The GPT3 wrote this for me

As the clock winds down to the final seconds of the year, the mood for work might seem

a million miles away. On New Year’s Eve, the urge to go out and celebrate is strong,

but if you have a project to complete, it can be hard to find the motivation to stay focused

and make progress. If you’re looking for ways to find your mood for work on New Year’s Eve...

I am unimpressed, dear GPT. Illustration: 

"Moebius illustration of a simulacrum living in an AI-generated story discovering it is in a simulation" by DALL-E 2. 

Onion Soup in the Kibbutz

 Yesterday we celebrated 30th birthday of my daughter's common-law husband in the kibbutz. Every family was supposed to contribute a soup. The one in front of me was an onion soup of unknown origin,  not bad but definitely not like the traditional French onion soup in the picture. I am not saying that the Israeli kitchen is undigestible (which it is), but has much to learn from the French (and the Italian). 

Israel is Not Poor Anymore

 
The per capita GNP of Israel positions it among the wealthiest countries in the world, richer than Austria, Germany, and other European countries. It is very surprising for this old Jew. We are definitely not like you. Ill.: Restaurant BUY THE WAY, my village. Explanation: The more you eat 30-dollar alfalfa sandwiches, the wealthier you must be. 

ZIM dividend expected in 2023

The price of the stock was cruelly cut this month. Still it is the number one favorite of Jim Cramer.

  Due to the strong operational performance, the company further strengthened its balance sheet by redeeming its Series 1 and Series 2 unsecured notes due in 2023. With the early redemption of the unsecured notes, ZIM was no longer subject to certain dividend restrictions, and it declared a special dividend of $2 per share, which will be payable on Sept 15th (goes ex on August 24th).

Reason to be a Proud Israeli

After several years of temporary governments in Israel, it appears that a stable coalition has been formed and assumed power under Bibi Netanyahu.  The signing of the coalition agreement took more than a month, because of the demands of the religious parties. The demands were related to more generous financing of religious education, a specifically Jewish thing. In Argentina or the USA, education has zero priority and it is never debated in elections or at the party level. We are not the same as you are and I am rather proud of it.  Pic: Yitzhak Goldkopf, the leader of the Haredi fraction. A life dedicated to creating more religious kindergarten.  

Malaria Memories

When I was working in Nigeria, I caught diseases. First was recurrent fever, which a missionary doctor in the jungle, diagnosed and cured with antimalarial pills. Saved my life, probably.  The second was some VD, caught in a small hotel in Iboland, which was cured with penicillin. I was young and strong, so it felt like nothing at the time. Only fifty years later I realize how dangerous it was. 

Malaria is a bad parasite. Its control is threatened by emerging resistance among Anopheles mosquitoes and the changing behavior of mosquitoes, which now bite before people during daylight. In those times, VD was cured by easily available antibiotics, which are increasingly losing their strength.  Too bad. 

About Rome

 

I am reading Livy's history of Rome. The Israelites had wo tables of law, Rome had twelve. Livy describes the development of the Roman religion, how they consulted the will of Heaven, by watching the birds.

Illustration: Emperor Nero through the coins. He grew very fat as he aged. 

Rome was built on a worthless swampy piece of land. The marketplace, the Forum, was a wetland that had to be drained to be habitable. When the malaria mosquito appeared in Italy, Rome was doomed. 

It was climate change allowed the northward advance of the mosquito, sickening and successively emptying Palestine's coastlands, Greece, and then Italy. The center of gravity moved to France and Germany.  

A Day Wasted

 While the people are celebrating Shabbat I spent the whole day in my little office trying to repair my computer. Without success. The Outbyte PC Repair program is working all day and nothing is repaired. Just scanning. I am trying to work on the other machine. 

P.S. Outbyte apparently is trap. It took my 25 dollars and gave me nothing. Probably copied everything from my computer. 

Monday: Another day wasted trying to repair the computer.

December 21 2022 Computer in working order. But the car is overheating and my mechanic went on vacation... Wifey complaining. 

