Technology has enabled our Finance Minister to be heard in the shebeens and taverns of modern capitalism throughout the land of Zansi immediately.  From online streaming to live TV we now get our finance fix immediately.   That, of course, is where the trouble starts.  Next year same time same place, same fix.

No analysis.

What we get is around 90 minutes of Pravin Gordhan talking gently to citizens about the total which should be spent this financial year to create better living conditions and improved lives.   There’s an awful lot of rahrah and tub thumping and mumblemumble fatbelly porkbarrel bleating.   The overweight MP’s look even more overweight than last year on our small TV sets as they lounge against the background of parliament’s green leather and rampant political theatre.  The rest of SA ignores the actual speech and reacts to the SMS they receive which will say something like:

- Gordhan announces beer tax will rise

or

- Government to spend more on education

or

- Pravin announces more money for roads

or

- The minimum tax rate rises to protect the poorest of the poor.

(information courtesy of using digital search engines and a digit vacuum,  ie: Thumb-suck)

But most of us sitting watching and listening have to ask a few pertinent questions at this juncture,  19 years into democracy.

Who is going to jail now that up to 20% of the budget is pilfered and wasted within government’s services?   Will Pravin actually condemn this blatant Rand-based treason?  Will he announce the Auditor General now has a team of attorney’s putting people directly into jail?

Nah.

And we hear that only 10 cases of corruption have actually been processed through the courts in a decade – an indictment of the lack of accountability and the joke which is now the central government’s spending patterns.   Its funny unless you’re the one facing another agonising day standing in a queue at Bara hospital or watching the local school fall into disrepair while the local clinic sees management stealing the pain-killers and selling them to syndicates.

Of course,  technology could come to our aid at this point.   While we use fifty year-old technology to view the Budget speech (and some of us fifteen year-old technology by viewing this online),  most South Africa’s view the budget reading as a boring speech by a boring politician.  Show me the money.

Accountants and corporate lawyers in particular are going to wait for the new tax rates to be loaded onto the Dept of Finance and SARS websites later today and will troll through these new xl spreadsheets to determine where savings can be made.  But using search engines and a question or two,  here is what we could expect:

- Confirmation about new share tax structure for equity investments

- An increased minimum at which tax kicks (likely to rise to R5500 pm?)

- More sin taxes

- More money poured into education

- More money poured into roads

- More money for civil servants

- An investigation into an additional mining royalties tax

- the announcement of groundwork and this months’ start of a test phase of the National Health Initiative

- No tax breaks for the middle class – government needs every penny it can get

No surprises there.  Pravin really is the company book keeper announcing the papers are in order.  That the in tray and the out tray look a certain way and that the lucre is lined up.  What he will fail to do is tell us how last year’s disasters of mis-management and mis-spending, theft and fraud, corruption and venality,  will terminate shortly in some specific action against specific people stealing specific amounts of moolah from  you and me.

And therefore,  we must use our digital voices to expose the local lackeys who are wastefully tucking into the fiscus,  and then who disappear in a cloud of self-righteous ruling party oligarchical dust , only to reappear as the DG or MEC of some  ANCYL NEC pecking-tender-order like a member of the illuminati they so profess to abhor.

We need a website into which we can load the names and faces of these shameless thugs who use their nefarious networks and our brilliant constitution to steal and run – never to be identified and never to be jailed.

And that’s not TellPeter or whatever.  It needs real legal teeth and guts to bring these louts of lucre to book, then pursues them infinitely until their BMW and other stolen items are returned and they revert to what they are.  Scum sucking fools and fearful minions bereft of ethics and blatantly boorish.

Logging into company operations can be such a bind.  In 2000 it was a cinch.  So easy.  Forget the cloud,  we were the cloud.  I could upload stories into our radio station database directly into the studio via a small application that my computer intern generated using Java code.  And it was safe.

In fact, I was living in Boston and uploading these files into a computer in Braamfontein.

Protected from the scam-mongerers and hack-flackers that were around at the time.

So what happened?

