The horrible slaughter of human beings at play last week in Amman, Jordan once again highlights the presence of evil in our world.
Fanciful as it is to speculate that the CIA is brainwashing idiots into committing acts of horror, it is more probable that fanatics of many descriptions are hijacking various religions to fight a last ditch struggle against the secular forces of reason that have been in the ascendency for some time now.
This piece was written in rage after the murders of hundred of children playing in Bali some years ago.
Now i see that a woman, part of a married pair has condfessed to blowing up a room full of wedding guests. She is a failed bomb and a bomb cannot be expected to have any morality.
Lyndon Johnson was alleged to have spoken in a cavalier fashion about America's prospects in Vietnam. "We are killing ten of theirs to one of ours." he said,"So we must win, cause we got more people."
Alexander HAig said much the same thing in the great european civil war 1914-1918.
AT the moment the bombers are scoring twenty to thirty per hit so if we're not careful 'we' whoever 'we' are who are the presumed objective of all this terror may well lose.
Weblog 17/10/02
The Butchers of Bali
'What we obtain too cheaply we value too lightly'
I read these lines of Thomas Paine, American
Revolutionary, and secular pamphleteer
as I heard
The news on the Television
About the horror attack on happy
Young
Human
Beings
At play in Bali.
Once again the world of unreason
Has intersected with that
Of the rational.
Democracy and human ingenuity versus the
Nature of the human at its worst
This struggle between the forces of reason
And unreason, millennia old
Has persisted in force now for 500 years: is it finally
Showdown time.
How does one react to a barbaric act?
What could motivate a human being to
Deliberately plan and then execute
Such an horrendous crime
Against ordinary people.
What war are these people fighting
That makes it possible to demonise a room full of children
So completely that their destruction leaves them cold?
Is this the true face of evil
Acting in defence of some irrational good?
In this strange war between the
Secular forces of progress, the law,
The democratic process and the frequent flaw
Of reason
Against the insidious poison of
Unreason how does one define the
Line
Between good and evil
Other than to extend beyond
Both.
Is it the taking of life itself that is evil?
Should evil be fought with evil?
Should we argue that an eye deserves an eye?
Or would it be more certain to argue
That an eye deserves the entire body when
Those who preach and then practice bloody murder
Perpetrate such acts in defence of the indefensible.
If we gave this behaviour any other motivation than religion then we should call
Those people madmen
And we should incarcerate them in a place of safety
For both themselves and us, for they
Act on behalf of a conjecture
Raised to a fantasy.
If evil lies in ignorance then
How is one to judge
A creed that holds an unbeliever to be
Evil
And pursuit of their own creed
To be the only truth.
Is it then truth?
To live in blissful
Ignorance
Of the real nature of death and the illusion of the life
Ever after
Is this not substantiating one evil by recourse to another?
And is this not in conflict with the law?
At best it is deceptive advertising.
So what Now?
Firstly it is beyond obvious that we are engaged in a circumstance Mao
Tse Tung once defined as the
'War of the Flea.'
The scratch, scratch, scratch has already made its mark
Upon us
In the form of sagging, markets, declining
Productivity and terrorised citizens.
Airlines have collapsed and millions have had their lives
Disrupted, many terminally, by this scratch
Scratch
Scratch.
This 'War-' is being motivated and prompted by
Unreasoning fanatics who hate the world
As it is, or even as it could be, probably because liberated citizens have no need
Of fantastical nostrums to leaven the horror of their
Lives.
No these unreasoning fanatics seek nothing less
Than a return to
A more congenial form of Stone Age: where inequality
May be rationalised
Through invocation of some of other
Sacred message justifying the inequality of human beings.
For the Secularists of the world
The way forward is terrifyingly apparent.
We are under siege by people, who it seems believe in ghosts and goblins
And in their desperate search for
Simplicity
Seek a future more deeply rooted in the 8th century than in the 21st.
It is an essential ingredient
Of the democratic viewpoint that
Those strange human beings who are terrified of the
Dark and seek solace in strange antediluvian
Philosophies and pastimes are entitled to those beliefs and practices
Provided they remain
Private and personal.
When those beliefs transcend their correct place in moderating
Private behaviour then, as they say, the buck must stop.
Any system of belief that condones
The butchery of citizens
Whether in Bali, New York or the remotest villages of
Algeria or wherever else this pestilential
Terror has struck over the past decades of increasing horror,
Has to be evaluated in terms of
Its final objective, which is to enslave the mind
And shackle it to darkness.
This layman and secularist has to
Interpret that desired outcome of the Fundamentalist
(Of whatever creed)
Using the objective evidence
Presented by those places which have succumbed to the terror
Of religious oppression.
Away with this horror
Down with all the priests of darkness with their infernal cargo cults.
What priests and other brainwashed acolytes may choose to believe in the sanctity of their heads in private places
Is their right.
It is not their right
To demand that if the rest of us do not share their onanistic
Obsession that we must die.
This is both barbaric and absurd.
To put it more simply their position is the metaphysical equivalent of
Claiming that all those
Who will not drive, say, a Mercedes Benz
Should be put to death for failing to drive the 'true motorcar'
Or failing to achieve 'the true driving experience'.
We see this
As absurd. Why is it that the marketers of
Soul food should expect us to see their musings as being any different or
Subject to alternative rules just because
The product they sell
Is more intangible than
Life assurance or the sales of advertising space?