Desanimo = Discouragement

 The last six hours were spent trying to repair my Autocad. A stupid System.Web.Extension version=4.0.0.0 cannot be loaded. Now I downloaded a PC repair program and it is working for an hour. I have a light feverless flu, all my body is aching. Not too bad but it sets a discouraging mood. 

The Economist estimates that 40% of Argentina's workforce is in the informal sector. Meaning selling ice cream on the streets, repairing old cars, and working as daily construction hands. This was totally unknown at my time. On the other hand, my relatives are comfortable. The young generation is already mixed, drop-outs from the Jewish people. They fall in love with a nice schikse and don't realize that they are forfeiting their future. You have to lose your mind to choose to be an Argentine Criollo (pic) instead of the European Jews they are. My childhood friend Viky Haar married a Criolla at age 18 and now, one of his three sons is selling balloons in the zoo, and the second is doing occasional ironsmith jobs and living in abject poverty. The youngest is the most successful:  he operates a cultural marijuana joint and has two kids from two different women.  I am convinced that out-marrying leads to a loss of moral and social position. 

Wall Street sinking

 Every analyst in the world is prognosticating a total financial crisis to come. The bourses are oscillating 5% up and down.  Something I never experienced. I am following the Tao (way of the water) and doing nothing. 

Is AI intelligent?

 
AI is a statistical calculating machine with a very large data memory. Finds something similar in its memory and calculate the probabilities. As Martin Fierro says: Mas sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo. 

Wikipedia is actively erasing information. Especially about human evolution and intelligence. The truth is the enemy of religion and morality. Religion and morality are good, agreed, so there is a hard contradiction. Fortunately, I am able to hold two contradictory ideas in my mind without being confused. 

Pic.: The second Schneursohn rabbi.

As if a few days ago

 

We went to the Cameri theatre to see "A few days ago" כימים אחדים . It is organized in a storytelling format about a family knot in the early Jewish settlement in Emek Yezreel. It is extremely well done, with superb actors and professionals. I enjoyed it. 

I am Hungarian Jew and the early settling of Palestine is not my background, but after fifty years in Israel, the national folklore is almost mine. Like Americans adopting the cowboy hero myth, or now, the Southern plantation myth. Myths are myths, the real cowboys were Mexican farmhands ("boys") and plantation owners took good care of their expensive workforce. 

There were two or three old Russian songs that are identified with the early pioneers,  yet contemporary Russians never heard of them. Now they are Israeli folklore and "touch" me too.

Interesting what is NOT in the play. It takes place in Israel before the independence, but not one word about Zionism or patriotism. Second, there are no Arabs in Israel in the play. Those were the times of the big Arab revolt, but the farmers never heard of it.  

 

Revolution

Two hundred years ago, African slaves took over the rich half-island of Haiti and expelled the Europeans. The place became dirt-poor and unlivable. The process has reached the USA and the State of Georgia is now ruled mostly by Africans with disorderly lives. It makes me think that history is not proceeding as expected.  

Deep State (Argentina) vs. the Peronist Party

 

Argentine Judiciary sentenced the powerful Vice President and leader of the ruling Peronist Party to six years in jail. She is guilty of stealing billions of State monies. "The Parallel State and the Judicial Mafia condemned me", she said, "They are trying to cancel the Peronist Party". 

Argentina's hundred-year-old struggle between the 

Bourgeoisie

 and the destitute majority. The poor have no confidence in a serious, liberal government. Every time the Peronists were out of power, the government imposed cruel austerity measures on the poor, even famine. Peronism is a kind of populism that stole much public money but also took care to feed the poor. The outlook for Argentina is not good.

Pobre pais!

