Rain falling on Tel Aviv

It is raining in Tel Aviv. The Ayalon River has flooded the nearby streets, almost closing down the access road to South Tel Aviv.

Tel Aviv in the pic looks impressive, almost like Hong Kong. Almost. 

The case against Loma Negra

The success of Singer in extracting billions from the Argentine state has whetted the appetites of copycat would be "vultures" and they are suing Argentine corporations. Two years ago Loma Negra cement and infrastructure company sold shares on NASDAQ for 980 million dollars. Apparently the buyers were unaware that Argentina was broken and owed many billions, that the government was corrupt and in general, South Seas hopes of fast and easy profits are always illusory.

Having lost money, the investors are suing Loma Negra that it had hidden "secret information", such as Argentina finances were hopeless, that Loma Negra was forced to pay bribes, that Loma Negra operated in a third world environment. In short, they feel deceived and defrauded.

Now, I always thought that the law was caveat emptor - buyer should beware, specially in the bourse. I am sure that in the sales prospect it was written that there was no guaranty that Loma Negra shares would rise. But in America's "capitalism" it is possible that a judge of New York 2nd Circuit will agree that they were cheated. Crazy! 

What they did to us

Worldwide Crash

Stock exchanges the world over are collapsing. Here the dollar is 3.7 shekel that is, there was a silent devaluation of ten percent. My most beloved stocks are worth less and less. Hour by hour. In dollar terms, I am being impoverished fast.

What should I do?

End of the Hedge Funds

A Deutsche Bank study shows that  hedge funds have generated no alpha (or beta for that matter) over the past 4 years. 

Bloomberg says that automated trading, with plenty of data, has reduced the weight of hedge funds. Stock picking is no fun anymore. 

Pythagorean Secret Cult: Democratic or Dictatorial

That Pythagoras founded an utopic, elitist, puritanical cult is proved by the fact that his communes were burned by the pitchfork peasantry of Ancient Greece, and that he was persecuted. He is on my mind as I am re-reading "The end of Sparta" by Victor Davis Hanson, a novel where the revolutionary democratic ideas of Pythagoras fuel the Boiotians' onslaught on Sparta - to free the Messenian helots and spread democracy. Hanson's central thesis hits me as paradoxical because in the original history, it was the democratic party of Croton that persecuted Pythagoras for teaching tyranny. Yet his followers lived in closed, secret communes, everything in common, that is, they were the first Communists. Hanson knows of Greece more than I do, yet something seems wrong. 

We know that Pythagoras  invented the metempsychosis, or the "transmigration of souls", which holds that the soul is immortal and, upon death, enters into a new body. They believed that numbers - the numerability - was the underlying principle of the universe, which seems to be so. The sect followed bizarre customs, such as taking a wow of silence, putting on the right sandal before the left one, not wearing wool textiles, vegetarianism except eating beans, erecting tombstones in life and so. Pythagoras was a math and music genius, he invented an equation that I understood only at age six. 

Saloniki Jews Old Age Home

Superurgent job: to map the compound's water and sewage system. The Ministry of Health demands this document and I promised it. Slept badly, woke up with fear in my guts.

P.S.: After a hellish 48 hour workday, I finished and submitted the drawing and report. The Min.of Health answered me immediately, and it transpires that they were interested only in the hot water system, if the water was hot enough to prevent Legionnaria sp. survival. The elderly have no resistance against this bacteria.  I always work too much.

Anecdote: The staff kept mentioning the Saudi residents in the old age home, the plumbing issues in the Saudi wing and so. I wondered - do they have Saudi Arabians here? Then I understood, "סיעוד" in Hebrew (and probably in Arabic) means nursing and it is pronounced almost the same. And most of staff is Arabic. Maybe it was a private joke of theirs.