Thought For The Day No. 33 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

Why do people use the cliché 'meteoric rise', when meteors go downwards through the earth's atmosphere? 

A. Whyte

We've Murdered Prices..

I've heard of some interesting ways of trying to get an apartment cheaper than the market rate, buying derelict flats and doing them up, buying foreclosed properties or looking in an area that is 'up and coming', but this is a new one - the murder houses of Taiwan...

...essentially as it suggests, places where a murder or maybe suicide has taken place and thus noone wants to touch with a bargepole. Might be taking advantage of others suffering, but if that doesn't bother you and you're not spooked by it, could be a way of finding a real bargain. I have no idea if the price is in inverse proportion to the number of murders that took place, they bulldozed the Fred West place after all..

Thought For The Day No. 32 - The Rabbi Anders Weiss

The voice of your passions can be louder than that of your conscience. Your passions speak differently - they scream at you - whereas your conscience speaks to you in a quiet but firm voice.

William Ellery Channing

If You Choose Any Old Port It's Not Likely To Be In The Far East..

Amazing set of statistics  on the Economist website, which outlines one dimension to the unstoppable rise to preeminence of Asia over the last 20 years - namely the dominance of far Eastern container ports, by volume of traffic...the same figures also show the huge rise in capacity of ports in general over that time..

In 1989, the Dutch port of Rotterdam was third on the list with 3.9 twenty foot equivalent units (TEUs), evidently the unit of measurement in such things. Since then, Rotterdam's capacity has more than doubled to 9.7 TEUs, and yet it's fallen down to 10th place on the list. The top spot today, occupied by Singapore, processes some 25.8 TEUs (in 1989, when it was in second place, it saw a volume of 4.4 TEUs, more than a five fold increase).

In 1989, nine out of the top twenty ports were in the Far East (assuming the Philippines is in the Far East); now that total stands at 14, with East Asian ports occupying 8 of the top 10 places...and of the 4 countries that were newcomers to the list, namely China, Malaysia, Thailand and the UAE, 3 of them are Far Eastern countries (Hong Kong topped the list in 1989 but it was still a British colony then of course).

China itself boasts no less than 6 new ports today that were nowhere to be seen 20 years ago; the US has only 2 ports on the list today as opposed to 4 in 1989,  and poor old Felixstowe (always loved that name) in the UK  is presumably gone for good..

..hope you got all that..have no data for the Baltic ports..

Seth's Blog - The Roush Effect

Gerald Roush, who recently died at the age of 68, was a long time Ferrari enthusiast. Nothing too interesting in that you might think, but as my big brother Seth Godin explains, this obsession led to a very nice little earner indeed, simply by compiling lists of information on Ferraris around the world and selling this info on a subscription basis to a few hundred people.

This is it, I feel. Find a tribe which has a passion for something, and provide everything that that group of individuals want to know about their passion (and sod the rest) and charge them a little bit of money for it...

....of course, it helps if you yourself have a passion for the same thing, and Roush's obssession started in his teens when these things tend to take root. But for those of us in our 20s, 30s, 40s and beyond, I don't for a minute believe all is lost. It's just a question of hitting on something that works; even in a small country like Estonia, we have the internet.

Or maybe you prefer giving a huge amount of your life that you'll never retrieve to employers who don't care if you live or die, performing a task that anyone else could do just as well, donating twenty something per cent of your hard earned money to incompetent Governments to piss up the wall (it's salutary to reflect that the Islamic faith demands as zakat, one of its five pillars, that an adherent  gives just 2.5 per cent of their income to the poor, not ten times that, and this for an unequivocally worthy cause) and having nothing to show for it at the end.

Anyway, it's a good post.

Shackleton's Disillusionment

A (very) short story..

After all the privations the team had suffered over the past months, Ernest was at a loss as to why they had disappeared. Only yesterday they'd held a vote of confidence in his leadership in letting him overrule them in his choice of campsite for the evening– not the shelter from the cruelty of the Southern ocean that was offered by the lee of a small bluff, the Bosun's choice, nor the cook's choice, a spot right on the beach, convenient for the quick despatching and preparing of the fish that they would surely be able to land, but the unpromising crush of rocks, held together by robust gorse, where they had finally struck on

So now where were they? Barely a trace of them, aside from a couple of empty pemmican tins and ski equipment, surplus to requirements during the summer months in South Georgia, and yet Ernest discounted the idea of a mutiny out of hand.

His curiosity therefore could hardly fail to be drawn by a small square of yellow light which appeared at just the spot where the horizon melded into the grey lowlands, which a short walk revealed as coming from a house – no, a hotel, the word emblazoned in no less than three languages, the proprietors no doubt ready to take any and every business which might drift in from the sea.

The vantage point offered by a steep, glaciated, geological feature which he'd forgotten the name of enabled the now deeply puzzled Ernest to look straight through the open window, from which he'd already caught bursts of aggressive, forced laughter, only to see the rest of the crew, very drunk, and clearly happy to have found environs which wouldn't have been out of place in yorkshire or guernsey, even more so that they were free of their leader's jurisdiction at last.

For the first time in his life Ernest felt truly left out.

Shackleton's Disillusionment

A (very) short story..

After all the privations the team had suffered over the past months, Ernest was at a loss as to why they had disappeared. Only yesterday they'd held a vote of confidence in his leadership in letting him overrule them in his choice of campsite for the evening– not the shelter from the cruelty of the Southern ocean that was offered by the lee of a small bluff, the Bosun's choice, nor the cook's choice, a spot right on the beach, convenient for the quick despatching and preparing of the fish that they would surely be able to land, but the unpromising crush of rocks, held together by robust gorse, where they had finally struck on

So now where were they? Barely a trace of them, aside from a couple of empty pemmican tins and ski equipment, surplus to requirements during the summer months in South Georgia, and yet Ernest discounted the idea of a mutiny out of hand.

His curiosity therefore could hardly fail to be drawn by a small square of yellow light which appeared at just the spot where the horizon melded into the grey lowlands, which a short walk revealed as coming from a house – no, a hotel, the word emblazoned in no less than three languages, the proprietors no doubt ready to take any and every business which might drift in from the sea.

The vantage point offered by a steep, glaciated, geological feature which he'd forgotten the name of enabled the now deeply puzzled Ernest to look straight through the open window, from which he'd already caught bursts of aggressive, forced laughter, only to see the rest of the crew, very drunk, and clearly happy to have found environs which wouldn't have been out of place in yorkshire or guernsey, even more so that they were free of their leader's jurisdiction at last.

For the first time in his life Ernest felt truly left out.

Thought For The Day No. 31 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

...psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste..

"Never does a man portray his character more vividly than his proclaiming the character of another."

Winston Churchill