberg — it will earn phenomenal returns, the other side of the coin.
In other words, this may all be a kind of correlate to income inequality and massive returns for founders…
…you have extra money, you really would like to lend it out for a real productive investment, rather than storing it at slightly negative nominal interest. [savings glut, a’la Softbank]
But whom to trust? Who is your local Mark Zuckerberg? You just don’t know. The uncle you might give it to will just rip you off and he is a dope anyway. [tech talent harder to spot because you can’t rely on traditional credentials]
If the agency wedge is larger, because the talented are already occupied for the most part, you might just have to store it.
This implies mega-returns for good talent spotters, which in fact we observe as of late."

J wonders what are "agency problems".

• Agency problem is a conflict of interest inherent in any relationship where one party is expected to act in the best interest of another. Agency problem arises when incentives or motivations present themselves to an agent to not act in the full best interest of a principal.

But it makes no sense in Tyler's context. May be he is referring to scarcity of able manpower aka talented Jews. If so, try the Har Bracha yeshive (pic). 

I learn something new every day. 

San Francisco-On-The-Hadas

Hadas is the name of the only "river" near my beloved city of Kever Benjamin. Hadas is a winter stream that flows from the pond behind the Ushiland Shopping Center (pic), receives the treated wastewater of the Kfar Saba WWTP and flows on to feed the Yarkon River.

The only thing common to San Francisco and my place is the rejection of development: the Municipality will invent the most bizarre reasons why no new buildings may be built nor apartments added to the existing ones. The recently elected major "froze" two important projects in the downtown that already had their permits, and wove that no new developments - approved or not - will pass. The obvious result of this policy is an immediate jump in real estate prices. As owner, it benefits me, but on the other hand, I would love my daughters buying and settling near. Prices are not yet at the infamous San Francisco range (after all, this is a town bordering with knife-wielding savages), where hi-tech millionaires can only afford a mobile home, but we are not far.

Frightened by the financial media talk about recession and crash, I had been looking for investable real estate nearby, and a 4-room 40-years old apartment costs about 700,000 dollars. And going up fast.

I am wondering if current prices are... cheap. Maybe I should take a 25 year mortgage and buy. The bank doesn't care that my probabilities of being alive in 2044 are nil, they would love to lend me the money, just ask dear J. 

River Mismanagement and Sinking Cities

Let's forget the damming of China's big rivers and the channeling of the high Himalaya flows to feed Beijing. They don't appreciate criticism. Let's look at the Mekong. Soon there will be no Mekong as we knew it through old Vietnam War films.

The big cities in the world are sinking. Tel Aviv is not so big but the Coastal Aquifer below is overpumped and buildings have to be reinforced and/or collapsing. Jakarta's subsidence is 20 cm a year. Much already is flooded. Manila, Dhaka, Saigon, Venice, etc. and nearer to us, Alexandria. If the icebergs keep melting, most coastal cities will have problems. Much infrastructure will be needed, more work for the water engineers of the next generation.

I know, we the Jews will be blamed for all these problems. So let pre-empt them: YES! We did it! 

Huszar Aladar the Chief Sheriff of Hungary

The Polish Jewry had been "liquidated", the Germans had already lost the war and the Russian army was approaching and Eichmann was organizing the deportation, yet Hungarian Jews lived in the illusion that the evil will pass them. Now I see that they had some basis for hope, since many decent Hungarian politicians and churchmen courageously protected the Jews. One of them was Huszar Aladar, pic., his title was Fo-Ispan, which means Chief Sheriff. He ended in Dachau.

The EU is emitting a memorial Euro with the pic of the Losonc synagogue. My Grandfather Duved came from there. He suffered a lot when the Hungarians (Horty) demanded he prove his Hungarian roots going hundred years back. Or be expelled to fascist Slovakia. Anyway, he was deported with the whole family to the poison gas chambers of Auschwitz. If I had a son I would have called him David. His name lives on through David Libermann of Melbourne.

BTW, the Neolog Synagogue in the bill is NOT our synagogue. We belonged to the extreme Orthodox community.

Israel starts to evict Philippine families

Many Philippine caretakers had affairs or found partners in Israel and have children born and raised in Israel. Up to now, the Supreme Court forbid for humanitarian reasons the expulsion of these children and their mothers. Those who care understood that the our Judge-Gods are not for the people but for hyper-altruistic humanism, and worked to elect sober ones. We are seeing some changes. Judges who are not slaves to the foreign media but take into account the survival needs of this embattled country. 

Our next client

A recent Israeli research says that the emergence of the Islamic State was not consequence of a natural drought in Northeast Syria, as I presumed, but the over-exploitation of upwater flow by the Ataturk Dam. It makes sense.

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam will use former Sudanese and Egyptian water. They'll fight. We shall sell weapons to our Ethiopian blood-brothers. Pic.: Gondar. 

J explains White Replacement

It is the notion … " the “white race” is being squeezed out of existence through its own low birth rate, miscegenation and more prolific reproduction by non-white people."  (From The Economist.) 

Fair enough, but not enough. The question is if (a) there is a basis to it and if so, (b) is it bad? The statistics of the last hundred years surely confirm the trend.  Humanity is brown and the "white" (I prefer the classic Chinese description of 'colored people' or the people with colored eyes and hair) are getting scarcer. I love multi-colored girls (Sadly, only in past tense) and not attracted to big butted African girls, so - for me - it is a (notional) loss.