Fear and loathing.  It appears Information Technology managers now are imbued with that great line of irony,  ”Just because you’re not paranoid, doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you”.

So the upshot is VPN – virtual private networking and massive firewalls, as well as huge anti-virus programs which cause 3Gig machines to slow down.

Now the VPN systems that are around are just so clunky and slow.   Let me repeat.

What happened?

Servers that watch servers watching servers.  And a cacophony of malicious hackers that have grown in number since the early 2000′s.    I guess we are all prone to forgetting where we’ve come from.  The first really malicious global event was the Denial of Service (or DoS) attacks of 7th February 2000, give or take a day or two.  Then along came others with the names Trinoo and Tribal Flood Network which targeted California college networks and CNN’s first  website, along with eBay.

Ping attacks began in earnest in the early 21st century which launched millions of emails into the system, causing gridlock and shutdown.

So our IT managers are now terrified.  Paranoid.  They toss and turn at night,  thinking about the shady Ukrainian or Georgian or Chinese hacker trying to break into the digital bank to steal the passwords and bank details.

The reality is, the more we move into the digital world to organize and run our lives, the more digitalised criminal networks become.  So I have some sympathy for IT managers who wake up at night screaming in terror as their server is gang-raped by the Russian mafia.

The happy go lucky days of the early web and net are long gone.

The old digital frontier where we were all naive and happy explorers has been corporatised, and thus,  targeted by political hackers, criminal spy junkies, religious zealots and digital dingleberries.

So I guess its now time to move all systems into one giant cloud where the cloud police are armed and worry about their servers,  while the rest of us get on with breathing air and flying planes and playing music.

Everyone complains and everyone hurts (to quote Michael Stipe) and everyone is a coward of some sort.  Some are afraid of the dark, others of their own machines which lurk in garages and kitchens and on work desks.

There is a ghost in every machine and folks are afraid of ghosts.  Being unafraid of ghostly machines,  I slipped beneath my V6 two weeks ago and changed the oil.  That entailed converting US olde fashioned gauge nut into metric, then going off to purchase the correct ratchet.  It also entailed driving my car around first to heat up the oil making it easier to drain.  That job took fifteen minutes,  most of the time was spent waiting for the oil to drip out of the smallish metric size 13 space.

After replacing the oil filter and 5L of 5W 40 grade (which is very expensive but excellent oil), I changed the air filter.  That took five minutes.  A week before I had taken the front wheels off and changed my brake pads.  That took an hour.

Total cost of said work amounted to parts.

• Brake pads and anti-squeal paste   =  R1200.00
• Oil filter = R 97.00
• Air Filter = R 250.00
• Oil  =  R 490.00
• Cup of coffee and old rags = R 3.00
• Plastic kiddy playbox (in which to drain the oil) = R 10.00

GRAND TOTAL R 2050.00

So what ?

Well previously I had used the services of various maintenance specialists to do the same job.  Their totals were somewhere around R R6000.00 plus VAT for the same job.  I looked at the total time spent and figured out that the labour charges were bogus.

They had charged R4000.00 for labour,  and at R1000 an hour,  that means the mechanic had supposedly spent 4 hours on my car.

What rubbish.  Even as a very basic function,  the total time to do both the oil and brakes should not have been more than 2 hours.  And being professionals with all the tools,  cut that down again by half.

So these days I take the car in for plugs change (which on my vehicle is very twiddly with alternator having to be removed and starter motor un hooked and main drive belt pulled out) and for a major work-over every four years and mutter up front about only paying cash.  The quote is always reduced.

Since I changed the oil and air filter,  my car dropped from chewing 15L per 100 km to 10L per 100km.

What does this all mean?

In a time of recession,  worry about every cent and don’t be afraid of the ghostly machines.

Blowing up missiles with lasers sounds a little old fashioned.  Flash Gordon in the 1930′s featured high-riding aliens firing ray guns at each other.  Ronald Reagan dreamed up a star wars programme.  Much of the latter is now thought of as false propaganda,  but with our world increasingly managed from outer space get ready for the real Star Wars.