Quantum Fields of Gold

I never made promises lightly

And there have been some that I've broken
But I swear in the days still left
We'll walk in fields of gold
We'll walk in fields of gold

(Sting)

Fun and Entertainment

I spent almost a day in bed (backache). Read an old textbook on matrices and reflected that this math area was developed 150 years ago when French and Scotts started to think about the properties of numbers. The next generation discovered that the universe strictly follows maths, from the temperature of faraway celestial bodies to rockets to the moon. The enigma of Newton's falling bodies has been solved: there are no gravitons nor gravitational waves, it is mass that changes the curvature of the spacetime membrane. As I walk on this membrane, my mass bends it. Illustration: Cirque du Soleil. All that follows numerical relations. I think we live in and are a mathematical simulation. It seems totally pointless but beautiful. Are we also just for fun and entertainment? 

SPACE PIONEERS

 

The ceremonial President of Israel, Adv. Itzhak Herzog, landed in Abu Dhabi. The tall guards in beige jalabiya are impressive. He lauded the cooperation in space exploration. "Our cooperation can turn our beautiful region into a global hub of climate solutions,” he said.

Mapping a hidden and improbable water supply piping

 

I had to do it on Saturday early morning because normally there is no parking in the area, not even illegally. Hard work in a hidden garden, and for this old fat Jew - dangerous too.  

Maria - tango de Julio Sosa

 Que vieja y cansada imagen me devuelve el espejo... 

China: A different opinion

易富贤Yi Fuxian《大国空巢》

@fuxianyi

·

1h

Economists made exaggerated economic forecasts based on wrong population data, misleading China's leaders into a strategic miscalculation of "the East is rising and the West is declining". U.S. leaders and think tanks have mistook China, an old, sick cat, for an aggressive lion.

Quote Tweet

Chris Reed

@calwhine

·

2h

The biggest uncovered story of modern life: China's population is collapsing. India is now the most populous nation on Earth and has been for years. India is far more wired, its schools are improving, and is at least as poised as China to be a long-term global U.S. rival. twitter.com/fuxianyi/statu…

The Motley Fool about ZIM

The Motley Fool economic web magazine writes about the fall of the container shipping business. It appears that the AI robot that writes its articles has improved its style.

...protests against a government "zero-Covid" policy are spreading across China, threatening both the ruling regime's stability, the country's economy, and its ability to produce products that would need container shipping services to reach foreign markets. To cite just one example, CNBC reported this morning that Apple is likely to produce 6 million fewer iPhone Pro smartphones this month than it would like to produce, as a result of a combination of Covid outbreaks at its factories, government measures to contain the outbreaks, and protests against the containments.  

Result: Less demand for ocean-going container shipping.

Now what

But this, too, shall pass.

There's an old saying in economics: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." As applied to today's situation, we can understand why China's government wants to stamp out Covid and has imposed draconian measures to accomplish this goal. But after three years of trying, and failing, and seeing its economic growth rate hobbled in consequence, it's starting to become apparent that "zero-Covid" is a policy that cannot be sustained forever.  

Therefore, it will stop...eventually.

Kashmir and the Israeli leftist

This week there was an international film festival in India, with the jury presided by an Israeli. He harshly condemned the Indian film "The Kashmir Files" declaring that it was not artistic but gross anti-Muslim propaganda. Hindus had been massacred and expelled from Kashmir in the nineties. India lost half of the province. The film had been financed and promoted by the President of India himself, and a formal diplomatic protest followed.

The Hindu director of "Kashmir" said that Lapid - that is name of the Israeli artist - favors the Muslim rapists and assassins. That he is traitor. Of course he is. Israeli intellectuals, as a class, are hardcore leftists, identified with the Palestinian cause and hating everything Western and Israeli. "Kashmir" being a government-supported film could not be but instinctively odious for them.  

About Regulatory Compliance in the US

 

We quantify firms’ compliance costs of regulation from 2002 to 2014 in terms of their labor input expenditure to comply with government rules, a primary component of regulatory compliance spending for large portions of the U.S. economy. Detailed establishment-level occupation data, in combination with occupation-specific task information, allow us to recover the share of an establishment’s wage bill owing to employees engaged in regulatory compliance. Regulatory costs account on average for 1.34 percent of the total wage bill of a firm, but vary substantially across and within industries, and have increased over time. We investigate the returns to scale in regulatory compliance and find an inverted-U shape, with the percentage of regulatory spending peaking for an establishment size of around 500 employees. Finally, we develop an instrumental variable methodology for decoupling the role of regulatory requirements from that of enforcement in driving firms’ compliance costs.

