Marx in China

 

“These people are promoting traditional culture,” quipped one, referring to one of Mr Xi’s pet projects. “Dragons give birth to dragons, phoenixes to phoenixes, and a rat’s son knows how to dig.”

From The Economist. 

שנה טובה! (שולח מהממ"ד)

 

Shaatnez Panic in Jerusalem

 

Hundreds of students at the Old Seminary, an ultra-Orthodox school in Jerusalem, removed their shoes and walked barefoot after discovering their TOMS footwear contained Shaatnez, a forbidden mixture of wool and linen, BeHadrei Haredim and Mynet reported.

In a display of religious observance, the incident began when a student reported finding Shaatnez in her shoes, prompting the school’s principal, Rabbi Yisrael Levin, to announce the discovery over the PA system. Within moments, hundreds of pairs of shoes were removed as students chose to observe the halachic ruling by walking barefoot, BeHadrei Haredim reported.

The origins of the prohibition of shatnez in Jewish tradition is considered chok, an unexplainable law. The prohibition of mixing wool and linen is called kilayim. “The word shatnez is not actually a real word.”  Shatnez comes from combining three Hebrew words that refer to the different steps of garment production: combing, spinning, and weaving.

Basically, Judaism is a religion of purity and hates all kinds of mixing, like meat and milk. It must come from Egyptian priests, who shaved their whole body and had all sorts of impurity tabus. 

The Temple of the God of Money

 

Israel following Britain's Lead

 

The planning documentation for the Lower Thames Crossing, a proposed tunnel under the Thames connecting Kent and Essex, runs to 360,000 pages, and the application process alone has cost £297 million. That is more than twice as much as it cost in Norway to actually build the longest road tunnel in the world.

Much of the discussion is about the metaphysical question of whether the road+tunnel will increase or decrease the emission of CO2. As far as I  know, civil works do not produce nor consume CO2 / For those who do not know, CO2 is something invisible produced by, say, breathing. Infrastructure, as a rule, does not breathe. 

But we are not far from the Brits. 

Haggling or Fixed Price

I

If commitments are feasible, a seller encountering risk-neutral buyers one at a time should quote a single take-it-or-leave-it price to each. This strategy is superior to any other for finite or infinite buyer populations, whether there is learning or the distribution of buyer prices is known at the outset, with one object for sale or many. Although haggling may offer advantages in terms of price discrimination, these gains are more than offset by the losses it generates by encouraging buyers to refuse purchases at high prices.

Hard Times Ahead

 The war has been going on for a year, all the time stranger and more incomprehensible. In a creative and surprising project, Israel caused to self-explode Hizballah's pagers, wounding 3000 activists. Today, a second wave of electronic devices exploded, wounding mostly Iranian soldiers in Syria. The world wants us to retire from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, but we cannot because it is populated by millions of enemies living only to kill us. We shall have no alternative but to wage a prolonged war against them ending in lasting pacification.