At best they sell a conjecture at worst they peddle
Lies.
Increasingly we citizens of a secular State
View people of such a fanatical disposition (favouring
The world of unreason)
As objects of pity: the lunatics of Bedlam, at best
Sad confused people who seek the certainty in ghost stories, ghost written
For them by countless nameless monks
Who gathered about them nostrums,
Like so much unsophisticated advertising fluff
And public relations hype.
That we should let them kill us
In their despair at our amusement
Is intolerable and may require that we set aside
Our indulgence in the
Interests of our own survival.
.NiK(2002)
God is a thought that makes cooked all that is straight, and
Makes turn whatever
Stands. How? Should time be gone and all that is
Impermanent a mere lie? -. Evil I call it and
Misanthropic all this teaching of the One and the Plenum
And the Unmoved and the Sated
And the Permanent. All the permanent --- that is only
A parable
And the poets lie too much.
Nietzsche
After Bond: a Haiku for Leigh Matthews: *
Sweet child lies here
plucked too early left
cold one winter's night.
.NiK[04]
Student and loved child of distraught parents: abducted at random from the car park of Bond University in Jozi, was ransomed and then murdered. 2004. R.I.P.
There is no greater calamity
Than lavish desires
There is no greater guilt
Than discontent
There is no greater disaster
Than greed.
Lao Tzu
The judge quoted these words when sentencing Donovan Moodley to life in prison for the abduction and murder of Leigh Mathews on the eve of her twenty first birthday. He pleaded guilty and took the secret of who had helped him [if anyone] to prison.
Monday, November 14, 2005
Friday, November 11, 2005
Why talk of interest rate hikes is premature
Weblog 6 November 05
Jozi South Central Zone One
Why talk of interest rate hikes is premature
At the moment all Thabo's good wo/ men
And all Thabo's horses want to knock Humpty Dumpty
Off the wall again with a battering ram of rising interest rates.
And we all know about the problem of putting things back together again.
It is this Blog's view that a rise in interest rates should be postponed for as long as
reasonably possible towards the end of next year. There are in my view various
reasons why this would be sensible.
Firstly I think it is a bad move from the point of view of the BEE programme.
Secondly our interest rates are still far too high for us and should in fact come down even further than they already are. They are our interest rates not some other country's. Thirdly it is my opinion that we have a change of investor in the offshore foreign investor category and this may well indicate a shift in investor behaviour significant enough to test by squeezing the margins traditionally expected by offshore investors.
But firstly to the BEE programme [for offshore readers: South Africa has embarked on a programme to remedy the past evils of the ancient Apartheid system by introducing a counter ' Togetherheit' programme which the government of SA calls BEE or Black Economic Empowerment. It's rapidly becoming more Byzantine than the Apartheid wankers dreamt of in their philosophy [sorry willy]]
This Togetherheit programme is turning into a quagmire of bureaucratic black tape as increasingly the beady eye of the State is brought to bear on every facet of commercial life; with the intention that no one should even contemplate any commercially oriented action that does not intimately involve a black person. Even black people have to be intimately involved with black people.
One of the emerging downsides of the programme is that it creates discriminatory vested interest structures between competing black individuals. In having to make a decision to employ or share ownership with a statutory black person the most logical and sensible approach [for a non black whatever that is or any other person] has to be to choose someone who is connected to the system in some way: someone that is, who is 'greased'. Logically therefore when choosing between a competent qualified and skilled black person and a buffoon who represents the Party's interests or who has a cousin on the tender board: but both of whom can be considered as 'having grease', then centuries of history and present anecdotal evidence suggests that the latter gets the job. Grease always trumps merit.
Therefore notwithstanding that Black people make up 91 % of the population only a few thousand have Grease. Because of this we have an explosion in upper end remuneration packages as the handful of well-connected dudes trot around factoring their prices higher and higher. This pursuit of those who have 'grease' pushes up the price of greasemongers at the broad expense of those less connected giving rise to the currently accelerating wage gap between the well-connected rich and the generally unwashed poor. It also facilitates a skills exodus of alarming proportions [ if anyone could get their noses out of the trough long enough to care], as those unconnected, greaseless black citizens seek a level playing field elsewhere where grease counts for less than know how or, less fashionably, 'merit'.
What this means at a practical level is that huge chunks of the economy are increasingly under the guidance of persons whose prime business skill and acumen is suspect, since grease power is not necessarily the same as business savvy [although obviously there are instances when it is and we will later discover some ratios].
This means that a rising tide of interest rates will do the 'market's' traditional work of weeding out the weak and the inept, the corrupt and the useless with perhaps rather more brutality than would be politically convenient, given that the top of the next rates cycle could be somewhere in the run up to the next general election.
Because so many appointees may be suspect under stress, it is better that the present crop of BEE winners should have a bit more practice on the smooth fields of the longest period of economic expansion in our history, before they have to start riding bareback on a rocky slope. The real issue here is the size of the debt burden, in the debt for equity swap that has characterised the past few years and which is unknown, or like almost all statistics in our fair land something of a thumb suck.
Currently this debt is being liquidated by the healthy profit flows of the past two years. However it could be that five fat years are needed to push most of these deals into positive debt limited cash flows.
As we all know monetary economics discriminates against those who use borrowed capital to develop their businesses. Why should we whack our newly emerging entrepreneur base with the heavy reality of monetary theory before it's absolutely necessary.
