Headaches

An architect is calling me thrice a day demanding to finish the plumbing plan for his project. I can't suffer him anymore. I was so tired that went to sleep on the sofa.

Que reviente!

Argentina: The run on the peso

On May 6 there was a run on the Argentina peso, that was stopped immediately by the Central Bank raising REPO interest rates to 40%. International interest rates are about zero, which illustrates the level of chaos in Argentina's finances.

I know bunches of solid, hardworking, decent Spanish and Italian people in Argentina, I find no reason for its chaos and instability.

P.S. Argentine finance minister Dujovne (a relative?) traveled to New York to beg Madam Lagarde (IMF) for a 30 billion dollar loan. 

25 year in the University of Ariel in Samaria

This is my 25th year teaching in the university. At first I was teaching on a temporary basis, without even a contract, then the University started to get organized and offering one-year contracts. By then I have reached retirement age, too late to ask tenure. It is so that this temporary job is lasting more than all the other employments I had in my life. I had received "kviut" (tenure) in TAHAL, in the WWTP and also in the Water Authority, but I got bored and abandoned those safe and well paying positions for new ventures. As they say: In Israel, the temporary is forever, like in "the temporary emergency tax"  that turned out to be permanent, as most knew from the start.

Like the "occupation" of the West Bank. Driving through and working for 25 years in Samaria I witnessed how the land became urbanized, with many 4-5 stories buildings in the Arab villages. This part of Samaria was industrialized, there are very large industrial areas and thousands of Arab peasants working there as salaried employees with all the benefits of the Israeli welfare State. I see the informal taxi and minibus stations that take them back at 5 PM to their villages. The roads are full of heavy trailers transporting construction materials, industrial raw materials and foodstuffs. My impression is that the Shomron is now the heart of Israel's light industry. The optimists like Sharon were right. The left, that believed that it could not be done and the Jordanian West Bank had to be "returned" were wrong.   

Down Syndrome and Autism in Tehran

Let me write something nice and positive about my (temporary, I hope) Iranian enemies:

TEHRAN — Ten teenagers with autism and down syndrome are running a café in northern Tehran, Tasnim news agency reported.

The teenagers are in charge of running the café, called downtism (made up of two words of autism and down which refers to their disorders). The café just opened on Tuesday.

Passive funds

"Passive funds, which include low-cost exchange traded funds (ETFs), today manage an astonishing $8tn of assets, or 20 per cent of all investment fund assets. For equities the figure is higher. In Europe, passives make up 30 per cent of equity fund assets; in the US the figure is 43 per cent.

Passive funds have slashed investing costs for investors. Yet one outstanding question is what they mean for the allocation of capital. Two years ago Bernstein Research described passive investing as “worse than Marxism” because of its indifferent approach to capital allocation.

The theory goes that passives, which mainly allocate funds to follow market capitalisation-weighted indexes, are typically backward looking. Therefore the biggest company today will remain the biggest company tomorrow, and capital will therefore be allocated by size, not future productivity." From the Financial Times.

This is an amazing development. The bourse as a capital allocation mechanism is losing its traditional function. Those putting their savings - like me - in an index fund, are uninterested in the success or failure of companies. They arrived to the conclusion that betting on the most promising firms is impossible, that the average will always be superior to specific bets. This position has important philosophical consequences, and definitely, it is worse that Statist management of the economy. It reveals the absence of intelligent and brave speculators in the stock exchange. They became cowards and mediocrity rules.

Proactive Defense vis-a-vis Iran

I cannot  imagine what the Ayatollahs of Iran, who look rather normal and not very fanatic, have against us. They are following a persistent (twenty years and more) aggression against Israel and the Jews - see AMIA. Why?

May be no reason needed to hate us.

 

Cixiu Liu

I am reading and rereading Cixiu Liu's trilogy of Death's End etc. Funny that he totally destroys the universe and near the end, only Chinese people remain. May be not even they.