Is the fear of replacement bad? Taken to the extreme of racism, it is. The Nazi Party, professing its iron will to save the colored eyes people, attacked its neighbors - who were more "white", "pure" and colored than they were, the Polish and Ukrainian peoples. (And Ashkenazi Jews, who are lighter-colored than most Germans, you didn't know that.) Ten million Germans died. How you save your race exterminating your own race? The Nazis said one thing and did exactly the opposite. Ergo, racism is bad, causes people to harm themselves.

More than, I don't know. The girl in the pic resembles my cousin in Australia.

Greenland: Israel should outbid Trump

President Trump is floating the idea that America should buy Groenland. The island is very big and cold, and peopled by some 50000 seal hunting esquimaux. Why should Trump have it? We are a small country and very hot, we need a cold place for our summer dachas. It is worth more for us. We could subdivide it and sell plots for young couples and retirement homes. We could industrialize the seal business. 

Tu böÁv

Hungarian Jewish Lovers' Day

The Talmud describes how the girls of Jerusalem dressed in white went out to dance in the vineyards. On this day, it was permitted that boys not yet married should follow them and choose a wife. Taanit 31a tells us that  

The beautiful girls sang: Seek beauty, because women are for their beauty.

 The girls from good families sang: Look at the family, because women are for children. 

And what sang the plain girls? Decide as Heaven wants, and beautify us with your jewels. 

Dealing with Nervous Wrecks

No one knows why, but the crossed bond yield curves failed to cause the total collapse of the markets as it was universally predicted. Worldwide, players are nervous wrecks, they move in and out trillions without knowing where to hide. Only The Economist conserved his head and warned against exuberance in the bull side. The English are still the best. 

Flint Water Poisoning started a Trend

EPA discovered that Newark's water supply had excessive concentration of lead. That is, it was poisonous. Toxic. Neuro-toxic. Mayor Ras Baraka blamed the aged infrastructure and apparently believed that corrosion
control efforts had solved it.

It should have been so. In a normally functioning city. 

“But Newark changed course after a study found that lead was leaching into the water because of ineffective corrosion treatment at the city’s Pequannock plant,” The New York Times reported. “Last year, lead levels in more than half the samples tested at homes served by the plant exceeded the 15 parts per billion standard.”

In response to the EPA letter, Mayor Ras Baraka and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy issued a joint statement asking the federal government for help in resolving the crisis. A modest 70 million.

However, the problem can easily controlled through corrosion control at the Pequannock facility. Water treatment is no rocket science. It is basic chemistry. Adding buffer chemicals to control the pH. And work ethics, like not stealing the money budgeted for the chemicals. The Flint Water Treatment Plant had the same problem and they too claimed government help. President Obama declared National Emergency and generously, sent millions to Flint municipal incompetents. Ras Baraka expects the same from Trump. This is becoming a routine. 

Ras Baraka is son of poet Amiri Baraka. His sister Shani was killed in a domestic violence episode. I gather that Newark needs lots of Federal assistance to function. I love America. This is so sad.

Are we living on borrowed time?

TASE lost 3% today reflecting worldwide financial panic. I am re-reading George Soros' Alchemy of Finance, and his point is that nobody knows nothing, even his own Quantum Fund just worked on intuition. He advises to focus on expectations, not on hard material facts. Today, investors (speculators) are expecting the stock market to turn sour because an ominous omen in the heavens: the 2 year and 10 year bond yield curves - inverted. It is like the conjunction of Saturn, a malefic and noxious planet, with Mars, the war planet. BAML warned that an inverting yield curve means equities are on “borrowed time."   Who knows. I found no system nor consistent philosophy in Soros, only clever opportunism. He should have titled his book "The Astrology of Finance". 

Israel takes in American Refugees

Well, not exactly refugees, but "olim" - Zionist immigrants. Four hundred of them landed just in one day. Isn't this something of a miracle, when half of humanity is risking life and leg to get into America?

Must Follow the Rules

 The best self-help book I read is The Rules. Although it is written specifically for young ladies desperate to catch a husband, deleting the technical specifics of seduction, the spirit of the book is a genius. The concept consists in having a clear, mechanical set of rules and follow it with NO deviation. I bought it for my daughters but I am the only one who has read it (I am not looking for Mr Right!). It embodies the spirit of Mr Wilson of IBM who prescribed to his salesman down to the angle of their ties (have not seen one in years), and what sentences to voice and forbid any creativity. The fabulous Fund of Funds, created by a Jewish psychologist turned speculator to sell a saving vehicle to American servicemen stationed in Europe (that was in the sixties), had a written dialogue to execute with prospective clients. Salesmen had to memorialize and say exactly what was written. The idea of Fund of Funds was that it would diversify the risk incorporating the diverse strategies of the individual funds. Of course it was a Ponzi but most successful. My point is that success is achieved by strictly following a formula, the Rules, and avoiding distractions and creativity. 

Argentina's 100-year bonds

In 2017, Argentina sold $2.75 billion worth of U.S. dollar-denominated bonds that mature in 2117, with a coupon of 7.125%. Investors placed 10 billion dollars’ worth of orders for the paper.  Argentina had defaulted six times within the past 100 years and that didn’t deter these intrepid buyers. 

At 7%, investors recoup their investment in just 12 years. The investors expected that Argentina would be solvent for at least 12 years, not 100. It seems they were over-optimist, only after one and half years and already we have issues. Anyway, Argentina still will be there in 2117 and even, possibly, paying its debts. I would not bet on it, but who knows?

Pic.: Unemployment. A 50 y.o. relative of mine has been unemployed for the last 9 months.