In fact what the logic of BEE demands is that the interest rate regime be lowered even further so as to consolidate debt into more manageable packages while building profits to offset debt. To throw an entire emerging class to the wolves as they are just beginning to gain their spurs would add cruelty to the growing resentment the ruling party is facing amongst discontented mobs in a rising number of backwater places.
Of course the Reserve Bank would argue, plausibly, that we are hostage to foreign trends and that we must start to raise our interest rates or get out of 'sync'.
One of these 'trends', is that we have for decades now had a spread of three, four or even five percentage points between our rate and that of our trading partners, to encourage investment, by party's in those places, in our economy, which by default therefore has to be considered a risky environment.
In other words America's present rate is 4% [after being raised twelve times in the past year or so] versus our 7% historically 'low' rates, giving a 'low' spread of three percentage points. When you consider that in many [developed world] regions a quarter of one eighth of one percent may be a margin sufficient to attract one of the billion dollar funds investors who proliferate in the first world you can imagine that a three point spread is munificent, and even seen as risky.
Yet we need it. Most of our foreign investment is hot investment. This doesn't mean it is illegal although some probably is FICA notwithstanding. It means it's the money a fund manger is looking to use to balance his* quarterly earnings growth profile and meet his* targets. Stick some money in the SA market for a few months and pull some guaranteed percentages. [* Apparently fund managers are almost always 'he']
Now you may argue why should we citizens have to pay higher rates of interest so's some offshore punter can get a fatter guarantee than he could at home. Well firstly it works and brings in money that wasn't coming anyway. Secondly you're right why should we?
Mostly we have to do it because the laws we are cobbling together to facilitate our new "Togetherheit" policy are complicated enough for we to live here to figure out, but mostly, as far as foreigners are concerned, it's like a game of Marabaraba. Most canny investors know that the more complicated the rules the greater the risks of business. In all probability one attracts a class of investor who enjoys the Byzantine because it affords strategic hiding places.
This historical spread between 'our' rates and 'their' rates suits offshore investors at our expense. Achieving an official 6% growth rate [I'm ignoring unconfirmed reports with which I agree that the true rate of growth is probably already 6%] requires an acceleration of activity. Rising patterns of interest rates have as their rationale the curbing off growth to restrain cost and wage inflationary pressures. Therefore raising interest rates in the near future will work counter to our expressed desire.
This raises the third issue. Given that risks of business under conditions of bureaucratic excess is not going to disappear how can I suggest lowering rates when the rest of the world is raising theirs.
It is because of the canny class of investor I've just mentioned. I believe we have a different type of investor today than we had in the past when the four-point spread was critical.
To illustrate this I ask you to cast your mind back a few weeks to a most eventful week when the murder of a prominent mining financial personality drove the headlines while page three carried the story of the governments expropriation moves on a clutch of farms. A funny thing happened on our way to the interest rate argument.
The exchange rate never moved. More recently the Gov't has announced it intends to expropriate another sixty farms [and, I predict, about a thousand by end 2006]. Again the rate never flickered. Five years ago a similar event sent the rand crashing to thirteen to the dollar and financial mayhem ensued.
Now, notwithstanding considerable urban and rural unrest, expropriations, high profile crimes and other things that would normally cause investor jitters we have not a murmur. Interest rates have remained what Michael Coulson of the financial press calls 'range bound'. [okay it is nudging above the top of the range at the moment but this is hardly dramatic.]
My suspicion is that we currently have a different breed of investor to what we have had in the past. They certainly seem tougher and with a much lower 'whine' factor. They may possibly even be those to whom our issues are small beer, and are as such demonstrably people who may be here for more than a train ride.
In fact I would speculate that many are hovering on the sidelines to swoop in and buy up the shareholdings of BEE empowerment entities when those groupings find it expedient to 'sell off' when the debt service burden becomes unbearable, as it inevitably must do when interest rates are fifty percent higher than they are today and the monthly instalment on the family Merc jumps from ten grand to fifteen, simultaneously with the relevant revenue stream shrinking by twenty percent. It's a well-worn story.
As a side issue on this I am also speculating that those many business entities that have structured their BEE ownership equity with forced 'buy back' provisions: i.e.: a 'You have to sell your shares back to us if you want to sell them' clause will be challenged in court and the court will rule against them, quite possibly on onerous restraint of trade grounds. In fact it is possible that too early a resort to hiking interest rates may well see us emerge from the next round of the 'grand old' business cycle with a radically transformed ownership structure in the national economy-albeit not necessarily the transformation we envisaged.
So to nurture the BEE programme and sustain the present 'good times' we should take account of a changed behaviour response pattern on the part of our current crop of offshore and other sources of FDI's [foreign direct investments] and accept that all this gives us the potential to track at least a half to one percentage point closer to the American rate.
We have to act with the courage of our convictions here. Since we have chosen to go this complex BEE route we must hold true to our conviction. We have demonstrated to some investors at least that ours is a stable financial environment, albeit with some curious quirks, and an expanding market maintains this stability. As such, ours is appears to be a reliable investment destination end in itself. Holding ourselves steady in the present interest regime place, or even lower, for the next twelve months would extend our present buoyant market conditions for at least another twelve months, and that may then piggy back us into the era of 'Grand Spending' the Government intends to initiate when they get around to it-with Gautrain and other tales. Only then should we be thinking of tightening the taps a tad.
