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.