Concentrate! Focus!

 

A whole week wasted without doing work. Pesach and today are Remembrance Day. Internet distractions! Maybe in the afternoon I can concentrate and work.

Bought some Kenon shares.It is 30% down this year, a real bargain (?). Kenon has a complicated corporative structure, lately, it bought  ekWateur - founded by Julien Tchernia, 

 "L’énergie est notre avenir, c’est pourquoi on ne s’économise pas ! Fournisseur d'énergie verte, gaz & bois."  Meaning:  "Energy is our future, that's why we don't economize! Supplier of green energy, gas & wood." That's idiotic, woke and imbecile; but Idan Ofer believes in it. Participez à la lutte contre le réchauffement climatique en passant à une offre d’énergie 100% renouvelable. Changez simplement, sans engagement et sans coupure : on s'occupe de TOUT.

Ma Chi Se Ne Frega

 Evo writes about Italy:  

Italians' mean age is 47; therefore, more than half are past the age of reproduction. With a fertility rate of 1.3 children per woman, the smaller "procreative fraction" of the population will fall by almost 50% with each generation. (If President Meloni adopts nationalist measures...) she will have to deal with the European Court of Human Rights, the Court of Justice of the European Union, and the United States, if she does not respect the treaties on the management of immigration, Islam, free and undistorted competition, and the European Union's defense policy.  

If she is really very brave, she will carry on regardless and continue her policy. That is when the European Central Bank will deal with her. Indeed, Italy has become, thanks to Berlusconi, a beggar. It owes its survival only to the accommodative policy of the ECB, which massively buys its abysmal debt, and protects it from hedge funds. Remember that the ECB holds 780 billion [euros] of Italian public debt (30% of total debt), and that this is only growing. Italy's 10-year borrowing rates have already exceeded 4%, which is completely unbearable for the country's budget. Then it would be enough for the ECB to stop its purchases, or even to sell part of its stock on the market at a low price, to immediately raise this rate to stratospheric levels, and make Italy look like Zimbabwe. 

The Future

 I have seen the future and am disappointed. Fifty years ago I was a member of TAHAL's consulting team in Nicaragua. Among our projects, Afik wrote the Atlantic Coast Development Project, dealing with extensive mapping of soils and planning rational economic enterprises. The Atlantic Coast was about 70% of Nicaragua's surface, a vast tropical forest extending to the city of Limon. I asked the internet what happened in these fifty years and was amazed to read about woke stories of "settlers" usurping native lands. The only natives were the Moskito - small settlements of African slaves marooned on the Caribbean coast. We Israelis were among the first professionals mapping and planning the development of those diseased, malarial jungles. 

Looking at the same place from the future (today), I found the Costa Atlantica semi-deforested by mestizo cattle farmers, with a developed frozen meat industry selling to the US market. It had happened spontaneously; Afik's plan had been long forgotten. Current issues were dealing with "Native" land rights, and sustainability accusations by American "woke" groups. They were demanding certificates of origin of the meat, that is identifying the "hacienda" that sold the cattle, and a certificate that it was "woke" in the sense that it was ecologically sustainable, not a "settler" farm on the new-fangled Biosphere Reserve, and so on - following the Save the Earth ideology. They were demanding that the US stop importing Nicaraguan meat considered immoral and harmful to the planet. 

BTW, the "settlers" are mixed-blood Nicaraguans, certainly not Europeans. Those White Americans' impositions may be interpreted as a form of imperial interference.  

 The Future II: Argentina vs Brazil

When I was in high school in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Brazil were more or less equal. Those were times of military dictatorship and the papers used to compare their military powers. Argentine was worried that its traditional rival was growing faster and leaving behind the country. Fifty years after, today, Brazil's population and economy are five times larger than Argentina's. I have no data on their military. 

 

From Slavery to Freedom

For a whole week, I ate unleavened bread - matza - which is truly indigestible. Having survived Pesach, the escape saga from slavery, bought a large baguette and finished in ten minutes. At last, I felt full, free, and happy.  

San Francisco

 

This is the city's new totem animal. Oro en paz, fierro en guerra. Gold in peace, iron in war. 

Local papers write that San Francisco transgender population is oppressed, lives in fear, and is cruelly discriminated against. They have no access to free transgender medical care, etc.  In other, general issues their tone is standard (for woke America).

According to a leaked Pentagon paper, the Israeli Secret Service rebelled against the government and worked for its fall. The Economist writes that the elite pilots' squad started the mass protests when understood that without an independent Supreme Court, they could find themselves accused of war crimes and detained in Europe. It is difficult to be Jew. 

Tradition, tradition!

 

Read an interesting article about the population in Palladium. It makes a realistic estimation that in two generations, South Korea's population could decrease by 94%. I think that that is what happened to Hungarian Jews in the post-WWII era.  Except for the religious who followed their rabbi in time.

The graph is from "Coin hoards vs population decline". Roman historians, for example, have been unable to agree on how to interpret an abrupt jump in recorded census tallies that occurred during the first century BCE.

How Argentine bondholders were cheated

In 2005 Argentina sold bonds linked to statistical information on Argentina's economic situation published by INDEC - the national bureau of Statistics. In later years, it became obvious that the figures of INDEC did NOT reflect reality so even the World Bank stopped using them. The University of La Plata (my alma mater) made a study about what happened, analyzing INDEC hard disks and mail, and discovered the  Ipn_Calind_Pkg.SQL program. This computer program was used to calculate the indices and contained a "top" function that, in case of reaching an undesired figure - recalculated the index so that it was more "government friendly".

Several foreign holders of Argentine indexed bonds demanded the State for falsifying the data and cheating them. The London tribunal accepted the demand and now Argentina will pay about 1.5 billion dollars.  Triste.

See https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/latamcaribbean/2017/02/21/the-case-of-indec-in-argentina-shows-that-statistical-neutrality-is-an-unachievable-ideal/