Loves ya all
NiK
Jozi South Central Zone One
Why talk of interest rate hikes is premature
At the moment all Thabo's good wo/ men
And all Thabo's horses want to knock Humpty Dumpty
Off the wall again with a battering ram of rising interest rates.
And we all know about the problem of putting things back together again.
It is this Blog's view that a rise in interest rates should be postponed for as long as
reasonably possible towards the end of next year. There are in my view various
reasons why this would be sensible.
Firstly I think it is a bad move from the point of view of the BEE programme.
Secondly our interest rates are still far too high for us and should in fact come down even further than they already are. They are our interest rates not some other country's. Thirdly it is my opinion that we have a change of investor in the offshore foreign investor category and this may well indicate a shift in investor behaviour significant enough to test by squeezing the margins traditionally expected by offshore investors.
But firstly to the BEE programme [for offshore readers: South Africa has embarked on a programme to remedy the past evils of the ancient Apartheid system by introducing a counter ' Togetherheit' programme which the government of SA calls BEE or Black Economic Empowerment. It's rapidly becoming more Byzantine than the Apartheid wankers dreamt of in their philosophy [sorry willy]]
This Togetherheit programme is turning into a quagmire of bureaucratic black tape as increasingly the beady eye of the State is brought to bear on every facet of commercial life; with the intention that no one should even contemplate any commercially oriented action that does not intimately involve a black person. Even black people have to be intimately involved with black people.
One of the emerging downsides of the programme is that it creates discriminatory vested interest structures between competing black individuals. In having to make a decision to employ or share ownership with a statutory black person the most logical and sensible approach [for a non black whatever that is or any other person] has to be to choose someone who is connected to the system in some way: someone that is, who is 'greased'. Logically therefore when choosing between a competent qualified and skilled black person and a buffoon who represents the Party's interests or who has a cousin on the tender board: but both of whom can be considered as 'having grease', then centuries of history and present anecdotal evidence suggests that the latter gets the job. Grease always trumps merit.
Therefore notwithstanding that Black people make up 91 % of the population only a few thousand have Grease. Because of this we have an explosion in upper end remuneration packages as the handful of well-connected dudes trot around factoring their prices higher and higher. This pursuit of those who have 'grease' pushes up the price of greasemongers at the broad expense of those less connected giving rise to the currently accelerating wage gap between the well-connected rich and the generally unwashed poor. It also facilitates a skills exodus of alarming proportions [ if anyone could get their noses out of the trough long enough to care], as those unconnected, greaseless black citizens seek a level playing field elsewhere where grease counts for less than know how or, less fashionably, 'merit'.
What this means at a practical level is that huge chunks of the economy are increasingly under the guidance of persons whose prime business skill and acumen is suspect, since grease power is not necessarily the same as business savvy [although obviously there are instances when it is and we will later discover some ratios].
This means that a rising tide of interest rates will do the 'market's' traditional work of weeding out the weak and the inept, the corrupt and the useless with perhaps rather more brutality than would be politically convenient, given that the top of the next rates cycle could be somewhere in the run up to the next general election.
Because so many appointees may be suspect under stress, it is better that the present crop of BEE winners should have a bit more practice on the smooth fields of the longest period of economic expansion in our history, before they have to start riding bareback on a rocky slope. The real issue here is the size of the debt burden, in the debt for equity swap that has characterised the past few years and which is unknown, or like almost all statistics in our fair land something of a thumb suck.
Currently this debt is being liquidated by the healthy profit flows of the past two years. However it could be that five fat years are needed to push most of these deals into positive debt limited cash flows.
As we all know monetary economics discriminates against those who use borrowed capital to develop their businesses. Why should we whack our newly emerging entrepreneur base with the heavy reality of monetary theory before it's absolutely necessary.
In fact what the logic of BEE demands is that the interest rate regime be lowered even further so as to consolidate debt into more manageable packages while building profits to offset debt. To throw an entire emerging class to the wolves as they are just beginning to gain their spurs would add cruelty to the growing resentment the ruling party is facing amongst discontented mobs in a rising number of backwater places.
Of course the Reserve Bank would argue, plausibly, that we are hostage to foreign trends and that we must start to raise our interest rates or get out of 'sync'.
One of these 'trends', is that we have for decades now had a spread of three, four or even five percentage points between our rate and that of our trading partners, to encourage investment, by party's in those places, in our economy, which by default therefore has to be considered a risky environment.
In other words America's present rate is 4% [after being raised twelve times in the past year or so] versus our 7% historically 'low' rates, giving a 'low' spread of three percentage points. When you consider that in many [developed world] regions a quarter of one eighth of one percent may be a margin sufficient to attract one of the billion dollar funds investors who proliferate in the first world you can imagine that a three point spread is munificent, and even seen as risky.
Yet we need it. Most of our foreign investment is hot investment. This doesn't mean it is illegal although some probably is FICA notwithstanding. It means it's the money a fund manger is looking to use to balance his* quarterly earnings growth profile and meet his* targets. Stick some money in the SA market for a few months and pull some guaranteed percentages. [* Apparently fund managers are almost always 'he']
Now you may argue why should we citizens have to pay higher rates of interest so's some offshore punter can get a fatter guarantee than he could at home. Well firstly it works and brings in money that wasn't coming anyway. Secondly you're right why should we?