Countries already thought to possess such a giant ray include America, Britain, China, France, Israel, Japan and Russia.

Recently the French were seething when China dazzled  its satellites for a second with laser flash.  Beijing said nothing but the European Space Agency confirmed what’s called the dazzle attack.  The satellite wasn’t permanently damaged,  but the point had been made.  The Chinese are very sensitive about craft circling overhead.  They’ve already generated a satellite or two, as well as robotics aboard which could commit something like Sar Wars Piracy.  Chinese satellite cruises up to GPS satellite, out pops an arm and WHAMM!  GPS system is a gonner.   It just has to nudge the GPS satellite and all hell will break loose.

So bear with me a second.  Imagine the space station as a place of conflict.  There are scientists from around the world, but what happens in the future if that giant contraption becomes the setting for an extra-terrestrial gunfight or similar?  Cosmonauts and astronauts clashing with ray guns from room to room,  trying to damage each other’s oxygen storage facilities.  On the ground,  that could lead to a severe conflict.

Or Iran test fires a missile.  It fails.  It test fires another.  It fails.  Why?  Because the Israelis giant ray-gun can detonate missiles 2000 kilometers away.

All of this leads to a really good idea based in Sci Fi game playing.  The Force Shield.   An electromagnetic field that arcs across the sky and anything striking it is either incapacitated – or blows up on contact. 

And according to sleuths in the military field,  the US is working on the idea already.  Which means at some point,  missiles passing through airspace will become defunct.   And that’s when the art of digital missiles that terminate systems from the inside rather than physically detonate will become the new must have.

Speaking of which,  two men have been arrested in Bloemfontein for allegedly pointing a lazer at aircraft carrying ANC dignitaries attending the centenary celebrations.   If these devices are now so easy to come by,  I expect that in a very short space of time,  terrorists may move from the suicide bomb to the death ray.

There is trouble brewing in tanker-land.

Bond investors have just reduced the owner OAO Sovcomflot to junk status.  The Russian company has proudly declared previously that it owns more oil tankers than any other single company.

Which is true.

Also true is the shipping glut which continues as the world economy stumbles into a dark place.

S&P has already lowered the Russian state-owned entity to BBB negative from stable this week,  but bond investors say that’s too optimistic.

Bond holders want up to  105 points more on Sovcomflot’s dollar-based certificates due in 2017.  Tanker trade is now no longer a viable long-term investment,  and what’s more,  it reflects finally on the oil price in a few years.

No longer a giant in the tanker world

Right now we’re looking at farcical oil trade figures,  where the price appears to be manipulated by speculation.  Oil is overpriced and the value of tankers tells you that.  So the smart thought would be going short on the oil price in 2013.

While the terrible word bankruptcy cannot be used to describe Sovcomflot,  the world’s fifth largest by capacity tanker company is in a spot of bother.  It also tells you something about Russian bonds generally, which are heavily influenced by oil and gas trades.

Russia itself is now rated Baaa1 by Moody’s which is low.  A spread of Russian bonds is 68 points below the average for all emerging markets – compounded by a bleak outlook generally for shipping.

The hidden news here is that Sovcomflot’s bonds reflect general fears about Russia and its bond market.

Its dropped to stable from positive in Fitch’s view with Russian leader’s quaint view of what democracy means driving negative sentiment.

My name is Bond.  Russian bond.    And I have been stirred by being shaken.

Here comes an interesting week for machines and people.  The US, France and Britain have joined forces in the Persian Gulf.  Iran previously rattled its sabres and suggested the US stay away as Washington tightened sanctions on Tehran over its nuclear ambitions.  On Sunday 22nd January,  the USS Abraham Lincoln which is a large  nuclear-powered carrier capable of launching 90 aircraft, sailed through the narrow passage into the Persian Gulf from the Gulf of Oman.

