Kardan: Buy? Sell? Do Nothing?

Kardan is holding company that owes the double of its presumed assets. Its owners sold all their shares before Kardan become almost worthless. Kardan has three assets that has been trying to sell for more than three years: TAHAL, the Dalian Mall and AVIS Ukraine. They almost sold Tahal for 100 million sheqels to Fortissimo Fund. Tahal, and I worked twenty years for that consulting company, is worth little to nothing. After Government subsidies stopped, I wondered how they were able to pay my salary. I am watching and waiting. 

Missing My Turn to Get Rich

Two unnoticed changes in Israel's building permits "industry" are causing me problems: One, the Government is starting to tackle the illegal building activity that has brought us a situation that most of the public land has been occupied by unrecognized villages, of Jewish settlers in Samaria but specially by the Bedouins in the Negev. In the past, the Government ignored the intensive building taking place in Arab villages. The Arabs and their Jewish friends had an effective international lobby that made almost impossible to bulldoze a standing and occupied building. The European Union would protest the inhumanity of throwing into the streets a poor Arab family of an aged sheikh with four wives and twenty little innocent children. The EU would automatically fund the rebuilding of the structure in the same place. Encouraged by  President Trump's backing, Netanyahu's last government started to act and illegal buildings are being bulldozed by the hundreds and the pics published in the media. It has caused a panic in the Arab but mostly in the Jewish sectors. This year, everybody is trying desperately go legal and to get a permit.

Second, the permitting bureaucracy has been strengthened and an additional layer of inspectors has been added. Once, the drawing plans were signed by non-professional bureaucrats, but now they are studied by dedicated full time specialists that enforce all the regulations and standards. These new inspectors enjoy their power of rejecting drawings for minor errors even if the error is non-compliance with a long-forgotten, never-enforced, idiotic colonial-era municipal order.

The result is that I have been inundated with work orders and the prices have doubled. It is a veritable bonanza for permitting engineers like me, with twenty years of activity and a wide network of contacts and publications. This bonanza arrives when I am about to close shop, as I am a generation after retirement age and losing patience with the mindless bureaucracy. Just when my window of opportunity to get rich arrives, I am too old. I shall miss it. As my father used to say, "Son, you will have to inherit less".

A world in peace and prosperity

The papers are full of frightening bad news but the reality is that humanity is passing through a period of almost complete peace and absence of serious wars and internal strife. Most of the countries have no internal rebellions going on, and physical violence has almost disappeared in most societies. Aparently the fake media is succeeding in pacifying the masses and their grievances have been reduced to the level of perceived impoliteness. Prolonged peace has brought increasing prosperity. There has been no famines - physical hunger - in the last seventy years, and food is abundant and very cheap. On the other hand, several Chinese societies - Singapore, Taiwan,  China itself, as well as the Germanic states, are growing fantastically rich. Over 15,000 dollar per month salaries are common in Singapore (and San Francisco). Stock exchanges, that represent the wealth of the saving classes, are inflating: people that has savings in the NASDAQ and Shanghai Bourse have seen their worth rise 20-30% this year. TASE increased only 13% and I am not complaining. The family has grown and more babies are on the way. All this is too good to be true, too good to last. שנה טובה

When the engineer fails...

Change of vantage point

Yesterday was Saturday and a cloud of exhaustion descended on me, I could not focus on the drawing in front of me. With chemical help,  I slept the night and now feel less tired. But it is becoming clear that I am not up to my projects, I have entered the different phase of my life and should start retirement. Of course I am afraid of the "golden years", although all my friends have retired and spend their time travelling in the old country. What can I do in Vienna and Budapest? Last time I found the Viennese schwarzwald torte with solid margarine - uneatable, and the Hungarian goulash came with greasy chips. The turn-of-century buildings of Budapest are uncomfortable and unsafe (pic. my old neighborhood, VII kerulet). What can I do? 

Golden shower in Iran

The boys of my barrio were crazy for football but we had no money to buy tickets, so we used to steal into the Velez Sarsfield stadium shortly after the match had started and the guards had left their posts. The tribunes were crowded and people had to relieve themselves in-situ. We had to pass under them with golden drops falling on our heads. We said "it is raining", pretending that there was nothing to notice. 

Iran is attacking left and right and lately sent a well-coordinated air attack on Saudi oil facilities. The Saudis ignored the attack, their papers printed pics of the King attending an exciting camel race. The Americans, ultimate guarantors of the kingdom, did not react. Saudi spends some 50 billion dollars per year on Western weapons, they have the AWACS capable of observing every bird shitting in the air. Iran, with its hundred million inhabitants, spends a fifth of that money on weapons but has an hyper-aggressive policy. 

Iran has been ruled for fifty years by a clerical dictatorship. The CIA easily ousted Mossadegh but does nothing against the ayatollahs. Maybe the West thinks that the ayatollahs in their black skirts and turbans are troublesome but not really dangerous, so let them keep raving, shooting fireworks and frightening the Saudis so they keep buying more weapons? 

The story of Honi HaMe'agel the Rainmaker

From time to time, the weather disagrees with human desires and there is no rain for a few years, or it rains too much and floods the streets, or it is too hot or too cold. It is told that there was a long drought in Jerusalem, and climate activist Honi sat in protest in the sand and menaced God that he will not move  from the circle in the sand he drew till rain comes. God relented and sent him rain, Honi was saved and became famous. His protest was the right thing to do and was supremely effective. It worked so well that in our days thousands, worldwide, are protesting against the climate (pic.: Australian schoolgirls) demanding that it change. They all want to show how much they want to save the planet. Pathetic, I say. Wish them success.