The Motley Fool about ZIM

The Motley Fool economic web magazine writes about the fall of the container shipping business. It appears that the AI robot that writes its articles has improved its style.

...protests against a government "zero-Covid" policy are spreading across China, threatening both the ruling regime's stability, the country's economy, and its ability to produce products that would need container shipping services to reach foreign markets. To cite just one example, CNBC reported this morning that Apple is likely to produce 6 million fewer iPhone Pro smartphones this month than it would like to produce, as a result of a combination of Covid outbreaks at its factories, government measures to contain the outbreaks, and protests against the containments.  

Result: Less demand for ocean-going container shipping.

Now what

But this, too, shall pass.

There's an old saying in economics: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." As applied to today's situation, we can understand why China's government wants to stamp out Covid and has imposed draconian measures to accomplish this goal. But after three years of trying, and failing, and seeing its economic growth rate hobbled in consequence, it's starting to become apparent that "zero-Covid" is a policy that cannot be sustained forever.  

Therefore, it will stop...eventually.

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.