What was interesting is that it was part of a convoy.  Sailing alongside was the HMS Argyll.  That’s a frigate which has some of the latest missile technology on board,  while the French navy sent a warship to join the convoy as a show of force.   A few other vessels armed with defensive and offensive missiles joined the fleet.

As of Monday 23rd January 12h30 Central African Time no shots had been fired.

Don’t forget a few things about the Strait.  One is that Iran believes that beautiful deep blue channel belongs to the people of Iran,  and its merely allowed other shipping to operate in the area because 20% of the world’s oil passes through the notch.

Iran’s large oil port of Bandar Abbas is in the central part of the Straits,  looking directly south towards the tiny gate through which the USS Abraham Lincoln passed sometime on Sunday.   But its not so simple for Iran.  Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Oman and Iraq all have an interest in the waters which Iran wants to shut down.  Pakistan is another nation which has a coastline in the Gulf of Oman.

Last month Iran hosted its own wargames in the Straits,  and the US sent its aircraft carrier out,  saying it needed to return to the US for maintenance.   So lets take a proper look at the firepower at play here, sans nuclear of course.

Iran’s known missiles include the Shahab-3 strategic intermediate range ballistic missile with a range of up to 800 kilometers, the Ghadr-1 with an estimated 1 300 kilometer range and a Shahab-3 variant known as Sajjil-2 with a range of up to 2 300 kilometers.

The US sports an array of short, medium, and long distance missile technology – as any good 2012 empire state would.    In fact, in 2010 the Obama administration sent land-based Patriot missile systems to Kuwait, Qatar, UAE and Bahrain.  It also has placed two US Navy vessels in missile defence systems around the Mediterranean.   The list of American offensive missile technology is long, and includes Tomahawk cruise missiles which caused chaos in Iraq when Saddam Hussein refused to budge.   But possibly the most terrifying for the Iranian is the drone technology.  Should Iran begin firing shots at the Americans in the Gulf,  you can be sure that instead of just lobbing a few Tomahawks back,  Washington will send a highly accurate drone overhead the facility that fired the shot,  and destroy the communications centre relaying information to these facilities.

Take a good look at the NASA shot of the Gulf and you’ll notice that there is one big glaring problem the Iranians face here.  No weather.

The southern Iran coast is so clear on most days that the members of the space station could probably spot a jeep in the desert with a good telescope.  So while the Iranians and the Americans pontificate and prance about,  the reality is Tehran is too weak militarily to lash out just yet.  But if it does,  expect an extremely accurate and immediate response from the Americans, the British, and the French.

We know that vessels carry the world’s goods back and forth across our oceans.  We know that the rate of construction of new vessels,  coupled with the value and rental charged is driven directly by the economic expectation and purchases made by people.   As I have noted over the past three years,  the figures for the movement of various types of cargo vessels shows that the world economy is now contracting.

In the latest reality check, charter rates for iron ore-carrying capesize (at least 160 000 tons and upwards) ships declined by 18% on Thursday 12th January.

That is a severe contraction.  What is more,  the total rates for these vessels dipped by 64% last year.

Around 6% of the world’s active fleet is being delayed in various ports around the world,  but even so,  the rental price has dropped.  When the 6% emerge and things settle down,  the returns will dip still further as supply of these vessels will increase while the demand is going down.

We know that whatever bright spark analyst X says on CNN about positive signs in the economy or whatever is merely trader noise.

The reality about the world economy can be tracked EXCLUSIVELY through the actions of the cargo fleet.  Don’t get caught up trying to debate against this logic.  All you will do is appear a little dumb.  There is a reduced demand for container vessels generally,  and capesize ships in particular.  There will be fewer goods travelling between Asia and Europe and the US this year. There will be fewer commodity-carrying capesize ships travelling between Africa and Latin America and Australia into Asia this year.  Therefore the world’s economy is going to remain in a very bad shape, and China in particular is going to be hard hit, along with countries like Brazil.

That is not good news.   But its the truth.

Each day we grapple with irony.  At least I do.  There is a tinge of hapless confusion and contradiction in everyone and everything,  all you need to do is take a critical look at matters to find these ironic twinges.