Mostly we have to do it because the laws we are cobbling together to facilitate our new "Togetherheit" policy are complicated enough for we to live here to figure out, but mostly, as far as foreigners are concerned, it's like a game of Marabaraba. Most canny investors know that the more complicated the rules the greater the risks of business. In all probability one attracts a class of investor who enjoys the Byzantine because it affords strategic hiding places.
This historical spread between 'our' rates and 'their' rates suits offshore investors at our expense. Achieving an official 6% growth rate [I'm ignoring unconfirmed reports with which I agree that the true rate of growth is probably already 6%] requires an acceleration of activity. Rising patterns of interest rates have as their rationale the curbing off growth to restrain cost and wage inflationary pressures. Therefore raising interest rates in the near future will work counter to our expressed desire.
This raises the third issue. Given that risks of business under conditions of bureaucratic excess is not going to disappear how can I suggest lowering rates when the rest of the world is raising theirs.
It is because of the canny class of investor I've just mentioned. I believe we have a different type of investor today than we had in the past when the four-point spread was critical.
To illustrate this I ask you to cast your mind back a few weeks to a most eventful week when the murder of a prominent mining financial personality drove the headlines while page three carried the story of the governments expropriation moves on a clutch of farms. A funny thing happened on our way to the interest rate argument.
The exchange rate never moved. More recently the Gov't has announced it intends to expropriate another sixty farms [and, I predict, about a thousand by end 2006]. Again the rate never flickered. Five years ago a similar event sent the rand crashing to thirteen to the dollar and financial mayhem ensued.
Now, notwithstanding considerable urban and rural unrest, expropriations, high profile crimes and other things that would normally cause investor jitters we have not a murmur. Interest rates have remained what Michael Coulson of the financial press calls 'range bound'. [okay it is nudging above the top of the range at the moment but this is hardly dramatic.]
My suspicion is that we currently have a different breed of investor to what we have had in the past. They certainly seem tougher and with a much lower 'whine' factor. They may possibly even be those to whom our issues are small beer, and are as such demonstrably people who may be here for more than a train ride.
In fact I would speculate that many are hovering on the sidelines to swoop in and buy up the shareholdings of BEE empowerment entities when those groupings find it expedient to 'sell off' when the debt service burden becomes unbearable, as it inevitably must do when interest rates are fifty percent higher than they are today and the monthly instalment on the family Merc jumps from ten grand to fifteen, simultaneously with the relevant revenue stream shrinking by twenty percent. It's a well-worn story.
As a side issue on this I am also speculating that those many business entities that have structured their BEE ownership equity with forced 'buy back' provisions: i.e.: a 'You have to sell your shares back to us if you want to sell them' clause will be challenged in court and the court will rule against them, quite possibly on onerous restraint of trade grounds. In fact it is possible that too early a resort to hiking interest rates may well see us emerge from the next round of the 'grand old' business cycle with a radically transformed ownership structure in the national economy-albeit not necessarily the transformation we envisaged.
So to nurture the BEE programme and sustain the present 'good times' we should take account of a changed behaviour response pattern on the part of our current crop of offshore and other sources of FDI's [foreign direct investments] and accept that all this gives us the potential to track at least a half to one percentage point closer to the American rate.
We have to act with the courage of our convictions here. Since we have chosen to go this complex BEE route we must hold true to our conviction. We have demonstrated to some investors at least that ours is a stable financial environment, albeit with some curious quirks, and an expanding market maintains this stability. As such, ours is appears to be a reliable investment destination end in itself. Holding ourselves steady in the present interest regime place, or even lower, for the next twelve months would extend our present buoyant market conditions for at least another twelve months, and that may then piggy back us into the era of 'Grand Spending' the Government intends to initiate when they get around to it-with Gautrain and other tales. Only then should we be thinking of tightening the taps a tad.
Loves ya all
NiK
Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Scrap the Gautrain
Scrap the Gautrain
It is time to seriously question the wisdom of building the Gautrain.
According to a recent report on the Voyo Mbuli programme radio South Africa comes bottom of the list in the fields of Maths and science. No where is this more apparent than in the current rising tide of madness over the Gautrain.
Are we mathematical illiterates? To judge by the way gambling has taken off over the past decade we have to assume we are but for certainty let us consider three numbers.
R20 Billion Rand-ie: R20,000,000,000.00 current estimate of the ballooning cost
of the Gautrain. It may be comfortably assumed that this will not be the final figure.
102,000 the number of citizens and tourists expected to use the elitist instrument each day.
R40.00 the present proposed ticket price inclusive of parking and transport to and from destination for traveller at 'other end'[Business Day]
We'll add one more number: the number of days in the year when 102,000 people might most probably use Gautrain. 365-104 [weekends: annually] public holidays and long weekends 15 = 261
Ignore for the moment the fact that Gauteng is like a graveyard from December 15 to January 15 each year when most people leave town to crowd out the coast and the place becomes sheer pleasure.
If we multiply 102,000 by R40.00 and then again that figure by 261 the anticipated revenue from the annual sales of Gautrain rides is marginally over one billion rand, equivalent to the interest on the 20 billion capital in a country with 5 % interest rates.
If we do a Mrs Thatcher here and put these figures into groceries language would you consider spending R20.00 to earn one Rand a sensible and feasible proposition-?