That is from a new NBER working paper from Francesco Trebbi and Miao Ben Zhang.  Keep in mind those are the costs of compliance narrowly interpreted, not the costs of regulation overall.  And they do not consider the longer-term innovation costs of “having to turn the firm over to the lawyers.” (Cowen has a certain sense of humor).

For the last ten years, I have been working in this area, more precisely in the water planning field with enormous attention to complying with regulatory rules. There is almost no freedom to design - it is always done with one eye on the regulators. It is not a happy, creative occupation.

I have back ache from sitting too much in front of the computer, overweight, and lack of exercise and walking. 

Stone-age Art

 

Malfeasances

 
An old and good client, a chain of small food shops open 24/7, asked me to update a drawing made four years ago. The Taagid HaMaim, the local Water Supplier, made several new demands. After I updated once and again to comply with their strange requests, they asked for the Client's number. I mean, the water company demanded to know the user's identity. After dozens of emails exchanged, the Client sent me a water bill with a number, but the address was wrong and the amount of water consumed during the year was zero. I told them that I cannot use this document. And I am asking for more money to continue working on the project.

Obviously, the chain had been stealing water and intended to complicate me. It is not the first time that Clients feed me lies, trying to use me to certify their malfeasances. I have to be super careful with whom I work.  

Next day, after sleeping on this situation: Most probably it is not malfeasance but simply disorder. I discovered that many Israeli companies are unable to follow simple but rigorous administrative routines. I surely cannot.

About not working

 

I have lots and lots of work orders and some even paid me advances, and here I am doing nothing. Thinking about how to avoid delaying. Maybe I should stop working but then, what? I have no hobbies or love interests. 

So, start working. 

Sunny November

 

I am somewhere on the map and is sunny and hot. Europe is fortunate that it does not need Russian oil for heating.  Chronologically we are in mid-November, and should be cold. I have no use for half of my wardrobe. 

Giacomo Casanova

 After swimming for an hour, moved to the jacuzzi to relax. In front of me was sitting a horrible old woman, with incredible makeup and hair. She smiled at me, and soon started to dance in the hot water, DANCING!, "eyeing me up" and approaching her feet to mine. THE HORROR!  THE HORROR! 

The event reminded me of an anecdote of Giacomo Casanova when he was invited to visit a wealthy Countess, and she expected him on the recamier with open legs. Casanova was a Venetian gigolo who made his living from cards, fortune telling and servicing lecherous ladies, but he was so deeply horrified that he recorded the incident in his autobiography. 

Confused

Hours I am sitting here and following US news, and cannot make sense of them. It is all a distraction, I need to do some work too! The American elections as shown in the media is unanimous: the Democrats won because the Trump avalanche was stopped. I see that the Republicans won more positions, so the media is biased or just lying? It is something of a mystery to me. The cryptocurrencies collapsed, losing 70-80% of their market value, why? NASDAQ is up 7%, something I never experienced nor expected. Maybe people are selling crypto and buying stock. Here we are going to have a new government, and people are afraid. There is talk of Dery (a convicted thief) taking the Treasure, and Ben Gvir (a Kahanist rabble-rouser) getting the Police ministry. It is difficult for me to concentrate and work. I am feeling old and tired. 

Ill: Confucius. 

Peres' Dream Coming Along

 

There was some kind of regional climate conference and Israel's President Herzog attended and talked to other leaders. Big deal, we are starting t be accepted here.

Jordan and Israel signed a letter of intent to exchange electricity for desalted water. The solar field in Jordan is an Israeli project. We are investing in Jordan. Slowly they are coming along. 

