(no subject)
And now for my next trick...
I'm going to mystically appear back in the UK. Cannot wait to see everyone again, am currently sitting in my flat having spent most of the day online doing christmas shopping. I love Christmas. I'm looking forward to short days, long nights, fires, family, friends and drinking lots.
Got one more week of nonsense to get through at work, then I'm done. Silly performance reviews all round, I've done one, have three to go. Bluergh, horrid honesty.
Now in other news, we are celebrating 50 years of the MPLA in Angola this week. You too can rob a country blind for longer than the average lifespan of your subjects using new and improved 'Dos Santos' strength kleptocracy.
Latest inspired gambit is to fly in major league rap stars for a big party, then give it a fig leaf of corporate legitimacy by mysteriously having it align with a phone company's 2 millionth customer. Stand forward and bow your heads in shame mssrs. MTV, Movicel, Sean Paul, Fat Joe et al.
To make this stellar event possible they decided to put a stand up next to the main street (called the Marginal). This is slightly tricky because there's not really space to do this properly. Never mind they thought, we'll borrow the road. So borrow they did a la Prince's Street. But there's not space put the generators in.
No problem use the other side of the road and run cabling. But that goes across the street. Hmmm, what to do. Have a long drag on a jazz woodbine and try this. Run the cabling across the road anyway. To protect the cables, put 6" high box steel around it. To secure same, drill holes in the main street and bolt it down. Allow cars to hit box joint without cover. Inspired work.
In other, they'd only do it here news. With a keen eye on the problems of getting Sean Paul a sufficiently mighty PA system long-term (the govt. here really sweats the big stuff), they've decided that the beach area isn't big enough. So, they've gone for a gulf style land reclamation scheme. They're going to dump a few billion tonnes of sand to get themselves another 4 lanes of traffic and a shopping centre. Estimated cost, slightly north of half a billion dollars. Estimated cost of a world class hospital, around $200M, estimated cost of a primary school around $500k tops. So, rather than have a thousand primary schools built, they're assembling a shopping mall using public money, generated with considerable difficulty (and non-renewably) by oil.
Of course this is partly as a result of the considerable pressure on real estate. After all Angola is four times the size of France, with a population around a quarter of the UK's. So you can see how they're short. Here's a radical alternative. Take $500M. Invest in a balanced portfolio of stocks around the world. Hedge the exposure to forex. Make around 8%, invest half in the fund you've just established, spend half on primary schools. It's not that hard to fathom you'd have thought.
Also of note is that miraculously the government appear to be encountering delays in their voter registration effort. That means no elections next year. Note these are the elections originally scheduled for 2004 and repeatedly delayed.
The opposition meanwhile appears to be taking kickbacks from all and sundry and currently are engaged in a serious effort to run a piss up in a brewery. To little or no avail at present. To be fair, I think intellectually, they're still trying to rediscover their identity. After all their previous leader (Savimbi) spent his last days trying to persuade people he could control the sun and had magical powers, leading him to be bulletproof. A thesis somewhat sadly put to scientific tests by his own men after one too many of these proclamations and another attempt to drag the country back to war. Allegedly. Either way, his juju was clearly not working one day in the bush and that was that for 2003.
For the record, one of my staff keeps salt and garlic on her desk, with a cross in it. This apparently wards off bad luck, which may go some way to explaining why Mr. S. felt this sort of shamanistic shindiggery was a seam worth mining in the first place. Voodoo my arse. What a bunch of bobbins.
This week we had the christmas party. Not my kettle of fish, really. Still had a decent dinner and cards night round mine the next day, together with a lot of wine. Splendid.
Meanwhile one of my economic analysts has a long commute to work, due to the roads. He seriously proposed flying the entire staff to work by helicopter as a solution. Then a speedboat as a fallback. I'm not joking and nor was he. He's been with us three years specialising in economic analysis.
He followed this blistering assault on common sense, with the information that we should be taking on insurance based on the view that if we're involved in a car accident we should instantly assume full economic liability for everyone involved and their families and that this might prove expensive. This was argued on the basis that insurance is cheaper to buy on average than the consequences of not having it. Since insurance companies make profits this is a view somewhat open to question one would have thought, though perhaps they simply have a large license to print money.
In short, the gribble is gribbly, the holidays are here, and I love amazon, so long as the bastards deliver.
