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.