The small colored man at the left seems to be al-Sisi, Egypt's ruler. I am not sure, because in other pics he appears almost white. They may have forgotten to filter this picture.  

The Truth about Humans

Our twin variety, the Neanderthals, lived on meat alone. Like jackals and wolves. The human stomach has a pH of 2 and can digest rotting meat like other scavengers, say vultures. Even the sapiens variety prefers meat to vegetables.

Everywhere humans moved, game and large-bodied animals on land or in the sea worth hunting,  soon disappeared. They were exterminated. Nothing can survive where there are humans. They are everywhere. 

Humans are naked and defenseless and have no big teeth or strong paws. Cannot outrun or overpower any animal. Humans hunt in groups like wolves, but they are less disciplined. It was this absolute inferiority that forced famished humans to develop artificial weapons, and about ten thousand years ago, when they had finished all game, to eat undigestible grasses like teosinte and Triticum and then cultivate them. But humans did not turn into peaceful ruminants. The latest development is the settling of Mars. Already two tribes are exploring and mapping it. Anything out there must see itself as doomed.   

Potash market mystery

 

The graph shows Nutrien's 14% loss today. It is worrying why a very stable product - fixed production potential and fixed demand - can suffer such variations. It never goes under the minimum but a less-than-expected quarter profit (still enormous) can decrease its price by 14% or maybe 30%. I don't understand, have to think why a temporary disappointment can do this. 

Netaniyahu and three Orthodox parties

 
The papers talk about the victory of the Right-wing in yesterday's elections, but that is wrong. Netanyahu is liberal in his economic outlook, strongly capitalist, and free-marketist. He will govern with three smaller parties that hate Lapid's anti-religious, secular liberalism. The largest is the Religious Zionist party, which focused on Jewish settlement and integration of the West Bank territory in Israel. The Shas party is led by Orthodox Rabbis of the Moroccan and North African communities, interested in maintaining a large educational network and in stopping the immigration of European Jews. Their rabbinical judges are questioning the racial purity of Russian and Ukrainian Jews and rejecting their visas. The logic is absurd because North African Jews - themselves - are indifferentiable from Palestinian Arabs, while European Ashkenazi Jews are genetically unique. The Torah Party are Orthodox Jews that do not identify with Israel and refuse to serve in the army. Many are lifelong biblical scholars and as such, are subsidized by the state. They are violently anti-woke modernism. They have no political or economic agendas, except to maintain their status and subsidies. In conclusion, it is false to characterize Bibi and his partners as right-wing, they are not paid by large monopolies (there are none in Israel) and they are not representing the interests of the wealthy. The Communist arguments that they are representing the plutocrats are so absurd that no one voted for them. 

Would you trust your savings to a Nigerian prince?

S&P cut Credit Suisse's rating one notch to BBB- meaning its credit is trash, worthless. Only fabulously rich Arabs are eyeing buying it. A bank lives on the confidence of the public. Those hardheaded Calvinist Swiss bankers imagined that the moneyed will trust a diverse Senegalese? Wokeness killed the bank. 

China closes down

Lei Ge, a senior media person, said in an interview with this station: "It is an integral part of Xi Jinping's vision of China's development strategy. Xi Jinping is determined to take the so-called socialist road with Chinese characteristics and fight against the mainstream of modern Western civilization in the United States. This is surrounded and blocked by European and American societies. This is the harsh reality China has faced in the past five years.”

 Immediately after the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, things start happening in China. 50,000 supply and marketing cooperatives in rural China have been re-activated. The purchase and sale of agricultural products will be completed by the supply and marketing cooperatives. Details: https://reurl.cc/oZLqVg 

The old Supply and Marketing Cooperatives were created during Mao's famine in 1959-60, to supply the cities. Internet commenters remember them as a government instrument and fear the end of free agricultural marketing and the return to mass scarcity. Although cooperatives are logical and successful in many parts, Xi's decision reminds me of Soviet collectivization and the Holodomor.