I'm going to mystically appear back in the UK. Cannot wait to see everyone again, am currently sitting in my flat having spent most of the day online doing christmas shopping. I love Christmas. I'm looking forward to short days, long nights, fires, family, friends and drinking lots.
Got one more week of nonsense to get through at work, then I'm done. Silly performance reviews all round, I've done one, have three to go. Bluergh, horrid honesty.
Now in other news, we are celebrating 50 years of the MPLA in Angola this week. You too can rob a country blind for longer than the average lifespan of your subjects using new and improved 'Dos Santos' strength kleptocracy.
Latest inspired gambit is to fly in major league rap stars for a big party, then give it a fig leaf of corporate legitimacy by mysteriously having it align with a phone company's 2 millionth customer. Stand forward and bow your heads in shame mssrs. MTV, Movicel, Sean Paul, Fat Joe et al.
To make this stellar event possible they decided to put a stand up next to the main street (called the Marginal). This is slightly tricky because there's not really space to do this properly. Never mind they thought, we'll borrow the road. So borrow they did a la Prince's Street. But there's not space put the generators in.
No problem use the other side of the road and run cabling. But that goes across the street. Hmmm, what to do. Have a long drag on a jazz woodbine and try this. Run the cabling across the road anyway. To protect the cables, put 6" high box steel around it. To secure same, drill holes in the main street and bolt it down. Allow cars to hit box joint without cover. Inspired work.
In other, they'd only do it here news. With a keen eye on the problems of getting Sean Paul a sufficiently mighty PA system long-term (the govt. here really sweats the big stuff), they've decided that the beach area isn't big enough. So, they've gone for a gulf style land reclamation scheme. They're going to dump a few billion tonnes of sand to get themselves another 4 lanes of traffic and a shopping centre. Estimated cost, slightly north of half a billion dollars. Estimated cost of a world class hospital, around $200M, estimated cost of a primary school around $500k tops. So, rather than have a thousand primary schools built, they're assembling a shopping mall using public money, generated with considerable difficulty (and non-renewably) by oil.
Of course this is partly as a result of the considerable pressure on real estate. After all Angola is four times the size of France, with a population around a quarter of the UK's. So you can see how they're short. Here's a radical alternative. Take $500M. Invest in a balanced portfolio of stocks around the world. Hedge the exposure to forex. Make around 8%, invest half in the fund you've just established, spend half on primary schools. It's not that hard to fathom you'd have thought.
Also of note is that miraculously the government appear to be encountering delays in their voter registration effort. That means no elections next year. Note these are the elections originally scheduled for 2004 and repeatedly delayed.
The opposition meanwhile appears to be taking kickbacks from all and sundry and currently are engaged in a serious effort to run a piss up in a brewery. To little or no avail at present. To be fair, I think intellectually, they're still trying to rediscover their identity. After all their previous leader (Savimbi) spent his last days trying to persuade people he could control the sun and had magical powers, leading him to be bulletproof. A thesis somewhat sadly put to scientific tests by his own men after one too many of these proclamations and another attempt to drag the country back to war. Allegedly. Either way, his juju was clearly not working one day in the bush and that was that for 2003.
For the record, one of my staff keeps salt and garlic on her desk, with a cross in it. This apparently wards off bad luck, which may go some way to explaining why Mr. S. felt this sort of shamanistic shindiggery was a seam worth mining in the first place. Voodoo my arse. What a bunch of bobbins.
This week we had the christmas party. Not my kettle of fish, really. Still had a decent dinner and cards night round mine the next day, together with a lot of wine. Splendid.
Meanwhile one of my economic analysts has a long commute to work, due to the roads. He seriously proposed flying the entire staff to work by helicopter as a solution. Then a speedboat as a fallback. I'm not joking and nor was he. He's been with us three years specialising in economic analysis.
He followed this blistering assault on common sense, with the information that we should be taking on insurance based on the view that if we're involved in a car accident we should instantly assume full economic liability for everyone involved and their families and that this might prove expensive. This was argued on the basis that insurance is cheaper to buy on average than the consequences of not having it. Since insurance companies make profits this is a view somewhat open to question one would have thought, though perhaps they simply have a large license to print money.
In short, the gribble is gribbly, the holidays are here, and I love amazon, so long as the bastards deliver.