Examples recently include:

• Education Minister called Blade.   Blade happens to be a number of things in the real world and includes the concept of sharp.  Somehow I can’t reconcile the word sharp with Blade Nzimande.
• ANC spends R100 million on a massive party but Uganda’s president has to buy Nando’s because some ruling party minions forgot to actually organize anything.
• Seven police officers arrested in the Free State after they .. allegedly .. helped themselves to flat screen TV’s that really did fall off a truck after an accident.
• Chavez of Venezuela and Ahmadinejad of Iran laugh about having nukes on the same day an Iranian nuclear physicist is blown up in his car with an old fashioned piece of plastic explosive.
• American troops apparently urinated on Taliban dead .. more shocking than the fact that they actually shot them full of holes first…
• A local airport sees police scurrying around as a VIP convoy drives past,  cops trying to look fierce while their fat stomachs droop over their belts.
• NCOP to debate the Information Bill while Limpopo as a province is completely unworkable and its finances are about to be taken over by central government
• France and Germany want us to believe that Greece/Hungary/Italy/Spain/Portugal can really be saved just because they are European.  Apparently.
• The SANDF is called in to help stop rhino poachers and the number of incidents actually INCREASE.
• The new North Korean leader is not ill.  Unlike his father  Kim  Jong-il who took over from dead dad Kim ill-Sung.  However they are all sick puppies.
• Republicans about to nominate Mitt Romney as their supreme leader to take on Obama. Mitt is defined as1. the (prehensile) extremity of the superior limb
  2. the handwear used by fielders in playing baseball

  But Mitt can also stand as a shortened version of mitten,  which is normally used in the kitchen and perceived as a feminine concept.  Romney is trying to appeal to gun-toting right wing conservatives.  Good luck Mitt.

  Thus ends today’s ironic blog.  Yes,  my name can also be a shortened form of Desperate, but in the US,  everyone thought my name was Daze.  Everything is ironic.

   

This week two people accosted me on different occasions suggesting they would like to become pilots.  That got me thinking about aviation and how people are approaching the business these days.   Having taken a keen interest in the principles of flight since a boy,  I eventually turned an obsession into a reality and gained a private pilot’s license in 2009 after much sweating and toiling.

From plastic model aeros to nearly two thousand hours as a traffic reporter in the 1980′s,  numerous flips and trips and international to-ing and fro-ing,  I decided it was time to get real.   The exams are exceedingly difficult since the CAA converted its policies from the US system to the European.  Around 12,5% pass rate,  with a stipulation that you have to pass all eight exams within 18 months.  Sounds easy until you sit these.  It’s not easy,  and as the pass rate shows,  many just sommer fail.

But for many matriculants who have excelled in maths and science,  flying is an option.  However there is a catch.  Yes its all very well that you have a maths brain,  but do you have the obsession required to become a pilot?  Can you recite the list of your favourites planes and then explain at least some of the technicalities?

From the bunch of youths passing through flying schools its becoming increasingly obvious that many are just lining up to become Boeing bus drivers and couldn’t actually give a tinkers about the love side of flying.  That is a bad thing.  Very bad.  Flight is more than maths and Newton,  its also about poetry and motion.

Love.

What is happening in SA right now is not exactly driven by this crazed desire,  more a drive to develop pilots based on a need for demography,  and many being forced to consider flying are merely turning up to be trained based on the fact that they managed a good pass mark for maths and science.  Aptitude is not IQ.

I have closely observed a number of young pilots who are definitely not interested in aeroplanes.  When accosted this week,  one person told me she has completed 5 hours of flying.

“Oh, I asked,  what is your favourite plane of all time?”

“No idea,  I only have flown a Cessna.”

“Well,  from what you’ve read and seen on Youtube,  which one’s pull at your heart strings?

“I haven’t thought about it”  she said.

Sorry, that was a shocking response to a standard question pilots ask themselves constantly.

