According to my trusty Google-connected mobile phone, a Bitcoin would currently cost you R485k and change. Almost half a million rand! For what? For the opportunity to find a greater fool to whom you can sell it? That’s called a Ponzi scheme. The number of similar intrinsically valueless instruments and platforms on which to trade them has been growing for decades. There are tens of thousands of them, each presumably complete with a cohort of enthusiastic supporters, almost all of whom will in due course become disillusioned and poorer. This week Warren Buffet, that entirely real experienced expert is reported to have said that he would not pay even $25 for the worlds total supply of so-called crypto currencies. That’s because they don’t represent any value into the future. True enough. Tidemarks has always cheerfully admitted to not understanding Bitcoin and its umbilical cord – the blockchain. Its all a messy mystifying morass of mendacity. Maybe it’s a backlash from the sad realisation that the legacy markets such as property, equities and debt are not as straight forward as they portray themselves. The shysters are everywhere. It turns out that the systems in place to encourage institutions to publish regular reliable statements of their financial situation have not worked too well. The incentives for organisations to dupe their employees, their creditors, their shareholders, their competitors and especially the tax man now apparently outweigh both the possibility of being timeously exposed and also any sanction arising therefrom. The information they grudgingly supply is deeply untrustworthy for making judgements about the worth of potential investments. Investors (looking for income and capital gain) are switching to gambling (looking for short term profit)
Its chair-throwing season here in the political arena again. Local elections are coming up and the niceties the founders of democratic processes imagined are suspended. Unfortunately, political assassinations are also in full swing. A record number of men and women who thought they could make a difference are never going to get that opportunity. Only the families mourn these killings with official reaction often reduced to platitudes and the rest of us worrying about the petrol price. There’s an indignant article doing the rounds about the apparent vendetta against SA in not awarding us a long overdue Rugby World Cup venue status again. Allegedly the Aussies edged us out of the running, but SA is a hard sell when it comes to guaranteeing safety of visitors. And locals for that matter.
So SARS have published their plan for improving their collection of taxes from us. Other commentators have noted that they do seem to be pursuing the rats and mice for nickels and dimes when to the casual observer the health of the super luxury car and home markets seems astonishing. Wasn’t there an attempt years ago to limit cash payments for these sorts of assets? Top of SARS’s check list for the plan is to employ Artificial Intelligence (AI) to detect non-compliance among taxpayers. Well, excellent. But one sort of thinks that ordinary intelligence might have more success. You know the old proverb about “set a crook to catch a crook”?
The Giro d’Italia marathon bike race has begun, and early stages have been through Sicily and the adjacent tip of the mainland. The TV coverage of these events provide a wonderful glimpse of the geography of the country, but the relatively unkempt dilapidated appearance of the urban areas shown so far, is quite a surprise. The landscapes are magnificent however. Even routing the peloton near the summit of an active volcano was interesting if bleak. The Miami venue for last weekend’s Formula 1 GP was rather the opposite. Lavish opulence everywhere.
Wokism is going to swallow the world. The word processor program that I use to compile Tidemarks has taken to highlighting words that it feels may offend some readers. Gosh I hope so. A few weeks ago, an edition of Tidemarks triggered replies from a number of readers who requested I remove them from the mailing list and one who wished to cancel their subscription. They must have been offended. Naturally I complied. I shall miss that sub though!
James Greener
Friday the Thirteenth May 2022.