The fact that we are even debating this is testimony to our position at the bottom of the world's mathematical literacy tables -Hello.
We undoubtedly have to solve the problem of congested roadways but this is increasingly not the solution. It was always dubious that it was feasible it is now certain.
How can a country in the developing emerging category of existence even contemplate such a catastrophic concept-The entire province is jammed up daily and we anticipate spending five times our annual national transport budget on a rich kids toy-so as some politicians can avoid the discomfort of travelling by road. Get creative use the road reserves between the highway lanes-this figure of spending R20.00 to earn R1.00 is a sure path to ruination. Frankly the revenue does not even cover the interest on the capital outlay [but then we are a high interest country]
And while we are on the issue of mathematical illiteracy how come the price of this project jumps 400 % over a five year period when global inflation is allegedly around 2% and our targeted inflation rate has been under 6% for the whole time.
Either the first round was a thumb suck or we [the public and politicians] have been the victims of a classic 'Bait and switch' marketing strategy by those who sell trains. To facilitate their sale we had hype that this whole thing would be built for the World Cup in 2010. They are now selling the idea that it wont, after probably inflating the original cost to allow for a rack of contingencies to achieve the 2010 deadline.[which could be the real hidden reason for the escalation...the organisers are costing in the importation of chinese Indian or other heavy experience construction crews as contingencies.]
It is possible that we are witnessing the most dishonest sales pitch ever presented to any citizens of this city in which bent deals have always proliferated.
Assuming Parliament is of the people and for the people it is hard to see why the people should have to suffer this disaster which is most unlikely to benefit all of the people. They must reject this plan. We need a better and cheaper one.In fact what else could we do with 20 billion [bearing in mind that we haven't yet started paying for the guns and planes and ships and things yet].
NiK
It is time to seriously question the wisdom of building the Gautrain.
According to a recent report on the Voyo Mbuli programme radio South Africa comes bottom of the list in the fields of Maths and science. No where is this more apparent than in the current rising tide of madness over the Gautrain.
Are we mathematical illiterates? To judge by the way gambling has taken off over the past decade we have to assume we are but for certainty let us consider three numbers.
R20 Billion Rand-ie: R20,000,000,000.00 current estimate of the ballooning cost
of the Gautrain. It may be comfortably assumed that this will not be the final figure.
102,000 the number of citizens and tourists expected to use the elitist instrument each day.
R40.00 the present proposed ticket price inclusive of parking and transport to and from destination for traveller at 'other end'[Business Day]
We'll add one more number: the number of days in the year when 102,000 people might most probably use Gautrain. 365-104 [weekends: annually] public holidays and long weekends 15 = 261
Ignore for the moment the fact that Gauteng is like a graveyard from December 15 to January 15 each year when most people leave town to crowd out the coast and the place becomes sheer pleasure.
If we multiply 102,000 by R40.00 and then again that figure by 261 the anticipated revenue from the annual sales of Gautrain rides is marginally over one billion rand, equivalent to the interest on the 20 billion capital in a country with 5 % interest rates.
If we do a Mrs Thatcher here and put these figures into groceries language would you consider spending R20.00 to earn one Rand a sensible and feasible proposition-?
The fact that we are even debating this is testimony to our position at the bottom of the world's mathematical literacy tables -Hello.
We undoubtedly have to solve the problem of congested roadways but this is increasingly not the solution. It was always dubious that it was feasible it is now certain.
How can a country in the developing emerging category of existence even contemplate such a catastrophic concept-The entire province is jammed up daily and we anticipate spending five times our annual national transport budget on a rich kids toy-so as some politicians can avoid the discomfort of travelling by road. Get creative use the road reserves between the highway lanes-this figure of spending R20.00 to earn R1.00 is a sure path to ruination. Frankly the revenue does not even cover the interest on the capital outlay [but then we are a high interest country]
And while we are on the issue of mathematical illiteracy how come the price of this project jumps 400 % over a five year period when global inflation is allegedly around 2% and our targeted inflation rate has been under 6% for the whole time.
Either the first round was a thumb suck or we [the public and politicians] have been the victims of a classic 'Bait and switch' marketing strategy by those who sell trains. To facilitate their sale we had hype that this whole thing would be built for the World Cup in 2010. They are now selling the idea that it wont, after probably inflating the original cost to allow for a rack of contingencies to achieve the 2010 deadline.[which could be the real hidden reason for the escalation...the organisers are costing in the importation of chinese Indian or other heavy experience construction crews as contingencies.]
It is possible that we are witnessing the most dishonest sales pitch ever presented to any citizens of this city in which bent deals have always proliferated.
Assuming Parliament is of the people and for the people it is hard to see why the people should have to suffer this disaster which is most unlikely to benefit all of the people. They must reject this plan. We need a better and cheaper one.In fact what else could we do with 20 billion [bearing in mind that we haven't yet started paying for the guns and planes and ships and things yet].
NiK
Monday, November 7, 2005
Goodbye childhood hello bureaucracy
In the new world of Outcomes Based Education, which is being foisted onto all schoolgoing children whether, they like it or not childhood ends with the beginning of schooldays: it ends for certain now with the introduction of the new Grade ten to twelve phase of the new education curriculum programme next year.
Along the way six out of ten peers will vanish from the mill. They will be as the wind.
