SOME ELECTRONS ARE LESS RENEWABLE THAN OTHERS

Here we go again. Someone wakes up to the fact that minibus taxis aren’t paying much income tax and everyone feels that something must be done about that. Unsurprisingly not too many folk are volunteering to break this news and begin handing out tax return forms to the owners and drivers within this massive but pretty lawless business. The reality is that it’s probably best if we just leave that tax uncollected. After all, one of Tidemarks’ old shibboleths is that it is extremely unlikely that the government would be able to distribute that money as swiftly and widely as the industry itself is probably doing. They are running a pretty good case study in the benefits of economic freedom. For most of the world the Covid thing appears to be shaking down quite quickly with different levels of public rejection of the wilder and woollier requirements for behaviour modifications. Nevertheless, some governments seem to be particularly loath to give up the powers they gave themselves to control their pesky populations. In case you didn’t notice, our “State of Disaster” was this week rolled out another month. But its hard to tell. The last holdouts to “normality” are of course mostly those whose emolument was unaffected by the lockdown and who have yet to return to their usual places of work. Complicating any understanding of the status and impact of the virus are the various statistics which show huge improvements in the economy since a year ago. This a faulty comparison as that was when there were penguins were tottering through the streets of Simonstown and surfers were being arrested. The lockdown was hard and brutal and neither booze nor ‘baccy could be sold. Compared to the pre-covid periods we are way short of a real widespread recovery. Here on the southern tip as usual we are doing things quite differently. There appears to be scant urgency to administer any of the vaccinations that the rest of the world has adopted so enthusiastically. Why that is, is hard to tell but a possible reason is that the pathways to cadre riches that the ruling party like to map out in any expenditure of public money are unclear. Already the supposedly unavoidable and imminent third wave of infections is being blamed on the feeble vaccination program. Tidemarks would like to draw readers’ attention to the collision of two phenomenon These are Elon Musk and Bitcoin The former it seems has reversed an earlier decision to accept the latter in payment for purchase of his Tesla electric car product. The offered reason drips with hypocrisy. Elon is now worried about how much dirty electricity is required to “mine” a Bitcoin but is unconcerned that the same energy source is used exclusively to power the novel car. Years behind schedule, the national broadcaster SABC is only now switching off the legacy analogue terrestrial TV broadcasts in order to meet an international agreement to free up “spectrum” for mobile data. SABC’s channels will soon be transmitted only in digital format from the familiar array of huge masts dotted around the countryside. To watch “The News” and other fiction offerings churned out by SABC, viewers need to get a decoder (Just as Multichoice customers need to unscramble the digital TV signal broadcast from the DSTV satellite.) Much of the delay in getting to this point was due to the government working out how to ensure that their voters would continue to get the benefit of a daily opinion from a political worthy. After all, folk who do not buy TV licences are not going to purchase a decoder. Viewers on the old system, due to be cut off finally in about a year, are now getting messages inviting them to register for a free government-subsidised decoder. Um. So not all that free really then? Oh the excitement of the domestic rugby season. The Lions play the Stormers and the Bulls play the Sharks both on Saturday. The latter clashes with the FA Cup but few people care about much of this. The absence of audience is awful. The WHO have recently pronounced that “There has not been one verified covid infection transmission in the outdoors”. Is this real or just some pressure from Japan, the panicking Olympic hosts? James Greener Friday 14th May 2021