Proper aviators will spend hours bending your ear about when they were kids how they watched movies about pilots,  and when they made a plane out of wood and ran around the shack pretending it was  real,  or how they wished they could fly a warbird (older ‘plane used in conflicts such as the Zero,  or the Spitfire, or Messerschmitt….).

But too many of our new crop of pilots say stuff like “… I got 96% for Navigation in my exam…”  and think that they’re perfectly set up to be aviators.    And don’t give me that oh I  am from a poor family and never saw a plane blahblah rubbish because these things fly over our countryside and that’s how I got interested.   Not because papa bought me a plane,  but because I heard the first moon walk live from a tiny transistor radio in the middle of the KwaZulu bush and immediately knew that I wanted to explore the world from a higher altitude.

Having immersed myself in the aviation world,  I have found that 99% of people who fly are like me.  Obsessed and a little loopy.   However, its the newbies and wannabees who think flying is really a quick way to sex and cash that are going to endanger you and I somewhere over the SA skies one of these days.    Take note of the number of incidents involving the local airlines with planes ramping over runways, slipping off runways,  experiencing engine failures.

Because the pilots have doubles inside ATC operations as well as maintenance.  People who shouldn’t be there being pushed into a situation demographically because its politically expedient for the governing body.   That is a bad thing when the people being forced to fly actually dislike the experience and would rather have become accountants.    It’s bad when the ATC can’t pronounce words properly so that pilots don’t understand what they’re being told.   It’s bad when the maintenance team forgets to tighten your wheel nut after a major physical inspection on a plane.

This happened to me recently.  Had my flight continued in that plane,  the wheel could have broken off the undercarriage after circlips holding the loose bolt worked their way loose.  The entire wheel was being held on by a split pin.   Had this happened on landing it would have been, well,  a bad thing.

“oh,” I was told,  ”typical.. the maintenance team didn’t check the wheel nut was tight before slipping the circlip and split pin back on the axle”.

I checked the engine mounts,  the main spar,  every connection after that.  What else had the shoddy bunch managed to forget?

So next time you climb aboard your friendly local airliner,  ask the pilot if he/she is standing at the doorway,  what is their favourite plane of all time.  If they say ” I don’t know” or ” I haven’t thought about it”,  change planes.

Remember folks,  this blog is all about people and how we interface with machines.  Sorry,  did I use interface as a verb?  Slap me.

However, lets get on with this week’s blog.  I was camping at the beach north of Durban this past week and noted a few things about people and their machines which need fleshing out.  Firstly,  the people were living in caravans that had air conditioning.

bzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Now forgive me for chortling, but air conditioning in a caravan?  At the beach?  But let’s continue the analysis of these campers.  Were they happy?  They appeared to be.  Happy campers.

We  (three kids, vrou), on the other hand,  had two tents and a tarpaulin strung from two trees to protect us from the rain.  Not that it achieved much, other than proving that climbing ropes can be useful as a device to sling a tarpaulin between two trees.

The camp site is set up for caravans,  and for Vaalies.  That sounds better than Gautengies.    Forget the cooling ocean breeze blah blah,  these people need air conditioning.  What’s more,  there appeared to be a friendly sport going on at the same time.  A competition of sorts.  Kind of like who was best prepared for their month-long holiday at the beach.  Some had DSTV dishes attached to their caravans and large associated tents.  Others came with jet skies and electric motorbikes.  Some had enough fishing gear to take out the nearest barracuda school,  but didn’t appear to do more than wander down to the nearby salt pool,  and cast a few meters off shore.  One caught a minnow using heavy tackle.

All this stuff,  I thought,  just like a Great Trek.  All pulled into neat little rows and wheeled vehicles and accoutrements, flapping sounds of canvas in the wind.  All that’s missing is a musket or two.

The ancestors would be bemused no doubt by the plug points jutting out of the ground and the steady hum of air conditioners eminating from the wagons –  sorry – caravana-wagons.   I was poo-poohing this culture until the rain began to fall.  Then my nearest and dearest suggested a nice big dry caravan with air conditioning appeared most appealing.