With OBE the Child has to produce 'outcomes'- a general stream of them culminating in the new curriculum grades ten to twelve. They seem to be developing into robotically controlled 'learners' producing wads of documentation daily to prove they have attained outcomesn without which they have no future and once attained can either remain on the paper mill for a few more years or collapse exhausted onto the sidelines.
Last week I spoke to a group of twelfth grade 'learners' at a dinner. I was their guest. I asked them about their workload for the so-called Matric exam that they are currently writing. After some consultation and discussion between them they said That aside from having to ingest learn and remember all the information covering their range of subject choices and the usual homework associated with it all they had in addition to complete about 108 items of work done for purposes of so-called "Portfolio Assessment"[ aka CASS or Continuous assessment].
The 'Portfolio' contains a battery of tasks that have been completed assessed and filed as evidence of work done. In theory a sensible idea, in practice it is a fair whack of work to get through in about two hundred schooldays. It certainly means the end of childhood is now nigh for all those entering Grade ten in 2006.
According to current forecasts those entering Grade ten will have to adhere to a 'lesser' version of the current Grade Twelve programme-whereby the kids produced 108 pieces of completed work in one school year. Now of course there are seven prescribed subjects for the 'new' National Senior Certificate [recently renamed from the proposed FET certificate which fell into disrepute once enough people understood its significance.]
So once this engine gets hot these grade tens will be producing work almost by rote, ironically. As one of my dinner hosts observed 'School interferes with my inner child.' Another said less charitably, 'another day another project let 'em roll, knock 'em down, move right on don't think about them once they're gone.' She shrugged her shoulders-I feel like I've been pressure-cooked her words accompanied with a wry smile.
It's a pressure cooker that discriminates against poor and under-resourced kids and the casualty rate is immense. One could speculate that many of the new wave of 'Barricadeers' manning the offensives in rural town after town currently, could well be from this new lost generation, which frankly will be repeated time after time because this new system of education which offered so much promise is turning into a bureaucratic production line manufacturing system that has incorporated the child into the process with its entire focus on production output. This system somehow becomes.."child in...paper out". The old discredited system paid much stock on the production of a rounded person with focus on the human resource concerned. The new system is simply a bean counting exercise.
The new system exists as an accounting monument. The 'Classroom learning mediator' presents a series of learning skills exercises to the 'learner' who produces a pile of paper as proof which goes into his file and is later checked by the government who now pore over all the files of work done in every school in every district [perhaps to]making sure that only approved information is contained within the pages. The pressure to perform so great that no deviance can occur never mind reach a toleration point.
In their wildest imagination the architects of the former discredited system never conceptualised such finely tuned control. One hundred and eight completed projects ranging, according to my hosts, from two or three page efforts to a few pieces in excess of 6000 words. In less than one year while hanging out thirty or forty to a class! What are we trying to do here? It is small wonder the minister has recently referred to a pending crisis in the profession with more teachers opting out than are opting in.
The teachers I've spoken to tell me they don't know what the point is of all this outpouring of stuff. They have no time in their schedules to teach anything they are so busy checking that the children have discovered for themselves the pristine principles that were once the arcane territory of 'he who knows'- that they can't remember if they know anything. They tell me they spend their entire time assessing now instead of teaching and this is because most don't realise that teaching is no longer their job they are simply bureaucratic assessors
They are not supposed to be called teachers anymore by the way broadly because they aren't supposed to teach anything. Teachers are now called "Learning outcomes Mediators". The more you think about it the more you realise it is a subtly different job. In many ways it is a more creative job and certainly could be a more exciting one if anyone had time or energy to notice.
The teachers with whom I have discussed this all tell me that their administrative load has trebled or even quadrupled. I have spoken to some five hundred teachers over the past couple of years and this theme is constant. Many are experiencing family stress as assessments steal ever more consistently into private time. A number have resigned. Most tell me they see little point in their jobs anymore especially those who are older and feel they have been turned into highly trained childminders functioning on robot control.
At the present rate within the decade the State will run out of teachers and schools will employ minders to control internet access so's kids can calculate their outcomes on the web and truly take control of their own learning, becoming liberated at last from 'teachers'. Will this work? We'll find out.
Meanwhile children experience personal stress as ever more assessments creep into childhood and turn their voyage of discovery into a tedious mind numbing exercise in filing, that huge numbers have simply abandoned. It is hard to conceive of a system more brutalising, more guaranteed to despair: more insane, which is odd given that it was supposed to do the exact opposite.
What is even more insane is that the Teacher unions have bought into a system that demands more hours than are allowed for in the Basic Conditions of Employment Act [which doesn't apply to teachers] demands vastly more work for less pay, when they should be demanding that this system inherently requires them to be more knowledgeable and more effective organisers and that therefore they should be paid three times what they are now and since this wont happen we'll have far fewer next time round and the worst of them will be promoted upwards into the bureaucracy where they can pretend to read some of the billions of pages of stuff that will be produced annually for evermore.
Billions! Yeah think about it 500,000 matriculants this year have produced 50,000,000 items of "portfolio" material amounting to about one billion pages of things of uimportance to the bureaucracy.
Multiply by three for grades ten eleven twelve and we thought the cops were having issues trying to process a million gun licences.
Why are we turning our country into a bureaucratic mindfuck worthy of ten Kafkas?
NiK
Along the way six out of ten peers will vanish from the mill. They will be as the wind.
