The dollar prices of a wide range of commodities are showing steady and, in some cases, alarming rises. The precious metals not so much. Obviously, folks are demanding stuff one can eat and use. A frequent news theme is the shortage of materials and goods causing delays and backlogs in manufacturing and retail. Ruthless stock and cost controls so eagerly and confidently adopted in these industries have proved to be very vulnerable to government polices of lockdown and work from home. Ironically neither of these had as much effect on the infection rates as they had on national capacity and productivity. Just about the only people financially unaffected were the political leaders and their armies of bureaucrats who never missed a payday or stopped issuing instructions of increasing irrationality and outright foolishness.
This week our government began the process of repealing the State of Disaster declared when the virus first appeared more than two years ago. Even this is not going well. The state is reluctant to acknowledge that we all have had two years of learning and experience of living with this infection. We are onto the fact that management of this pandemic long ago slipped out of the hands of knowledgeable and experienced doctors disinclined to panic and was hijacked by just about everyone else. Naturally the Ministry of Health is the chief interferer and we have already found one Minister with his hands in the honey pot, so their intentions are suspect.
Unsurprisingly the talking heads have almost all seized on “Climate Change” as the cause of the recent terrifying and calamitous floods here in KZN. The main reason for using for this vague and unsubstantiated culprit is that it provides a useful distraction from the likelihood that most of the mayhem was a result of unskilled and corrupt planning and maintenance activities. No amount of banning fossil fuels and getting us to drive all-electric cars would have mitigated this natural disaster of unusual rainfall inundating a tragically inadequate and unprepared infrastructure. Engineering rules of thumb such as 100 year storms are in constant need of revision. A simple support for this fact is the fascinating picture pairs showing identical stretches of coastline many years apart. There is scant if not zero change to the sea level! Perhaps one day it will be acknowledged that there is not much hard science to back up the claim that carbon dioxide is as dangerous as many insist.
As a nation we really need to stop wasting public money on the long dead albatross that is SAA. Several thousand gigabytes of incredibly infuriating and pointless commentary clogged up the internet recently with discussion of the 2018 results for this alleged airline. The Auditor-General claims to have ploughed through these financial statement (which apparently are still incomplete and surely always will be as the staff responsible for preparing them must be long gone). Results for later years are still in preparation which merely points up to the chimera of an imminent sale of the rotting body to an “independent private enterprise”. No true private money would buy a business with so many still to be discovered cupboard-bound skeletons lurking. Oddly, many who have requested sight of the alleged sale agreement have been ignored.
Another gobbet of legislation comes with the amazing name of “Older Persons Amendment Bill”. What?! But it’s not that sinister. It merely sets men to the same pensionable age (60) as women. And probably in so doing exacerbates an actuarial liability arising from an aging population with insufficient retirement resources.
I’ve not yet seen the F1 street circuit in Miami but frankly after with Monaco on the Grand Prix calendar no other venue can be worth it. Its odd that a similar observation can be made in comparing the country sides through which the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia (starting today) pass. France wins every time for the armchair tourist.
James Greener
Friday 6th May 2022
