Chinese Fake Brides

Single men in China are hiring stand-in brides to pacify their anxious parents to show them that they are in a relationship and close to bringing them grandchildren.

Being an old Jew, I identify with Chinese parents, who willingly accept being lied to by their beloved only son, and also to keep up a fake facade of happiness vis-a-vis the neighbors.  Isn't that horrible? The son going to such extraordinary lengths to fake success and happiness ...  to make his parents happy. They take selfies smiling and radiant while inside they are anguished and desperate. And full of shame, hating themselves and the whole universe. Oh, Earth, open up, and swallow me!
 
The Chinese live in a society where they are forced to invest enormous energy in fake courtesy and fake posing, just to be allowed some tranquillity. Since Chinese are basically honest people, they live in permanent  fear of being discovered and publicly shamed. Everybody knows that all around them are faking it and fearing shaming, being all mutual accomplices in faking it. It is no wonder that Chinese escape China as fast as they can to live more honestly and in peace with themselves.

Unhappy Chinese Women

Take a look at the three Chinese women in the pic left. They look terribly unhappy. Why, I wonder?

May be watching that Slovenian beauty queen in the Gucci pseudo-Chinese thing with white mink sleeves eats their jealous hearts out.

If not for a miracle, Hillary Clinton would be walking down the aisle with President Xi and his official wife. Imagine!

Sunni Disarray

Before Bush Sr.'s invasion of Iraq, no one imagined that the ancient Sunni vs Shi'ite religious fracture of the Muslim world had any relevance today. Bush unleashed a chain of development where now there is actual hot war between two well-defined blocks: The Sunni, lead and financed by the Saudi ruling clan, and the Shi'ite, directed from Tehran.

The Sunni rebellion in NorthEast Syria and NorthWest Iraq developed into an independent state, the Islamic State, which imposed rough uncooked Sharia and metastasized into many provinces. It is now beaten and no more. Lebanon, the Christian enclave, has changed into a ferocious Shi'ite entity. It was assumed that Syria, ruled for two generation by the Assad family, was secular and socialist, but it emerged that it was a Sunni country ruled by a Alawi minority. The Alawi never defined to which sect they felt closest. In fact, it was doubtful if they were Muslims at all. With the hardening of positions, the Alawi are now clearly aligned with the Shi'ia.

The same process has turned secular/socialist (Ba'ath) Iraq into a Shi'ia dominated nation, aligned with Iran. And then we have Yemen, which appeared to be homogeneous and Sunni, where the unheard of Huthi rebelled and are turning into Shi'ite allied with Iran.

Iran is developing nuclear weapons and powerful missiles and has declared that they are directed to Israel. The logical strategy for Israel is to seek allies in the Sunni camp. Unfortunately, the Sunni champion - Saudia - is undergoing a violent purge and it may end paralyzed or much weakened. Our neighbors, Egypt and Jordan, and Sunni dictatorships, but they may be hiding pro-Iran dissidents we never thought of.

We can only hope that this internal Muslim struggle never ends and both sides lose. Pic.: Explorer Bertram in the Empty Quarter, Arabia, 1930.

NVIDIA Triumphant

The US dollar is weakening vis-a-vis other currencies, which depressed the Tel Aviv Stock Market. The virtual token bitcoin is approaching 8000 dollars. INTEL has poached chip designer Kaduri to be in charge of the effort to create a chip to compete with NVIDIA, but the immediate effect will be weakening the current competitor. As for now, NVIDIA is the best chip (pic) for bitcoin mining and Artificial Intelligence applications. I bought another handful. Today it raised  5%.

Britain seems to be mismanaging its separation from Europe. Saudia is undergoing a self-coup and two luxury hotels - the Ritz and the Hilton - have been converted into jails. Israel has vanquished the Hamas and Gaza has been passed to the Palestinian Authority's government. The Hartuv design was rejected by the Ministry and I had to remake the infrastructure plan. The client warned me that if I work on the Shabbes he will not accept nor pay for it, so I worked all night and missed an important meeting this morning and finished it on time.

Billion Smuggled Eggs

Israel has inherited from her socialist past a quota system in the egg market. Farmers settled in mountain areas or with poor soils where nothing can be grown received egg production quotas. The Egg Marketing Board buys the eggs at controlled prices, subsidizing in fact Jewish agriculture. The system has survived 30 years of right wing capitalist regimes.

The well known result of socialism is scarcity with overproduction. Thanks to planned economy, Israel imports and exports eggs simultaneously. The situation promotes trade and the (illegal) trade in eggs flourishes. In the pic., a smuggled egg warehouse operated by Israeli Arabs from the non-subsidized Palestinian Authority farmers. The eggs carried the stamp of the Egg Marketing Board, thanks to a corrupt pakid (officer). He will spend the next four years in jail eating eggs (and chickpeas) three times a day. Prison dietitians have a passion for healthy, sugar-free eggs (and chickpeas).

I realize we have been consuming enemy eggs for years. At least we have not sinned: Palestinian eggs are perfectly kosher. 

Engineering in Argentina: From Worse to Worst

 We started 600 in the Facultad de Ingenieria of the Universidad de La Plata, Argentina. It was in the sixties. I was the first to graduate in my class. I left immediately for the USA and never knew how did finished at all; I know about 25. Most of the students were not studying nor working but living off their parents, the "eternal student" life suited them.


Clarin writes that today there are 215805 engineering students in Argentina, and that in 2016 a total of 8303 were granted the diploma of engineer. That is fewer than the 8542 graduated in 2014.

Only one in five engineering students graduates, meaning that 80% of the students are wasting their time and the time of the faculty.  In 2010 the Government launched a well-funded campaign to promote the profession and distributed generous scholarships: Judging from the numbers, the campaign had negative effects.

The cause of this absurd situation is that no government in the last hundred years dared to restrict the entrance to the universities. During the Peron era even those who did not finish high school were accepted in the name of "justicialismo", the regime professed that they could not study because of poverty, political affiliation or police repression, but social justice meant that they too deserved to enter the university. 

The student life in La Plata was cheap and easy, so much that I too spent a whole year without attending class (next year I worked double plus hard).  I did not take money from my parents, I worked as lifeguard in the beach during the four month summer vacation and that was more than enough for the whole year.

FollowUp Nov.23 2017: Argentine submarine lost in the South Atlantic. No one knows what happened, but I assume it may be somehow related to the above note. Poor mariners.

Who creams off the prosperity bonanza

Nov 6 Excellent apartment,near shenkin street ! ₪2650000 1br - 48m² - (Heart of TLV)
(= 757000 US$)


 
Enrico Moretti in the New York Times via the excellent MR blog:

Over the past two years, San Francisco County added 38,000 jobs, reaching its highest employment level ever. Yet only 4,500 new housing units were permitted. For all those new families knocking on San Francisco doors, new units are available for less than 12 percent of them. The numbers for Silicon Valley are even worse. This is why the rents skyrocket.
 

The problem is largely self-inflicted: the region has some of the country’s slowest, most political and cumbersome housing approval processes and most stringent land-use restrictions.

…One way to think about it is that the enormous increase in wealth generated by the tech boom is largely captured by homeowners in the urban core who bought before the boom.

In Israel we have the same situation. The sheqel is overvalued and is the second most expensive currency (the first: the yen). Building permits in Tel Aviv are in-achievable, it takes from five to ten years. Two room old apartments sell for a seven hundred thousand dollars (pic). I am selling TASE shares and buying NVIDIA on Nasdaq.