With OBE the Child has to produce 'outcomes'- a general stream of them culminating in the new curriculum grades ten to twelve. They seem to be developing into robotically controlled 'learners' producing wads of documentation daily to prove they have attained outcomesn without which they have no future and once attained can either remain on the paper mill for a few more years or collapse exhausted onto the sidelines.
Last week I spoke to a group of twelfth grade 'learners' at a dinner. I was their guest. I asked them about their workload for the so-called Matric exam that they are currently writing. After some consultation and discussion between them they said That aside from having to ingest learn and remember all the information covering their range of subject choices and the usual homework associated with it all they had in addition to complete about 108 items of work done for purposes of so-called "Portfolio Assessment"[ aka CASS or Continuous assessment].
The 'Portfolio' contains a battery of tasks that have been completed assessed and filed as evidence of work done. In theory a sensible idea, in practice it is a fair whack of work to get through in about two hundred schooldays. It certainly means the end of childhood is now nigh for all those entering Grade ten in 2006.
According to current forecasts those entering Grade ten will have to adhere to a 'lesser' version of the current Grade Twelve programme-whereby the kids produced 108 pieces of completed work in one school year. Now of course there are seven prescribed subjects for the 'new' National Senior Certificate [recently renamed from the proposed FET certificate which fell into disrepute once enough people understood its significance.]
So once this engine gets hot these grade tens will be producing work almost by rote, ironically. As one of my dinner hosts observed 'School interferes with my inner child.' Another said less charitably, 'another day another project let 'em roll, knock 'em down, move right on don't think about them once they're gone.' She shrugged her shoulders-I feel like I've been pressure-cooked her words accompanied with a wry smile.
It's a pressure cooker that discriminates against poor and under-resourced kids and the casualty rate is immense. One could speculate that many of the new wave of 'Barricadeers' manning the offensives in rural town after town currently, could well be from this new lost generation, which frankly will be repeated time after time because this new system of education which offered so much promise is turning into a bureaucratic production line manufacturing system that has incorporated the child into the process with its entire focus on production output. This system somehow becomes.."child in...paper out". The old discredited system paid much stock on the production of a rounded person with focus on the human resource concerned. The new system is simply a bean counting exercise.
The new system exists as an accounting monument. The 'Classroom learning mediator' presents a series of learning skills exercises to the 'learner' who produces a pile of paper as proof which goes into his file and is later checked by the government who now pore over all the files of work done in every school in every district [perhaps to]making sure that only approved information is contained within the pages. The pressure to perform so great that no deviance can occur never mind reach a toleration point.
In their wildest imagination the architects of the former discredited system never conceptualised such finely tuned control. One hundred and eight completed projects ranging, according to my hosts, from two or three page efforts to a few pieces in excess of 6000 words. In less than one year while hanging out thirty or forty to a class! What are we trying to do here? It is small wonder the minister has recently referred to a pending crisis in the profession with more teachers opting out than are opting in.
The teachers I've spoken to tell me they don't know what the point is of all this outpouring of stuff. They have no time in their schedules to teach anything they are so busy checking that the children have discovered for themselves the pristine principles that were once the arcane territory of 'he who knows'- that they can't remember if they know anything. They tell me they spend their entire time assessing now instead of teaching and this is because most don't realise that teaching is no longer their job they are simply bureaucratic assessors
They are not supposed to be called teachers anymore by the way broadly because they aren't supposed to teach anything. Teachers are now called "Learning outcomes Mediators". The more you think about it the more you realise it is a subtly different job. In many ways it is a more creative job and certainly could be a more exciting one if anyone had time or energy to notice.
The teachers with whom I have discussed this all tell me that their administrative load has trebled or even quadrupled. I have spoken to some five hundred teachers over the past couple of years and this theme is constant. Many are experiencing family stress as assessments steal ever more consistently into private time. A number have resigned. Most tell me they see little point in their jobs anymore especially those who are older and feel they have been turned into highly trained childminders functioning on robot control.
At the present rate within the decade the State will run out of teachers and schools will employ minders to control internet access so's kids can calculate their outcomes on the web and truly take control of their own learning, becoming liberated at last from 'teachers'. Will this work? We'll find out.
Meanwhile children experience personal stress as ever more assessments creep into childhood and turn their voyage of discovery into a tedious mind numbing exercise in filing, that huge numbers have simply abandoned. It is hard to conceive of a system more brutalising, more guaranteed to despair: more insane, which is odd given that it was supposed to do the exact opposite.
What is even more insane is that the Teacher unions have bought into a system that demands more hours than are allowed for in the Basic Conditions of Employment Act [which doesn't apply to teachers] demands vastly more work for less pay, when they should be demanding that this system inherently requires them to be more knowledgeable and more effective organisers and that therefore they should be paid three times what they are now and since this wont happen we'll have far fewer next time round and the worst of them will be promoted upwards into the bureaucracy where they can pretend to read some of the billions of pages of stuff that will be produced annually for evermore.
Billions! Yeah think about it 500,000 matriculants this year have produced 50,000,000 items of "portfolio" material amounting to about one billion pages of things of uimportance to the bureaucracy.
Multiply by three for grades ten eleven twelve and we thought the cops were having issues trying to process a million gun licences.
Why are we turning our country into a bureaucratic mindfuck worthy of ten Kafkas?
NiK
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